The Case of Ron Silliman

Marjorie Perloff

published in Qarry West, 34: Ron Silliman Issue, ed. Tom Vogler (1998): 167-81.

His works are composed very explicitly under various conditions, presenting a variety of possible words, possible language formations. Such poetry emphasizes its medium as being constructed, rule governed, everywhere circumscribed by grammar & syntax, chosen vocabulary, designed, manipulated, picked, programmed, organized, & so an artifice, artifact–monadic, solipsistic, homemade, manufactured, mechanized, formulaic, wilful. (CD 40-41)

The reference, so far as Silliman is concerned (for Bernstein is of course also thinking of his own work), is to Silliman’s use, in the long poems of the seventies, of rules and procedures, whether the Fibonacci series used to produce the paragraphs of Tjanting, or the format of 223 numbered paragraphs based on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations in The Chinese Notebook. Whatever the specific device used, so Silliman suggests in his “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World,” the construction of poetic discourse takes its cue from Marx’s famous statement, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” [3]

Early commentators on Language poetry, myself included, thus took for granted that the poetic community represented by The American Tree was united by its antagonism to lyric voice, coherent self, individual consciousness, or transcendental ego. But now that the movement is twenty years old and inevitably showing signs of strain, now that the differences between individual “Language poets” are beginning to seem more significant than their similarities, it might be well to look at the “voice” conundrum again. Statements of poetics, after all, can never be taken at face value. Is the language of the rustic, as Wordsworth famously claimed, really closer than that of the city dweller “to the beautiful and permanent forms of nature”? Is poetry, as Eliot declared, “not the expression of emotions, but an escape from emotions,” and is Prufrock thus a “persona,” unrelated to his creator? What about Pound’s axiom “Direct treatment of the thing” or Williams’s notorious “No ideas but in things!”? Are these universal prescriptions? And how accurately do they characterize Pound’s and William’s own lyrics?

Both Bernstein and Silliman have recently contributed to the Gale Research Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series. Bernstein’s piece, which I shall discuss elsewhere, takes the form of an autobiographical interview conducted by Loss Pequeño Glazier; Silliman’s Under Albany is a more traditional first-person narrative, “topic” sentences being used as titles or captions for blocks of narrative, often out of chronological order. [4] Read in the context of his poems, Silliman’s autobiography brings before us a very particular speaking voice–a voice not to be mistaken for Bernstein’s or, for that matter, for any of his fellow poets in The American Tree. Indeed, one wonders how or why the writers in question should continue to be identified as tout court “Language poets” and hence linked as being somehow the same. Perhaps a discussion of Under Albany will finally put to rest the group label, together with its specter of “voicelessness.”

Or so I hope, given the continuing dismissal and demonization of language poetry. At Buffalo, for example, the young poets associated with the journal Apex of the M have tried to separate themselves from an entity known as Language poetry–an irony given the continuing refusal of mainstream presses to bring out the work of the poets in question and of foundations like the Guggenheim or MacArthur to give them fellowships. “The moment of communal coherence,” as Silliman explains in his interview with Tom Vogler and Tom Marshall (elsewhere in this journal), was “extremely fragile and fleeting. . . . For langpo, that moment existed roughly from some time around 1970 until, at the latest 1981 or maybe ‘82.” The critique by younger–and basically like-minded poets (in Buffalo, in the pages of Ed Foster’s Talisman, or on Rick Caddel’s British Poets List on the Web) of the language poets’ power and hegemony, says Silliman, thus “feels like the literary equivalent of the old split between the house slave and the field slave–the real issue should be the elimination of slavery.” Touché. Just yesterday, I received a request to write an essay on some aspect of new American poetry for the English journal Poetry Review, edited by Peter Forbes. The choice of topic, wrote Forbes, was mine, “but we don’t want an essay on Language poetry because we already had one in the last issue.” A single essay on this vexed topic is evidently enough!

Suppose, then, we put the well-known Language manifestos and statements of poetics on the backburner and look at the text of Under Albany, written just this past year for the Gale Research series mentioned above. The Albany of the title is the small Bay Area town north of Berkeley where Silliman grew up but it is also the title of an earlier prose piece included in ABC (Berkeley: Tuumba Press, 1983). “Under” Albany thus points to getting under and inside of the parataxis of Albany, with its characteristically non-sequential, juxtapositional “New Sentences,” as well as getting out from under the stifling life of the poet’s childhood Albany, CA.

Albany, carefully plotted, consists of a hundred sentences of varying length. In the first section of Under Albany we learn that “The ‘average sentence in Albany is 6.94 words long.” [5] Since these hundred sentences will be so important to the later text, I shall cite Albany in its entirety here:

If the function of writing is to “express the world.” My father withheld child support, forcing my mother to live with her parents, my brother and I to be raised together in a small room. Grandfather called them niggers. I can’t afford an automobile. Far across the calm bay stood a complex of long yellow buildings, a prison. A line is the distance between. They circled the seafood restaurant, singing “We shall not be moved.” My turn to cook. It was hard to adjust my sleeping to those hours when the sun was up. The event was nothing like their report of it. How concerned was I over her failure to have orgasms? Mondale’s speech was drowned by jeers. Ye wretched. She introduces herself as a rape survivor. Yet his best friend was Hispanic. I decided not to escape to Canada. Revenue enhancement. Competition and spectacle, kinds of drugs. If it demonstrates form some people won’t read it. Television unifies conversation. Died in action. If a man is a player, he will have no job. Becoming prepared to live with less space. Live ammunition. Secondary boycott. My crime is parole violation. Now that the piecards have control. Rubin feared McClure would read Ghost Tantras at the teach-in. This form is the study group. The sparts are impeccable, though filled with deceit. A benefit reading. He seduced me. AFT, local 1352. Enslavement is permitted as punishment for crime. Her husband broke both of her eardrums. I used my grant to fix my teeth. They speak in Farsi at the corner store. YPSL. The national question. I look forward to old age with some excitement. 42 years for Fibreboard Products. Food is a weapon. Yet the sight of people making love is deeply moving. Music is essential. The cops wear shields that serve as masks. Her lungs heavy with asbestos. Two weeks too old to collect orphan’s benefits. A woman on the train asks Angela Davis for an autograph. You get read your Miranda. As if a correct line would somehow solve the future. They murdered his parents just to make the point. It’s not easy if your audience doesn’t identify as readers. Mastectomies are done by men. Our pets live at whim. Net income is down 13%. Those distant sirens down in the valley signal great hinges in te lives of strangers. A phone tree. The landlord’s control of terror is implicit. Not just a party but a culture. Copayment. He held the Magnum with both hands and ordered me to stop. The garden is a luxury (a civilization of snail and spider). They call their clubs batons. They call their committees clubs. Her friendships with women are different. Talking so much is oppressive. Outplacement. A shadowy locked facility using drugs and double-celling (a rest home). That was the Sunday Henry’s father murdered his wife on the front porch. If it demonstrates form they can’t read it. If it demonstrates mercy they have something worse in mind. Twice, carelessness has led to abortion. To own a basement. Nor is the sky any less constructed. The design of a department store is intended to leave you fragmented, off-balance. A lit drop. They photograph Habermas to hide the hairlip. The verb to be admits the assertion. The body is a prison, a garden. In kind. Client populations (cross the tundra). Off the books. The whole neighborhood is empty in the daytime. Children form lines at the end of each recess. Eminent domain. Rotating chair. The history of Poland is 90 seconds. Flaming pintos. There is no such place as the economy, the self. That bird demonstrates the sky. Our home, we were told, had been broken, but who were these people we lived with? Clubbed in the stomach, she miscarried. There were bayonets on campus, cows in India, people shoplifting books. I just want to make it to lunch time. Uncritical of nationalist movements in the Third World. Letting the dishes sit for a week. Macho culture of convicts. With a shotgun and “in defense” the officer shot him in the face. Here, for a moment, we are joined. The want-ads lie strewn on the table. (ABC, unpaginated)

Here the collocation of disparate sentence units (A never follows B) is vintage Silliman. As in Ketjak and Tjanting, both written a few years earlier, the poet avoids conventional “expressivity” by avoiding a consistent “I,” indeed, by not specifying who is the subject of the sentences in question. Who, for example, says “I just want to make it to lunchtime”? Or “Talking so much is oppressive”? Whose “carelessness has led to abortion”? Whose “best friend was Hispanic”? And so on.

At the same time–and this has always been a Silliman trademark–indeterminacy of agent and referent does not preclude a razor-sharp realism of description. Despite repeated time and space shifts, the world of Albany, CA. is wholly recognizable. It is, to begin with, not the Bay Area of the affluent– the Marin County suburbanites, Russian Hill aesthetes, or Berkeley middle-class go-getters. The working-class motif is immediately established with the reference to “My father withheld child support, forcing my mother to live with her parents, my brother and I to be raised together in a small room.” And this is the white working class: “Grandfather called them niggers.” Later, when the narrator is living in a part of San Francisco where, on the contrary, many ethnicities are represented, we read that “They speak in Farsi at the corner store.” The poet is a political activist: he participates in demonstrations and teach-ins, is briefly jailed, avoids the draft, and so on. There are many explanations of everyday things the activist must deal with: “The cops wear shields that serve as masks.” But the paragraph is also filled with references to sex and love, couplings and uncouplings, rape, miscarriage, and abortion. And finally, there is the motif of poetry: “If it demonstrates form they can’t read it.” And readings: “It’s not easy if your audience doesn’t identify as readers.” Writing poetry is always a subtext but one makes one’s living elsewhere: “The want-ads,” as the last sentence reminds us, “lie strewn on the table.”

“Silliman’s work,” observes Jed Rasula, “may be read as a grand refusal of the chronic strategies of authorial domination.” [6] The allusion is, again, to the “Language” credo: the avoidance of all “lyrical interference of the ego,” the refusal to create a consistent or coherent “self,” whose construction of events as of verbal forms controls the material in question. The “realism” of Albany, Rasula would no doubt argue, is not that of personal expression but of a language game that allows for “thick” subject-matter even as it formalizes and thus distances it.

But must it be either/or? Is it really the case that Silliman eschews “authorial domination”? I find myself increasingly uncomfortable with such formulations. For one thing, there is a very particular “voice” that comes through Albany. We have, to begin with, not the slightest doubt that this is a man’s poem: a man, sensitive to the sexual needs and difficulties of the women in his life, but centrally caught up in the political: the abuses of the cops, the need for demonstrations, the “bayonets on campus,” the question of “nationalist movements in the Third World.” “How concerned was I,” we read in sentence 11, “over her failure to have orgasms.” Evidently not overly concerned (the “she,” we learn later, is his wife Rochelle), since the very next sentence reads “Mondale’s speech was drowned by jeers.” Even such seemingly neutral statements as “My turn to cook” give Albany away as a man’s poem: woman’s “turn to cook,” let’s remember, is not an item of interest since it’s always woman’s turn.

The voice of Albany is matter-of-fact, street-wise, the voice of a largely self-educated working-class man who has slowly and painfully learned the craft of poetry, a man who’s been around and has had to put up with quite a bit, beginning with his father’s withholding of child support. Pain, violence and injustice are the facts of his life: sentence after sentence refers to murders, shoot-outs, abortions, riots, asbestos poisoning and the like. And even at the trivial level, difficulty dominates: “It was hard to adjust my sleeping to those hours when the sun was up.” “Becoming to live with less space.” “I used my grant to fix my teeth.” And so on. Yet Silliman’s utterances are by no means gloomy: on the contrary, his voice is sprightly, engaged, fun-loving, energetic, a voice that loves the word-play of “They call their clubs batons. They call their committees clubs.” Or “Eminent domain. Rotating chair.” Or “There were bayonets on campus, cows in India, people shoplifting books. I just wanted to make it to lunch time.”

No individual signature? Let’s compare the prose of Albany to the following extracts:

(1) How was I to know that the woman, seated next to me on the bus,
would, when the bus lurched, just appear to lose her balance,
and, as if to keep herself from swaying, would take hold of my arm
with her hand so that pressing me between her finger and thumb
she pinched my arm. Though I believed (looking at her sideways,
and seeing only that her lips were parted slightly, with her snout
breathing softly) that during the two or three minutes
in which this pain lasted, she was saying (or at least I imagined so
from the length of time that she held on to my arm
before releasing me) I wish that I could make you yelp just once.

(2) A and Not-A are the same.

My dog does not know me.

Violins like dreams, are suspect.

I come from Kolophon, or perhaps some small island.

The strait has frozen, and people are walking–a few skating– across it.

On the crescent beach, a drowned deer.

A woman with one hand, her thighs around your neck.

The world is all that is displaced.

Applies in a stall at the street corner by the Bahnhof, pale yellow to blackish red.

Memory does not speak.

Shortness of breath, accompanied by tinnitus.

(3) A man is standing in front of a window. In possession of
what he sees. A person becomes a lens on a room inside.
Then to walk into the room on sequent occasions. The
lights go down on the buildings outside. The window is
off the kitchen, the room is filled with people. Smoke
coming out of the cracks. What can he have. All words
resolve this matter like a huge weight balancing on a single
point. That point is in motion, verging from one word to
the next. A cyclone covers the surface of the ceiling with
wavering lines. The room fills in with fragments of their
talk. But a window is an opening to the outside. He is
contradicted in his rooms, imagining a better place to live.

All three of these passages come from poetic works by West Coast poets associated with the Language movement: they are, respectively, Leslie Scalapino’s “hmmmm” from Considering how exagerrated music is, Michael Palmer’s “Autobiography” in At Passages, and Barrett Watten’s “City Fields” in Frame (1971-1990) .[7] All three poets would insist, I think, that theirs is not an “expressivist” poetry, that, in Palmer’s words, “He regards the self as just another sign.” And it is true that, read against, say, a lyric by Seamus Heaney or Louise Gluck, there is no doubt that Scalapino, Palmer, and Watten are trying, in the words of Jasper Johns, to “do something else” with language, true that they have no interest in the closural first-person metaphoric model of mainstream poetry.

But to label these texts “Language poems” and let it go at that tells us very little. Scalapino’s nine-line paragraph has a perfectly consistent angle of vision, quite unlike Silliman’s collage-prose. It is part of a longer sequence on the uncanny and terrifying substrate of ordinary life. Scalapino’s empiricist “flat” narrative purports merely to describe what happened, but what did? The scene, as so often in Silliman, [8] is on a bus; the poet is sitting next to an unknown woman. When the bus lurches, this woman, evidently to keep her balance, grabs the poet’s arm and pinches it. The incident couldn’t be more trivial but the narrator is convinced that the woman is pinching her on purpose, that somehow she is telling herself, I wish that I could make you yelp just once. There is no evidence for this malice, but no evidence against it either: we only know that “her lips were parted slightly, with her snout breathing softly,” the word “snout” for “mouth” connoting a malignant, animal quality. But of course the real focus of this paragraph is not on the stranger but on the “I,” who reads these sinister motives into the most ordinary of incidents. Somehow–how?–her mind’s not right, or is it that her suspicion is merely the emblem of the larger, depersonalized, tooth-and-claw survival of the fittest that characterizes the postmodern metropolis?

Scalapino’s prose, in any case, far from being disjointed like Silliman’s, moves seamlessly from beginning to end, from the question “How was I to know…” to the projected words of the stranger presented in italics. Silliman would never describe the woman as having a snout; indeed, his eyes would rest on the surface of her person and quickly, impatiently, move on to something else–a memory, perhaps, or a description of a boarding house, or an amusing pun that occurs to him. His jaunty utterances, upbeat despite the constant difficulties he faces, are quite unlike the just barely controlled hysteria of “Hmmm.”

Michael Palmer’s lineated poem is called “Autobiography” but the poet’s tone is more impersonal than either Silliman’s or Scalapino’s. His short sentences, separated by large areas of white space, are enigmatic and parabolic. Some of his aphorisms–”A and not-A–are the same”; “The world is all that is displaced”–allude to Wittgenstein, the latter a nice twist on “The world is everything that is the case” (1.1. of the Tractatus). Some sentences contain literary allusions: “My dog does not know me,” for example, inverts Gertrude Stein’s, “I am I because my little dog knows me.” In this context, “My dog does not know me” is equivalent to saying “I am nothing.” “All clocks are clouds” brings to mind a Magritte painting; and such lines as “Winter roses are invisible,” and “Late ice sometimes sings,” are written under the sign of Breton’s Nadja and related Surrealist dreamworks. Unlike either Silliman or Scalapino, both of them insistently urban poets, Palmer is given to references to “roses” and “ice,” to “the crescent beach, a drowned deer.” And these nature images are underscored by references to foreign (usually European) locales, as in “Apples in a stall at the streetcorner by the Bahnhof, pale yellow to blackish red.”) One thinks here of Apollinaire ‘s “Zone” or Cendrars’s “Panama, or My Seven Uncles.”

Altogether, Palmer’s imagination is more visual than Silliman’s; his memories more hallucinatory and dreamlike. His is the anxiety, not of the malignant, faceless crowd, as in Scalapino’s piece, but of the empty room: “Violins, like dreams, are suspect.” “There is,” David LeviStrauss has remarked, “a quite identifiable first person running through [Palmer’s] books. It is usually male, neurasthenic, doubtful, by turns cheerful and morose: a reluctant survivor. If it had a visible companion, the other might be called Didi or Clov or Camier. This first person is trepidatious and apologetic, constantly undercutting its own authority.” [9] Thus in “Autobiography,” Silliman’s sturdy resilience gives way to “Shortness of breath, accompanied by tinnitus.” And although, like Silliman, Palmer writes a poetry of parataxis, his is a juxtapositioning of literary, philosophical, and aesthetic fragments rather than the phenomenology of everyday life characteristic of Silliman.

Yet another kind of psychic drive can be found in Barrett Watten’s prose poem, again part of a longer sequence. Unlike Silliman, Scalapino, and Palmer, Watten uses the third person, but his narrator, who becomes “a lens on a room inside,” functions as a kind ofJamesian register, through whom all “events” and items perceived are filtered. It is he who is “in possession of what he sees” first from outside the room and then from inside. He who feels cut off from the “fragments of their talk”. Yet he is more confident than Palmer’s self-critical “I,” more assertive about “imagining a better place to live.” Anxiety, for Watten, is socially constructed and hence to be overcome: “All words resolve this matter like a huge weight balancing on a single point.” For the moment, however, there is no escape: “A cyclone covers the surface of the ceiling with wavering lines.”
In Watten’s account of displacement and possible reconnection, each sentence leads to the next. If Silliman were writing this, “The window is off the kitchen,” would be followed by a sentence like “Net income is down 13%” or “They photograph Habermas to hide the hairlip.” Watten’s prose is more chaste, consecutive, linear; his vocabulary less exuberant and varied. And even though his narrator never speaks in his own person, a voice–measured yet urgent, direct yet highly “educated”–comes through. Again, no one would mistake this passage for a work by Silliman.

“Voice,” it would seem, is not so easily eradicated. But what happens when the elaborately constructed collage of Albany is used to design the openly autobiographical narrative of its successor Under Albany, coming a full fifteen years later? In a letter to me (10 January 1998), Silliman comments, “I used the sentences of Albany to tell me what to write, where to focus, that moment in the essay. The whole premise of Albany (or at least a premise) was to focus on things that were both personal and political, so when Gale called it seemed like the right place to begin. That poem always has been my autobiography, so to speak” (my italics).

The first sentence of Albany, and hence of Under Albany is “If the function of writing is to ‘express the world.’” The sentence is left suspended, the reference to writing as expression can be made only by using scare quotes. In the same vein, the last sentence of Under Albany (not a title from the original) is “It is not possible to ‘describe a life.’” Again the disclaimer, again the scare quotes. But of course the text itself does express the poet’s world, does describe a life–and does so very graphically and movingly. Despite Silliman’s evident desire to subvert the autobiographical, the lyrical, the confessional, in keeping with Language poetics, the urge is to express. On the other hand–and this is an important difference–one “expresses,” not by putting oneself at the center of the universe, but by following Wittgenstein’s precept that “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” “The subject,” says Wittgenstein, “does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the world” (Tractatus 5.6, 5.632).

Silliman’s one-hundred titles constitute the limits in question. Under the first, “If the function of writing is to ‘express the world’,” we have an anecdote about the fifth grade writing contest where young Ron separates himself from the class “star” and “wild kid,” Jon Arnold, and begins, unknowingly, to find his own métier, scribbling “longhand tales scrawled into thick notebooks (‘the assassination of Hitler,’ ‘manned rocket flies behind moon only to disappear’).” The function of writing, it quickly appears, is to “express the world,” at least, with the Wittgensteinian proviso, “the world as I found it.” Arnold’s flashy paper on “the reaction of students hearing him . . . read aloud” is an index to his later career: “I veered away from Arnold by the time high school arrived, his outsiderness reaching regular truancy. . . . When I saw him at State nearly 20 years later . . . the narrative of clothing was aging beach boy, his torso and limbs, every visible inch, covered with tattoos.” For Silliman, by contrast, home life was so bad that “school presented itself as an alternate society (if not reality), an utter necessity.” And that necessity is soon translated into “writing.” The very next title sentence, “My father withheld child support, forcing my mother to live with her parents, my brother and I to be raised together in a small room,” leads to a second account of story-telling–this time the horror stories with which nine-year old Ron barraged his younger brother, scaring the little boy nearly to death . Atypically, Silliman here probes motivation:

The cruelty of my behavior is evident. It’s not an excuse to say that I was nine years old, or twelve. What motivated me? Over forty years later, it is still unclear to me whether I was driven out of a confused sense that my brother’s arrival shortly after the disappearance of my father had been, in some vague way, the cause of that man’s abandonment, or whether the practice of emotional terrorism (modelled with such artistry by my grandmother) was simply the only form of autonomy I understood. (UA 3)

It sounds, at this point, like anybody’s autobiography–the standard retrospective account in which the mature narrator tries to make sense of the child he once was, tries to understand his motives and the familial/ social matrix in which they were developed. But just when we are comfortable with the convention, we come to sentence #3:

Grandfather called them niggers.

So that I was surprised at how many elderly African American men, all, like my grandfather, members of the Veterans for Foreign Wars (VFW) came to his funeral. (3)

In the context of Albany, the first sentence is taken at face value. Followed as it is in the poem by “I can’t afford an automobile,” it gives us a sense of the bleak deprivation and petty racism of white working-class Albany, CA. But in the autobiography, the meaning shifts: perhaps, the reader now surmises, “calling them niggers” wasn’t equivalent to simple racism, for, as Veterans of World War I, black and white actually came together.

The disparity between title and text points up an interesting feature of Silliman’s work. On the one hand, the commissioned autobiographical piece seems much more “straightforward” than its earlier “poetic” source. The paragraphs themselves are not made up of disparate sentences arranged paratactically; their mode is narrative–a very immediate, documentary narrative that seems designed to give as accurate a “picture” as possible of growing up in a dysfunctional family in the dreary North Bay and moving on to the seamier spaces of San Francisco. Although the chronology is by no means straightforward, we learn a great deal about Ron’s “background.” For example:

Yet his best friend was Hispanic.

What I know of my grandfather’s family is almost entirely hearsay, although I never once in the 15 years I lived with the man heard him speak of them. His mother was “a monster,” “a terror,” “cold” and “mean.” On that my mother and grandmother both agreed. (I should be suspicious. This is the exact story I hear about my father and his family from my maternal grandmother). . . .

My grandmother’s first memory of him came from an event in the combined fifth-sixth grade class at LeConte School they attended. A fellow student had had a seizure and my grandfather, following the recommended practice of the day, had inserted his belt into the boy’s mouth to keep him from swallowing his tongue. While my grandmother, the youngest of 11 surviving children in a single-parent household, only made it to ninth grade, my grandfather graduated from Oakland Technical High School and worked briefly for Santa Fe railraod before joining the army and shipping off to Paris to load taxis with munitions during the First World War. Returning, he took a job with what was then called the Paraffin Company in Emeryville where he worked from 1919 until 1961. (UA 9)

This flat, documentary, straightforward account strikes me as curiously horrific. Not because the story is so sad–that would be normal–but because it is so empty. Imagine working for the Paraffin Company in Emeryville for over forty years, doing more or less the same job! Forty yeqrs during which nothing remarkable seems to happen. A more artful autobiographer would have heightened it, would have found a way to give Grandfather’s life symbolic meaning, as, say, Robert Lowell does in his “91 Revere Street.” But Silliman feels sorry neither for the grandfather nor for himself. For him, the personal is always political, and although the poet never says so in so many words, the kind of alienated labor described is just that–there is nothing more to say about it. His own path, in any case, will be different: via an endless assortment of odd jobs, writing workshops, and hoops to jump through, he will remake himself as a poet.

The macrostructure of Under Albany is thus that of Bildungsroman–a kind of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where the young man is both poet and political activist in the Vietnam years. But because this particular activist-poet discovers that the self is constructed in language, he uses his core sentences to play verbal games with the reader. For example:

Revenue enhancement.
I do not recall a time in which I was not the absolutely poorest kid in my class.

or

Television unifies conversation.
Our next door neighbors, the Pruters, were the first on the block to own a set, a large box with a small blue round screen. A year later, when we first bought ours, we would turn it on at 5.00p.m. every day, letting it warm up for a half hour against one of the test patterns that was on before the arrival of the first broadcast, Howdy Doody. (12)

or

I look forward to old age with some excitement.
Sixteen years later, I writing from my room 218 in the Motel Six of Porterville, in the Sierra foothills north of Bakersfield. My nephew, Stephen Matthew Silliman is just four days old. Allen Ginsberg has been dead for 13 days. Their worlds never crossed, just as mine never crossed Gertrude Stein’s. But I know people who have slept with people who have slept with people who slept with Walt Whitman. At 94, Carl Rakosi’s mind clear as a bell. Others at 24, hopelessly muddied and muddled. Once, walking on the beach at Stinson with Rae Armantrout during our student days at Berkeley, I knelt to pick up a beautifully pocked smooth gray stone (I still have it). She asked me what I was doing. “Looking for the good ones,” I replied. (23-24)

The technique in these passages is much subtler than it seems. In all three cases the sentences don’t necessarily “follow” their titles: the discourse shifts from business lingo (“Revenue enhancement”) to the personal (#1), or contradicts the title, as in #2, where television “unifies” conversation only in the sense that everyone is staring at the same set, making only the occasional comment; everyone, moreover, is watching the same program the neighbors are watching. So much for good conversation. In #3, the paragraph does serve as “illustration” for the “topic sentence,” but in a very oblique way. The poet is meditating on the ubiquitous conjunction of birth (his nephew’s) and death (Allen Ginsberg’s), on the interrrelation of lives, past and present. The idea of recovering Whitman’s past via a series of people who have slept with other people is comically grotesque, but it illustrates nicely Silliman’s optimism, his ability to find some trivial emblem of the good life–in this case the “beautifully pocked smooth gray stone.” One feels here that the “absolutely poorest kid in the class” has become steadily happier. Thus he actually can look forward to old age. But “with excitement”? Only in the sense that the “Ron” of Under Albany has always looked forward to the next stage of his life with excitement.

There is no “reasonable” explanation of this mood. Another person might have reacted quite differently to being the poorest kid in the class or having had his father desert him. And there are strange and startling moments, for example in “Two weeks too old to collect orphan’s benefits,” with its account of eighteen-year old Ron’s first acid trip. followed by an unpleasant confrontation with his mother, back home, who, not recognizing the symptoms, accuses him of being drunk:

Then she added, almost in the same breath, before I could decide whether or not to trust myself to say anything at all, that she’d gotten a phone call from my uncle in Pasco. My father had been in an accident somewhere in South Carolina. After several days, he’d died. I still didn’t say anything, nor did she. I went to the room that was nominally mine and lay on the bed I’d grown up with–the “cottage cheese” stucco and asbestos walls pulsated every shade of the rainbow. I don’t recall what I thought–I don’t even recall thinking–but I remember looking inside myself, imagining that I should find an emotion somewhere, puzzled a little that I seemed to find none. (UA 27)

How are we meant to react to this grotesque moment? Explanation, here as elsewhere, gives way to description, as Wittgenstein insisted it should. And the longish narrative in question now yields to a very different time and place, the title sentence being “A woman on the train asks Angela Davis for an autograph.” Beneath this caption we read, “Some of the passengers on the BART car look up, trying to figure out who the “famous” woman is. I’m sitting half a car away, jotting in a notebook.” What is the relation of the death of the prodigal father–a death learned of while high on acid–to this Angela Davis-on-the-bus vignette?

We can take it in various ways. Perhaps the passivity of the poet’s mother in the face of desertion leads her son to activism. Perhaps he escapes into it? Or perhaps he is not all that interested in the Angela Davis phenomenon, busy as he is scribbling in his notebook. Events, in any case, are not related in logical ways: in Under Albany, juxtaposition of the larger units is modelled on the parataxis of the individual sentences of Albany. Thus, although the passages themselves are narrative and coherent, we move easily from sexual encounters to rallies, to memories of the front porch at Albany, to those who ask Angela Davis for her autograph. The “new sentence” thus gives way to what we might call the “new paragraph.” The reader has to fill in the blanks.

And this is of course what Silliman wants us to do. In the interview with Vogler and Marshall, he remarks that “my writing aims at bringing the reader as deeply inside the immediate unit of writing as possible–the sentence, the line, the word” (16). Unlike the usual “‘voice’ trope,” he maintains, “an elaborate conceit . . . that attempts to focus the reader’s experience outside of him-or herself,” his writing is designed to allow the reader to “activate” the text, to “sense how her own nose interrupts and shapes the lower limit of the horizon” (17).
One might interject here that good poets have always “activated” reader response in this way, have always allowed for gaps which the reader must construct and interpret. And, Silliman is quick to add , he is by no means suggesting that anything goes: “The revolution of the word,” as he puts it, “is not an anarchist event.” Indeed, “as the author, I get to determine unilaterally which words in what order will set forth the terms through which the experience shall occur” (17, my italics).

Is Silliman’s then, as Jed Rasula posits, a “grand refusal of the chronic strategies of authorial domination”? Yes, if by “chronic” we are referring to the confessional mode of the sixties and seventies, in which verbal material is all but subsumed under the presence of a commanding “I.” But if we look further afield and read Silliman against Blaise Cendrars or Apollinaire, against the early Eliot or the late Stevens, not to mention Williams and Stein, we learn that it’s perfectly reasonable to think of Silliman as an individual lyric poet, a poet whose mainspring, however bound to the theorems of early Language poetics, has always been essentially autobiographical.
Under Albany ends with the poet’s marriage to Krishna and the implication that life in the Bay area is over: The final title is

The want-ads lie strewn on the table.

There follows the poem’s conclusion, “It is not possible to ‘describe a life’” (57). But in fact it is possible and we have just seen it happen. The caveat is that such description can never produce closure. The want-ads, strewn on the table on Silliman’s final page point toward the future: another job, another city, another life. And in this sense it really is “not possible to ‘describe a life’,” for in the act of writing, it continues to be lived. The future must be extracted, bit by tantalizing bit, from “under” Albany.

Footnotes

RON SILLIMAN’S ALBANY, SUSAN HOWE’S BUFFALO

Marjorie Perloff

published in Albany, Critical Inquiry, 25 (Spring1999), 405-434.

The “personal” is already a plural condition. Perhaps one feels that it is located somewhere within, somewhere inside the body–in the stomach? the chest? the genitals? the throat? the head? One can look for it and already one is not oneself, one is several, incomplete, and subject to dispersal.
–Lyn Hejinian, “The Person and Description” [1]

One of the cardinal principles—perhaps the cardinal principle—of American Language poetics (as of the related current in England, usually labeled “linguistically innovative poetries”) [2] has been the dismissal of “voice” as the foundational principle of lyric poetry. In the preface to his anthology In The American Tree (1986), Ron Silliman famously declared that Robert Grenier’s “I HATE SPEECH” manifesto, published in the first issue of the San Francisco journal This (1971), “announced a breach–and a new moment in American writing”–a rejection of “simple ego psychology in which the poetic text represents not a person, but a persona, the human as unified object. And the reader likewise.” [3] From the other coast, Charles Bernstein similarly denounced “voice” as the “privileged structure in the organization and interpretation of poems.” [4] And in his early essay “Stray Straws and Straw Men” (1976), Silliman is Bernstein’s Exhibit A for a constructivist poetry, a poetry that undermines the “natural look,” with its “personal subject matter & a flowing syntax.” [5] “Ron Silliman,” Bernstein writes, “has consistently written a poetry of visible borders: a poetry of shape”–one that “may discomfort those who want a poetry primarily of personal communication, flowing freely from the inside with the words of a natural rhythm of life, lived daily” (“SS,” pp. 40-41). And the essay goes on to unmask Official Verse Culture, with its “sanctification” of “authenticity,” “artlessness,” “spontaneity,” and claim for self-presence, the notion, widely accepted in the poetry of the 1960s, that “The experience is present to me” (“SS,” pp. 41, 42). [6]

Although Bernstein doesn’t explicitly say so, the critique of voice, self-presence, and authenticity, put forward in Content’s Dream, as well as in such related texts as Ron Silliman’s own The New Sentence (1987) or Steve McCaffery’s North of Intention (1986), [7] must be understood as part of the larger poststructuralist critique of authorship and the humanist subject, a critique that became prominent in the late sixties and reached its height in the U.S. a decade or so later when the Language movement was coming into its own. It was Roland Barthes, after all, who insisted, in “The Death of the Author” (1968), that writing, far from being the simple and direct expression of interiority, is “the destruction of every voice, every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.” “Linguistically, “ Barthes declared, “the author is never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language knows a ‘subject’, not a ‘person’.” And he famously concludes:

We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the message of the Author-God). . . . The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. The writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others. . . . Succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt: life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred. [8]

Here Barthes anticipates Foucault’s equally famous pronouncement, in “What Is an Author?” (1969), that “The writing of our day has freed itself from the necessity of ‘expression’.” In Foucault’s words:

Writing unfolds like a game that inevitably moves beyond its own rules and finally leaves them behind. Thus, the essential basis of this writing is not exalted emotions related to the act of composition or the insertion of a subject into language. Rather, it is primarily concerned with creating an opening where the writing subject endlessly disappears. The author is now replaced by the “author function”–the function of a particular discourse– and the pressing questions about a given text become, not “what has [the author] revealed of his most profound self in his language?” but “where does [this discourse] come from; how is it circulated; who controls it?” [9]

What matter who’s speaking? (“WIA,” p. 138). Beckett’s question, as recharged and transmitted by Foucault, was to be historicized, along Marxist and specifically Althusserian lines, by Fredric Jameson in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of late Capitalism (1991). Whereas Barthes, Foucault, and the Derrida of Writing and Difference were essentially talking about how to read, how, that is, to construct an existing text without taking its author’s intentions as normative, Jameson takes the death of the author, or rather, the death of the subject, quite literally, that death being no more than one of the symptoms of the social transformations produced by late global capitalism. “The very concept of expression,” Jameson posits, “presupposes indeed some separation within the subject, and along with that a whole metaphysics of the inside and outside” that characterizes great modernist artworks like Van Gogh’s A Pair of Boots or Edward Munch’s The Scream.[10] Postmodernism no longer recognizes such “depth models” as inside/ outside, essence/appearance, latent/manifest, authenticity/ inauthenticity, signifier/signified, or depth/surface.

The “alienation of the subject is displaced by the latter’s fragmentation,” and indeed by the “death” of the subject itself–the end of the autonomous bourgeois monad or ego or individual” (P, pp. 14-15). Coupled with that end is the end of a “unique style, along with the accompanying collective ideals of an artistic or political vanguard or avant-garde.” The result is the now axiomatic “waning of affect” that manifests itself in an ability to produce satire or even parody, the latter giving way to “blank parody” or pastiche. “As for expression,” writes Jameson, “. . . the liberation, in contemporary society, from the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean not merely a liberation from anxiety but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling (P, p. 15).

In his first formulation of this “new depthlessness” or “waning of affect” (1984), [11] Jameson voiced some regret over the passing of Modernism. But by 1990 (the date of the “Conclusion” to Postmodernism), he seems to find the passing of the Modernist Giants–Picasso, Kafka, Proust, Frank Lloyd Wright–the occasion of at least some satisfaction:

[I]f the poststructuralist motif of the ‘death of the subject’ means anything socially, it signals the end of the entrepreneurial and inner-directed individualism, with its “charisma” and its accompanying categorical panoply of quaint romantic values such as that of the “genius” in the first place. Seen thus, the extinction of the ‘great moderns’ is not necessarily an occasion for pathos. Our social order is richer in information and more literate, and socially, at least, more “democratic” in the sense of the universalization of wage labor . . . .this new order no longer needs prophets and seers of the high modernist and charismatic type. . . . Such figures no longer hold any charm or magic for the subjects of a corporate, collectivized, post-individualistic age; in that case, goodbye to them without regrets, as Brecht might have put it: woe to the country that needs geniuses, prophets, Great Writers, or demiurges. (P, p. 306; my emphasis).

I cite this passage at some length because its argument has been so thoroughly internalized in our own “advanced” discourses about the place of the aesthetic in our culture. The demise of the transcendental ego, of the authentic self, of the poet as lonely genius, of a unique artistic style: these, as we have seen, are now taken as something of a given. In their group manifesto “Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry” (1988), for example, Silliman, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Steve Benson, Bob Perelman, and Barrett Watten concur that “our work denies the centrality of the individual artist. . . . The self as the central and final term of creative practice is being challenged and exploded in our writing.” [12] And, given the tedious and unreflective claim for the unique insight and individual vision that has characterized so large a portion of mainstream poetry, the case for an “alternative” poetics remains compelling.

At the same time, now that the exploratory poetries associated with the Language movement are more than twenty years old, Jameson’s formulations (and related theories of the postmodern) have lost much of their edge. For, even if we set aside the work of mainstream poets like the American laureates Robert Pinsky and Robert Hass, Mark Strand and Rita Dove, even if we restrict ourselves to the poets of the counterculture represented in, say, Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris’s new Poems for the Millenium,[13] differences among the various poets now strike us as more significant than similarities or group labels. Such counters as asyntacticality or the disappearance of the referent or even the materiality of the sign cannot alter the simple fact that we can easily tell a Charles Bernstein poem from one by Steve McCaffery, a Tom Raworth sequence from one by Allen Fisher, a Maggie O’Sullivan “verbovisivocal” text from one by Susan Howe. More important: the breakdown of the high/low distinction, accepted as a cornerstone of postmodernism by the theorists of the seventies and eighties, is coming under increasing suspicion as common sense tells us that all artworks are not, after all, equally valuable (whatever valuable means), and that when, for example, Frank Sinatra is called, as he has been in the wake of his recent death, one of the great artists of the century, this statement is not really equivalent to the proposition that John Cage is one of the great artists of the century. For one thing, the two assertions call for different speakers. For another, they posit different contexts. The word great in any case, means something different in the two cases, as does the word artist. Even One of is unstable: Sinatra fans were comparing their idol, not only to other “great” singers and movie stars but to tycoons of the American record industry, those savvy entrepreneurs who know how to market a given label. In the case of Cage, on the other hand, one of would refer to the international avant-garde market– the Hörspiele heard on German radio as well as the Zen art of Japan.

Then, too, contemporary poetics has not satisfactorily resolved the relation of what Jameson calls the “new depthlessness” to the “genius” position now occupied by those evidently deep (read complex, difficult) theorists, whose word is all but law. Indeed, even as Jameson rejects the image of the “great demiurges and prophets” like “Proust in his cork-lined room” or the “‘tragic,’ uniquely doomed Kafka” (P, p. 305), he cites, on page after page, names like Adorno and Althusser, Freud and Lacan, Hegel and Nietzsche, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Ernesto Laclau, not to mention the book’s presiding deity who is, of course, Karl Marx. If genius theory is passé, if there is no such thing as unique style or authorial presence, why are these names so sacred? If Foucault has pronounced so definitively on the death of the author, why are we always invoking the name of the author Foucault? Again, if in the current climate we dare not claim canonical status for Beckett or Brecht, why does Walter Benjamin enjoy that status so readily?

In a recent essay for Bernstein’s collection Close Listening (1998), Silliman speculates on this phenomenon. Silliman begins by restating his opposition to “the poem as confession of lived personal experience, the (mostly) free verse presentation of sincerity and authenticity that for several decades has been a staple of most of the creative writings in the United States.” [14] But, in reevaluating what he calls Barthes’s “ritual slaying of the author” (WS, p. 364), Silliman wonders whether Barthes’s theory of text construction hasn’t gone too far. The insistence, in “The Death of the Author,” that “the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted,” is finally unsatisfactory: “The idealized, absent author of the New Critical canon has here been replaced by an equally idealized, absent reader. All that remains are the reports of other readers–call them critics–whose texts endlessly read textuality itself, whose claim to authority lies precisely in the self-knowledge of their texts as infinitely deferred, deferring, acts” (“WS,” p. 365).

And where do these acts take place? Where else but in the university? As Silliman speculates:

Perhaps it should not be a surprise, that while postmodernism in the arts has been conducted largely, although not exclusively, outside of the academy, the postmodern debate has been largely conducted between different schools of professors who agree only that they too dislike it. Thus the characteristic strategy of the ambitious critic and anxious graduate student alike is not the opening of the canons, but rather the demonstration of a critical move upon some text(s) within the already established ensemble of official canons. . . . Once incorporated into an institutional canon, the text becomes little more than a ventriloquist’s dummy through which a babel of critical voices contend. (“WS,” pp. 365, 368).
Barthes could not, of course, have foreseen that the privilege he accorded the reader (“We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning”) would so easily turn into the form of ventriloquism Silliman describes. But, as those of us in the academy know only too well, this is precisely what has happened. “We know now: (“On sait maintenant”): we who are critics can practice our virtuosity on this or that poem, which is consequently accorded secondary status. Hence the elevated status of Benjamin or Deleuze vis-à-vis Beckett or Kafka.

What matter who’s speaking? Perhaps it is time to reconsider the role of the subject in lyric poetry. “The relation between agency and identity,” writes Silliman, “must be understood as interactive, fluid, negotiable” (RSCL 371). It is a “relation between the poet, a real person with ‘history, biography, psychology,’ and the reader, no less real, no less encumbered by all this baggage. In poetry, the self is a relation between writer and reader that is triggered by what [Roman] Jakobson called contact, the power of presence” (RSCL 373).
I find it interesting that Silliman, once an outspoken detractor of formalism, here invokes the name of the great Russian Formalist critic. A similar shift may be noted in the work of Bernstein. In the mordantly funny essay “The Revenge of the Poet-Critic” (1998), Bernstein examines the issues posed by the poetics of cultural construction. “In the 1990s,” he remarks,

the problems of group affiliation (the neolyric “we”) pose as much a problem for poetry as do assertions of the Individual Voice. If poems can’t speak directly for an author, neither can they speak directly for a group. . . . Each poem speaks not only many voices but also many groups and poetry can investigate the construction of these provisional entities in and through and by language.
If individual identity is a false front, group identity is a false fort. [15]

And, in the related essay “What’s Art Got to Do with It? The Status of the Subject of the Humanities in an Age of Cultural Studies,” Bernstein gives a devastating critique of the current critical orthodoxy that treats literature as no more than “symptom” or “example,” even as the theorist is taken to be above and beyond the fray. Isn’t it possible, asks Bernstein, that Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Tasteis itself a “commodity whose status is determined by its role in the professional habitat to which he belongs?” Or, again, “Is Fredric Jameson’s writing on postmodernism a symptom of postindustrial capitalism?” (MW 62-63). “Behind every successful artist,” Bernstein declares, “is a new historian who says it’s all just a symptom. Behind every successful new historian is an artist who says you forgot to mention my work–and, boy, is it symptomatic!” [16]

Of course, as Bernstein would be the first to insist, there’s no going back to earlier models. The workshop term voice, for example, a term that implies, quite inaccurately, that speech is primary and prior to writing and that hence a poem is simply the outward sign of a spoken self-presence (as in the ubiquitous cliché, “She’s really found her voice”) is not adequate. Neither is the fuzzy term style, a term now thoroughly co-opted by the media and commodified in such titles as “Life and Style” (a daily section of the Los Angeles Times).
Perhaps a more accurate term to refer to the mark of difference that separates one identity from another, no matter how fully the two share a particular group aesthetic, is the word signature. From 1580, from the Latin signare, “to sign or mark,” a signature is “the name (or special mark) of a person written with his or her own hand as an authentication of some document or writing.” “The fatal signature,” we read in Robert Southey’s All For Love (1829), “appear’d / To all the multitude, / Distinct as when the accursed pen / Had traced it with fresh blood.” A subsidiary meaning (1613) of signature, now obsolete, was “A distinctive mark, a peculiarity in form or colouring, etc. on a plant or other natural object, formerly supposed to be an indication of its qualities, especially for medicinal purposes.” A signature thus came to mean “a distinguishing mark of any kind”: in 1626, Lancelot Andrewes wrote in one of his sermons, “The saviour . . . taking on Him “Abraham’s seed” must withal take on Him the signature of Abraham’s seed, and be . . . circumcised.” And in his translation of the Odyssey (1725) Pope writes, “Vulgar parents cannot stamp their race / With signatures of such majestic grace.” In the seventeenth century (this meaning is now obsolete), signaturewas used to designate “a naevus or birth-mark.” [17]

A second category of definitions comes from the discourse of printing: a signature, let’s recall, is “a letter or figure, a set of combination of letters or figures, etc., placed by the printer at the foot of the first page (and frequently on one or more of the succeeding pages) of every sheet in a book, for the purpose of showing the order in which these are to be placed or bound.” And, thirdly, there is the musical designation of signature; from 1806 on it has meant “a sign, or set of signs, placed at the beginning of a piece of music, immediately after the clef, to indicate its key or time.” [18]

The common thread of all three of the above categories is that of the signature as identifying mark. As such, it is not surprising that, like its cognate term, author, the word signature became suspect in poststructuralist theory. In Les Mots et les choses (1966), Foucault writes movingly of signatures as the key element in the system of similitudes that dominated the preModern world. As “the visible mark of invisible analogies,” the signature was, for centuries, the external sign of a hidden but present interiority, and the world was “read” as a large open book, whose signs, characters, numbers, symbols, and hieroglyphs demand interpretation. “To find the law of signs,” as Foucault famously puts it, “is to discover things.” [19]
Les Mots et les choses traces the historical dissolution of this Renaissance “episteme,” a dissolution considered from a hermeneutic perspective by Derrida in “Signature Event Context” (1972). “A written sign . . . ,” writes Derrida, “is a mark that subsists, one which does not exhaust itself in the moment of its inscription and which can give rise to an iteration in the absence and beyond the presence of the empirically determined subject who, in a given context, has emitted or produced it.” [20] But since the written sign inevitably breaks with its context, “with the collectivity of presences organizing the moment of inscription,” “the absolute singularity of signature as event” can never fully occur (“SEC,” pp. 9, 20). Thus writing “is not the site, ‘in the last instance,’ of a hermeneutic deciphering, the decoding of a meaning or truth”(“SEC,” p. 21).

From a hermeneutic perspective, this is no doubt the case. But even Derrida, posing the question, “Are there signatures?” responds, “Yes, of course, every day. Effects of signature are the most common thing in the world” (“SEC,” p. 20). And he ends his essay with the “counterfeit” signature “J. Derrida” (“SEC,” p. 21). The implication is that, however conscious we must be of the basic instability of a given signature, in practice, we do take signatures seriously as markers of a particular individual, a cultural practice, an historical period, a national formation, a convention, and so on. Indeed, if our purpose is to understand specific writing practices, individual as well as generic, we can hardly avoid noting their individual stamp or mark of authorship. The new Bilbao-Guggenheim Museum, for example, may bear witness to any number of postmodern architectural traits (and some modernist ones as well: witness the building’s Frank Lloyd Wright allusions), but its indelible signature is that of its highly individual architect Frank Gehry.
This brings me back to the question of the lyric subject in the ostensibly “deauthorized” work of the language poets. In what follows, I want to look at signatures in two poetic texts, both of them written by what are nominally Language poets and both charting, in very specific ways, the geography of childhood. The first is Ron Silliman’s own “Albany,” the second, Susan Howe’s Frame Structures.

“SIGNATURES OF ALL THINGS I AM HERE TO READ”

“Albany” is a long prose paragraph made up of one hundred “New Sentences,” to use Ron Silliman’s own term, defined in a now well-known (and hotly debated) essay by that name. The “new sentence” is conceived as an independent unit, neither causally nor temporally related to the sentences that precede and follow it. Like a line in poetry, its length is operative, and its meaning depends on the larger paragraph as organizing system.[21] Here, for example, are the first twenty sentences of “Albany”:

If the function of writing is to “express the world.” My father withheld child support, forcing my mother to live with her parents, my brother and I to be raised together in a small room. Grandfather called them niggers. I can’t afford an automobile. Far across the calm bay stood a complex of long yellow buildings, a prison. A line is the distance between. They circled the seafood restaurant, singing “We shall not be moved.” My turn to cook. It was hard to adjust my sleeping to those hours when the sun was up. The event was nothing like their report of it. How concerned was I over her failure to have orgasms? Mondale’s speech was drowned by jeers. Ye wretched. She introduces herself as a rape survivor. Yet his best friend was Hispanic. I decided not to escape to Canada. Revenue enhancement. Competition and [22] spectacle, kinds of drugs. If it demonstrates form some people won’t read it. Television unifies conversation.

And here the last twenty:

Client populations (cross the tundra). Off the books. The whole neighborhood is empty in the daytime. Children form lines at the end of each recess. Eminent domain. Rotating chair. The history of Poland is 90 seconds. Flaming pintos. There is no such place as the economy, the self. That bird demonstrates the sky. Our home, we were told, had been broken, but who were these people we lived with? Clubbed in the stomach, she miscarried. There were bayonets on campus, cows in India, people shoplifting books. I just want to make it to lunch time. Uncritical of nationalist movements in the Third World. Letting the dishes sit for a week. Macho culture of convicts. With a shotgun and “in defense” the officer shot him in the face. Here, for a moment, we are joined. The want-ads lie strewn on the table.

As in his long poems Ketjak and Tjanting, both written a few years earlier, “Albany” relies on parataxis, dislocation, and ellipsis (the very first sentence, for example, is a conditional clause whose result clause is missing), as well as pun, paragram, and sound play to construct its larger paragraph unit. But it is not just a matter of missing pieces. The poet also avoids conventional “expressivity” by refusing to present us with a consistent “I,” not specifying, for that matter, who the subject of a given sentence might be. Who, for example, says, “I just want to make it to lunchtime”? Or, “Talking so much is oppressive”? Who believes that “music is essential,” and, by the way, essential to what? Whose “best friend was Hispanic”? And so on.

At the same time–and this has always been a Silliman trademark–indeterminacy of agent and referent does not preclude an obsessive attention to particular “realistic” detail. Despite repeated time and space shifts, the world of Albany, CA. is wholly recognizable. It is, to begin with, not the Bay Area of the affluent– the Marin County suburbanites, Russian Hill aesthetes, or Berkeley middle-class go-getters. The working-class motif is immediately established with the reference to “my father withheld child support, forcing my mother to live with her parents, my brother and I to be raised together in a small room.” And this is the white working class: “Grandfather called them niggers.” Later, when the narrator is living in a part of San Francisco where, on the contrary, many ethnicities are represented, we read that “they speak in Farsi at the corner store.” The poet is a political activist: he participates in demonstrations and teach-ins, is briefly jailed, avoids the draft, and so on. There are many explanations of everyday things the activist must deal with: “The cops wear shields that serve as masks.” But the paragraph is also filled with references to sexual love: couplings and uncouplings, rape, miscarriage, and abortion. And, finally, there is the motif of poetry: “If it demonstrates form they can’t read it.” And readings: “It’s not easy if your audience doesn’t identify as readers.” Writing poetry is always a subtext but one makes one’s living elsewhere: “The want-ads,” as the last sentence reminds us, “lie strewn on the table.”

“Silliman’s work,” observes Jed Rasula, “may be read as a grand refusal of the chronic strategies of authorial domination.” [23] Here Rasula echoes Silliman’s own early Language manifestos, with their emphasis on the avoidance of what Charles Olson called the “lyrical interference of the individual as ego,” the refusal to create a consistent or controlling self, whose construction of events as of verbal forms controls the material in question. [24] The “realism” of “Albany,” Rasula would no doubt argue, is properly understood, not as personal expression, but as elaborate network of signifiers in which conflicting vocalizations and linguistic registers come into play.

But must it be either/or? And is it really the case that Silliman eschews “authorial domination”? I find myself increasingly uncomfortable with such formulations. For who, after all, controls the specific language operations in the text before us? There is, to begin with, not the slightest doubt that “Albany” is a man’s poem, a man, aware of the sexual needs and difficulties of the women in his life, but centrally caught up in the political: the need for demonstrations, the abuses of the cops, the “bayonets on campus,” the question of “nationalist movements in the Third World.” “How concerned was I,” we read in sentence 11, “over her failure to have orgasms?” However much—and the question may have been posed to the narrator by a friend, a relative, a physician, or by himself–the very next sentence, “Mondale’s speech was drowned by jeers,” places the question about orgasms in ironic perspective. Even such seemingly neutral statements as “my turn to cook” identify “Albany” as the narrative of a young man who has consciously rejected the traditional male role: in his mother’s household, after all, such a statement would have been absurd, given the traditional division of labor.

The signature of Albany is a “normal” declarative sentence (“I can’t afford an automobile”) or part of a sentence (“To own a basement,” “Died in action”), sometimes commonsensical, sometimes aphoristic, sometimes an item in a newspaper or on television. In their curious collisions, these “casual” sentences point to an author who is matter-of-fact, streetwise, and largely self-educated; his is the discourse of a working-class man (as even the first name Ron rather than Ronald suggests) who has slowly and painfully learned the craft of poetry, a man who’s been around and has had to put up with quite a bit, beginning with his father’s withholding of child support. Pain, violence, and injustice are the facts of his life; sentence after sentence refers to murders, shoot-outs, abortions, riots, asbestos poisoning and the like. And even at the trivial level difficulty dominates: “It was hard to adjust my sleeping to those hours when the sun was up.” “Becoming to live with less space.” “I used my grant to fix my teeth.” And so on. Yet Silliman’s characteristic formulations are by no means gloomy; on the contrary, his “voice” emerges as sprightly, engaged, curious, fun-loving, energetic, a voice that loves the wordplay of “they call their clubs batons. They call their committees clubs.” Or, “Eminent domain. Rotating chair.” Or “There were bayonets on campus, cows in India, people shoplifting books. I just wanted to make it to lunch time.”
No individual signature? Let’s compare the prose of “Albany” to the following extracts:

(1) How was I to know that the woman, seated next to me on the bus,
would, when the bus lurched, just appear to lose her balance,
and, as if to keep herself from swaying, would take hold of my arm
with her hand so that pressing me between her finger and thumb
she pinched my arm. Though I believed (looking at her sideways,
and seeing only that her lips were parted slightly, with her snout
breathing softly) that during the two or three minutes
in which this pain lasted, she was saying (or at least I imagined so
from the length of time that she held on to my arm
before releasing me) I wish that I could make you yelp just once.

(2) A and Not-A are the same.

My dog does not know me.

Violins like dreams, are suspect.

I come from Kolophon, or perhaps some small island.

The strait has frozen, and people are walking–a few skating– across it.

On the crescent beach, a drowned deer.

A woman with one hand, her thighs around your neck.

The world is all that is displaced.

Apples in a stall at the street corner by the Bahnhof, pale yellow to blackish red.

Memory does not speak.

Shortness of breath, accompanied by tinnitus.

(3) A man is standing in front of a window. In possession of
what he sees. A person becomes a lens on a room inside.
Then to walk into the room on sequent occasions. The
lights go down on the buildings outside. The window is
off the kitchen, the room is filled with people. Smoke
coming out of the cracks. What can he have. All words
resolve this matter like a huge weight balancing on a single
point. That point is in motion, verging from one word to
the next. A cyclone covers the surface of the ceiling with
wavering lines. The room fills in with fragments of their
talk. But a window is an opening to the outside. He is
contradicted in his rooms, imagining a better place to live.

All three of these passages come from poetic works by San Francisco poets associated with the Language movement: Leslie Scalapino’s “hmmmm” from Considering how exaggerated music is, Michael Palmer’s “Autobiography” in At Passages, and Barrett Watten’s “City Fields” in Frame (1971-1990).[25] All three poets would insist, I think, that theirs is not an “expressivist” poetry, that, in Palmer’s words, “He regards the self as just another sign.” And it is true that, read against, say, a lyric by Mark Strand or Louise Gluck, there is no doubt that Scalapino, Palmer, and Watten are trying, in the words of Jasper Johns, to “do something else to it,” [26] true that they have no interest in the closural first-person metaphoric model of mainstream poetry.

But to group these texts as Language poems tells us very little. Scalapino’s nine-line rectangular print block, written in complete sentences but with internal spacing that emphasizes its lineation, has a perfectly consistent angle of vision, quite unlike Silliman’s collage-prose. It is part of a longer sequence on the uncanny and terrifying substrate of ordinary life. Scalapino’s empiricist “flat” narrative purports merely to describe what happened, but what did? The scene, as so often in Silliman, [27] is on a bus: the “I” is sitting next to an unknown woman. When the bus lurches, this woman, evidently to keep her balance, grabs the narrator’s arm and pinches it. The incident couldn’t be more trivial but the narrator is convinced that the woman is pinching her on purpose, that somehow she is telling herself, “I wish that I could make you yelp just once.” There is no evidence for this malice, but no evidence against it either: we only know that the woman’s “lips were parted slightly, with her snout breathing softly,” the word “snout” for “mouth” connoting a malignant, animal quality. But of course the real focus of this paragraph is not on the stranger but on the “I,” who reads these sinister motives into the most ordinary of incidents. Somehow–how?–her mind’s not right, or is it that her suspicion is merely the emblem of the larger, depersonalized, tooth-and-claw survival of the fittest that characterizes the postmodern metropolis?
Scalapino’s prose, in any case, far from being disjointed like Silliman’s, moves inexorably from beginning to end, from the question, “How was I to know…” to the projected words of the stranger presented in italics. Silliman would never describe a woman as having a snout; indeed, his eyes would barely take in her person and quickly, impatiently, move on to something else–a memory, perhaps, of what he did with her, or a description of a boarding house, or an amusing pun that occurs to him. His jaunty utterances, upbeat despite the constant difficulties he faces, are quite unlike the just barely controlled hysteria that animates “Hmmm.”

Michael Palmer’s lineated poem is called “Autobiography” but the poet’s tone is more impersonal than either Silliman’s or Scalapino’s. His short sentences, separated by large areas of white space, are enigmatic and parabolic, his images equivocal. Some of his aphorisms–”A and not-A–are the same”; “The world is all that is displaced”–allude to Wittgenstein, the latter a nice twist on “the world is all that is the case.” [28] Some sentences contain literary allusions: “My dog does not know me,” for example, inverts Gertrude Stein’s, “I am I because my little dog knows me.” [29] In this context, “My dog does not know me” is equivalent to saying “I am nothing.” “All clocks are clouds” brings to mind a Magritte painting; and such lines as “winter roses are invisible” and “Late ice sometimes sings” are written under the sign of André Breton’s Nadja and related Surrealist dreamworks. Unlike either Silliman or Scalapino, both of them insistently urban poets, Palmer is given to references to “roses” and “ice,” to “the crescent beach, a drowned deer.” And these nature images are underscored by references to foreign (usually European) locales, as in “apples in a stall at the streetcorner by the Bahnhof, pale yellow to blackish red”). One thinks here of Apollinaire ‘s “Zone” or Cendrars’s “Panama, or My Seven Uncles.”

Altogether, Palmer’s imagination is more visual and literary than Silliman’s, his memories more hallucinatory and dreamlike. His is the anxiety, not of the malignant, faceless crowd, as in Scalapino’s piece, but of the empty room: “Violins, like dreams, are suspect.” “There is,” David Levi Strauss has remarked, “a quite identifiable first person running through [Palmer’s] books. It is usually male, neurasthenic, doubtful, by turns cheerful and morose: a reluctant survivor. If it had a visible companion, the other might be called Didi or Clov or Camier. This first person is trepidatious and apologetic, constantly undercutting its own authority.” [30] In “Autobiography,” not surprisingly, Silliman’s sturdy resilience gives way to “shortness of breath, accompanied by tinnitus.” And although, like Silliman, Palmer writes a poetry of parataxis, his is a juxtapositioning of poetic and philosophical fragments rather than the phenomenology of everyday life characteristic of Silliman.

Yet another kind of psychic drive can be found in Barrett Watten’s prose poem, again part of a longer sequence. Unlike Silliman, Scalapino, and Palmer, Watten uses the third person, but his narrator, who becomes “a lens on a room inside,” functions as a kind of Jamesian register, through whom all “events” and items perceived are filtered. It is he who is “in possession of what he sees,” first from outside the room and then from inside, he who feels cut off from the “fragments of their talk.” Yet he is more confident than Palmer’s self-critical “I,” more assertive about “imagining a better place to live.” Anxiety, for Watten, is socially constructed and hence to be overcome by social change: “All words resolve this matter like a huge weight balancing on a single point.” For the moment, however, there is no escape: “A cyclone covers the surface of the ceiling with wavering lines.”
In Watten’s account of displacement and possible reconnection, each sentence leads to the next. If Silliman were writing this, “The window is off the kitchen,” would be followed by a sentence like “net income is down 13%” or “they photograph Habermas to hide the hairlip.” Watten’s prose is more chaste, consecutive, linear; his vocabulary less exuberant and varied. And even though his narrator never speaks in his own person, a voice–measured yet urgent, direct yet highly “educated”–comes through. Again, no one would mistake this passage for a work by Silliman.

The poet’s naevus or birthmark, it would seem, is not so easily eradicated. It is interesting that when, in 1997, Gale Research invited Silliman to contribute an autobiographical essay to their Contemporary Authors series, he used the sentences of “Albany” “to tell me what to write, where to focus, that moment in the essay. The whole premise of ‘Albany’ (or at least a premise) was to focus on things that were both personal and political, so when Gale called, it seemed like the right place to begin. That poem always has been my autobiography, so to speak.[31] The resultant text, in which each of the one hundred sentences is printed in boldface, followed by a paragraph of varying length, is called Under Albany. —“under,” no doubt, because the poet now tries to get inside, behind, and under his earlier statements so as to make some sense of their psychological and social trajectory. [32]
Not infrequently, the “under” entry contradicts or qualifies the original sentence. For example (sentence 3):
Grandfather called them niggers.

So that I was surprised at how many elderly African American men, all, like my grandfather, members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) came to his funeral. [33]
In the context of “Albany,” the first sentence is taken at face value. Followed as it is in the original poem by “I can’t afford an automobile,” it gives us a sense of the bleak deprivation and petty racism of white working class Albany, CA. But in Under Albany. , the meaning of what is now a title shifts; perhaps, the reader here surmises, “calling them niggers” wasn’t equivalent to simple racism, for, as veterans of World War I, black and white men may well have had interacted more fully than have their grandsons.
I have discussed elsewhere the complex relationship of title to paragraph in Under Albany. , [34] a text that is deeply moving in its account of the poet’s empty childhood—a childhood that paradoxically paves the way for the remarkable resilience and optimism of Silliman’s maturity:
I look forward to old age with some excitement.

Sixteen years later, I’m writing from my room 218 in the Motel Six of Porterville, in the Sierra foothills north of Bakersfield. My nephew, Stephen Matthew Silliman is just four days old. Allen Ginsberg has been dead for 13 days. Their worlds never crossed, just as mine never crossed Gertrude Stein’s. But I know people who have slept with people who have slept with people who slept with Walt Whitman. At 94, Carl Rakosi’s mind clear as a bell. Others at 24, hopelessly muddied and muddled. Once, walking on the beach at Stinson with Rae Armantrout during our student days at Berkeley, I knelt to pick up a beautifully pocked smooth gray stone (I still have it). She asked me what I was doing. “Looking for the good ones,” I replied. [35]

In the context of Silliman’s account of his day-to-day difficulties and trauma, the upbeat ending of this paragraph comes as a real surprise. His is a complex and engaging autobiography, but then “Albany,” the prior text that supposedly exhibits what Jameson calls the “waning of affect,” was always already autobiographical.

Hinge Pictures/ Dividing Lines

Like Under Albany, Susan Howe’s Frame Structures (1996) refigures the poet’s earlier work. It collects four of her earliest long poems (Hinge Picture, 1974; Chanting at the Crystal Sea, 1975; Cabbage Gardens, 1979; Secret History of the Dividing Line, 1978) in slightly revised versions and adds a long “preface” that gives the book its title. The poems are characterized by their distinctive visual layout: in Secret History of the Dividing Line, for example, the title (derived, minus the word “Secret,” from William Byrd’s eighteenth-century journal of explorations in the Virginia wilderness) appears in the center of a blank page with its mirror image (figure 1), even as the opening horizontal rectangles (the four-line units havejustified left and right margins and double spacing) play on the word “MARK”:

mark mar ha forest 1 a boundary manic a land a
tract indicate position 2 record bunting interval
free also event starting the slightly position of
O about both of don’t something INDICATION Americ

made or also symbol sachem maimed as on her for
ar in teacher duct excellent figure MARK lead be
knife knows his hogs dogs a boundary model nucle
hearted land land land district boundary times un (FS 89)

Here mark refers first of all to the surveyor’s (William Byrd’s) mark made in delineating a boundary between “tract[s]” of forest land. But the mark is also a trace, a sign that points us to specific things that have happened: one thinks of Blake’s “London,” with its lines, “And mark in every face I meet / Marks of weakness, marks of woe.” The poem’s opening “Mark mar ha forest 1 a boundary manic” gives the word mark a number of paragrammatic possibilities. “Mark ma ha”: stutter is followed by exclamation, an inability, perhaps, to “mark” the boundary in question. Or again, “mar ha” may be parts of the name Martha, the t missing in the imagined source manuscript Here and throughout the text, “boundary manic” is central to the poet’s thought; she is mesmerized by questions of “secret” divisions, borders, boundaries, fault lines. Then, too, Mark refers both to Howe’s father (Mark DeWolfe Howe) and to her son, as the italicized line on the third page of the poem, “for Mark my father; and Mark my son” tells us (FS, p. 91). Indeed, the frontispiece informs us that Mark DeWolfe Howe’s Touched with Fire: The Civil War Letters and Diary of Oliver Wendell Holmes (Harvard University Press, 1947) is one of the poem’s sources.
On the second page of Secret History of the Dividing Line, we find the following passage:

Close at hand the ocean
until before
hidden from our vision
MARK
border
bulwark, an object set up to indicate a boundary or position
hence a sign or token
impression or trace

The Horizon

I am of another generation
when next I looked he was gone.

The final line is repeated three times on this page and relates the Colonial expedition of William Byrd to the “MARK” who is the poet’s father.
How does this allusive visual poem relate to Howe’s so-called preface, which interweaves autobiography, visual poetry, and the founding and early history of Buffalo? For example:
I was never sure what my father was doing in the army. Then I was never sure of anything what with his rushing away or changing cities and World War banging at windows the boundless phenomena of madness. I remember him coming back to Buffalo from basic training by snapshot once or twice in a uniform. Absence is always present in a picture in its right relations. There is a split then how to act. Laws are relations among individuals.

When Theophile Cazenove reached America in 1789, he realized that Philadelphia was the best scene for his operations because the future of American funds, federal and state, depended on the actions of the federal government. Pavements were in wider space and getting social satisfaction he carried along a letter of introduction from his backers in Amsterdam to Andrew Craigie in New York. The Van Staphorts told Craigie their envoy came to America “to gratify his thirst after knowledge in order to become better acquainted with the Genius of their Government and the objects of their growing commerce.” (FS, p. 6)

The common wisdom would be that these two paragraphs are “straight”—although rather odd—prose; in the first sentence above, for example, the noun phrase “the boundless phenomena of madness” is syntactically but not semantically in apposition to the noun “windows.” And the relation of syntax to semantics gets stranger as the paragraph continues: how, for example, can the poet’s father be “coming back from basic training by snapshot”? Similar nonsequiturs characterize the passage about Cazenove, as when “pavements . . . in wider space” are linked to “social satisfaction.”

How to construe this curious way of writing an autobiographical memoir, a memoir designed to serve as “frame structure” for the disjointed and fragmentary lyric poems that follow? In one sense, “Frame Structures. ” recalls Robert Lowell’s “91 Revere Street,” that bemused account of the Beacon Hill childhood and “Mayflower screwball” ancestry that makes “young Bob” the neurotic and specially gifted child he is. [36] But whereas “91 Revere Street” provides us with a series of snapshots, in which the Winslow-Lowell relatives come before us in all their foibles and futility, “Frame Structures” juxtaposes biographical sketches (for example, the poet’s American grandfather, Mark Antony De Wolfe Howe [1864-1960]) with the documentary history of the founding of Buffalo, with allusions to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Evangeline and James Joyce’s Eveline as analogues to the family and social drama of the Howes and Quincys, and with scraps (“flinders”) of largely illegible text, evidently drawn from Edward Gibbon. Again, whereas “91 Revere Street” is a kind of mirror image (in prose) of the autobiographical poems like “Commander Lowell” and “Beverly Farms” that comprise Life Studies, poems that culminate in Lowell’s own very private “Skunk Hour,” in Frame Structures, the connection between Howe’s memoir and, say, the epigraphs from Boswell’s Life of Johnson and Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit that open Cabbage Gardens, remains elusive. Indeed, the oblique narrative that follows, which begins with the lines

The enemy coming on roads
And clouds
Aeons.
Cashel has fallen
Trees are turf
Horizon thanks to myself, yes
Pacing the study. [37]

Here, Howe’s detractors would say, is a cryptic language poem that denies the very possibilities of the expressivity one wants from lyric.
Or does it? Consider the leitmotif of framing and being framed that runs through both prose preface and visual poems, crisscrossing, in myriad ways, the related motifs of war and colonization. The frontispiece (figure 2) is an engraving from Frank Severance’s Picture Book of Earlier Buffalo, based on “an original sketch by Lt. Jesse D. Elliott, accompanying his report to the Secretary of the Navy on the Capture of the Detroit and Caledonia, dated Black Rock Oct. 9, 1812.” “The Second Oldest View of Buffalo,” as this depiction of schooners going up in smoke is captioned in Howe’s book, thus immediately introduces the motif of war, in this case the War of 1812 (FS, p. 1).
But if this is the “Second Oldest View of Buffalo,” what would the first look like? For Howe, origins cannot be known. “Lines represent the limits of bodies encompassed by the eye” (FS, p. 5). The section “Floating loans” contains an historical sketch of Joseph Ellicott’s acquisition and settling of the land in upstate New York that was to be called Buffalo. We can take in the facts but we cannot quite visualize the resulting city. “Space is a frame we map ourselves in” (FS, p. 9). When we finally do “see” the Buffalo harbor in the engraving, we are witnessing a war scene: war, for that matter, is very much this poem’s condition. At the same time, “a picture,” as Wittgenstein puts it, “held us captive”: neither poet nor reader can get beyond the engraving, the stylized image, to experience the “reality” of Buffalo. This is why names become so tantalizing: Nicholas Van Staphorst, Christiaan Van Eeghen, Paul Busti: we yearn for, but cannot get at, what’s behind them. And consider the absurdity of calling a city Buffalo. “Clans and individuals adopt the name of animals,” Howe remarks, “cities seldom do.” And she adds, “Prefaces are usually afterimages.” (FS, p. 13). [38]

The first sentence of Howe’s “afterimage,” under the heading Flanders, with its allusion to World War I, is, “On Sunday, December 7, 1941, I went with my father to the zoo in Delaware Park even now so many years after there is always for me the fact of this treasured memory of togetherness before he enlisted in the army and went away to Europe” (FS, p. 3). December 7, 1941 is, of course, Pearl Harbor Day, but this fact is not mentioned, the focus being on the “usually docile polar bears rov[ing] restlessly back and forth around the simulated rocks caves and waterfall designed to keep brute force fenced off even by menace of embrace so many zoo animals are accounted fierce” (FS, p. 3). The final clause here trails off, “so many” not anticipated by what comes before. The three polar bears are framed both literally and figuratively–literally behind the “iron railing” of their cage, figuratively by “the north wind of the fairy story [“Goldilocks”] “ringing in my ears as well as direct perception” (FS, p. 3). From the opening image of (unstated) war malaise, through the accounts of King Philip’s War, the Revolutionary War, World War I, and World War II, the text’s war space is crisscrossed by “life-lines,” lines of descent, connection, and association that, as the poet puts it, “I transmit to you from the point of impact throughout every snowing difficulty,” lines “certified by surveyors chain-bearers artists and authors walking the world keeping Field Notes:” from “Flanders” to “Flinders,” [39] from Nigeria, to Niger, to Niagara, from the “iron railings” of the bear compound in the zoo to the “iron railings” of the Charles Street Jail, from Fanny Appleton Longfellow to the poet’s younger sister Fanny (FS, p. 28).

But the lines are also borders, boundaries, marks of enclosure–the line between the Boston Brahmin Howes and Quincys on the one hand and the Irish Mannings on the other. The Preface thus paves the way for the poems that follow“Hinge Picture,” “Western Borders,” “Secret History of the Dividing Line” (my italics). And even in Cabbage Gardens, the shifts in line justification and word placement (figure 3), suggests that language is always in danger of becoming an enclosed space but that the poet refuses to let forms play their accepted role. Each segment is, so to speak, a “cabbage garden” that is planted differently. [40]

The extensive historical documentation in “Frame Structures. ” thus serves to construct the past that has shaped what Howe takes to be her very palpable present. Weetamoo, “squaw-sachem of the Wampanoags, Queen of Pocasset (now Tiverton), wife of Wamsutta the son of Massasoit and sister-in-law of the Narrangansett sachem, Metacomet (King Philip to the colonial militia),” a figure Howe knows only from her reading of Mary Rowlandson, is just as “real” as John d”Wolf, “Norwest John,” a venture capitalist who “sailed to Russia by way of Alaska” (“P,” p. 21). The poet herself appears only in the interstices of the text: “Now draw a trajectory in imagination where logic and mathematics meet the materials of art. Canvas, paper, pencil, color, frame, title. . . “(FS, p. 27). Right after this catalogue of artist’s tools (where “title” is the odd item) the cited overprint text becomes illegible (figure 4), forcing the reader to become a kind of viewer / voyeur.

“Preface” never spells out its “life-lines” to the lyrics that follow. In the words of the epigraph from Duchamp’s Green Box that opens Hinge Picture (FS 32)–”Perhaps make a HINGE PICTURE. (folding yardstick, book. . . .) / develops in space the PRINCIPLE OF THE HINGE in the displacements 1st in the plane 2d in space”–the Preface is a kind of “Hinge Picture,” that contains connections to the historical and literary fragments that follow. Indeed, Howe’s book is an elaborate trace structure: Secret History of the Dividing Line ends with a verbal rectangle on an otherwise empty white field:

sh dispel iris sh snow sward wide ha
forest 1 a boundary manic a land sh
whit thing : target cadence marked on
O about both or don’t INDICATION Americ
sh woof subdued toward foliage free sh
[FS, p. 122]

From “sh” to “sh,” from “snow sward” to “foliage free,” via a “boundary manic,” a target cadence marked.” “Sh.” The rest is white space.
Compared to the “Robert Lowell” of Life Studies, Howe’s “I”— female, maverick, only half New England blueblood— is much less of an insider, much more self-conscious about her particular origins. Her Boston is always shadowed by her Buffalo. Accordingly, she rarely speaks in her own person (e.g., “I was a deep and nervous child,” [FS, p. 3]), preferring the voice of the chronicler (“Joseph Ellicott, sometimes called “the father of Buffalo,” was born in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in 1760 to Quaker parents from England” [FS, p. 5]), and the voices of others:

What are you crying for, Great-Grandmother?

For all the ruin so intolerably sad.

But we have plenty to eat. We are lucky to be living in the
United States, so very new and very old, lucky to be in the new
part. Everything is clearer now we have electric light.

You must go on as if I was an open door. Go right on
through me I can’t answer all your questions.
[FS, p. 25]

Add to such voices the visual devices– line placement, typography, page design—that characterize all four of the early books reprinted in Frame Structures. , as well as the new preface, and you have a signature (quite literally a series of marks made on paper) as unique and “personal” as any we have in poetry today. Susan Howe and Ron Silliman, included as they both are in every anthology of “Language poetry” to date, could hardly be more different in their modes of self-writing.

What then of the purported death of the subject? “The revolution of the word,” Silliman remarks in a recent interview, “is not an anarchist event.” On the contrary, “as the author, I get to determine unilaterally which words in what order will set forth the terms through which the experience shall occur.” [41] A remarkable statement, this, for a language poet, and yet, at one level, it is simple common sense: every poet, after all, gets to determine the words in his or her poem. The question remains, of course, what larger cultural and ideological constraints determine that determination. If Silliman and Howe’s poetry is, as I have argued, a complex amalgam of Language poetics and difference, a writing that is everywhere resisting its paradigm, how, to see the half-full cup as half-empty, does that paradigm itself resist its contemporary others?

Suppose we read the poems of Silliman and Howe (or Palmer or Scalapino or Watten cited above), not against one another, but against those of a very different poetic community—for example, the work of Charles Wright. Here is one of the thirteen-line lyrics (there are twenty-four, divided into three sections) in Wright’s recent sequence “Disjecta Membra,” included in James Tate’s Best American Poetry 1997:

O well the snow falls and small birds drop out of the sky,
The backyard’s a winding sheet—
winter in Charlottesville,
Epiphany two days gone,
Nothing at large but Broncos, pick-ups and 4 x 4s.
Even the almost full moon
Is under a monochrome counterpane
Of dry grey.
Eve of St. Agnes and then some, I’d say,
Twenty-three inches and coming down.
The Rev. Doctor Syntax puts finger to forehead on the opposite wall,
Mancini and I still blurred beside him, Mykonos, 1961,
The past a snowstorm the present too. [42]

The obvious thing would be to say that Wright’s lyric sequence, which traces the poet’s emptying out, his night and death thoughts, and the gradual renewal of being, as defined by the seasonal cycle from the end of summer to the end of winter in Virginia, is more “personal” or “expressive” than the “language poems” of Silliman or Howe. But, strictly speaking, we learn less about the particulars of Wright’s personal life than we do about theirs; people and places from the poet’s past and present remain elusive as do the causes that trigger the feeling of absence and emptiness described so lovingly in this particular snow poem, where even “the almost full moon / is under a monochrome counterpane / of dry grey.”
What is different is not expressivity or subjectivity as such but the authority ascribed to the speaking voice—and here it is a particular voice that is represented. Wright’s speaker confidently uses metaphor to characterize what he perceives ( “The backyard’s a winding sheet”) and feels (“Epiphany two days gone”); he compares the dismal sleety night to that of Keats’s Eve of St. Agnes, and knows that what he sees when he looks out the window are “nothing . . .but broncos, pick-ups and 4 x 4s.” In “Albany,” on the other hand, such connections and continuities (Wright’s winter portrait is wholly consistent and of a piece) are implictly judged to be impossible. Phrases like “the bird demonstrates the sky” or “eminent domain” cannot be taken as self-revelatory. For these utterances, in Silliman’s scheme of things, are not those of an observer located in a particular place; indeed, the distinction between inside and outside has been eroded. For Silliman, as for Howe, there are no ideas or facts outside the language that names them–no “broncos, pick-ups and 4 x 4s,” no “twenty-three inches” of snow, outside the poet’s verbal as well as literal window. Rather—and here the difference in epistemology is profound—language constructs the “reality” perceived. And this means that perspective, as in the polarbear scene in Howe’s “Frame Structures. ,” is always shifting and that the subject, far from being at the center of the discourse, as is the case in Wright’s poem, is located only at its interstices.

It is not coincidental that “Disjecta Membra” has echoes of Keats (and, later, Stevens), for its mode is Emersonian: “We live in the wind-chill, / The what-if-and what-was-not, / The blown and sour dust of just after or just before, / The metaquotidian landscape / of soft edge and abyss” (p. 194). Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. There is no way Silliman or Howe could write such a poem because theirs is not a Romantic Einfühlung into the external—is there an external?—world. And, in this respect, we can differentiate quite readily between their ethos and that of such mainstream postromantic poets as Charles Wright or Mark Strand or Louise Gluck.

It was, of course, the opposition to this romantic paradigm that prompted the theoretical discourse of Language manifestos in the first place. And that oppositionality remains significant even though the “Us-versus-Them” rhetoric of The L=A=N =G=U=A=G=E Book, now twenty years old, [43] has become complicated by the appearance of new poetic paradigms that don’t quite fit the original theoretical frame. The dialectic, in other words, has shifted ground and it now seems more useful to look at special cases within the Language movement and related alternate poetries rather than at the group phenomenon.

Indeed, the paradox is that, like the earlier avant-garde movements of the century, Language poetics may well become most widely known, when it starts to manifest notable exceptions. Imagism, after all, became interesting only when Ezra Pound declared that it had been diluted as “Amygism” and called himself a Vorticist instead. Dada, as I have suggested elsewhere, [44] derives much of its cultural capital from Duchamp, who had made his most “Dada” readymades before he had ever heard of the Cabaret Voltaire and who refused all his life to participate in Dada exhibitions. A renewal of interest in Concrete Poetry was sparked by the decision of one Concrete poet, Ian Hamilton Finlay, to cultivate (quite literally) his own “concrete” Scottish garden. And the New York School, felt by many to have lost its center when Frank O’Hara died in 1966, is now getting renewed mileage from the increasing renown of one of its charter members, John Ashbery, even though Ashbery’s poetry may well have more in common with T. S. Eliot’s than with Kenneth Koch’s. [45]
I do not mean to downplay the role of community, movement, cultural formation, or discourse in the making of avant-garde aesthetic. Community, after all, is crucial to the poets and artists who belong to it, especially in their formative stages. Indeed, the prominence of the lonely, isolated genius, which Jameson takes to be the hallmark of modernism (as opposed to postmodernism), was always something of a myth; even those “isolated geniuses” Joyce and Beckett needed a community of fellow writers and a set of publishing venues—for example, Eugene Jolas’s transition– within which to circulate.

The poet has no obligation to be a responsible historian; indeed, the anxiety of influence precludes the possibility of reliable accounts of one’s own genealogy. Here is where the poet’s readers come in. In writing as critics or literary historians, even those who are themselves poets must maintain some critical distance, discriminating, for example, between the “language” poetics of Michael Palmer, with its Celanian and French Surrealist cast, the New York school-based language poetics of Ron Silliman and Bob Perelman, and the fusion of “nation language” and “video style” in the work of a proto-language poet like Kamau Brathwaite. [46]

Movement ethos, itself the stepchild of the post-structuralist critique of authorship, has, for too long now, occluded the critical need to discriminate difference, to define the signature of the individual lyric subject in its complex negotiations with its larger cultural and historical field of operation. In the words of Charles Bernstein’s satiric little poem (MW, pp. 3-4) on the limits of structuralism, “Don’t Be So Sure (“Don’t Be Saussure)”:

My cup is my cap
& my cap is my cup
When the coffee is hot
It ruins my hat
We clap and we slap
Have sup with our pap
But won’t someone please
Get me a drink.

Footnotes

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ISBN 0817314210, 9780817314217

Citation:

Contents:

Introduction: Differential Reading
1. Crisis in the humanities?: reconfiguring literary study for the twenty-first century    1
2. Cunning passages and contrived corridors: rereading Eliot’s “Gerontion”    20
3. The search for “prime words”: Pound, Duchamp, and the nominalist ethos    39
4. “But isn’t the same at least the same?”: Wittgenstein on translation    60
5. “Logocinema of the frontiersman”: Eugene Jolas’s multilingual poetics and its legacies    82
6. “The silence that is not silence”: acoustic art in Samuel Beckett’s radio plays    102
7. Language poetry and the lyric subject: Ron Silliman’s Albany, Susan Howe’s Buffalo    129
8. After language poetry: innovation and its theoretical discontents    155
9. The invention of “concrete prose”: Haroldo de Campos’s Galaxias and after    175
10. Songs of the earth Ronald Johnson’s verbivocovisuals    194
11. The Oulipo factor : the procedural poetics of Christian Bok and Caroline Bergvall    205
12. Filling the space with trace: Tom Raworth’s “Letters from Yaddo”    227
13. Teaching the “new” poetries: the case of Rae Armantrout    243
14. Writing poetry/writing about poetry: some problems of affiliation    258

Reviews:

• Barbour, Douglas. “Perloff on Pedagogical Process: Reading as Learning.” EBR. <http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/notable>
• Becker, C.A. “Marjorie Perloff. Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy.[Review]” RMMLA 59.2. <http://rmmla.wsu.edu/ereview/59.2/reviews/becker.asp>
• Corey, Joshua. “Poetry Microreviews.” Boston Review 30.3. <http://bostonreview.net/BR30.3/micros.html>

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