"Gerald Bruns, or're of our most distinguished philosophical critics, here turns his at-

tention to the cuttin€l-edge poetry and poetics ot the past few decades, seeh through
the prism of such theorists as Adorno, Blanchot, ahd Levinas. Bruns's readings are
everywhete animated by his profoqnd learnineiand his knowledge ofthe larger po-
etic tradition, For anyoyre interested in the avant-eiarde to day, Whqt Are Poets For?
is alr indispensable book."-Mariorie Pedoff, author, Uroriginqt Genius

"Gerald Bruns's learhil1fl is prodi€lious, and he seems hot onlyto have read but to
recall on command iust about all of even mihor aestheiic documents (and the basic
scholarship on them) since Kant. Yet he holds his learhing lightly, bringing it to bear
only wheh it is called forto illuminate a point. MoreoveF, he writes elegantly, fluidly,
and lucidly on quite difficult material, and he has excellent taste. Most important,
Bruns makes the stron€lest and richest statements I know of an aestheticthat dlivesr
the work of his authoPs""
-Charles Altieri, authot, The Art of Moderu Americsn Poet*

is the William P, end Hazel B. White Professor Emeritus oI En€llish

at the University of Notre Dame. A prolific author, his works i nclude Modem Poetry dnd th,e
lded of Ldngudge, tnventions! Writing, Textudlity, dnd Undetstdnding in Literdrtt History,
Heftneneutics Ancientdnd Modefi, Ttdgic Thoughts dt the End ol Philosophy! Lo,r',gudge,
Literotute, dnd Ethicdl Theory,The Mdaefidl of Poetryt Sketches for d Philosophiccrl Poet-
ics, Oo the Ancrrchy of Poetry dnd Philosophy, and On Cedsing to Be Human.ln 1974 a:nd
agaih in 1985 he received GuElgenh€im fellowships end has been a fellowet the lnstitute for
Advanced Study at Hebrew University ofJerusalem (1985-1986), the Centerlor Advanced
Study ilr the Behavioral Sciences at Sta ford ('1993-1994), alrd the Stahtord Humanities
Cehter (2007-2008). ln 2OO8 he was electcd to the American AcedemyofArts ahd Sciences,

tsBN l3: 978 1-6093A-0a0-9

ISBN-10: l-60934-0a0 0

Cover image from Asenlc Mctgttzine #2,1,is used

courtesy ofDavid Dellafiora and Tim Gaze- , llillru[xl U[ilrlllll tlnu[u[tt
 {&ffiffi&H-ffi A_" &SffiffiruS

WHAT ARE POETS FOR?

alr anthropology
of contemporary poetny
and poetics

CONTEMPORARY NORTH AMERICAN POETRY SERIES

SeriesEditors Alan Golding, Lynn Keller, and Adalaide Morris
l:.:, l:. l( ,:'i l;i t r'

Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Abbreviations xvii

WhatAre Poets For? r

Should Poetry Be Ethical or Otherwise? r8
Voices of Construction I On Susan Howe's Poetry and Poetics
(A Citational Ghost Story) 35

A PoemaboutLaughterand Forgetting I Lyn Hejinian's ABorderComedy 56

Amongthe Pagans I The Polyvocal PoetryofKaren MacCormack 7z

The Rogue Poet's Return I OnlohnMatthias's PoeticAnecdotes 9r
Adding Garbage to Language I On l. H. Prynne's "Not-You" ro6
Anomalies of Duration in Contemporary Poetry rz3
Nomad Poetry | A Ludic Miscellany from Steve McCaffery r37
On the Conundrum of Form and Material I Adorno's Aesthetic Theory r5z

Notes 167
Bibliography zor
lndex zr9
 Literature is a concern for the reality ofthings, for their unknown, free
and silent existence; literature is their innocence and forbidden presence,
it is the being which protests against revelation, it is the defiance of what
does not want to take place. In this way, it sympathizes with darkness
(l'obscuritS,with aimless passion, with Iawless violence, with everything
in the world that seems to perpetuate the refusal to come into the world.
ln this way, too, it allies itself with the reality of language, it makes
language into matter without contour, content without form, a force that
is capricious and impersonaland says nothing, reveals nothing, simply
announces-through its refusal to say anything-that it comes from the
night and will return to the night.
Blanchot, "Literature and the Right to Death"
-Maurice

One of my first attempts to write about poetry-more than half-a-century

ago-carried the title, "The Obscurity of Modern Poetry." My first book, Mod-
ern Poetry and the ldeq ofLonguage (1974), pursued someof the various ways in
which this topic emerged in literary history, from the ancient conception of
languagc as a "substantial medium," through St6phane Mallarm6's poetryand

ix
poetics, to the writings of Joyce, Beckett, Wallace Stevens-and Maurice Blan-
chot, whom I began reading as an undergraduate at Marquette University in
the r95os, thanks to my Francophile roommate, Dan Finlay, and to my Jesuit
teachers, who were in those days deeply under the influence of French intel-
lectual culture. Later came a study of Blanchot's work, particularly his theory
of d.criture-the materialization of language in fragmentary writing of the kind
that we find in the poetry of Ren6 Char and Paul Celan, as well as in Blanchot's
own work (forexample, L'attente,l'oubli1196z]). More recently, inTheMaterialof
Poetry Qoo5),1 attempted something like a traditional apology for recent ex-
periments in sound poetry, visual poetry, and poetry as a form of conceptual
art. And inThe Anarchy ofPoetry and Philosophy (zoo6), I tried to clarifr an argu-
ment about literary modernism that turns up in different forms in the writings
of many European thinkers, namely that the work of art (one of Duchamp's
readymades, for example) is something absolutely singular, that is, outside
the alternatives of universal and particular, refractory to categories and dis-
tinctions, anarchic with respect to principles and rules: in a word, anomalous.
ln lean-Frangois Lyotard's words, modernism makes "pagans" of us all: "When
I speak of paganism," Lyotard writes, "l am not using a concept. It is a name,
neither better nor worse than others, for the denomination of a situation in
which one judges without uiteria. And one judges not only in matters of truth,
but also in matters of beauty (of aesthetic efficacy) and in matters of justice,
that is, of politics and ethics, and all without criteria."'
The present volume of essays continues this nominalist line-and tries
to cope with its consequences. For if there is no one thing that can be called
poetry-if it is made of anomalies (a one-word poem, for example, or a collage
of letters or letterlike scribbles)-then one's study of it must proceed, like an
anthropologist's progress through an alien culture, atground level, from one
local practice or artifact to another, without subsuming things into a system.'?
Of course, at ground level pitfalls and double binds are waiting at every turn:
remember the sculptor Donald Judd's famous remark: "lf someone calls it art,
it's art."r Anything goes, even if not everything is possible at every moment:
hardly an intellectually defensible thesis, at least in respectable academic cir-
cles. As a dodge I take recourse to Wittgenstein's idea that things (games, for
example, but also philosophy itself) have a history rather than an essence, and
that history is made of family resemblances, so that as one proceeds along the
ground one finds connections in which different forms of words and things
shed their light on one another.+ In this event the simple juxtaposition of cita-
tions often proves more fruitfulthan lengthy exegeses on behalf of some uni-
fied field theory.
For this reason I have often found myself following, often against the ad-
vice of mentors and friends, Walter Benjamin's program: "Good criticism is
composed of at most two elements: the critical gloss and the quotation. Very
good criticism can be made from both glosses and quotations. What must be
avoided like the plague is rehearsing the summary of the contents. In contrast,
a criticism consisting entirely of quotations should be developed."s Unfortu-
nately exorbitant permission fees occasionally prevent one from putting good
criticism into practice.
My first chapter tries to locate some ingredients that recur in the disparate
essays that follow-displaced subjectivity, found texts and open forms, not to
mention the many diversions of materialized language. The second chapter
is, basically, an argument against efforts (including my own) to ground po-
etry upon any philosophical justification that would efface the singulariry of
its forms and events-a kind of iconoclasm that both philosophy and literary
studies are prone to. As for subjectivity, a main point of interest in my chapter
on Susan Howe is her recuperation ofYeats's conception ofthe poetic subject
as a receptacle for the voices of others, which is one of the forgotten features
of romantic poetics-recall Keats's "negative capability." "For something to
work I need to be another self," Howe says. Meanwhile she locates her "self"
within a "constructivist" context of found texts and paratactic arrangements of
wordswithinthewhitespaceofthe pr:inted page (as inTh eMidnight). Found texts
and paratactic arrangements-but in very d ifferent rend itions-characterize
the work of Lyn Hejinian and Karen Mac Cormack. lohn Matthias's poetry, as
Matthias himself notes, is composed of quotations and pastiche-and of an-
ecdotes: a form to which very little thought has been given. Matthias, interest-
ingly, is an American poet who seems most at home among the British: he is
a major scholar of the work of David lones, and thinks of himself as being in
perpetual transition back-and-forth between the United States and England,
neither here nor there. It seems right to place him alongside I. H. Prynne, the
recondite "Cambridge" poet whose work is influenced very much by Ameri-
can poets like Robert Creeley and Ed Dorn, although Prynne's way of putting
words together (if "together" isn't exactly the wrong,word) seems peculiarly
his own. The chapter on "Arrhythmia" takes up George Kubler's cha[lenge in
"The Shape of Time" to "imagine duration without any regular pattern." A
good deal of poetry-Michael Palmer's, Tom Raworth's, among others stud-
ied here-is an exercise in just such an irregular imagination. The chapter on
Theodor Adorno might at first seem out of place in this book, but much of it
takes up Adorno's essay on paratactic form in Holderlin's late hymns as well
as his essays on two experimental German poets seldom or never studied in
 =-fl

x,l

this country, Rudolf Borchardt and Hans G. Helms. Adorno's AestheticTheory

is perhaps the most important work of philosophical aesthetics since Kant,s
third critique and Hegel's lectures on aesthetics, but its major weakness is its
poverty of examples. Happily there is nothing impoverished about Adorno's
literary essays, which are remarkably in tune with the "nomadic" innovations
of the Yorkshire/Canadian/Buffalo poet Steve McCaffery, who reminds us that
if contemporary poetry bears anything like a distinctive feature, it is that free-
dom from determinations of any kind is a condition of comedy-and a form
of the good life.

I owe a great deal to a number of peopre for their herp

and encouragement on
this project, particularly Marjorie perroff, Herman Rapaport,
charles Artieri,
Ralph Berry, Charles Bernstein, Dee Morris, steve Tomasula,
and John wilkin-
son. I remember especiaily a course on experimentar poetry
that Romana Huk
and I taught together at Notre Dame severar years ago, which
made me rearize
that, left to my own devices, r wourd never find myway through
the comprexi-
ties of contemporary poetry and poetics.
This book is for my friend Steve Fredman, in memory
of our quarter_cen_
tury ofconversations, the courses we taught together, the poetry
ieadings we
organized-not to mention the perpetual round of administrative
dJties,
committee meetings, and visiting lecturers, none of which,
to my amaze_
ment, ever seemed to defeat steve's serenity and good humor.
His writings
on American art and poetry-poet's prose (r9g3), The Grounding poetry
of Americon
(rg,,), A MenorohforAthena
(zoor), and Contextualpractice (zoto), among many
others have been and wirr remain the best of intelectual compl'nions.
Mcanwhilc there is his own incomparabre contribution to,.carifornia,,poetry,
\rrrslrr4 (lt;7j).

riii
 Several of the chapters in this book were completed while I was a fellow
at the Stanford Humanities Center in zooT-zoo8. My thanks to lohn Bender,
then director of the Center, and to the Center's marvelous staff, particularly
Robert Barrick, Nichole Coleman, Susan Sebard, and MatthewTiews.
Chapter z appeared in Sub5tance: A Review ofTheory and Criticism,38.3 (zoo9),
7z-gt.Chapter3 appeared inContemporaryLiterature,5o.r (zoo9), z8-53. Chapter
4 appeared inTextualPractice,23.3(zoo9), 397-416. Chapter 5 appeared in Anriph-
onies: Essoyson Women'sExperimentalWritinginCansds, ed. Nate Dorward (Toronto:
The Gig, zooS), rg4-2r3. Chapter 6 appeared in The Ssk Companion to John Mqt'
thios, ed. Ioe Francis Doerr (Cambridge: Salt Publishing, zotr), rz-zg. Chapter
ro appeared as "The Conundrum of Form and Material in Adorno's Aesthetic
Theo ry" in The o u r nal of Aesth etics and Art Criticism, 66. 3 (z o o8), 2z5-35.
J rg75), Crossing (Swallow Press, 1979), Northern Summer: New ond Selected Poems
l'm grateful to John Ashbery for permission to reprint the following: "Crazy
Weather" and "Syringa," from HouseboatDays. Copyright o 1975, tgzz by John
Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Ceorges Borchardt, lnc., on behalf of the
author. "The System," fromThreePoems. Copyright @ tg7z, 1985, rgg7, zoo8 by
lohn Ashbery. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Georges Bor-
chardt, Inc., on behalfofthe author. "Scheherazade" and "No Way ofKnow-
ing," from Sef-PortrqitinqConvexMirror. Copyright O 1975, rggo by John Ashbery
and Viking Penguin, lnc., reprinted by their permission. My thanks to Charles
Bernstein for permission to reprint lines from hisDarkCity (Sun & Moon Press,
tg94), RoughTrcdes (Sun & Moon Press, r99r), "Poetic lustice," RepublicsofReal'
ity,tglS-rggS(Sun & Moon Press, zooo), and WithStrings (University of Chicago
Press, zoor); to Christian Bokand Coach House Books for permission to reprint
some lines from Eunoio (zoor); to DalkeyArchive Press for permission to reprint
some Iines from Shorrer Poems (1993) by Gerald Burns; to Suhrkamp Verlag, for
permission to reprint several poems from Paul Celan's 6 esammekeWerke (Frank-
furt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983); to Kenneth Goldsmith for permission to reprint
some passages from Soliloquy (zoor); to Tim Gaze for permission to reproduce
the image of an "asemic poem," fromAsemic, vol. r (KentTown Australia, n'd.);
to Lyn Hejinian for permission to reprint passages from A Border Comedy (Grana-
ry Books, zoor) as well as lines fromTheColdofPoerry (Sun & Moon Press, 1994),
The Fatqlist (Omnidawn Press, zoo3), My Lrfe (Sun & Moon Press, 1987), My Life
in rhe Nineties (Shark Books, zoq),Slowly (Tuumba Press, zooz), andWritingls
sn Aid to Memory (Sun & Moon Press, rgg6); to Susan Howe for permission to
reprintpoemsfromTheEuropeofTrusts:SelectedPoems (Sun &Moon Press, 1989),
Frqmestructures:EarlyPoems,ry74-79(NewDirections, ry96),TheMidnight(NewDi-
rections, zoo3),TheNonconformist'sMemoriol (New Directions, ry93),Pierce-Arrow
(New Directions, r 999), Singularities (Wesleyan University Press, I qso), and Souls
oftheLabadieTracr(New Directions, zooT);to Simon larvis for permission to re-
print passages from The Unconditionql: A Lyric (Barque Press, zoo5); to Eduardo
Kac for permission to reproduce both his digital poem, "Letter" (t996), and
his holographic poem, "Adhuc" (r99r); to Karen Mac Cormack for permission
to reprint poems from At lssue (Coach House Books, zoor), Implexures (Chax
Press, zoo3), Quill Driver (Nightwood Editions, 1989), Quirk and Quillets (Chax
Press, r99r), andVanity Release (Zasterle Press, zoo3); to Steve McCaffery for per-
mission to reprint poems from Seven Pages Missing,ll: Previously UncollectedTexts,
t968-zooo (Coach House Books, zooz),SlightlyLeftofThinking(Chax Press, zoo8),
TheCheatofWords (ECW Press, 1996), andTheoriesofSedimentffalon Books, r99r);
to John Matthias for permission to reprint poems from Turns (Swallow Press,
(SwallowPress, 1984),A6ctheringofWays (SwallowPress, tggt), SwimmingotMid-
night: Selected Shorter Poems (Swallow Press, 1995), Beltane atAphelion: Longer Poems,
(Swallow Press, 1995), Poges: New Poems tr Cuttings (Swallow Press, zooo), Working
Progress,Working Tirle (Salt Publishing, zooz), New Selected Poems (Salt Publish-
ing, zoo4), Redging (salt Publishing, zooT); to Michael Palmer for permission
to reprint poems from FirstFigure (North Point Press, 1984); to l. H. Prynne for
permission to reprint "Not-You" from Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 1999); to Tom
Raworth for permission to reprint lines from Ace (Edge Books, zoot); to Wes-
leyan University Press for permission to reprint lack Spicer's poem, "Sporting
Life," from My Vocabulary DidThisto Me:TheCollected Poetry oflockSpicer (zoo8).
Every effort has been made to avoid errors or omissions in the above list.
Please advise if any corrections should be incorporated into any future edi-
tions of this book.
F or
full bibliographic information for these sources, see the bibliography.

AI Atlssue. Karen Mac Cormack.

AP A Poetics. Charles Bernstein.
AT AestheticTheory. Theodor Adorno.
B Breqthturn. Paul Celan.

BC A Border Comedy. Lyn Hejinian.

BM The Birth-mark. susan H owe.
C Crossing. f ohn Matthias.
CP Collected P rose. Paul Celan.
CPH Th e Cold of Poetry. Lyn Hejinian.
CW The Cheat ofWords. Steve McCaffery.
D The Differend. lean-Frangois Lyotard.
DC Dork City. Charles Bernstei n.
'fht f
ET Lurope of rusrs. Susan Howe.

x vli
 .:"<II

F TheFatalist. Lyn Hejinian. SL Slighdy LeftofThinking. Steve McCaffery.

FB FathomsunsandBenighted.PaulCelan. SLT SoulsoftheLabadieTrqct.susanHowe.
FP Fitto Print. Alan Halsey and Karen Mac Cormack. SM Stanzasin Medirdrion. Gertrude Stein.
FS Framestructures. Susan Howe. SMM SwimmingatMidnighr.lohnMatthias.
GW GessmmelteWerke,l-lll.PaulCelan. 5P Self-Portraitin a Convex Mirror. John Ashbery.
HD HouseboatDays.fohnAshbery. SPM Seven Pages Missing, II. Steve McCaffery.
I lmaginorions. William Carlos Williams. SPP Selected Poetry ond prose. paul Celan.
lC ThelnfiniteConversation.Maurice Blanchot. T Turns. John Matthias.
lM lmplexures. Karen Mac Cormack. TC Threadsuns. paul Celan.
K Kedging.lohnMatthias. TP ThreePoems.lohnAshbery.
Ll TheLanguageoflnquiry.LynHejinian. TS TheoriesofSedinrenr.SteveMcCaffery.
LP LqstPoems. Paul Celan. VR Vanity Release. Karen Mac Cormack.
M TheMidnight. Susan Howe. WF TheWorkof Fire. Maurice Blanchot.
MED MyEmilyDickinson. Susan Howe. WL WritingsandLecrures,GertrudeStein.
ML MyLife.LynHejinian. WP Working Progress,WorkingTitle.lohn Matthias.
MLN MyLifeintheNineties. Lyn Hejinian. WS WithStrings.CharlesBernstein.
MM Minima Moralia. Theodor Adorno.
MW MyWay Charles Bernstein.
ND NegativeDialectics.TheodorAdorno.
NI Northoflntention.SteveMcCaffery.
NL NotestoLiterature.TheodorAdorno.
NM TheNonconformist'sMemorial.susan Howe.
P Poems. . H. Prynne.
f

PIM Pages.JohnMatthias.
PM Priorto Meaning. Steve McCaffery.
PNM PhilosophyofNewMusic.TheodorAdorno.
PPC PoemsofPaulCelsn. Paul Celan.
QD QuillDriver. Karen Mac Cormack.
QF QuasiunaFantasia.TheodorAdorno.
aQ QuirksandQuillers. Karen Mac Cormack.
RR Republicsof Realiry. Charles Bernstein.
RT RoughTrades.CharlesBernstein.
S Sin.gulorities. Susan Howe.
SH Slowly. Lyn Hejinian.
WHAT ARE POETS FOR?

To make things of which we do not know what they are.

--{heodor Ado rno, AestheticTheory

In his Prologueto RorainHell:lmprovisations $9zo), William Carlos Williams re-

calls his conversation one day with Walter Arensberg in which he asked Arens-
berg (one of the earliest collectors of modern art) what painters like Charles
Demuth and Marcel Duchamp were up to. As an answer Arensberg mentioned
Duchamp's idea that "a stained-glass window that had fallen out and lay more
or less together on the ground" was more likely to be of interest than anything
an artist might produce in a studio.' Williams then goes on to mention the
controversy over Duchamp'sFountqin, "the porcelain urinal fsubmitted] to the
Palace Exhibition of r9r7 as a representative of American sculpture."'A ready-
made anecdote follows: "One day Duchamp decided that his composition for
that day would be the first thing that struck his eye in the first hardware store
he should enter. lt turned out to be a pickax which he bought and set up in his
studio" (1, ro).
As we know, one implication of readymade aesthetics is that what defines
thc work o[ art is the displacement of intentionaliry, as if the work were less
,r wolk th:rrr arr cvcnt or discovcry something whose arrival is unpremedi-

I

tated, contingent, and anomalous. Thus an improvisation, being unplanned
and unrevised, is, formally, a fragmentary arrangement of materials: things
al-
Iowed to stand where they happen to fall.: Williams refers at one point to "the
brokenness of his composition" (1, r6), ofwhich the following gives us but one
example among others assembled differently: "when beldams dig clams their
fat hams (it's always beldams) balanced nearTellus's hide, this rhinoceros
pelt,
these lumped stones-buffoonery of midges on a bull's thigh-invoke,-
what you will: birth's glut, awe at God's craft, youth's Poverty, evolution of
a child,s caper, man's poor inconsequence. Eclipse of all things; sun's self
turned hen's rump" (1, 5r: a "beldam" is an old woman;
"Tellus" was a Roman
goddess ofthe earth).
what is broken here, given "whatyou will," are the rules of a schoolmaster.
Outside the classroom words have their own chemistry, "a kind of alchemy of
form,, (1, 75) for which the attendant poet provides the laboratory space of a
white page. lmagine a poetics that figures the poet as less an agent of the work
than someone who underwrites it, say by attaching a signature or a title that
gives the work, not a definition, but a place in or against an art-context. For
the philosopher Theodor Adorno, this sort of thinking reveals the distinctive
antinomy, or performative contradiction, of modernism, where the aim is to
produce an artwork that is absolutely singular, refractory to categories and dis-
tinctions, irreducible to models or to any rule of identity-a kind of monad.c
ln Williams's words, "The true value is that peculiarity that gives an object a
character by itself" (1, r4). This "aesthetic nominalism" marks the end of art as
approxi-
such, that is, ofany notion ofan ideal work reflected in its particular
mations (no more concrete universals).sThere is no longer any one thing that
can be called art or poetry which henceforward must draw its concepts from
a history of local practices-as the poet Charles Bernstein says, "poetic
posi-
tions . . . have to be understood within the context of other poetic positions
that are articulated by other poets, or nonpoets, at the moment but also in the
past,, (AP, r56). Hence the modernist proliferation of prefaces and manifestos
whereby art tries to work through its antinomies, not at the level of universals,
but on the ground where controversies arise among conflicting notions as to
what counts as art ("Here I clash with wallace stevens" [], r+]). ln this respect
Korq in Hell is, like one of Duchamp's readymades, a piece of
"conceptual art"
that carries with it its own distinctive "suPport language," not only in its pro-
logue but in the intervening "interpretations" thatWilliams added later-and
above all in its reigning statement of principle: "A poem can be made of any-
thing" (1,7o).6
Not that "anything goes," exactly. What doesn't go for Williams is the hov-
ering of antecedents. "Our prize poems are especially to be damned," Wil-
liams says, "not because of superficial bad workmanship, but because they
are rehash, repetition-just as Eliot's more exquisite work is rehash, rep-
etition in another way of Verlaine, Baudelaire, Maeterlinck-conscious or
unconscious-just as there were Pound's early paraphrases from Yeats and his
later cribbing from the Renaissance, Provence, and the modern French: Men
contentwith the connotations of their masters" (1, z4). Instead of literarylan-
guage Williams proposes "a language of the day":
That which is heard from the lips of those to whom we are talking in our days'-
affairs mingles with whatever we see in the streets and everywhere about us as it
mingles also with our imaginations. By this chemistry is fabricated a language of
the day which shifts and reveals its meaning as clouds shift and turn in the sky and
sometimes send down rain or snow or hail. This is the language to which few ears
are tuned so that it is said by poets that flew men are ever in their [ul[ senses since
they have no way to use their imaginations. Thus to say that a man has no imagi-
nation is to say nearly that he is blind or deaf. But of old poets would translate this
hidden language into a kind of replica of the speech of the world with certain dis-
tinctions oIrhyme and meter to show that it was not really that speech. Nowadays
the elements of that language are set down as heard and the imagination of the
listener and the poet are left free to mingle in the dance. (1, 59)
Two things are worth noticing about this passage. The first is that Williams's
imagination is not Wordsworth's "awful Power" rising from "the mind's
abyss" (The Prelude,Yl.Sgq); it is simply a perceptual keenness toward everyday
sights and sounds. The second is that "the language ofthe day" is structured
like the weather ("clouds shift and turn in the sky and sometimes send down
rain or snow or hail"); it is, like an improvisation, turbulent and unpredict-
able ("brokenness" of composition)-but not just nonsense. Chaos theo-
rists would call it a "complex entity."7 Poets "of old" tried to introduce some
measure of order into this complexity, but now the task is not to organize this
language poetically but simply to "set [it] down as heard." And so what we get
From Williams-as, in a slightly different turn, from his contemporary Mari-
anne Moore-are plain words whose order is not metrical, nor perhaps even
syntactical, but open-ended, as in a run of anomalies.
Here are some lines from Marianne Moore's "Poetry," which begins (fa-
nrously), "l too dislike it":
thc sanre thing may be said for all of us, that we
<lo rrot adnrire what
 we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse
that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician-
nor is it valid
to discriminate "against business documents and
school books": all these phenomena are important.s
ln an essay on Marianne Moore, Williams wrote: "The only help I ever got
from Miss Moore toward the understanding of herverse was that she despised
connectives" (1, 3r3)-a point later amplified by Iohn Ashbery in a review of
Moore's TellMe,Tell Me: Granite,Steel, and }therTopics (rg6q):
Some of us will regret the kaleidoscopic collage effects of the early poems, and
with reason for they were also a necessary lesson in how to live in our world of
"media," how to deal with the unwanted information that constantly accumu-
lates around us. What can we do about those stack of Nationol Geogrophics, leaflets
from the BellTelephone Company, the IllustrotedLondonNews,the NewYorkTimesMog-
ozine, business letters, overheard remarks, and also the habits ofjungle flora and
fauna, which we shall probably never see and which in any case can never concern
us? Well, live with them is Miss Moore's answer, recognizing them as part of the
rhythm of growth, as details of life possibly helpful in deducing the whole, in any
case important, in any case important as details.e
Here is the basic question of complexity: "how to deal with the unwanted in-
formation that constantly accumulates around us"? The problem is not non-
sense but t00 m uchsense, the philosophical solution to which is to reduce things
to their basic types, categories, or essentials: integration of elements into a
unity is the standard received definition of intelligibility (the "hermeneutical
circle"). Marianne Moore's procedure by contrast is nonreductive: within or
amongthescatterofcategorymistakes(bats, elephants, critics, baseball fans),
even "business documents" and "school books" matter. lmagine nonexclu-
sion as a principle ofpoetic diction: such a principle defeats the very idea of
apoetical diction, which historically is a closed system that rules out ducks and
toads as ingredients of a true poem. But for Marianne Moore, as for Wi[liams,
"A poem can be made of anything."
ln his "Robert Frost Medal Address" (rggs), Ashbery recalls thatwhile living in
France during the r95os he "began to realize how much the spoken American
language . . . had entered into mywriting":
For the next two or three years, I lived in a state of restless experimenting. Of-
ten I'd visit the American Library and leaf through popular magazines, [ook-
ing for the tone of voice I felt was lacking. Or I'd buy magazines like Esquire and
look through them, copying down random bits of phrases in a sort of collage
technique-unaware that about the same time Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and
Gregory Corso were practicing doing "cut-ups" elsewhere in Paris. lt's an odd co-
incidence that we all happened on this way of writing at that particular time and
place. (Selected Prose, z5o)
Found texts, assemblage, collage: Ashbery's HouseboatDays (1977) contains the
following poem that begins with an American catchphrase, "crazy weather":
It's this crazy weather we've been having:
Falling forward one minute, lying down the next
Among the loose grasses and soft, white, nameless flowers.
People have been making a garment out of it,
Stitching the white of lilacs togetherwith lightning
At some anonymous crossroads. The sky calls
To the deafearth. The proverbial disarray
Of morning corrects itself as you stand up.
You are wearing a text. The lines
Droop to your shoelaces and I shall never want or need
Any other literature than this poetry of mud
And ambitious reminiscences of times when it came easily
Through the then woods and ploughed fields and had
A simple unconscious dignitywe can never hope to
Approximate now except in narrow ravines nobody
Will inspect where some late sample of the rare,
Uninteresting specimen might still be putting out shoots,
for all we know. (HD, zt)
Weather is a major preoccupation of chaos theory which celebrates the ratio-
nality of turbulence, as does Ashbery's poem, whose first line answers (at least
formally) a request fora reason: Whatis causing this anomaly?The poem itself
is an anomaly-machine, producing things of which we do not know what they
are. "Falling forward" and "lying down," for example, are a bit like "lt is rain-
ing," whcre "it" is a phantom subject, a purely functional occupant of what
upscale grammarians call the "middle voice." And then there is the problem
of "nameless flowers" (whatwould Louis Zukofsky have said of such things?).'o
Meanwhile you can make a "garment" out of the weather by talking about it,
as people do in the absence of anything else to say-recall ancient rhetoric
in which words are the "clothes" and "colors" of things, although "white" is
a shifry or anomalous word, especially when "Stitching the white of lilacs to-
gether with lightning," thus producing a name given to moonshine and rock
bands. lnterestingly, "anonymous crossroads," besides echoing "nameless
flowers," are where suicides used to be buried, ideally against a gothic back-
ground of lightning and thunder. The indifferent earth is their shield against
a vengeful heaven. Speaking of garments: rumpled pajamas will right them-
selves when you get to your feet; but if they are (still) a garment of words, well
then, "You are wearing a text."
Ashbery doesn't entirely "despise connectives," but in the tradition of
"broken composition" his lines form periods filled with insubordinations:
"The lines / Droop to your shoelaces," as if wet, and, being wet, form, of all
things, a literary plenum, than which none greater can be desired: a "poetry of
mud" conjoined to "ambitious reminiscences of times" when another phan-
tom "it" ambled through what were once "woods and ploughed fields"-all
quite beyond us now. Have we become too thoroughly modern, or modern-
ized? No longer believing in the folklore of "crazy weather"? Time to repair
elsewhere-to "narrow ravines" where horticulturalists never tread, but
where ("for all we know") some "rare, / Uninteresting specimen" of we-don't-
know-what might be starting life or poetryall overagain, as in these lines from
"Scheherazade":
Other dreams came and leftwhile the bank
Of colored verbs and adjectives were shrinking from the Iight
To nurse in shade their want of a method
But most of all she loved the particles
That transform objects ofthe same category
lnto particular ones, each distinct
Within and apart from its own class. (SP, 9)
lmagine Scheherazade as Gertrude Stein ("And therefore and I say it again
more and more one does not use nouns")." ln fact these lines describe some-
thing like Ashbery's philosophy of composition, in which plain words are
turned loose from their propriery or "aboutness": call it an anarchic poetics
in which meaning proliferates into singularities, "each distinct / Within and
apart from its own class"-a common event at ground level, as in Ashbery's
prose poem (or poem in prose) "The System," which begins with a straightfor-
ward statement: "The system was breaking down" (TP, 53).'' ln which case-
Whatdid matter nowwas gettingdown to business, or back to the business ofday-
to-day living with all the tiresome mechanical problems that this implies. And it
was just here that philosophy broke down completely and was of no use. How to
deal with the new situations that arise each day in bunches or clusters, and which
resist categorization to the point where any rational attempt to deal with them is
doomed from the start. And in particular how to deal with this one that faces you
now, which has probabty been with you always; now it has a different name and a
different curriculum vitae; its qualities are combined in such a way as to seem dif-
ferent from all that has gone before, but actually is the same old surprise you have
always lived with. Forget about the details o[name and place, forget also the con-
cepts and archetypes that hauntyou and are as much a part ofthe q,pical situation
you find yourself in as those others: neither the concept nor the state of affairs
logically deduced from it is going to be of much help to you now. (TP, 87)
Notice: another question about complexity-"How to deal with the new situ-
ations that arise each day in bunches or clusters, and which resist categori-
zation to the point where any rational attempt to deal with them is doomed
from the start." The answer is coherent with aesthetic nominalism. Resist-
ing categorization is the way mere things (and artworks) turn philosophy on
its ear, thereby keeping their freedom.'3 What breaks down inThree Poems, as
in so much of Ashbery's writing, is the subsumption of particulars, of which
there are too many for concepts to bear.'c In place ofcontext-formation we get
something [ike context-dispersal (fragmentation), as in the heterogeneous
sentence that concludes"Crazy Weather," or this from a poem aptly entitled
"No Way of Knowing":
Yes, but-there are no "yes, buts."
The body is what this is all about and it disperses
In sheeted fragments, all somewhere around
But difficult to read correctly since there is
No common vantage point, no point ofview
Like the "l" in a novel. And in truth
No one never saw the point ofany. (SP, 56)
I hink of itl-a pointless (or empty) vantage point, as from inside a storm that
spreads itselF in "sheeted fragments." Complex entities, being unstable, give
tlre definition of the uncontainable, or ungraspable, like Eurydice. "Syringa,"
;r l)ocrn whose title is the name of a (nonwhite) lilac, but which is about the
Irrtility of bcing Orpheus, exhibits an even wilder complexity:

But how late to be regretting all this, even
Bearing in mind that regrets are always late, too latel
To which Orpheus, a bluish cloud with white contours,
Replies that these are ofcourse not regrets at all,
Merely a careful, scholarly setting down of
Unquestioned facts, a record ofpebbles along the way.
And no matter how all this disappeared,
Or gotwhere itwas going, it is no longer
Material for a poem. lts subject
Matters too much, and not enough, standing there helplessly
While the poem streaked by, its tail afire, a bad
Comet screaming hate and disaster, but so turned inward
That the meaning, good or other, can never
Become known. (HD,7r)
The composer (ofelectronic music and otherturbulent artworks) Herbert Briln
says that there is one sort of complex entity that "prefers its problems to its so-
lutions," and will resort to violence in order to prevent solutions from being
attempted.rsAshbery's swiftly movingpoem seems to qualifr as such an entity:
it leaves "all this" behind, as Orpheus does Eurydice, except that Orpheus in
these lines is a speaking cloud, as gods sometimes are. Actually each line of the
poem leaves its subject behind, breaking as it goes the law ofnoncontradic-
tion, among other rules of composition: "all this" matters "too much, and not
enough," as the violent poem streaks past, "a bad / Comet screaming hate and
disaster" at the poor exegete who tries to take hold of it.
In the early r97os the poet Bernadette Mayer conducted a poetry workshop at
5t. Mark's Church, which for several years had sponsored a number of avant-
garde projects in poetry, dance, theater, and film.'6 Among her pedagogical
exercises was an extensive list of "Experiments," of which the following is a
brief sampling:
Pick a word or phrase at random, let mind play freely around it until a few ideas
have come up, then seize on one and begin to write. Try this with a non-connota-
tive word like "so," etc.
Systematically eliminate the use of certain kinds of words or phrases from a piece
of writing: eliminate alt adjectives from a poem of your own, or take out all the
words beginning with "s" in Shakespeare's sonnets.
r! i:i fi il i:e
Rewrite someone else's writing. Experiment with theft and plagiarism.
Systematically derange the language: write a work consisting only of preposition-
al phrases, or, add a gerund to every line ofan already existingwork.
Get a group ofwords, either randomly selected or thought up, then form these
words (only) into a piece of writing-whatever the words allow. Let them demand
their own forms, or, use some words in a predetermined way.,z
Naturally the question arises as to the point of these assignments. Taking the
last sentence of this citation as a cue, one could refer to Williams's improvisa-
tions, or (in a different register) to the proceduralwritings of the Oulipo group
(the }uvroir de littd,rature potentielle, or Workshop of potential Literature, which
included writers like Raymond Queneau, ltalo Calvino, Harry Mathews, and
Georges Perec-this last the author of LaDisporotion, a novel of some 3oo pages
in which the letter "e" never appears).,8 In both cases the basic idea (as perWil-
liams) is to expand the possibilities of composition by distributing the inten-
tionality of the work across impersonal regions of language. Oulipovians, for
example, subject the act of writing to sets of purely formal constraints: palin-
dromes, lipograms, anagrams, acrostics, crosswords, including compositions
modeled on mathematical rules and equations.re The Canadian poet Christian
Bdk gives us a contemporary rendition of procedural poetics in Eunoia, a lipo-
grammatic poem in five parts, one for each vowel, as in the following from
"Chapter A," dedicated appropriately to the Dadaist Hans Arp:
Awkward grammar appals a craftsman. A Dada bard
as daft as Tzara damns stagnant art and scrawls an
alpha (a slapdash arc and a backward zag) that mars
all stanzas and jams all batlads (what a scandal). A
madcap vandal crafts a small black ankh-a hand-
stamp that can stamp a wax pad and at last plant a
mark that spark an ars m0gn0 (an abstract art that
charts a phrasal anagram). A pagan skald chants a dark
sage (a Mahabharata), as a papal cabal blackbal[s all
annals and tracts, all dramas and psalms: Kant and
Kafka, Marx and Marat. A law as harsh as a fonaro bans
all paragraphs that lack an A as a standard hallmark.,o
As B<ik says, the paradox of Oulipianism is that rule-following can produce
unforeseen events: "even a machinic calculus has the potential to generate
the novelty of anomaly."'' We'll return to this paradox in a moment, probably
withorrt hopc oIrcsolving it.
 -'.:I

Meanwhile a hard-core conceptualist like Sol Lewitt (r9zg-zoo7) would say

where everything ends in confusion.'s At any rate,
that Mayer's "writing experiments" need not be put into practice at alI because spicer's poet is croser to
Plato's ludic schizoid than to Aristotle,s
an ideo for an artwork is already itself a work of art: "The idea itself, even if not cool plot_maker.
speaking ofradios, there is (at reast conceptuaily)
made visual, is as much a work of art as any finished product.', In fact, Lewitt a genearogicar rine from
,'Concep- Jack spicer (t925-65) to Kenneth Gordsmith
adds, the "realization" of an artwork is conceivably self-defeating: lb. rgor), whose wiitings consist
of transcriptions offound texts, includingwhat
tual art is meant to engage the mind of the viewer rather than his eye or emo- is said on the radio, ,-, in cota-
smith's Trilog: weather (zoo5), which transcribes year,s
tions. The physicality of a three-dimensional object then becomes a contra- a worth of a radio sta-
tion's daily weather reports; Troffrc (zoo7) is made
diction to its non-emotive intent."., On this theory, a conceptual poem is an of traffic reports broadcast
on a New york radio station during one day ofa
artifact in a possible world. Transposing it to our world, that is, reducing it to a horiday weekend; sporr (zooa)
gives us the play-by-pray broadcasr
material work, however striking, might just be the way to destroy it. Recall the ofa yankees basebail game.,6 (Recail irre st.
Mark's church assignmenil "Experiment with
poem Hart Crane once imagined, one that gives "the reader a single, new word, theft and pragiarism.,,) s oritoquy,
meanwhile, is a transcription of everyword (in
never before spoken and impossible actually to enunciate, but self-evident ract, orever!sound) uttered by
Goldsmith during the course of a week. This is not
as an active principle in the reader's consciousness.".3 Unfortunately Crane a diarogic text, but simpry
the edited tape of coldsmith's noises, ail words
does not say anything about what the experience ofsuch a word would be like. ofothers hiving been dereted.
A portion ofhis talk, describingthe projectjustas
Perhaps it would simply take the form of an alien visitation-something on itgets undeiway, provides
the work's "support language,,;
the order of lack Spicer's idea that "there is an Outside to the poet,,,who is a
passive rather than expressive subject: someone taking dictation or receiving Here's a here's a new project I,m working on.
OK? l,m taking a leap of language.
signals like a radio-or taking punches, rather too many of them: l'm recording everything r'm saying for an entire week.
I mean it no, t,m ltways
taking [sic] about the vorume of language that's around I mean what
The trouble with comparing a poet with a radio is that radios wourd your
language look like ifit was you coilecteJ
don't develop scar-tissue. The tubes burn out, or with a every piece ofshitword thatyou said for
an entire week. yeah and what wourd it rook
transistor, which most souls are, the battery or diagram like and you know what form would
it you know it say you just printed it out and put
burns out replaceable or not replaceable, but not like that
it in a big stack and it,s a visual
representation oFall the crap thatyou speak
in a week. That see there it,s a visual
punchdrunk fighter in the bar. The poet representation of language.,z
Takes too many messages. The right to the ear that floored him
in New lersey. The right to say that he stood six rounds with "set down as heard," in ail of its turbulence.
The fuil text of soriroquy comes to
a champion. nearly 5oo pages, which means that the reading
of the work would be some_
Then they sell beer or go on sporting commissions, or, if the thing of a school assignment-cordsmith himserf
remarks on the deadry te-
scar tissue is too heavy, demonstrate in a bar where the dium ofhaving to proofread the text (twice). A friend
ornis suggesreiiirr,t
as pieces of instailation art."
invisible champions might not have hit him. Too many of printed book could simpry be exhibited in a galrery
them. Goldsmith regards this as a "dumb" idea-but "to
do a z4-hour reading of the
The poet is a radio. The poet is a liar. The poet is a book in the gallery would be interes ting,, (Soliloquy,
16). Interesring for i,homl
counterpunching radio. However, as Coldsmith explains in a talk entitled ..Being
Uoing,, (zoo4),
And those messages (God would not damn them) do not even "You really don't need to read my books
to get the idea of what thly,re rike,
know they are champions.,+ you just need to know the generar concept."28
(rn other wordr, ,,,"nd at reast
to the "support language.") Gordsmith identifies
The "outside," whatever or wherever it is, is clearly not inhabited by school- his work as ,,conceptuarwrit-
ing," where "the idea becomes a machine that
masters. It is a complex entity, overloading the poet with mixed metaphors makes the text.,,rs such writing,
he says, "is not necessarily rogicar," but rike
that unfold like episodes in a serial or rounds in a fight (or a drinking bout) oulipianism it is procedurar (or
"nrodular"): the writer's task is to
serect the form that,,becomes the gramma.
12
for the total work" ("Paragraphs," ro9). Any actual writing-down could be left
to one's scribes or apprentices. lndeed, the purpose of the text's bulk seems
precisely to throw the idea behind the work into the foreground by making
the prospect ofreading seem like a Sisyphusian project, or at least a gauntlet
meant to separate critical readers from mere idlers.:o
What is interesting about Goldsmith's "writing" is that what looks like a
closed system-composition according to rule-works like a complexity, the
more so when the transcription is of events rather than of finished texts. Gold-
smith's Day (zoq), to be sure, reproduces a day's edition of the New York Times
(September t, zooo), but Doy is basically a second-order transcription, since a
newspaper is itself a record of the passing show, like Goldsmith's Fidget, which
tracks a day's worth of Goldsmith's own bodily movements-movements that
grow increasingly complex (or chaotic, or maybe just boring) as the day draws
to a drunken close.3'
In an essay entitled "Art in a Closed Field" (1962), Hugh Kenner argued that
the invention of the printing press produced a culture defined by such
things as books, dictionaries, enryclopedias, and a systematic conception of
language-language conceived as a finite set of elements and rules for com-
bining them into self-contained objects.r'Such a culture did not (pace Henry
James) generate a literature of loose and bagry monsters; rather it gave us
Custave Flaubert's dream ofa "book about nothing," a work held together by
purely formal relations, indifferent to anything save its own possibility; lames
loyce's Ulysses, a book made of dictionaries, directories, records, maps, and
(above all) a system of correspondences in which each word is, to the attentive
ear, an echo every other; and Samuel Beckett's Wort, where Watt is (as Watt's
interlocutor, Sam, experiences him) something of an aphasic whose speech
follows not the rules of grammar but an exhaustive series of mathematical
permutations:
Then he took it into his head to invert, no longer the order ofthe words in the sen-
tence, nor that ofthe letters in the word, nor that ofthe sentences in the period,
nor simultaneously that of the words in the sentence and that of the letters in the
word, nor simultaneously that of the words in the sentence and that of the sen-
tences in the period, nor simultaneously that of the letters in the word and that of
the sentences in the period, nor simultaneously that of the letters in the word and
that ofthe words in the sentence and that ofthe sentences in the period, ho no,
but, in the briefcourse ofthe same period, now that ofthe words in the sentence,
now that of the letters in the word, now that of thc scnt('nc('s in tltc period, now
13
simultaneously that of the sentences in the period, now simultaneously that of
the words in the sentence and that of the letters in the word, now simultaneously
that of the words in the sentence and that of the sentences in the period, now
simultaneously that of the letters in the word and that of the sentences in the pe-
riod, and now simultaneously that of the letters in the word and that of the words
in the sentences and that ofthe sentences in the period.::
"l recall," Sam says, "no example of this manner" (Watt, 169). Watt is, in his
way, a conceptual artist, or an Oulipovian beside the fact.
Interestingly, Kenner remarks in passing (he was, in fact, among the first
to notice) that "American literature . . . has always tended to reject" analogies
between writing and closure, and this is especially true of American poetry
since Williams, which "has patterned itself aggressively on speech, not print,
and furthermore not the speech of conversation, which is always in danger of
falling into a closed set of patterns . . . , but rather the speech ofwhat is some-
times called spontaneity but is actually just naked utterlnce, spontaneous or
premeditated" (6o9)-rather like Goldsmith's Soliloquy, where the spatiality of
the closed field gives way to the temporality of things that, like Spicer's serials,
stop but do not end. Think of Beckett's Unnamable as-what?-an inversion
of Watt, and Goldsmith's prototype.
To speak strictly, however, Coldsmith's transcriptions, particularly Soliloquy
and Fidget, cannot help reducing events to spatial form, whose boundaries
Goldsmith has explored in search of an exit, which he finally finds in digital
technology's eradication of the page. In his conversation with Marjorie Perl-
ofi he writes: "ln my practice, I've come to believe that language by its nature
is fluid and will assume any form it's poured into. Hence my production has
taken the form of everything from gallery installations to computer programs
to couture dresses to CDs and books, all using the same language. Before the
computer, language was much less fluid and it was almost impossible to coax
off the page. Reproducing technologies such as Xerox just gave you more
language glued to the page. Now, once language is digitized, its transportive
and morphic tendencies are foreground. Great chunks oflanguage have been
melted and are free to assume a myriad of forms" ("A Conversation," 9).
Recall Williams's idea that words have their own autonomy, and that what
the poet provides is a place for them to sit down. Now we see that the page
is itself a closed field, however open words might themselves try to remain
in the "what you will" of their assembly. The typographical experiments of
nrodernism-from St6phane Mallarm6's Un Coup de Dis (r897) through lsidore
lsou's l-ettristcs to the various forms of visual and concrete poetry that have
llorrrishc<l sincc thc r96os attcnrpted to keep the page open by rejecting the
idea of language as any form of mediation.3a A poem is made of words, not
ideas, and words, at bottom, are made of ink-as in Rosaire Appel's "word-
less" poems orTim Gaze's Asemic writing.:s
Digital technology (if l, a Luddite, have it right) liberates poetry from the
fixity of ink by mobilizing it within a four-dimensional electronic space. In an
essay titled "Holopoetry" (19g6) the digital artist Eduardo Kac writes:

Holopoetry belongs to the tradition ofexperimental poetry and verbal art, but it
treats the word as an immaterial form, that is, as a sign that can change or dis-
solve into thin air, breaking its formal stiffness. Freed from the page and freed
from other palpable materials, the word invades the reader's space and forces him
or her to read it in a dynamic way; the reader must move around the text and find
meanings and connections the words establish with each other in empty space.
Thus a holopoem must be read in a broken fashion, in an irregular and discon-
tinuous movement, and it will change as it is viewed from different perspectives.36

The holopoem, in other words, is a virtual text that moves and changes as the
reader wanders through it, thus giving Williams's practice of "broken com-
position," not to mention the concept of a complex entity, a new turn-
something one might compare to a funhouse tour, since the reader, however
much now a collaborator of sorts, remains (rather like Spicer's poet) subject
to the words themselves, or at least to the letters (or digits) that endlessly re-
shape themselves and their environment.3T
To be sure, any form is inevitably caught in the double bind of its technol-
ogy, which limits or confines what it makes possible-witness the difficulty
of citing a holopoem; "Because of their irreducibility as holographic texts,"
Kac writes, "holopoems resist vocalization and paper reproduction. Since the
perception of the texts changes with viewpoint, they do not possess a single
'structure' that can be transposed or transported to and from another medi-
um" ("Holopoetry," t3213). The best one can do is to make a film of such a
poem, which Kac has done in the case of several of his works.38 A mere pho-
tograph (see figure 2, a stop-frame of Eduardo Kac's "Letter") simply turns the
work back into a piece of visual poetry.
Marjorie Perloff's book Poetry 0n E }ffthe Page concludes with a chapter on
the video artist Bill Viola, who makes the claim that one of his pieces is "a
form of visual poetry." At which point Perloff asks: "What makes such an in- dd &. tg
stallation 'poetic'?" Her speculation is that Viola's videos, however visual, are
something other than "retinal art, " and that the nonlinearity of contemporary
poetry is an example of this "other.":s Similarly, Eduardo Kac claims allegiance
to "the tradition of experimental poetry and verbal art," not bccause his art
 1 7 ;,rr, j: ;; I i! i. :? L:r :tl ii ti .; , {; r., 'a

,q$l%e1s'\\' is"poetical" (or even linguistical), but because ofthe way it executes the con-

{k$N
cepts of turbulence, nonidentity, and open form:

In its reaction against fixed structures, holographic poetry creates a space where
the linguistic factor ofsurfaces is disregarded in favor ofan irregular fluctuation
ofsigns that can never be grasped at once by the reader. This turbulent space, with
t bifurcations which can take on an indefinite number of rhythms, allows for the
creation of what I call textual instability. By textual instabilig, I mean precisely
the condition according to which a text does not preserve a single visual structure

.g*offi
in time as it is read by the viewer, producing different and transitory verbal con-
figurations in response to the beholder's perceptual exploration. ("Holopoetry,"

$""5S*"-ouq$U$- Bs-tq)

*W
One might put it this way: it is as if holopoetry transported us through a look-

\Wxe) ing-glass back into the legendary khdra, Plato's aboriginal space of proliferat-
ing structures on the hither side of any formal order, a receptacle whose an-
archic purpose is to maintain itself in a perpetual neither/nor (neither eidos
nor kosmos) in which no one is anything and everything is otherwise (imaeus,

^W \N
5ta-5zc).ao
Not surprisingly, I'm reminded of Gertrude Stein's line, "l have lost the
thread of my discourse," to which she adds: "it does not matter if we find it"
(SM, r55).

daitt'aa.a

,'),&'? /
lJh 2

d,
,1 ?/ .t-,'
-t- -2 t*

?o'
I
.4 *1)?,tr/o ,"'"
r
""'"'-'--
7;.
'"/,.eZzttZ/ | .r"r'
 1 I :! .ir l; ;:i

to link up poetry and the political-the critical mandate from the r97os and
r98os whose force is still felt both in and out of the seminar room-the articu-
lation of poetry and ethics carries with it, certainly with the best of intentions,
an attempt to provide poetry with a justification that it may neither want nor
need-nor, for all of that, entertain as a possibility. fhe ghost of Aristotle
spooks the whole project. What if poetry, at least in some of its versions, only
gets interesting when it is in excess of its reasons for being?

A number of writers, myself included, have proposed for better or worse that
there are at least two conceptions ofthe "ethical" to choose from in our cur-
rent intellectual environment (which is two too few, Badiou would say). One
goes back to Kant and has to do with the application of principles or rules as
SHOULD POETRY BE .ETHICAL to what is right and good. These rules are either universal, or, as in Hegel's
OR OTHERWISE? theory, they comprise the Sittlichkeir, the moral customs, of integrated com-
munities. In either event the point of ethics is to enable one to rise and remain
above reproach in one's actions, beliefs, and character (at ease with the face
in the mirror). Self-possession, or autonomy for short, is the principal ethi-
cal ideal. To this normative theory the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas
Ein Zeichen A sign
offered an alternative by arguing that the claims other people have on me are
Kemmt es zusammen combs it together
in advance of whatever reasons I might use to justifi my conduct. I am respon-
zurAntwort aufeine to answer a
sible for the good of the other come what may: that is, my responsibility is an-
grlbelnde Felskunst. brooding rockart.
archic, on the hither side of moral principles and the reasonings that provide
Celan, "MitMikrolithen gespickte" (GWll, 237)
-Paul their support-which means, among other things, that my relation to others
is not one of knowing but, as Levinas likes to put it, one of proximity, as of skin

ln recent years there has been a good deal of important work on the relation
between poetryand ethics.' Notsurprisingly, oneconclusion to bedrawn from
this materialis thatthe relation between poetry and ethics is highly conflicted,
not simply because of the conceptual instability of the terms in question-
"Ethics does not exist," says Alain Badiou'-but also because any effort of con-
junction threatens to limit the autonomy that opens the practice of poetry to
its multifarious futures. (On my desk, as I write this, is a copy of the TimesLiter'
ory Supplement containing a review, entitled "The Poetry of Ethics," of Geoffrey
Hill's Collected CriticalWritings. The reviewer, Adam Kirsch, notes that ever since
his first book of poems, published in 1959, "Hill has been concerned with the
ethics of poetry. What, if anything, makes it morally acceptable to write po-
etry in an age dominated by suffering and evil?"3 The word "barbarism" has
exposed to the touch.aThis reversal of subjectivity is crucial. Being approached
or addressed by the other, not the cogiro, makes me what I am, namely some-
one who exists in the accusative, not so much an I as a me to whom the other
"happens" as an event oftranscendence ("otherwise than being, or beyond es-
sence," as Levinas's motto has it: outside the grasp ofconcepts and categories).
Kantian ethics appears more utopian (more in tune with bourgeois comforts)
than does Levinas's theory, but a Levinasian would argue that ethical respon-
sibility belongs to the economy of the gift rather than to systems of exchange
and their returns on investment (where the good I do for others puts them in
nry debt). The ethicaI is, whatever else it is, a critique of these systems, along
with their presiding icon: the disengaged punctual ego exercising rational
( ontrol over its possessions.s The ethical subject, by contrast, is an offering,

had poetry under surveillance for at least the last half-century.) Like the effort ,r nrovcnlclrt oIorre-for-the-other. Sometimes Levinas figures this movement

IB
20 21

as a Saying (le Dire) on the hither side of language, that is, prior to predication rH I Dftppnee"eantsanegcintineoep emfnemtn t'e'w'aswen
or production of the Said (le Dit).6 Saying is not self-expression (except perhaps toTT pr'-kkePrym l (" Lift Ofl' [RR, r7a])
in the literal sense of self-expulsion); in one of Levinas's favorite similes, it is a
My weight becomes something that neither holds me down nor gives me release
turning ofoneselfinside-out "like a cloak."7
the stomach hair eyes all set themselves in a separate way downflow you might
say as Susan says shimmering is too strong an end note not that this particular
bulb or cube doesn'tglow but that figuration almost too overwhelms, which
Arguably there is an open boundary (or crack) between poetry and Levinasian cries out for some quieter moment ("Faculty Politics" [RR, r77])

ethical theory in the sense that poetry seems to have long since broken with
any analytic culture of principles and rules, together with the various con-
cepts ofmastery and authority that such a culture sponsors, as in the universal
supervision ofparticulars. There is no one thing that can be called "poetr),"
neither now nor at least since the start ofthe last century when, as Adorno
says, artworlds began producing "things of which we do not know what they
are" (AT, rr4). ln which case it follows that there are no criteria by which any-
thing could be set aside as nonpoetic-an anarchic state of affairs in which
poets like Charles Bernstein have flourished for a seemingly endless number
ofyears. Here is a samplingof brief passages from some of Bernstein's poems
in an early collection entitled, appropriately or otherwise, Poeticlustice (r979):
Listen. I can feeI it. Specificatly and intentionally. It does hurt. Gravity weighing
it down. lt's not too soft. I like it. Ringing like this. The hum. Words peeling. The
one thing. ("Palukavitle" IRR, ra5])
One problem with a fragment sitting. Wave I stare as well at that only as if this all
and not form letting it but is it. ("Lo Disfruto" [RR, r+8])
Bernstein's work is, whatever else it is, a persistently comic investigation
of the idea that there are more ways of putting words together than can be
contained within the standard received model of a (unitary) speaking voice.
This is the form his iconoclasm takes. His poetry suggests a more complex and
decidedly more porous and ludic subjectivity than the linguistic concept of a
speaker can contain; it is one that belongs to a history of poetry made of differ-
ent conceptions of what voices are and where they come from, whether from
gods, demons, the other minds in one's head, a good library, or the channels,
circuits, airways, and back alleys of mass (and mis-) communication. All of the
above and a good deal more apply in Bernstein's case, since what characterizes
his poetry is not the disappearance of the voice (as one of the graphic stews
above might suggest) but its wild, heterogeneous proliferation in forms of
pastiche, parody, and manic impersonation-poetic madness as madcap-as
in "The Age of Correggio and the Carracci" (from Wrrh Strings), whose title has
no bearing on the poem, unless we imagine something baroque about Bern-
stein's paratactic interruptions. The poem in any event breaks up the idiom of
a familiar kind of letter:

Thanks foryour ofalready some

its the DENSE
weeks ago. Things
stU Ff again that shlt i cANt UN DErstAnd when yOu gO oN that way ("elecTric"
very much back to having returned
IRR, r5a])
to a life that
izwurry ray aZoOt de puund in reducey ap crrRisle ehk nugkinj sluxYY senshl. lg (regrettably) has very little in
si heh hahpae uvd r fahbeh aht si gidrid. ("Azoot D'Puund" [RR,16r]) common with, a

totatly bright few

all that on a fall that sweats in it upon layers of, and if, the on, just a, silk, soiled,
or something like
crying down the banisters, mommy, mommy, the cornflakes, the stale beer in
it. Was
the hall ("'OutofThis Inside"' [RR, r65])
delighted to get
HH/ie,sobVrsxr;atjrn dugh seineopcv i iibalfmgmMw er,, me"ius a most remarkable & am assuming
ieigorcyCjeuvine+pee.)a/na.t" ihl"n,s allcorrtinues, well
ortnsihcldseloopitemoBruce-Oiwvewaa3gosoanfl ++, r" P thcrcabouts. (WS, r9)
22 23

Bernstein describes his work as "a mix of different types of language pieced
together as a mosaic-very 'poetic' diction next to something that sounds
overheard, intimate address next to philosophical imperatives, plus a mix of
would-be proverbs, slogans, jingles, nursery rhymes, songs" (MW, z5*26). To
which one should add: puns, jokes, goofr wordplay-"mentality / drives the
/ spoon" ("Epiphanies of Suppression" [RT, r9]-Bernstein's poems won't
leave home without them. ln the essay "Comedy and the Poetics of Political
Form" Bernstein refers to such goofiness as "acting out, in dialectical play, the
insincerity of form. . . . Such poetic play does not open into a neat opposition
between dry high irony and wet lyric expressiveness but, in contrast, collapses
into a more destabilizingfield of pathos, the ludicrous, schtick, sarcasm. . .
where linguistic shards of histrionic inappropriateness pierce the momentary
calm of an obscure twistof phrase" (AP,zzo).8
"lnsincerity of form" is a curious phrase, but perhaps it only means that
form is not "expressive" in the sense that Susanne Langer gave this term in
Feeling and Form, where the work of art is said to reflect the dynamic structures
of feeling-growth and attenuation, conflict and resolution, speed and arrest,
and so on.e Form for Bernstein is, after all, not formal but materialized: an ale-
be uncovered without any defense, to be delivered over";.'o Bernstein's verse
is entirelyotherwise-call it "vociferous," or "vociferential," or "ventrilocol-
loquial": very much like the Shakespeare of whom Samuel lohnson com-
plained that the quibble "has some malignant power over his mind" ("Preface
to Shakespeare"). According to the 0ED, a quibble originally meant "ethically
dubious matter." One of Bernstein's "Fragments from the Seventeenth Mani-
festo of Nude Formalism" reads: "Poetry has as its lower limit insincerity and
its upper limit dematerialization," which is to say that materiality is the condi-
tion in which insincerity thrives." By contrast a "dematerialized" poetry is one
that presumably can rise (and remain) above reproach: lyrical ascent as against
the art of sinking.
Or, alternatively, one can invoke the upside-down spirit of Tristram Shandy,
who broke the law of gravity that remains foundational for the ethical under
whatever philosophical description. Recall the grave Levinas in his early essay
"Reality and lts Shadow" (1948) :

atory mixture of found sounds and incongruous words ("linguistic shards of Magic, recognized everywhere as the devil's part, enjoys an incomprehensible
histrionic inappropriateness": Bernstein is not Rousseau, or Geoffrey Hill)- tolerance in poetry. Revenge is gotten on wickedness by producing its caricature,
which is to take from it its reality without annihilating it; evil powers are conjured
A poem should not mean but impale
by filling the world with idols which have mouths but do not speak. It is as though
not be but bemoan,
ridicule killed, as though everything really can end in songs. . . . Myth takes the
boomerang
place of mystery. The world to be built is replaced by the essential completion of
buck(le)
its shadow. This is not the disinterestedness of contemplation but of irrespon-
bubbte. Malted meadows & hazelnut sibility. The poet exiles himself from the ciry. From this point of view, the value
innuendos: l'll bet the soda water of the beautiful is relative. There is something wicked and egoist and cowardly in
gets the shakes sooner than artistic enjoyment. There are times when one can be ashamed of it, as oFfeasting
Dan gets to Tampa. "Don'tTampa during a plague. (Collected PhilosophicalPapers, e)
with me or I'll lacerate that
On reading this Boccaccio's name comes to mind, followed quickly by Ador-
evisceration offyour face so fast
no's, among others. The problem, as Plato understood, is that the poet is a
you'll think my caddle prod was a
light and flighty thing. The task of philosophy, as it has been since Aristotle, is
lollipop." "Stay out of my face or I'll
to read poetry seriously, that is, to redeem it (ground it) by way of appropria-
deploy my assets against whatever
tion or subsumption into categories of the good, the true, and the beautiful
collateral you've got left after I
("allegory" is the word for it). Levinas does this in his later work by anchoring
targetyourabstemious alarm." ("Dark City" IDC, rar])
poetry to the grauitos of le Dire,the movement of one-for-the-other that consti-
The word "sincere" derives from a Latin word for "clean." lt means, says the tutes the ethical subject. lt is worth reciting the passage cited in note 6 above:
)ED,"pure, unmixed, free from any foreign element," and in particular free of "Saying is not a game. . . . The original or pre-original saying, what is put forth
"dissimulation" (note that for Levinas the word defines the ethical subject: "to irr tlrc firrcword, weaves an intrigr-re oFresponsibiliry. It sets forth an order
24 25

more grave than being and antecedent to being. By comparison being appears
like a game. Being is play or ddtente, without responsibility, where everything
possible is permitted."
ln hisessay"PaulCelan: From Beingto theOther" (1972) Levinasrefers usto
Celan's famous address "Der Meridian," where poetry is, however obscurely,
said to be vocative in character:''
But the poem speaks. lt remains mindful ofits dates, but it speaks. True, it speaks
only on its own, its very own behalf [in seiner eigenen, allereigensren Soche]. But I
think-and this will hardly surprise you-that the poem has always hoped, for
this very reason, to speak on behalf of the strange-no,l can no longer use this
word here-on behalf of theother, who knows, perhaps of an altogetherother.
And a bit later:
The poem intends another lDasGedichtwillzueinenAndere), needs this other, it
needs an opposite lGegenilberl. It goes toward it, bespeaks it [es spricht sich ihm zu].
For the poem, everything and everybody is a figure [6estolt] of this other toward
which it is heading. (GWlll, rg6-g8; CP, 48-49)'3
It would be surprising if Levinas did not try to see himself (or his forebear,
Martin Btiber) in these lines, whose elusiveness allows for a good deal of in-
terpolation. One of Levinas's purposes in this essay is to pry Celan's remarks
on poetry loose from Heidegger's poetics of world-making where the poet
calls things into the openness being and, in the same stroke, gathers us (hu-
mankind) into a conversation.'4 Not an easy undertaking for Levinas, because
Celan's writings on poetry are saturated with Heidegger's vocabulary, as in the
following from his Bremen address:
I tried, during those years and the years after, to write Poems: in order to speak,
to orient myselfi, to flnd out where I was, where I was going, to chart my reality.
It meant movement, you see, something happening, being en route, and at'
tempt to find a direction lEswor . . . Ereignis, Bewegung, Untennegssein, eswar derVersuch,
Richtung zu gewinnen]. (GWl I I, 186; CP, 34)'s
centralto Celan's poetics. The prose writer, Mandelstam says, always address-
es himself (if "himself" is the word) to a familiar audience-his "public": "la-
dies and gentlemen." The poet, by contrast, must not know whom he is ad-
dressing. "Without dialogue, lyric poetry cannot exist," Mandelstam says, but,
paradoxically, it is a formal condition of poetry that its audience must remain
a stranger-an unknown and anonymous interlocutor. To address someone
one knows is to speak predictably, knowing in advance or from experience
how to make oneselfunderstood; but to address a stranger is not to know how
one will sound or what one will say-for the point of writing, after all, is to
catch oneselfby surprise: "there is only one thing that pushes us into the ad-
dressee's embrace: the desire to be astonished by our own words, to be capti-
vated by their originality and unexpectedness."'z To which Celan adds a screw-
turn of his own, figuringthe poetas a kind of Orpheuswhose audience is made
of things as well as people:
The poem becomes-under what conditions-the poem of a person who still
perceives, still turns toward phenomena [dem ErscheinendenZugewandten), address-
ing and questioning them. The poem becomes conversation-often desperate
conversation lv erzwerfekes Gespriichl.
Only the space of this conversation ldiesesGesprdchsl can establish what is ad-
dressed, can gather it into a "you" around the naming and speaking l. But this
"you," come about by dint of being named and addressed, brings its otherness
into the present. Even in the here and now of the poem-and the poem has
only this one, unique, momentary present-even in this immediaq lUnmittel'
barkeitl and nearness, the otherness gives voice to what is most its own: its time.
Whenever we speak with things
fDinge] in this way we also dwell on the ques-
tion of their where-from and where-to, an "open" question "without resolution,"
a question which points toward open, empry, free spaces fins )ffeneundLeereund
Freieweisenden Fragel-we have ventured far out.
The poem also searches for this place. (GWlll, t98-99; CP, 5o)
Or, as a Heideggerian would say: GelassenheitzuDingen.

ln "Der Meridian" Celan figures the poem not fiust) as an art object but on the l(rokus, vom gastlichen Crocus, spotted from a

model of Heidegger's thinker who is on the way (Unterwegs) to an elsewhere Tisch aus gesehn: hospitable table:
(a-topia) not obviously marked on any map.'6 lt can be said that Celan differs zeichenfii h liges small sign-
from Heidegger because he populates this elsewhere with another person kleines Exil sensing exile
(there are, basically, no people in Heidegger's philosophy: anonymous Das- einer gemeinsamen ofa common
ein, gods and mortals, the faceless crowd, but no one whom anyone would Wahrheit, truth,
recognize). Specifically Celan borrows someone from the Russian poet Osip tlu brauchst you need
Mandelstam, who drew a distinction between prose and l)octry that seenls it'tlt'n ll:rlrn. (GWlll, tzz) cvcry blade. (SPP, 37a)
26 27

Notice that this is not exactly (or only) an apostrophe to the crocus. Rather it is
an address to a situation held in common, as from one exile to another, with
a piece of advice thrown in: take with you as much as you can, since whatever
you leave behind is a piece of yourself, Perhaps there is more to be said, since
the crocus is the first to bloom in the spring; and then there is the tradition
that extends from Wordsworth's daffodil to Zukofsky's eighty flowers. Where
do Celan's flowers fit in? There are certainly more stones than flowers in Cel-
an's poetry-the two are frequently in conflict, and flowers usually lose-so
one should think carefully about the crocus.'s Another crocus, of sorts, will
turn up in a moment.
i!:il
ln his Celan essay Levinas stops short of claiming any ethical standing for
poetry, which he regards as a parallel universe to be addressed in the form of
rhetorical questions-"Does [Celan] not suggest poetry itself as an unheard-of
modality of the orherwisethanbeing?" (ProperNames,45). Levinas is rather more
declarative in "Language and Proximity" (r967), where he reconfigures his dis-
tinction between Ie Dir and le Dire as a distinction between language as kerygma
"The poetry of the world," Levinas says, "is inseparable from proximity par ex-
cellence, or the proximity of the neighbor par excellence" (Collected Philosophicol
Papers, rrg).
No doubt this formulation captures something, namely that poetry is, in
some sense, a ground-level mode of responsibiliry, as when Heidegger speaks
of listening as being antecedent to discursiveness.'s lt is possible that Levinas
crosses over into metaphor when he says that this "relationship of proximity
. . . is the original language, a language without words or propositions, pure
communication" (CollectedPhilosophicalPopers,:rg).lf thiswereso itwould no
longer be clear how poetry could be a practice with a history, that is, some-
thing made up concretely (materially) of poems. We'll see very shortly the form
this problem takes in Celan's later poetry. What interests Levinas is the paradox
that the proximity of others and of things does not diminish their distance;
that is, sensibility is not serenity or repose but is, on the contrary, a "restless-
ness" or anarchy with respect to any order of things (Collected Philosophical pa-
pers,rzo-zr). And this is perhaps coherentwith the obscurities that beleaguer
the relationship between "l" and "you" in Celan's poetry, where, as Gadamer
says in his commentary on Atemkristall, "'1,' 'you,' and 'we' are pronounced in

and language as contact, where the one predicates something of something an utterly direct, shadouryr-uncertain and constantly changing way" (Gadomer
(rhis as thot) while the other is an event of sensibility or proximity in which the on Celan, z7). Not for nothing are pronouns called "shifters." "1" and "you" are

visible is no longer an object of consciousness, a phenomenon or sensation, restless, but so are Celan's poems, whose language is arguably no longer a
but is an impingement or obsession: "ln the ethicalrelationship with the real, form of mediation but is anarchic initsWortaufschilttung(Gwll, zg)-its weird
that is, in the relationship of proximity which the sensible establishes, the and wild way of combining and compounding words;'o
essential is committed. Life is there. Sight is, to be sure, an openness and a Kalk-Krokus, im Chalk-crocus
consciousness, and all sensibiliry, openingas a consciousness, is called vision; Hellwerden: dein the coming of lighr your
but even in its subordination to cognition sight maintains contact and prox- steckbriefgereiftes indivisible
imity. The visible caresses the eye, and one hears like one touches" (Collected Von-dort-und-auch-dort-her, mellowed in the warrant
Philosophical Papers, u8).
unspaltbar, From-here-and-there-too,
Then, withoutwarning, much less explanation, Levinas gives the name "po-
Sprengstoffe high explosives
etry" to this "ethical relationship with the real": ldcheln dirzu, are smiling at you,
The proximity of things is poetry; in themselves the things are revealed before be- die Delle Dasein existence the nick
ing approached. In stroking an animal already the hide hardens in the skin. But hilft einer Flocke helps a snowflake
over the hands that have touched things, places trampled by beings, the things aus sich heraus, come out of itself,
they have held, the images ofthose things, the fragments ofthose things, the con- in den Fundgruben at the source-points
texts in which those fragments enter, the inflexions of the voice and the words staut sich die Moldau. (CWll, 4o6) the Moldau is rising. (LP, r49),,
that are articulated in them, the ever sensible signs oflanguage, the letters traced,
the vestiges, the relics-over all things, beginnlngwith the human face and skin, One can only imagine what Levinas would have made of "steckbriefgereiftes"
tenderness spreads. Cognition turns into proximity, into the purely sensible. (Col- or of'the nriddle stanza with its smiling "sprengstoffe" and "die Delle Dasein,"
lected Philosophical Popers, tt}-t g) wlrich (as in Ross's rendition) should perhaps be allowed its Heideggerian res-
28 29 ):, :i .,:: i,i ,. fi? ti i:i i": .'
,l ,i 11, P 1' ll." ; "i

onance ("the dent ofDasein"). Meanwhile the chalk-crocus here does not ap-
pear to be a flower, although perhaps a good horticulturalist could identifi it.
the proximity of things, which is "the original language, a language wirhout
wordsorpropositions,purecommunication" (Collectedphitosophicalpopers,ng).
But of course this is contradicted at once by the brute material fact of
Celan,s
poems23-

Weggebeiztvom Eroded by
lnterestingly, a photograph of a chalk-crocus (that is, of an image of a crocus
inscribed in chalk on a rock) is available online at http://flicker.com/photos/
Strahlenwind deiner Sprache the beamwind ofyour speech

melisdramati cl 4655486261. lt is hard not to take the photograph as an inten-

das bunte Gerede desAn- the gaudy chatter ofthe pseudo-

tional allusion to Celan's poem, given the almost obsessive place stones have
erlebten-das hundert- experienced-my hundred-
in his poetry. Turning a flower to stone is the work of a Medusa-head, Celan's
ztngige Mein- tongued perjury-

muse and nemesis-recall from "Der Meridian" Celan's elucidation of Georg

Cedicht, das Genicht. (cwll,3r) poem, the noem. (B, 95),4

Btichner's Lenz:"'Onewould [ike to be a Medusa's head'to . . . seize the natural These lines are commonly taken as a valedictory in which celan turns
away
as the natural by means of art. . . . This means going beyond what is human, from his earlier, more conventional (lyrical-poetical-figural) verse toward
stepping into a realm which is turned toward the human, but uncanny-the the characteristically incongruous word-clusters of his later work-,.das was-
realm where the monkey, the automaton and with them . . . oh, art, too, seem sergewordene Buch" (GWIl, 47), "blauschwarzen Silben,, (CWll, 6r), ..Der
Ke_
to be at home" (GWl I I, rg:; CP, 4z-$).To which he later adds these words: hlkopfuerschlu8laut / singt" (GWIt, u4), "Der herzschriftgekri.imelte sichtin-
sel" (GWll, r74)-that occasionally fragment into sound poetry:,s
Poetry is perhaps this: an Atemwende, a turning of our breath. Who knows, per-
haps poetry goes its way-the way of art-for the sake of just a turn. And since the Antwort.
Deine Frage-deine your question_your answer.
strange, the abyss ond Medusa's head, the abyss and the automaton, all seem to lie Dein Gesang, wasweiBer? yourchant, whatdoes it know?
in the same direction-it is perhaps this turn, this Atemwende, which can sort out
Tiefimschnee, Deepinsnow,
the strange from the strange? lt is perhaps here, in this one brief moment, that
Iefimnee, Eepinno,
Medusa's head shrivels and the automatons run down? Perhaps, along with the I,
estranged and freed Weigeseercn befremdeten lch) here, in this manner, some other thing
I-i-e. (cwil,39) l-i-o. (B,to7),6

lein Anderesl is also set free? Certainly this is a long way from the iconic "Todesfuge," which is still regarded
Perhaps after this the poem can be itself. . . can in this now art-less, art-free as celan's signature poem. "Aboutness" fades from the later texts, as in the
manner go other ways, including the ways o[art, time and again? (CWIII, 195-96; following from F adensonnen:
cP,47)
Die Fleissigen Busy
Art freezes the life out of things. The poem wants to breathe life back into Bodenschdtz, hduslich, mineral wealth, domestic,
them. No doubt the poem borders the possible/impossible relation of art die geheizte Synkope thermal syncope,
and life. That is, the poem is not (ust) an art-object but, following Heidegger das nicht zu entritselnde insoluble
and Mandelstam, a movement both toward utopia and toward an unknown Halljaha jubilee,
interlocutor; but, turn and turn about, kunst-loseundkunst-frei, it can also move die vollverglasten vitrailed
along the path of art-as how could it not? This leaves poetry in a neither/nor Spinnen-Altire im alles- spider-altars in the all-
condition, or leaves us uncertain as to what it is. Let us say that for Celan it is [iberragenden Flachbau, paramount block,
antinomic, being both immaterial as a breath and as grave as a stone, as when die Zwischenlaute the semivowels
breath crystallizes, as it frequently does in his poetry: witness Atemkristall.,, (noch immer?), (still?),
Celan wants to break with Mallarm6's hermetic thesis that poetry is made of rlic Schattenpalaver, the shadowparley,
words, not of things we use words to produce; poetry is immaterial language rlic Angste, eisgerecht, dread, ice-just,
(GWlll, zoz', CP,55: "immaterial, but earthly"), rather likc l.evinas's poetry of
 flugklar, clear to fly, of "wordcaves" lined with "panther skins." Plus an ambulatory syllable look-
der barock ummantelte, the baroque-immantled, ing for all the world like Franz Kafka. lt would be interesting to read Celan's
spracheschluckende Duschraum, tonguesluiced shower-room, poetry just to follow the often tragicomic course of his "winterhard-cold / syl-
semantisch durchleuchtet, semantically translumined, lables" (GWl, I, z9o: "winterhart-kalten / Silben"):
die unbeschriebene Wand the blankwatt
einer Stehzelle: ofa standing-cell:
Die Abende graben sich dir The evenings inter themselves
unters Aug. Mit der Lippe auF underyour eye. With lip-
hier here
gesammelteSilben-sch<ines, uploadedsyllables-lovely,
leb dich you must live through-
lautloses Rund- noiseless circle-
querdurch, ohne Uhr. (GWll, r5t) out, withouttime. (FB, ro5)
helfen dem Kriechstern help the creepstar
The poem forms a single period without becoming anything resembling a in ihre Mitte. (GWI, 235) into their midst. (my translation)
sentence, until perhaps the last (Poe-like) lines. Paratactic phrasing replaces
the discursiveness of speech. And the baroque-covered "spracheschluckende
Duschraum"-literally, "the language-swallowing shower-room"-is char-
acteristic of the heterogeneous ways in which, in the later poetry, words and One could say that as Celan's poetry thickens, the question ofpoetry and the
things are constellated along the same material plane of existence: ethical fades into the distance. But perhaps this would be to take a narrowview
because, after all, in its break with principles and rules the ethical is about the
Sie essen: They eat:
die Tollhiiusler-Triiffel, ein Sttick the bedlamite's-truffle, a piece
limits of my ability or power as a subject (the limits of possibility), which is
exactly what Celan's poetry brings me up against. ln his later writings lacques
unvergrabner Poesie unburied poetry,
found tongue and tooth. (B,r47) Derrida, drawing on the work of Maurice Blanchot as well as that of Emmanuel
fand Zunge und Zahn. (GWll,59)
Levinas, came to think of the ethical as an event of the impossible. An event
Bei den zusammengetretenen At the assembled of the impossible is something like an epiphanic break-what complexity-
Zeichen, im signs, in the theorists call a catastrophe-an absolutely singular disruption in the course
worthdutigen 0lzelt (GWll, 69) wordmembraned oiltent (8, r7o) or order of things, as when I am called upon for forgiveness. Derrida's idea is,
die Sprachtiirme rings the language-towers everywhere not surprisingly, paradoxical: "lf I forgive only what's forgivable, I've forgiven
in der totzuschweigenden Zeichen- in the to-be-silenced-to-death sign- nothing. . . . lf I forgive only what is venial, only what is excusable or pardon-
able, the slight misdeed, the measured and measurable, the determined and
Zone (GWll, 9r) zone (B, zt9)
Iimited wrongdoing, in that case, l'm not forgiving anything. . . . I can only
schlaksig gangly,
forgive, if I do forgive, when there is something unforgivable, when it isn't
kommt eine riber- a more than possible to forgive." (As if forgiveness were governed, like the gift, by the prin-
mtindige Silbe geschritten (CWII, r4z) major syllable comes walking (TC, 95)
ciple of loss.) The ethical event, in other words, is an advent of the impos-
Kleide die Worthohlen aus Line the wordcaves sible, where the impossible, Derrida says, "is not simply negative. " The ethical
mit Pantherhauten, with panther skins, means that "the impossible must be done. The event, if there is one, consists
erweitere sie, fellhin und fellher, widen them, hide-to and hide-fro, in doing the impossible."'z
sinnhin und sinnher (GWll, r98) sense-hither and sense-thither (TC, zo3) Besides forgiveness Derrida offers the example of invention-that is, the
invention of a work of art: "lnvention is an event; the words themselves indi-
lmagine, ifyou can, "unburied poetry": cadaverousverse-"Poetry, ladies and cate as much. It is a matter of finding, of bringing out, of makingwhat is not
gentlemen: an eternalization of nothing but mortality, and in vain" (GWlll, yct here come to be. lnventing, if it is possible, is not inventing. . . . If I can
zoo; CP,5z). The "wordmembraned oiltent" meanwhile belongs to the family irrvcrrt what I invent, if I have the ability to invent what I invent, that means
32

that the invention follows a potentiality, an ability that is in me, and thus it to include its impossibility and its non-realization in its very existence" (WF,

brings nothing new. It does not constitute an event. I have the ability to make ro4). or again, in an essay on poetry as a refusal ofthe powers ofexpression
this happen and consequently the event, what happens at that point, disrupts ("The Great Refusal" [rgsg]): "Poetry is not there in order to say impossibility;

nothing; it's not an absolute surprise" ("A Certain Impossible Possible Say- it simply answers to it, saying in responding. Such is the secret lot, the secret
ing," 43). Likewise if I merely say what can be said, nothing happens (recall decision of every essentiaI speech in us: naming the possible, responding to
Mandelstam on writing to surprise onesell or Adorno on making "things of the impossible" (lC, 48). No doubt this responsibility is what Levinas would
which we do not knowwhat they are": the event of modernism). ln this respect call "an unheard-of modality of the otherwisethonbeing."
the ethics of invention would consist in doing what cannot be done, as when It would not be difficult to locate Celan in this antinomic context-in his
Maurice Blanchot, in one of his earliest theoretical texts, writes: "Meridian" address he says quite explicitly, if a bit gnomically, that the poem
of which he is speaking "certainly does not, cannot exist" (GWll, r99; CP, 5r).
The writer finds himself in the increasingly ludicrous condition of having nothing
Poetry is, in Blanchot's word, ddseuvrement: worklessness:
to write, of having no means with which to write it, and of being constrained by
the utter necessiry of always writing it. Having nothing to express must be taken A new kind ofarrangement not entailing harmony, concordance, or reconcilia-
in the most literal way. Whatever he would like to say, it is nothing. The world, tion, but that accepts disjunction or divergence as the infinite center from out of
things, knowledge are to him only landmarks across the void. And he himself is which, through speech, relation is to be created: an arrangement that does not
already reduced to nothing. Nothingness is his material. He rejects any forms in compose but juxtaposes, that is to say, leaves each of the terms that come into
which it offers himself to him, since they are something. He wants to seize it not in relation ourside one another, respecting and preserving this exterioriry and this dis-
an allusion but in its own actual truth. He is looking for a "No" that is not "No" to tance as the principle-always already undercut-of all signification. luxtaposi-
this, "No" to that, "No" to everything, but "No" pure and simple. . . . [The] "l have tion and interruption here assume an extraordinary force ofjustice.:o
nothing to say" ofthe writer, like that ofthe accused, encloses the whole secret of
lmagine poetry as a defeat ofpoiesis: the fragmentary imperative. As I once tried
his solitary condition.'8
to show, there is in this embrace of contradiction, interruption, and paratax
A text that Samuel Beckett happily plagiarized: a deep kinship between Blanchot and Celan, who wrote in German, to be
B. The only thing disturbed by the revolutionaries Matisse and Tal Coat is a cer- sure-
tain order on the plane ofthe feasible. Sprich- Speak-
D. What other plane can there be for the maker? Doch scheide das Nein nichtvom la. But keepyes and no unsplit.
B. Logicalty, none. Yet I speakof an art turning from it in disgust, weary of its (GWI, r35) (PPC,9e)
puny exploits, wearing of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little
better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road. whose poetry and poetics are deeply informed by the French intellec-
-but
tual culture in which Blanchot was such a powerful presence.a' Here are the
D. And preferring what?
last lines of "Wer herrscht?" ("Who Rules?"):
B. The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to ex-
press, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, Die schwarzdiaphane The black-diaphanous
togetherwith the obligation to express.'s Cauklerg<isch jugglerjack
In unterer in lower
"Language," Blanchotwrites, "is possible only because it strives for the impos-
Kulmination. culmination.
sible" (WF, zz). The true poem is preciselywhatcannot bewritten. To which he
Der erkimpfte Umlaut im Unwort: The hardwon umlaut in the unword:
adds, in an essay on Rend Char (r9a6): "The search for totality, in all its forms,
dein Abglanz: der Grabschild your reflection: the tombshield
is the poetic claim par excellence,
claim in which the impossibility of being
a
eines der Denkschatten of one of the wordshadows
accomplished is included as its condition, so that if it ever happens to be ac-
hier. (GWII, rr6) here. (TC,39)
complished, it is only as something not possible, because the poem claims
34

"The hardwon umlaut in the unword": the line captures as concisely as possi-
ble the event of Celan's poetry. I'm reminded, in conclusion, of one of Michael
Palmer's Celan-like poems:

Unutterable
pages
ofcounterlight
in the fluid window
a dog sings songs
asking nothing
we cannot speak?'

vorcEs oF
CONSTRUGTION

on susan hourets poetry end poetics

(n citational ghost stony)

My purpose here is to give a fairly comprehensive account of Susan Howe's

work, particularly from the standpoint of her later writings, principally The
Midnight (zoo3) but also with reference to the more recent Souls of the Labadie
Tract (zoo7). My general thesis is that Howe's work is a proiect of self-forma-
tion through the appropriation of the writing (and therefore the subjec-
tivity) of others. This self-formation is not just metaphorical but is meant
to be taken literally, because for Howe the texts that she reads and cites are
pneumatic-inhabited by the ghosts of their authors. I take this to be a deeply
Yeatsian dimension of her work, which becomes increasingly pronounced as
her writing develops. ln My Emily Dickinson (rS8S), for example, Howe writes:
"Myvoice formed in my life belongs to no one else" (r3)-to all appearances a
straightforward statement, but "voice" and "life" turn out to be terms of con-
siderable complexity, as we are reminded by one of Howe's statements (in her
"Personal Narrative," which introduces Souls of the LabadieTract) in which she
recalls her reading of George Sheldon's A History of DeerfieldMassochuserrs (1895),
one oI the source texts for her "Articulation of Sound Forms in Time" (1987),
:rnrl t he tcxt in which she encounters (and embraces) one of her alter egos, the

ll !t
36 37

Puritan minister (and outcast) Hope Atherton: "l vividly remember the sense ing the mute vocables
of energy and change that came over me one midwinter morning when, as the of God that rained
book lay open in sunshine on my work table, I discovered in Hope Atherton's a demon daringdown in h
wandering story the authoriry of a prior life for my own writingvoice" (SLT, t3). ieroglyph and stuttering
Note where "authority" is located here: "voice" and "life" are heteronomous (FS,::)
rather than univocal or self-identical. We shall have to imagine the poet as a
As we shall see, this is, in many respects, a signature poem, off-square, like
fluid or, to turn the metaphor, a porous subject, not the sealed-off punctual ego one ofAgnes Martin's paintings from Howe's painterly period. (..My formats,,,
of modernity-Howe is not interested in self-possession but in selFalterity (if
Martin said, "are square, but the grids are never absolutely square; they are
such a term can be permitted): "for something to work," Howe said in an inter-
rectangles, a bit off the square, making a sort of contradiction, a dissonance,
view with lon Thompson, "l need to be another self' (SLT, 7).'
though I didn't set out to do it that way. when I cover the square surface with
Let me try to locate Howe's statement about life and voice, and others like it,
rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power.,,)4 Howe,s
within the conceptual frame of her poetics considered as a whole, and which
poem is a fragment of a narrative shaped geometrically into the look of a lyric
l've taken the liberty of distilling into five propositions, each one of which
with line breaks that emphasize the physicality or, as someone might now
seems in some way paradoxical or even antinomic when taken in relation to
prefer, the graphicity of syllables and letters.s "l was scared to begin writing
some of the others.
sentences," Howe says in an interyiew with Lynn Keller, as if hesitating to say
things instead of makingthem.6 In the background we glimpse the artworld of
t.The poem is a physical object, aspltial qndvisualartrfact, inwhichwords ond letters zre
minimalism and concrete poetry that Howe writes about in "The End of Art,"
imagestobeplacedlikelinesand colorsonthewhitespace oftheprinted (orperhapshandwrit'
where she cites the visual poet Eugene Gomringer's poetic theory: .,,Restric-
ten) page. As Howe said in her intewiew with Lynn Keller (speaking of her early
tion in the very best sense-concentration and simplification-is the very es-
career as a painter): "l moved into writingphysicolly because this was concerned
sence of poetry. ln the constellation [of words] something is brought into the
with gesture, the mark of the hand and the pen or pencil, the connection be-
world. ltis a reality in itself and not a poem about something or other.,,,z To
tween eye and hand. . . . Though my work has changed, l've never really lost
restrict is to confine within limits; in this case the limits are those of being (at
the sense that words, even single letters, are images. The look of the word is
least or no more than) a mere thing. But Howe's poems rarely discard their
part of its meaning-the meaning that escapes dictionary definition, or rather
"aboutness" entirely. ln her "Preface" to Fromestructures and elsewhere, Howe
doesn't escape but is bound up with it."'What is it to write physically-or, for
(born in t937) identifies herself as a war poet: "my early poems project aggres-
that matter, to read that way?3 (ln the Talisman interview with Edward Foster,
sion" (F5, z9), and accordingly this first poem inHingepicturegives us shards of
Howe asked: "How often do critics consider poetry a physical act? Do critics
the first war-the casting out of angels from heaven. Figure Lucifer as the first
look at the print on the page, at the shapes of words, at the surface-the space
antinomian. But perhaps the key word in the poem is "stuttering,, in virtue of
of the paper itselP Very rarely" [BM, rsz].) Howe's poetry forces you to look at
the discreet but crucial place that hesitation comes to have in Howe's poetics,
words, letters, shapes, and white space, there being (at first glance) little else
as when she writes of Emily Dickinson.
to do. I must confess to looking with a blank stare at "the shapes of words,"
or the white space of the page. Here is the first poem from HingePicture Qg74), she built a new poetic form from her fractured sense of being eternally on intel-
Howe's first collection of poetry: lectual borders, where confident masculine voices buzzed an alluring and inac-
cessible discourse, backward through history into aboriginal anagos/. pulling
invisible angel confined pieces of geometry, geologr, alchemy, philosophy, politics, biography, biology,
to a point simpler than mythology, and philolog from alien territory, a "sheltered,,woman audaciously
a soul a lunar sphere a invented a newgrammargrounded in humilityand hesitation. HESITATE from the
demon darkened intelle Latin meaning to stick. stammer. To hold back in doubt, have difficulty speaking.
ct mirror clear receiv (MED, zr)
Except that for Howe this difficulty is not so much a speech defect as an alter-
native way of puttingwords and things together, as in the poem just now cited,
or in one of Emily Dickinson's poems, with its paratactic dashes and appen-
dixes of alternative words. "Dashes," says Howe, "drew liberty of interruption
inside the structure of each poem" (MED, z3). Howe's dashes (or [iberties) are
invisible, as are punctuation marks, as in this recent poem from "u8 Westerly
Terrace" (Wallace Stevens's address in Hartford, Connecticut), which toys with
Stevens's " carefor particulars," as Louis Zukofsky called it.8
Poets have imagined you
whoever you are implicit
melody familiar metaphor
bawdy tapestries archaic
pillage love patience the
scales the dogs the boots (SLT, 8r)
Who are you ("whoever you are")? lnterestingly, in many of the poems in
"rr8 WesterlyTerrace" an anonymous speaker addresses an unidentifiable sec-
ond-person singular. Maybeyou are the perfect poem-perfect in the way geo-
metricaI objects are perfect, but unlike geometricaI objects poems are made
of particulars: from "bawdy tapestries" and looted antiquities to "the dogs rhe
boots." Or maybeyou're the ideal poet, a man with a blue guitarora comedian
as the letter "c." But perhaps the main character of "u8 Westerly Terrace" is
just the house Stevens lived in, and, who knows, he may be there still, since in
Howe's world you can't have a house (or a poem) without a ghost in it:
I want my own house I'm
you and you're the author
You're not all right you're
all otherwise it appears as
if you don't care who you
are-if you count the host
(sr,78)
Pronouns are not called "shifters" for nothing. Think of this as a poem
about the difficulty of inhabiting shifters (or any place at all). But to reod the
poem in this (or in any other) way is to obscure its physicaliry (obscure its ob-
scurity(). So for now contrast the austerity of Howe's lyric with the luxury of
so much of Stevens's poetry ("We drank Meursault, ate lobstcr Bombay with
mango / Chutney"). Of course, my citation of Howc's pot'rn rrrisrcprcscnts it
because on this paper there is not enough white space around its lines. We
need to invoke the spirit ofAd Reinhardt and his black paintings:
A square (neutral, shapeless) canvas, 5 feet wide 5 feet high, as wide as a man's
outstretched ars (not large, not small, sizeless), trisected (no composition), one
horizontal form negating, one vertical form (formless, no top, no bottom, direc-
tionless) three (more or less) dark (lightless) noncontrasting (colorless) colors,
brushwork brushed out to remove brushwork, a mat flat, free hand painted sur-
face . . . which does not reflect surroundings-a pure, abstract, non-objective,
timeless, spaceless, changeless, relationless, disinterested painting-an object
that is self-conscious (no unconsciousness) ideal, transcendent, aware ofno thing
butArt absolutely (no Anti-Art). (cited by Susan Howe, "The End ofArt," z)s
Imagine aesthetics as a kind of negative theology in which nothing positive
can be predicated of the work of art. But of course that was never Ad Rein-
hardt's position. ln an interviewwith f eanne Siegel he said: "l've been called a
godless mystic, which is not true."ro But eliminative procedures are meant to
deprive us (and not just us) ofthings to say:
clutching
myCrumbl
ejumble (FS,5r)
z. The physicaliry of wriring suggests that (in keeping with a number of American or,
for that mqtter, modernist poetic traditions) poetry for Howe is on objective construction,
not a subjective expression. The intentionality of the poem is more formal than
semantic-but also more aleatory and serial than architectonic: "l never start
with an intention for the sub ject of a poem. I sit quietly at my desk and let vari-
ous things-memories, fragments, bits, pieces, scraps, sounds-let them all
work into something. This has to do with changing order and abolishing cat-
egories" (BM, r6a). Abolishing categories is the work of anarchism. Of Emily
Dickinson Howe says in the Tolismon interview that "she abolishes categories"
(BM, r57), which is to say that she "disturbs the order of a world where com-
rnerce is realiry and authoritative editions freeze poems into artifacts" (BM,
r9). Likewise of Dickinson's practice of "variation and fragmentation," Howe
writes: "This space is the poem's space. Letters are sounds we see. Sounds leap
to the eye. Word lists, crosses, blanks, and ruptured stanzas are points ofcon-
tact and displacement. Line breaks and visual contrapuntal stresses represent
.rrr athenratic compositionaI intention" (BM, r39). An "athematic composi-
t i<rna I irrtcn tion " describes Howe's A Bibliography of the King's Book: Eikon Basilike,
ol whir h llowc says that shc "wantc.d to write something filled with gaps and
 .e
^tl"
. ., $./ihtiea of btood :
6:e
.r..&bl 16-
" y
u)
uo1rv3$O
0{$a\}
89 3
;*t''rj;'*J,i* sc- -*for Forr tiiel'i1'*f
B?fl
',, "
E
r
?' A\$IaY>'-
^";1,a*e",
{s c&\lses l,
l'qvY
,.* i 3S3.SrS"""
r $^ ${ ; ;,,
-., o

g*"-
*,b6+o"*
l(itiua
??
B*B i$
Ffr

33 rr
E:
S "#''# *.'?q ;tr' qE
S^ u**r? ,r8n.rJ "*os -Bt
d.' (D
ll.
(D

F€y, %; uou^o:,r, '$'1 eob- .4

a
8-

? *#"Ug'**gr%$4so.u,o
i
u on'o
'iu' q --,aporq.,
E W?^s.rrr,c.reroo*J,,^- ni"u&3%. I
E
Ptn"
E P'?81
ft'e'
'-'''i#tihffi,n o'uo

r,"^
b'ro_
^4sd1
"q{2".
crtrolvh*
6E
g
'F %E
ErB *,."-s "ifw
fu
:! ut "E? Some Passages otot"on "S
tE
i;
tq #r.ffn" *u'onuo,a g*"
E
"H .9"=-'
o'
e!T!r.,11
tae^_
''* 3:
and watt tr," u.ur"n"g*#r, i'ror,qn&n$
*'.-,, od ' ='5*5"
&BfitJl31th11t't5^#r"' *ffi."r",:;fl#
ES
a $ & ob[gation ..,or
^-o poorq
ro ,".-#$ 'oon"
"-
"c$"
 43
42

oblivious window of Quiet

words tossed, and words touching, crowding each other, letters mixing and
falling away from each other, commands and dreams, verticals and circles. lf
it was impossible to print, that didn't matter. Because it's about impossibility
anyway" (BM, t75).
Howe writes in the Talisman interview: "l felt when I finished [Eikon] that it
was so unclear, so random, that I was crossing into visual art and that I had
unleashed a picture of violence that I needed to explain to myself" (BM, t65).
She seems to have found one explanation in chaos theory, with its ideas of
randomness, self-interruption, turbulence, and singularities. "ln algebra,"
she explains, "a singularity is the point where plus becomes minus' On a line,
ifyou start at x point, there is +1, +2, etc. But at the other side ofthe point is
-1, -2, etc. The singutarity . . . is the point where there is sudden change into
something completely else. lt's a chaotic point. lt's the point chaos enters cos-
mos, the instant articulation. Then there is a leap into something else" (BM,
r73)." And so a page ofa Howe poem is aPtto lookvery strange, as in these off-
cited lines from "Articulation of Sound Forms inTime":
rest chondriacal IunacY
velc cello viable toil
quench conch uncannunc
drumm amonoosuck ythian
scow aback din
flicker skaeg ne
barge quagg peat
sieveeataeemb
stint chisel sect (S, to)
closing
egeiptes aegistes aegiptes egeps Egipp
egypt here there
Scotus (that is darkness)
forged history) slayius slamius stanius Monarch
greengrail mist-grey who
soundless parable possible Quiet to flame
hay (ET, 87)
Closing the "window of Quiet" means letting sound in (in the form of ca-
cophony). Perhaps we can read the third and fourth lines as a process oftun-
ing that finally produces the familiar word (or sound of) "erypt." Or perhaps
the closing window is the dying of day that produces the guttural rhythms
of frogs. The middle name of medieval theologian John Duns Scotus (born
in Duns, England) produced a famous pun (dunce), which echoes the dusky
color of dun. Scotus championed the doctrine of the lmmaculate Conception,
and so could be the subject ofthe ensuing predicate. Further tuning produces
sounds (but not words) of Latin: "slayius slamius stanius." Philip lV was king
of France when Scotus lectured at Paris. Philip enraged Pope Boniface Vl I I by
taxing church property to fund his wars. The pope excommunicated the king,
who then had the pope put in prison, where he died. Scotus, having sided with
the pope, was sent backto England. Notice thatthe "gnashingpattern ofallit-
eration" (ET , tzz) concludes with a tuning: "greengrail mist-grey" is given the
repose or rhyming closure of "hay."
ln other words , poetry is also an acoustical art: words are sounds os well as images . But
3.

in space rather than in sounds ofwhat, exactly?And do we knowwhatsounds are? Here is Emmanuel
Read this page as an "articulation of sound forms"
into another in Howe's work, Levinas on the primacy of seeing-
time-but time/space dimensions fold one
which is the point of her love of "polyphonic visual complexity" (BM, r4t). ls
Seeing means being in a self-sufficient world that is completely here. . . . Vision
"quench conch uncannunc / drumm amonoosuck ythian" a sonic or a visual is a link to being in such a way that being once seen precisely appears as a world.
line? (of course it's physical in either case.) Recall the assertion: "The look of This is where the primacy ofvision lies in relation to the other senses. And the uni-
the word is part of its meaning" ("lnterview" 6): the question is, what part? ln versality ofart also rests on that primacy ofvision. lt produces beauty in nature, it
My Emity Dickinson Howe converts this proposition from sight to sound; "Sound calms and soothes it. The arts, even those based on sound, produce silence.

was always part of perfect meaning" (SS)' No one has ever developed a satis-
Seeing is compositional: it means distance, perspective, arrangement, and
factory answer to the question of how sounds ought to be written, much less
r(r pose. Levinas seems to think of it as an essentially aesthetic activity (think
of how writing is to be sounded.'' The section of Howe's "Defenestration o[
ofaesthetic distance). Butsound for Levinas is antithetical or, better, anarchic
Prague" entitled "Tuning the Sky" is worth consulting in this context. lt ap-
with rcspect to vision:
pears, perhaps appropriately, to be made oFnoise:
 Sound-and consciousness conceived as hearing-includes within itself the split- offorces
ting apart of the always completed world of vision and art. Sound as a whole rings fa[[ing out sentences
out, detonates, and is scandalous. Whereas, in the realm ofvision, forms embrace (hollowwhere I can shelter)
and soothe their contents, sound is like the sensory world overflowing itself, falling out over
forms being unable to hold their contents-the world ripping asunder-that by and gone
which this world here extends a dimension which cannot be converted into vision.'3 Dark ballad and dark crossing

Sound is discord, disturbance, disruption, dissonance, disarray, disintegra- old woman prowling
tion, distress, disaster, but not distance. Eyes are easier to close than ears. What Ceniat telling her story

is the color of tinnitus? The first section of "The Defenestration of Prague" is ideal city of immaculate beauty

tuned into this aggressive character ofsound (againstwhich no doubt we con- invincible children
struct music to protect us, but Howe prefers the conflict of word-sounds): threshing felicity
Forwearelanguage Lost
sound sounde) ofsoun
in language (ET, 99)
amend unto
bowrougholder borrougolder borsolder bar "Speeches at the Barriers" even contains a lyrical "t," although
it is one who
soldier burrow holder Him says "we are language Lost in language," which is perhaps why the poem
/
bring into Awe is not made of speeches but of fragmentary allusions to the world of medi-
stranglerstragglers no eval romance, courtly love, and courtly forms of poetry-ballads, pastorals,
nightstealer masques-where the "Crumbling compulsion of syllables,, (ET, ro6) still
(by ways and blind fords) sounds the keynote ofthe whole:
Bog
Skeletal kin
some little fortilage
tilt
woden castle
italiclunaE
ragtaile ragtayle two letters worn off
long lines of Iittle difference
were a sea-poole
Seventy memories
corner (ET,93)
masks
Howe seems to have registered Levinas's insight that sound (like other people) singing and piping
produces the experience ofbeing turned inside-out and exposed to a some- to be
thing-or-other that cannot be grasped conceptually but instead sets a limit to (halfwords)
our powers of cognition, coherence, composition, containment, and control. beginning and begetting
Reading Howe's poetryalways involves the experience of this limit, even when strangers nodding to one another
her anarchic sound-forms ("bowrougholder borrougolder borsolder bar") stumbling and scrambling
evolve into linear patterns, as they do in the second section of"Defenestra- (uncertain theme)
tion," called "speeches at the Barriers," whose justified left margins seem to random form (ET, rr3)
restore the conventions of poetry-or anyhow of literary history: lmagine this as a poem aboutwhat poetry is made o[, startingwith antinomic
Say that a ballad sound-forms like "skeletal kin." What is interesting, however, is that for Howe
wrapped in a ballad sound is also pneumatic or even demonic because a sound made of phonemes
a play offorce and play is alrcady avoicinq.ln her interviewwith Keller Howe saysthat

in spite of all my talk about the way the page looks, and particularly in regard to
these pages constructed as ifthey were a kind ofdrawing, strangely the strongest
element I feel when I am writing something is acoustic. For example the pages in
Nonconformist M emorial and Eikon Basilike fwith their constellations of words and in-
tersecting, overprinted lines] are in my head as theater. I hear them in one particu-
lar way. I think that comes from my childhood and very directly from my mother
fthe lrish actress Mary Manning]. Even now, when she is eighty-nine years old, the
theater is her greatest passion. She was always fascinated by voice, by accents, and
she very early passed on to me that feeling for the beauty ofthe spoken voice. ("ln-
tewiew," r3)
But voices are not just voices. ln The Midnrghr Howe recalls her early experience
of Yeats's poetry:
Maybe one reason I am so obsessed with spirits who inhabit these books is be-
cause my mother brought me up on Yeats as if he were Mother Goose. Even before
I could read, "Down by the Sally Gardens" was a lullaby, and a framed broadside
"He wishes for the cloths of heaven" printed at the Cuala Press hung over my bed.
I hope her homesickness, leaving Dublin for Boston in 1935, then moving on to
Buffalo where we lived between r938 and r94r, then back to Cambridge, Massachu-
setts, was partially assuaged by the Yeats brothers. She hung lack's illustrations
and prints on the walls of any house or apartment we moved to as if they were
windows. Broadsides were an escape route. Points of departure. They marked
another sequestered "self'where she would go home to her thought. She clung
to William's words by speaking them aloud. So there were always three dimen-
sions, visua[, textual, auditory. Waves ofsound connected us by associationaI syl-
labic magic to an original imaginary place existing somewhere across the ocean
between the emphasis of sound and the emphasis of sense. I loved listening to her
voice. I felt my own vocabulary as something hopelessly mixed and at the same
time hardened into gtass. (M, 75)
Sound is transport but only because or when our relation to it is a form of
obsession. To be obsessed is, etymologically, to be besieged and possibly
overtaken: the prose poem of"Thorow," concerning her experience of Lake
George, New York, contains this strange fragment: "lnterior assembling of
forces underneath the earth's eye. Yes, she, the Strange, excluded from formal-
ism. I heard poems inhabited byvoices": to which Howe adds a citation from A
Thousqnd Ploteaus, by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: "'The proper name (nom
propre) does not designate an individual: it is on the contrary when the indi-
vidual opens up to the multiplicities pervading him or her, at the outcome of
the most severe operation of depersonalization, that he or she acquires her
true proper name. The proper name is the instantaneous apprehension o[ a trs. "
47
multiplicity. The proper name is the subject of a pure infinitive comprehended
as such in a field ofintensity"' (5, qz). So that's how poetry begins: a subject is
pervaded by multiplicities. ln the Tolisman interview Howe says, in response to
a reference to lack Spicer's idea that the poet is in some sense "the transmit-
ter of the poem" that arrives from elsewhere (BM, r55): "Well, I do believe that
Spicer radio-dictation thing, as I read it in Robin Blaser's essay on Spicer-that
poetry comes from East Mars. But the outside is also a space-time phenom-
enon. I think the outside, or East Mars, consists of other people's struggles and
theirvoices. Sounds and spirits (ghosts ifyou like) leave traces in a geography"
(BM, r56)-in New England, say, or (perhaps much the same thing) in a library.
The porous subject: "You are of me & I of you, I cannot tell / Where you leave
off and I begin" (S, S8). ln her introduction to The Europe ofTrusrs Howe writes
a much-cited line: "l wish I could tenderly lift from the dark side of history,
voices that are anonymous, slighted, inarticulate" (ET, ra). Compare the fol-
lowing from the Keller interview:
No, no. I don't hearvoices (though I'm scared I might). you don't hearvoices, but
yes, you're hearing something. You're hearingsomethingyou see. And there's the
mystery of the eye-hand connection: when it's your work, it's your hand writing.
Your hand is receiving orders from somewhere. yes, it could be your brain, your
superego giving orders; on the other hand, they ore orders. I guess it must seem
strange that I say poetry is free when I also say I'm getting orders. It can be very
frightening. ("Interview," 33)
Likewise, in "Personal Narrative" in Souls of the Labadie Tract, she writes: "l
wished to speak for libraries as places of freedom and wildness. Often walk-
ing alone in the stacks, surrounded by raw material paper afterlife, my spirits
were shaken by the great ingathering oftitles and languages. This may suggest
vampirism because while I like to think I write for the dead, I also take my life
as a poet from their lips, their vocalisms, their breath" (SLT, r6):
"Here we are"-You can't
hear us without having to be
us knowingeverythingwe
know-you knowyou can't
Verbal echoes so many ghost
poets I think ofyou as wild
and fugitive-"Stop awhile" (SLT, 58)
Poetry as connatural knowledge: "You can't / hear us without having to be
/
Pcrhaps it would be simpler to say that there is a powerfulyeatsian dimen-

sion to Howe's poetics, which is to say that for her Poetry is a form of ghost-
writing; or, to give the screw another turn, poetry is a certain way of inhabiting
and resonating with a world in which even mere things-leftover, discarded,
or forgotten things like things in a desk drawer-are haunted, which would be
a way of reading this fragment from The M idnight: "Wagons, rusty buckets, tires,
tables shovels, broken bottles, broken glass, cash boxes, plastic cups, old
clothes, torn magazines, newspapers, memos, business records. When the
other half of the dialogue of mind with itself is nothing but a picture, the sta-
tus of a spectral self resurfaces" (M, r:S).Whose self is this? ("You are of me & I
ofyou, I cannot tell / Where you leave off and I begin" [S, 58].) The poet's self is,
in Deleuze and Cuattari's language, a "multiplicity"-but at the same time one
cannot help thinking of Yeats's "Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can."r4
4.Thepoemisanassemblageoffoundtexts(in otherwords,citational). Susan Howe
famously describes herself as, from an early age, a "library cormorant" in need
of "out-of-the-way books" (BM, r8), but whose first experience of a library is
that of forbidden territory (she was not allowed to follow her father into the
stacks of Harvard's Widener Library)-hence her association of the library and
the (early American) wilderness: "Thoreau said, in an essay called 'Walking,'
that in literature it is only the wild that attracts us. What is forbidden is wild.
The stacks of Widener Library and of all the great libraries in the world are still
wild to me" (BM, r8). Forests are inhabited by spirits-and so are libraries. In
her "Personal Narrative" in Soulsofthe LabadieTract, Howe recalls her experience
of the Sterling Library at Yale where her husband, David von Schlegell, was a
professor of art, which meant that she now had library privileges:
ln Sterling's sleeping wilderness I felt the telepathic solicitation of innumerable
phantoms. The future seemed to lie in the forest of letters, theories, and forgotten
actualities. I had a sense of the parallel between our always fragmentary knowl-
edge and the continual progress toward perfect understanding that never withers
away. I felt a harmony beyond the confinement of our being merely dross or tin;
something chemical almost mystical that, thank to architectural artifice, these
grey and tan steel shelves in their neo-Gothic tower commemorate in semidark-
ness, according to Library ofCongress classification. (SLT, t4)
Years ago Northrop Frye wrote: "Poems can only be made out of other po-
ems, novels out of other novels": all of literary history is a recomposition of
received texts.rs Likewise Howe and her Emily Dickinson: "Forcing, abbrevi-
ating, pushing, padding, subtracting, riddling, interrogating, re-writing, she
[Dickinson] pulled text from text" (MED, zg)-an activity that produces or re-
49
flects something more complex than the structuralist's "intertextualiU." Su-
san Howe's philosophy of composition-very much a feature of the r96os-is
that of quotation and collage, to which she adds, however, a dimension of
intersubjectiviry, meaning that in writing she is always herself and others ("in-
numerable phantoms"), which is to say that she herself, as a writing subject,
is formed out of her library encounters with other subjects, each of which is,
moreover, historically, geographically, and (there being no better term) ideo-
logically situated: "My writing has been haunted and inspired by a series of
texts, woven in shrouds and cordages of classic American nineteenth-century
works; they are the buried ones, they body them forth"-to which she adds:
"Dickinson, Melville, Thoreau, and Hawthorne guided me back to what I once
thought was the distant seventeenth century. Now I know that the arena in
Scripture battles raged among New Englanders fchiefly the antinomian con-
troversy surrounding Anne Hutchinson] is part of our current American sys-
tem and events, history and structure" (BM, qS, 47).So the library is a kind of
time machine-except that the present does not 0ust) return to the past; rath-
er the past is always with us, perhaps as much in the form of traumatic mem-
ory (the stereotype ofthe New England writer) as that ofthe legendary eternal
return. "The pastis presentwhen lwrite," Howe says in her interviewwithTom
Beckett, which means thatwhen Susan Howe speaks in her own voice, it is not
only she herself who is speaking, because her writing is also a kind of ingath-
ering and appropriation-and this is true both in her poetry and in her prose
writings like My Emily Dickinson (but the distinction berween poetry and prose
in Howe's writings is, like her relation to others and their texts, an open bor-
der).'6 The principles of this form ofwriting are perhaps most fully articulated
in "Submarginalia," the continuation of Howe's introduction to TheBirth-mark,
in which she elucidates both the natural history of the cormorant as a deep-sea
feeder and the cultural history of the library-cormorant, starting with Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, whose writings feed off of his (obsessive-compulsive) read-
ing, which is to saytheyare citational in the form of marginal embellishments
(a species of open form) as well as in the form of quotation. The question natu-
rally arises as to how one is to read what amounts to the readings of others.
("1 thought one way to write about a loved author," Howe says, "would be to
lollow what trails he follows through words of others: what if these penciled
sirrgle double and triple scorings arrows short phrases angry outbursts crosses
cryptic ciphers sudden enthusiasms mysterious erasures have come to find
you too, here again, now" [NM, 9z].) This is perhaps one of the chief critical
r;rrcstions raised by Susan Howe's writings: it is a question that determines the
l.rnr as wc'll as the content oF her work. A preliminary answer is that what we
50
will read has been left mostly unread-for example, Cotton Mather's Magnalia
Christi Americqno, a prototype of Howe's writings since it is a montage made of
"blizzards of anecdotes, anagrams, prefatory poems, dedications, epigrams,
memories, lists of ministers and magistrates, puns, paradoxes, 'antiquities,'
remarks, laments, furious opinions, recollections, exaggerations, fabrica-
tions, 'Examples,'wonders, spontaneous otherversions" (BM, 3o). Howe cites
an exasperated editor of Magnolio, who complains that Mather "'was primarily
a smatterer, constantly skimming through whole volumes in search of pas-
sages containing ideas which he thought he could develop in his own way
or which might sewe him as appropriate quotations for use in his own writ-
ing"' (BM, 3o). Cormorant. (l once tried to show that this method of citational
composition has its roots in ancient rhetoric, with its concept of invention as
"finding things to say" in what has already been said, or written, with a view
toward its application to the discursive situation in which one finds oneself.
An authoritative text is a glossed text; the concept oforiginality, of"creative"
writing, is one of the constructions of modernity.)
5. The material of poetry is historical-or, more occurately, archival and, more strictly
still, anecdotal. In fact, Howe's relation to the past is that of an antiquarian (or
"antiquary') rather than that of a historian. This is not to gainsay the many ex-
cellent things that have been written about Howe's historical imagination and
her "anarcho-scholasticism."'7 ln The Amateur and the Professionol: Antiquarians,
Historians, andArcheologissinVictorianEngland,fi3S-t886, Philippa Levine studies
the professionalization of both history-writing and archaeology during the
middle of the nineteenth century-a process that entailed the scapegoating of
antiquarians as mere amateurs, that is, genteel but provincial hunter-gather-
ers without any conceptual framework or methodology, meaning chiefly that
they did not have universiry degrees (:S-:S). Historians study documents in
order to reconstruct (objectifr) the past of England, Europe, the world. Anti-
quarians are mere connoisseurs offound objects and keepers oflocal records.
Howe is an antiquary (down to the point of lacking a doctoral or even univer-
sity degree). She is a collector of oddities-of books, manuscripts, religious
(and poetic) practices, archaic forms or idioms of English, and particularly
vanished communities, misfits, nomads, and keepers of the fringe:
Com e aw ay--:f his woy-Ca lvi n ists, Congregatio na I ists, Ana baptists, Ra nt-
w ay, this
ers, Quakers, Shakers, Sandemans, Rosicrucians, Pietists, reformers, pilgrims,
traveling preachers, stro[[ing players, peddlers, pirates, captives, mystics, embroi-
derers, upholsterers, itinerantsingers, penmen, impostors scattered throughout
51 3:lr I ii: :::, Ji :': ': i' .il
antiquarian New England, Pennsylvania, and New york, I cling to you with all my
divided attention, itinerantly (M, 66)
Voices I am following lead me to the margins. Anne Hutchinson's verbal expres-
sion is barely audible in the scanty second- or third-hand records of her two tri-
als. Dorothy Talbye, Mrs. Hopkins, Mrs. Dyer, Thomas Shepard, Mrs. Sparhawk,
Brother Crackbone's wife, Mary Rowlandson, Barbary Cutter, Cotton Mather may
have been searching for grace in the wilderness of the world. They express to me
a sense of unrevealedness. Theywalk in my imagination and I love them. (BM,
a)
ln her " Prefac e" to Framestructures, in the section or fragment entitled "The An-
gel in the Library," Howe gives us something like a genealogy of her method:
"Antiquarianism," she says, "is as old as historical writing"-and in fact un-
denvrites it:
lnGibbon andHisRomanEmpire, David P. Iordan shows the ways The Dectine and Follofthe
Romon Empirewas partially built on the research ofskeptics and historical pyrrhon-
ists outside the universities. Pyrrhonists were usually proud to be catted amateurs.
often their research developed out of a need to classi! their own collections of
coins, statues, vases, inscriptions, emblems, etc.; and the work demanded new
tactics. Gibbon calls the literary results ofthe labors ofthese dilettante research-
ers the "subsidiary rays" of history. The best known defender of uncertainty in
history, Pierre Bayle, depended heavily on the work of antiquarians. Studies of
medals and inscriptions were more reliable less subject to human corruption, he
felt. Bayle's first idea wasn't to write an encyclopedia rather he hoped to produce
a record of mistakes. . . . Bayle's Historical and critical Dictionary follows the spirit of
coordination's lead rather than a definite plan. Trivial curiosities and nonsensical
subjects are kernels to be collated like tunes for a fact while important matters are
neglected. (FS, r7-r8)
This last sentence tells the tale: what falls beneath the threshold of academic
attention-the low overlooked by the high-is what Howe gathers into her
work. TheMidnrght contains an anecdote of hervisit in r991 to Harvard's Hough-
ton Library to examine Emily Dickinson's manuscripts. Naturally her first ex-
perience upon entering is ofghosts inhabiting a panoptical space:
Passing through this firstvestibule I find myselfin an oval reception antechamber
about 35 feetwide and zo feet deep underwhat appears to be a ceilingwith a dome
at its apex. I think I see sunlight but closer inspection reveals electric light con-
cealed under a slightly dropped form, also ova[, illuminating the ceiling above.
This first false skytight resembles a human eye and the central oval disc its,.pu-
pil." Maybe ghosts exist as spatiotemporal coordinates, even if they themselves
tlo not occupy space, even ifyou've never seen one, so what? Ifthe design ofthe
52
antechamber can be read in terms of power and regimes of library control, and if
.,presentty,, ,,occupy" papers, you need to understand the present tense of
ghosts
"occupy." (M, rzo-zr)'8
lnterestingly, Susan Howe experiences ghosts as familiars, but experiences
herself as an alien presence: her clothing possibly a violation of Harvard re-
search decorum-"and I have a new monogrammed black leather Coach brief-
case my husband gave me for my birthday because we knew I was making
this
trip and it seemed professorial. Neither of us has a college degree so we have
that feeling of failure in common and are always at war with what we wear" (M,
rzr). And then there is the question of how to sound. Told that the Dickinson
materials are not available, and asked to show proof that she has a right to
inquire after them, Howe think:
I havedriven up that day from Connecticut and booked into the Howard lohnson
Motel, my pencils are sharpened, notepaper ready. I have waited weeks for this
moment. I think of the disarming of the Antinomians in r637 coinciding with the
founding of Harvard college in cambridge, a provincial village of mainly British
immigrants. I think of Roger Williams and the "gap in the hedge or wall of separa-
tion between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world." I think
about the rattle of statistical traffic. Where and when did Engtish prosodial gram-
mar become American? As a hatFlrish or half-Angto-lrish woman, I know an audi-
ence will always react to the materiality of the voice as a sign. Deepness of
tim-
bre is preferable to shrill. I am feeling a sense of humiliation and angry despair'
I know my reaction is extreme. I can hear my voice running into its irksome high
pitch, jostling genteel decorum. The librarians are feeling its ugly assault. (M, tz6)
Recall Howe's love of her mother's voice, whereas of herself and her sister
Fanny she writes: "Our voices are grotesquely shrill-the way we pronounce
or don,t pronounce r's and u's, Amuurrica, waaturrr. Our Iong nasal a's: Baaast-
n, haarr-br, p40k, caa. The horribly dropped s in Yes to form a sort ofneigh-
ing eeYea. I can underline letters and use italics for emphasis, but two ears
cannot be in two places at once, such marks are charades" (M, r3z). voices are
not disembodied; better to say that they are uncontrollable and uncontain-
able singularities, apt to break out or in upon you in their most unwanted
forms. But they are incarnated in books as well as in oneself and others (past
and present)-imagine bodies as well as libraries as forms or regions of wil-
derness where unheard-of voices resound. lnThe Midnight Howe cites Henry
lames,s complaintagainst"'our national use ofvocal sound,"'which
he called
,,.slovenly-an absolutely inexpert daub of unapplied tone,"' as if sound were
a kind of paint (M, r3z). Yet it is precisely the nonconformity or, more exactly,
the antiquiry of sounds that Howe articulates, as in these lines in The Midnight
that derive from the Middle English poem "The Owl and the Nightingale":
Stille one bare worde
iseon at bare beode
iseon at bare beode
Fleao westerness iseo
Opertuo go andsware (M,39)
Compare to the Middle English original: "Me may iseon at pare neode / Hwan
me schal harde wike beode" (lines 529-3o), (roughly) "lt can be seen in hard
times / From whom hard work shall be demanded."
Concluding note on the anecdote. The historiographical equivalent of the anti-
nomian or the misfit is the lowly anecdote, which is one of the forms Howe
uses to contextualize her lyrics, asinThe Midnight, a volume inspired by Howe's
discovery one day in a gift shop of Bed Hongings: ATrestise on Fqbrics and Styles in
the Curtaining of Beds, t65o-r850. We lack a good theory of the anecdote, which
is perhaps not just one thing. Anecdotes sometimes adorn official historical
narratives, and also sometimes subvert them, because they inhabit the under-
belly of history. ln "Anecdote and History" Lionel Gossman tells the story of
Procopius, who produced a history in eight books of Emperor Justinian's wars
against the Persians, Vandals, and Goths, but he also composed his Anekdota,
a "secret history" of lustinian's court-"instances of the most brutal exercise
of despotic power, as well as scurrilous tales of palace and family intrigue, that
were completely at odds with the celebratory narrative of Procopius's official
History." To which Gossman adds: "Notsurprisingly, the friends of power, those
concerned with maintaining public images and decorum, have generally been
fearful of anecdotes and have lost no opportunity to denigrate them, while
at the same time enjoying them in private and, when necessary, using them
against their enemies."'s This observation suggests that from the anecdote a
different conception of the self emerges from the one we extract (Ricoeur-like)
from Aristotelian forms of narrative-epic, history, biography, and (especial-
ly) autobiography and the novel (originally a species offorged autobiography,
as Hugh Kenner once s aid ofTheStrange and SurprisingAdventures ofRobinson Crusoe,
Gentleman [r5]). The product of Aristotelian forms of narrative, let us say, is in-
evitably large-scale, like Odysseus, Oedipus, and the subsequent "great men"
of history. The product of the anecdote is, like the anecdote itse[[, small-scale,
one could even say "minimalist," being loca[, frequently personal, and merely
ctrrious:
54 55

of bed hangings is in a legend from the lrth century. After
The earliest account
a run of bad luck a seamstress named Thorgunna got fed up and left her home
somewhere in the stormy Outer Hebrides. ln England it didn't take long for
special notice of the immigrant's fantastically embroidered needlework to get
around. Soon she was in danger of being Promoted to the witch category' Trouble
followed trouble until she warned that ownership of her hangings could mean
curtains. Coulds are iffr. Throwing caution to the winds, she either burned or
tossed her tapestries out. It's an aesthetics oferasure. (M, qC-CS)
Or again, a page later:
ln "The Boston Upholstery Trade, voo-175o," Brock lobe tells us Samuel Grant
owned a shop in Boston called the Crown and Cushion for fiftyyears. His most
prolific worker was Elizabeth Kemble, a widow. Betlveen 1766 and 1768 she pro-
Mary Manning whose brain, nimble and observant as it was, could not keep pace
with a tongue so caustic that even her native city (unchanged and unchanging
since Sheridan brought its greatest social activity to light in his most famous com-
edy and laid the blame on London) was a little in awe of her, and one all but looked
for a feathered heel under her crisp and spirited skirts. (M, 5o)
An anecdote, this, that itself produces subsequent anecdotes about Richard
Brinsley Sheridan, whose grandfather produced a dictionary showing how the
words that make up the English language should be pronounced, and whose
play, The Riyals, is about Howe's obsessive theme, namely impersonation,
mistaken identity-or perhaps, in the spirit of Mary Manning, the theatrical
nature of the subject who inhabits or is inhabited by multiplicities (formed
by a plurality of voices). There are doubles everyrryhere-double truths ("di-

duced eighty-seven sets of hangings, fifty-three of cheney, eighteen oI harateen, altheism" [M, 6g*Zo]), double-dealings ("Above the shoulders poetry and
eight of printed fabrics, two of calico, and six of unspecified material for field philosophy-below, the feathered heel" [M, 7z]), "double words for every-
beds. Mrs. Kemble earned one shilting four pence a day. If style is a means and not thing" (M, 77).The upshot is that no single thought, much less description or
an end, does this historical anecdote illustrate genius in its manic state? (M, a6) account, can capture the selfofSusan Howe, who describes the collage form of
The Midnightasfollows: "l am assembling materials for a recurrent return some-
The history of bed-hangings, an antiquated practice, is made of anecdotes-as
where. Familiar sound textures, deliverances, vagabond quotations, preserva-
is the history of insomniacs, who (starting with Howe herself) appear with
tions, wilderness shrubs, little resuscitated patterns. Historical or miraculous.
great regularig inThe Midnight (ghosts, interestingly, from Howe's earlier writ-
Thousands of correlations have to be sliced and spliced" (tvt, SS). lmagine this
ings): there is Frederick Law Olmstead, superintendent of the New York De-
as an account of self-formation.
partment of Public Parks and one of the ciry planners of Buffalo, New York, of
whom Howe includes a number of anecdotes; likewise Charles sanders Peirce,
one ofwhose "earliest memories was of being taken to hear Emerson lecture"
(M, 4g)-Emerson, who preferred architecture to embroidery (M, 46-47)." An-
other early memory was of playing rapid games of double dummy from ten in
the evening until early sunrise with his father, the mathematician Benjamin
Peirce. In dummy at whist, an imaginary player is represented by an exposed
'hand'is managed byand serves as Partnerto one of the players. In double
dummy two 'hands' are exposed and each of the players manages two exposed
'hands' at once. Naturally Peirce became an insomniac" (M, 49). But for the
most part the anecdotes, citations, definitions, memories, and illustrations
that make upThe Midnighr are genealogical, that is, rooted in the handed-down
material possessions of the Irish side of Susan Howe's family, from which her
mother, Mary Manning, emerges as the principal ghost:
ln May 1944 the actor and director Michedl Liammdir pubtished an excerPt from
his unpublished memoirs called "Some Talented Women" in Sean o'Faoldin's
magazine The Bell. lt included a description of my mother: Rehearsals were in
progress for a new play, "Youth's theseos on" by a new authoress-a Dublin girl called
 57

I began all this months ago, years maybe-in lune, anyway , of rgg4
I thought I could, as it were, follow a poem that kept itself apart from me
And from itself
A short lyric of shifs
A page or two at most
A poem of metamorphoses, a writing in lost contexts
I would write a line or two
No more
And go away
And come back another day only to add something that would change everything
(8c,63)

Why write this way, as if starting the poem over again every "line or two"?
Gertrude Stein's answer is canonical: "Beginning again and again is a natural
A POEM ABOUT thing, even when there is a series." Or imagine a kind of writing that requires
LAUGHTER AND FORGETTING thatyou leave things behind. A "poetics ofthe frontier," Hugh Kenner once
'
'
':':'
ril
i.;ll.,.ji
said, means you can take only very few books with you when setting out for
a new world-your Bible, maybe Pilgrim's Progressi European literature disap-
.t:)a)

l
. l:,j:',..
,....'t ,.''.l''
lvn niants a bonden comedy
Poetry at this time, I believe, has the capaciry and perhaps the obligation
to enter those specific zones known as borders, since borders are by
definition addressed to foreignness, and in a complex sense, best
captured by another Greek word, xenos. It, too, means "stranger" or
"foreigner," but in a sense that complicates the notion as we find it in
barbaros. H ej inian, " Barbarism" (Ll, 326)
-Lyn
It seems reasonable to approach Lyn Hejinian's ABorder Comedy (zoot) by first
consulting the things she has to say about borders in her book ofessays, The
Language of Inquiry-for example, that they are sites of "encountef' (L1,44)
and milieus of "experience" (Ll,3z7), and that, perhaps more important, they
are mobile or fluid rather than fixed: "Like the dream landscape, the border
landscape is unstable and perpetually incomplete. It is a landscape of discon-
tinuities, incongruities, displacements, dispossession. The border is occupied
by ever-shifting images, involving objects and events constantly in need of re-
definition and even literal renaming, and viewed against a constantly chang-
ing background" (Ll,3z7). Borders, in otherwords, are restless-like language
(ML, r7), or like the writing ofA Eorder Comedy itself'.'
pears from memory.'And we know that in composing music and poetry lohn
Cage and lackson Mac Low took recourse to various forms of chance opera-
tions in order to leave themselves behind-to free their compositions from
history-laden forms of intentionality hidden in the ego. A Border Comedy bor-
ders these lines of thought, and also redraws them.
There are closed borders, to be sure, but for Hejinian the border is the type
and figure ofopen form-"notthatatwhich somethingstops but, as the Greeks
recognized, that from which something begins" (BC, r8). A border is a crosspoint
at which one begins a journey or experience (Erfahrung)-setting out on an ex-
pedition rather than getting on a train with schedules and destinations: recall
those early explorers Hejinian celebrates in "strangeness" who describe met-
onymically the particulars of their progress without a sense of an ending or a
comprehensive view of what is happening to them or even where they are.: A
border by definition borders a world where everything is otherwise ("involving
objects and events constantly in need of redefinition and even literal renam-
ing"), a no-man's-land or perhaps a future in which one can no longer remain
oneself but becomes subject to forms of estrangement, like the anonymous
"magician" who appears early in ABorder Comedy, who is precisely not enclosed
by boundaries, limits, definitions, or frames of reference, and who (therefore?)
"lived in confusion" (BC, r3)-and also, it appears, without a self or identity
that, as in Paul Ricoeur's theory, an Aristotelian narrative would confer:+

56

There was no accounting for her mutabitity since she lived entirely alone
But the number ofevents it takes to create the probable sequence
Necessary to cause a change in any person's state
Is far larger than one might think
Therefore any account of it must be very long
And during all that time
Reality moves around
Changing orientation (BC, r3-14)
An Aristotelian narrative edits the material of a life in order to make it continu-
ous and coherent; the magician's life has more in it (more changes) than any
narrative can contain. A chronicle is what her life requires (and the chronicle
is, in principle, or like time itself, interminable: it may stop but does not end)'
An odd figure, this magician, with no audience to fool.s lmagine a magi-
cian who dwells, not behind the scenes, manipulating them, but within
them as within a "dream landscape" of "ever-shifting images." Hers is not
so much Spenser's mutability as the one Proteus suffers (or enjoys): Prote-
us, who is constituted by shape-shifting and so has, strictly speaking, no life
one could give an account of, unless it would just be an account of his end-
less transformations-a progress that would be hard to follow. As Hejinian
says, "The history of mutability is very long / And hence it has long sentences,
with increase in semantic duration" (BC, zr)-rather like A Border Comedy it-
sel[, whose lines (long and short) form sentences without periods that move
digressively or metonymically from one topic to another ("A fable, fate, an
infant prophet, or infant bandit, banal, infamous, professing cacophony or
blame" [BC, zr]), resisting (although not entirely defeating) the formation of
patterns thatwould give us the sense of a whole superior to its parts ("the very
purpose ofpattern is to be reassuring" [BC, t5]).
One could put the matter technically, as Heiinian does in an interview with
reference to seriality: "Time as it divides produces repetitions and permuta-
tions; time as it accumulates produces sequences, series" (Ll, 167). My Lrfe is
structured according to divisions: forty-five sections composed of forty-five
sentences corresponding (in the 1987 edition) to forty-five years ofthe poet's
life. ABorderComedy,by contrast, is cumulative. No one wished it longer, but it
could have been. Long poems are those one learns to live with.
Cumulative, but of what, exactly? Arguably (if only roughly) a basic unit ofA
BorderComedy (beyond the line and the sentence) is the anecdote, aboutwhich
the second book ofthe poem has a good deal to say:
59
An anecdotal story is merely a span
Consisting of separate facts
Each tenuously connected to the next
What we respond to are the attractiveness of the facts
And the view each one provides
There are even such things as philosophical anecdotes
Going around
Beautifully feathered and perfectly circlin gGC, zl)
(A "span" is paratactic, like the distance between thumb and forefinger, which
is the original meaning of "span."):
ust as, in the old days (to quote Victor Shklovsky)
I
One anecdotal factwould be followed by another
And many togetherwould make a story
Consisting of "separate facts tenuously connected"
And conspired
Story to story
To which everyone should add and be added
And be confused (BC,3r)
An anecdote is (loosely) a brief story told from below (outside the grand nar-
rator's panorama) and which, being local and incidental, does not take us very
flar ("time requires anecdotes to contradict it" [BC, rz]): it belongs structurally
to the "round," as in a round of ditties, jokes, ordrinks thatform a momentary
circle of companions-"To which everyone should add and be added / And be
confused," no doubtwith one another, or maybe like the magician (confusion
reigns at every border). Meanwhile philosophical anecdotes are like birds,
"Beautifully feathered and perfectly circling," as if geometrically, or perhaps
like birds of prey. Or say that it is in the nature of the anecdote to make its way
around by way of recitation: it is (like gossip and the secret) a word-of-mouth
genre (BC, ro9).6 On Hejinian's or Shklovsky's theory, the anecdote is paratac-
tic both in itself-"separate facts tenuously connected" (if at all)-as well as
in its connection to other anecdotes, which would at best hang together in the
loose and baggy form of a collection not bound by logical or cognitive rules,
which is how a serial poem develops (avastbetween without extremities):
Not to search for the perfect poem, as Spicer said to Robin Blaser
But to let the writing of the moment go atong its own path
Explore and retreat
 61
60

within boundaries ofone poem "not-I" but rather forms relations of proximity, "From wing to skin / And
as
And never be fully realized (confined)
Or the perimeters of the mental life of one person's day (BC, t87-88)
fart to forge / Without premeditation." SelFcontained speech would presum-
ably have a beginning, middle, and end, but maybe it would just be speech
As Spicer said: "lt does not have to fit together."z (Compare Hejinian on "the that contains a sefas opposed to a person, as per Hejinian's distinction in "The
chaos that good stories introduce" IBC, z6].) Person and Description," where the "uniqueness of the person" is said to be
lust so, proliferation and mobility (restlessness) are the distinctive features "very different from his or her essential selftrood" (Ll,zot), which is what po-
ofthe form of ABorder Comedy: ems are sometimes thought to express. In the passage just cited the "poem,"
no doubt serial in its construction, wanders offwhile "the true person" (if that
I can say my sentences which I dot by day
is what it is) remains-recall the line cited earlier: "l thought I could . . . follow
They are full of disjointed dreams, audacities, unsystematic lampoons of
a poem that kept itself apart from me" (BC, 63). Only here the "1" is not a "true
systems, and all manner of reversed reveries (BC, 7r)
person"-"The term 'l' is a narrative clich6" (BC, 47)-but the one who chases
Recall William Carlos Williams: "A poem can be made of anything." ABorder "it" away after the poem departs (if that's how it goes).8
Comedy seems to be searching for (in order to breach) the limit of this vener- Of course one can no more contain these lines in a reading than in a writing
able principle. The poem is not governed by any principle of exclusion, much of them. Two lines from "The Person" come to mind: "The difficulty of reading
less a principle of identiry. lts borders are oPen to what happens, or fails is such / that there is no comprehension" (CPH, r5z). There is no comprehen-
to happen-"discontinuities, incongruities, displacements, dispossession": sion, or anyway no comprehensive (much less any certain) reading, because
imagine a poem as a container of the uncontainable, not to mention the dis- the mutability of contexts confines the construction of meaning to no more
carded or dispensable ("reversed reveries" defeating their telling): than a few lines at a time, destabilizing them in the bargain by depriving them
of any standing that an end-point might provide: think of Beckett's Textsfor
And so begins a true biography of a true person emitting a story
Nothing: "it's the end gives meaning to words."s Or, in Hejinian's version: "lt's
Though it comes out strangely
the beginning and end that are sorry messengers / And the bearers ofwriters'
Lacking in outcome
lies / About anything" (BC, r9):
Losing face
Returning to memory in the round clown's face My ambition being to unite the process of transformation with that of
All over the map interpretation
With squeakand thump And ifthat is taken as didacticism

Between Full stoPs Then what have you learned from this poem
From wingto skin And what have I learned as I'm writing it
And Fart to forge Through a sequence ofwilled culminations, in the culmination ofwill
Without premeditation Whispering [or disturbance
Though the vowel sounds change in self-contained speech Of my consciousness (the best partition)
What the true person says is uncontained Which is a[[ that lies between what I did yesterday and what I'll do next
The poem walks away and it remains Plurals increasing-it's all about "them"
Then I shout, Hey, get outl They're more vulnerable than before
5htt! To interpretation, paranoia (BC, Z:)
And it clears off(BC, zs)
What would it be to unite "the process of transformation with that of inter-
pretation"? Recall the (by now) well-known statement from "The Refusal of
A certain garrulity is perhaps inevitable ("Excessive difference elicits babble"
Closure": Whereas the closed text preempts interpretation ("all elements of
[BC,5r]). The "true person" is not opposed to the false friend ("as l've said
"l" is not opposed to the thc work arc dircctc<l towar<l ;r single rcading of it"), the "'open text,' by defi-
before, there are no opposites" [8C,03]), iust as the
nition, is open to the world and particularly to the reader. lt invites participa- That could never be traced back
tion, rejects the authoriry of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, Their denarrativization having been achieved
the authority implicit in other . . . hierarchies. lt speaks for writing that is Through an excess oIreferential and symbolic detail
generative rather than directive. . . . The'open text' often emphasizes or fore- As in a baroque sleep around a medieval dream
grounds process, either the process oforiginal composition or ofsubsequent Atthe end ofa daythatwent byofits own accord. . . .
compositions by readers" (Ll, +:). But when Proteus is driving the motor of Or as one must run through the alphabet to complete a rhyme
composition we may be in danger of falling between the lines. ln ABorder Com- From a great lock ofletters
edy, atany rate, the reader is hardly or barely in a position to put together what That recurrently duplicates itself, interminably fissures itself
the poet is perpetually setting apart, unless it is the case that here we have a And contradicts itself without remaining the same (BC, ro5)
text so strangely determined that we may begin imagining ghostly inaccessi-
An "excess of referential and symboric detail," indeed. A poem not governed
ble intentions hovering over and around us at every turn: "Although I feel that
byany principle ofexclusion defeats the raw ofthe same, or the law of
I too am being watched / Which may explain something about my poetics" noncon-
tradiction: Thisisnotanappte."rtis," we are told, "the markof a foreign
(BC, 89). The strange [ine aboutwriting in "a sequence ofwill culminations, in soul to
trust non-rational perceptions" (BC, 63), but foreign souls (barbarians)
the culmination of will," might be thought to suggest the whole art and craft is what
we are, orwhat the poem makes of us who lose ourway in it. In
of paranoia, which sees purpose and design, not to mention authority, more heressaytitled
"Barbarism" Hejinian cites the critic Marcel Raymond: "'To
vividly in their absence. "And the pleasure of seeing intentionality everywhere become a barbar-
ian . . . is, first of all, to receive sensations and to leave them a certain
is incredible / It makes everything in the universe mental" (BC, r7o). As if to amount
of free play, not to place them in a logical frame-work and not to attribute
ward off such madness, Hejinian's advice in "The Rejection of Closure" is that to
them the objects [for exampre, appres] that produce them; it is a method
one should read an open text in much the same aleatory manner in which it of
detaching oneself from an inherited civirized form in order to rediscover
was composed (not trying to put together what has been decomposed, but a
greater plasticity and expose oneself to the imprint of things,,, (LI,
composing anew from the material of the text): "Any reading of these works 335.n4):
is an improvisation; one moves through the work not in straight lines but in That's why I've kept this writing of fifteen books unfinished

curyes, swirls, and across intersections, to words that catch the eye or attract Fifteen underway
attention repeatedly" (Ll, 44)-words like "paran oia," for example: I move From one to the next
In the course ofmany days adding every day
But from your motionless face I suspectyou aren't Iistening
A few lines to a book
lust reading
Each of which takes a long time and considerable thought
Without reference
And that passage of time facilitates forgetting
The paranoid are afflicted with an overabundance ofreference
Then forgetting makes what's been written unfamiliar
Reference for which even the plenitude of the world is inadequate
As if some other writer had been writing
So the language of paranoia lacks world enough to match
And each of my returns to each of the book is prompted
But here you come now with a cauliflower (BC, 156)
To immediates in a sudden present
However, it is difficult to read ABorder Comedy without listening or with- Only pastness, which provides forgetting, can provide it (BC, r5r)
out reference because it is, like the magician's life, a poem with too many
what about this forgetting? Recall the point (or necessity) of leaving things
meanings-each line is an excess of words or, as Lyotard would say, an excess or
oneself behind. ln a brief review of the poem Jennifer scappetone
ofphrases whose linkages cannot be terminated ("as Lyotard says, for a phrase says th;t,,A
llorder Comedy's compositional process results from Hejinian's
to be the last one / Another one is needed to declare it" [BC, ro6]):'o enduring inter-
cst in the way memory determines pattern (i.e., in pattern,s ,psychical ,,past_
Thus the apples are effortlessly disguised rrt'ss"'), and accounts for thc work's disjunction: she adds lines ,"qr"niirlly
As objects ofappetite ,rt ross tlrc pocm's Iiltcr,n h.,ks all sirnrrltaneorrsly'underway,
order to
--in
64

to a creative principle or at the very least a principle (and practice) offreedom

tap the lapses generated by time's passage."" As il in contrast to epic tradi-
from whatever bears down on us from the past and, for all we know, from the
tion, ABorder Comedy were a poem composed by forgetting, paradoxically rais-
future as well, since it is in the future that promises and prophecies fall due.'s
ing amnesia to the level of poetic inspiration and, therefore, to that of Poetic
We may think of this as an achievement of Gertrude Stein's "continuous pres-
experience as well.
ent." So in the passage just cited forgetting is, like the border, a starting point,
For example, one might imagine the poet's experience of her poem, and
a beginning, a frontier way of writing differently-an anti-Proustian break
hence the reader's, as that of picking up found texts-something similar, per-
with "memory and its function in the associative, interpretive linking / That
haps, to Louis Zukofsky's experience of returning after many years to his
constitutes what we consider making sense / Of experience. " Not fitting things
own earlier writing, in which poems seem like found objects arranged ran-
together but dissociation as from the upright first-person singular and all that
domly in a museum exhibit.'' Forgotten writing is an experience of alterity,
goes with it (" 1 would get rid of I if I could" lLl, zrz)):
as if someone else-some anonymous other-had been writing one's poem:
"Personality has nothing to do with it-subjectivity counts for nothing" (BC, When I was young, for example, whenever I wrote I was a man
r53).,3 Some anonymous other, or perhaps (echoing and even exceeding Cage So I mentally imitated men
and Mac Low) mere chance: "lf everything that occurred did so through pure But in the end the form was too hierarchical
chance all movementwould take place without transition" (BC, r74), one event Constructed with too many ups and downs
dispatching another, as if the basic unit of time were the interruption, or as if And it wasn't that I wanted to be a man in any case but only that I wanted freedom
the purpose of time (pace Ricoeur) were to dissociate past and future from the Without having to sacrifice the disguising conventions and a domestic Iife
present (which is why the figure of lapsing applies equally to time, memory, (BC, r87)

and desire):
One can read ABorderComedy as a poem of freedom, of diversions, digressions,
One day after another and dislocations in which everything becomes otherwise than is the case,
lmportant things have occurred which means in particular the experience of freedom from categories and dis-
Which immediately afterwards I forget tinctions (containments) of every sort. Thus gender-switching (and -blurring)
As if to alter their effects and write this diffbrently is a recurrent motif in the poem, with its "Lesbian boys" (BC, rzz), its "hotel
It causes me to wonder in a new way, from a new vantage point catering to cross-dressing clientele / Engaged in a play on words" (BC, 94), its
That offorgetting "male woman" and "female man" (BC, r98). "Writing is cross-dressing" (BC,
About memory and its function in the associative, interpretive linking zr), as we remember from My Life: " As such, a person on paper, I am androgy-
That constitutes whatwe consider making sense nous" (ML, ro5). The idea is not to be either a man or a woman but to be elusive
Ofexperience (BC, r99) or evasive (the gist of comedy):'6

Heidegger thought that having an experience with language does not occur The flesh often offers answers that do not answer the question raised
in the speaking of it but rather when words faiI or get away from us, going off Will I be happy?
on their own, to which Derrida added the experience of the pun, which is a But that question cannot be addressed to fate
word-event whose intentionality is in the sound-play of language itself-a or rather, fate can't answer
play that philosophy struggles to suppress in the interest of univocity but Happiness is gratuitous, free
which poetry sets free: "Aliquid, nonquid, thought quid, nought" (BC, zo4).'+ A response to chance, to hazard, accident
Likewise, especially after a certain age, one exPeriences memory most dra- And hence it is itselfhazardous, precarious (BC, r8r)
matically not in the possession of it but in its loss ("And here a tale comes to
"Fate" is a tragic term (terminal, fixed): instead of a border there is a crossroads
mind and leaves again" [ac, gs]). The question is whether such a loss is alto-
whcrc everything turns toward a predetermined end.'7 A Border Comedy, by con-
gether a bad thing. Hejinian seems (in many places) distinctively Nietzschean
trast, is a lr.rdic poem filled with outbursts of craziness-
in her conception (or experience) oFforgetting, which is somcthing very close
66 iri:al!:{.l,. ;:ii 67

She must see herself(front and back) and profit by it
Ptotting a delightful break-out from culture's close quarters
By dipping her hands in mayonnaise and running them over her buttocks
(BC, u5)
other bodily rebellions: "And then a slender woman appeared in a
-among
narrative sentence and loudly farted" (BC, rz3)' $here is surely more farting
and pissing in ABorder Comedy than in any other poem in modern memory.) Not
surprisingly Leo Tolstoy arrives to complain-
By contrast, A Border Comedy-"without dirty (words) feet I cannot dance
(speak)" (BC, zo)-is as non-Aristotelian in its comedy as it is in its form ("The
actor wearing a phallus so engorged that his whole body laughs" [BC, r88]); it
brings the low and the broad back to life in defiance of seminar-room deco-
rum:
Diderot may have been right
The mind may be nothing without the impulse-ridden body
To laugh at (BC, r3o)

It's clear he doesn't like A Border Comedy And speak of the cheek!
He says it's an awkward act of affirmation Your mouth has become a muzzle, dear
Bobbing where the world can take no more than the impress of a nod You are doomed to be chased by hunters
But I (with the point of view of a man, so I am a man) don't laugh Over the elements on all fours
All night a mocking bird or bricklayer or bibliomancer and I have been switching Floundering
identities Flapping
That way we can maintain inconsistencies (BC, 79) Fuckingwith unwilling movements (BC, roo)

Napoleon appears "in his Donald Duck pajamas" (BC, t4), and Aris- He didn't know she would say something funny
-while
totle is transformed like a character in Ovid (this is, after all, a "Poem of meta- But she untied some babies and did
morphoses" [8C,63]): Morewomen morewords!
More geese moreturds! (BC, tz4)
In a series
of slaps, of smacks, of boPs, ofwhacks Nietzsche's principle
As Liuba as Phyllis "lt's false if it doesn't make you laugh at least once" (BC, r48)
Who gets Aristotle
"But what is laughter?" the poem asks, and then lists a number of familiar an-
On all fours
swers from Hobbes to Freud (BC, 8o-8r). Possibly, being usually inappropriate
To gallop her through the garden
(think of fits of giggling in church or classroom), laughter is a kind of seizure:
Saddled and bridted (BC, tt6)

the philosopher Simon Critchley says that humor, Laughter

ln his book 0n Humour
And what kind oflaugh is being laughed
especially in its eighteenth-century (and thus most rational) expression, is a
The laughter ofa laugher
superior form of comedy because it is wry and witty and elicits a smile rather
Whose only wish is to stop (BC, r6t)
than a laugh.'8 Laughter is too often a form of cruelty-it is one of the plea-
sures of xenophobia, for example.'s Critchley prefers the Earl of Shaftesbury to Or, more wickedly, as in "an old woman laughing":
laughter's prime movers, Aristophanes, luvenal, and Rabelais.'o Hejinian puts
She uncovers
it this way:
l-ifting the sentimental curtain bottom
The authors ofnew comedies differ from the authors ofold And inserting her nicety (also known as philosopher's willow)
As Aristotle himself pointed out Irrto a milky little actualgrammarwrinkle
To the authors ofthe latter indecent language is funny t)f veracity (BC, r76)
To those of the former innuendo is more so (BC, 86)
68 i; lli !r i.i ii i:
69

Or, for no reason, as when things get out of hand, which is all that chance with his heel are bodies reduced into flesh, as are the heroes ofancient tragedy
means, it just happens: (Agamemnon in his bath, various kings ofThebes). In her book on abjection
lulia Kristeva gives the flesh a splendid articulation:
Noting the numbers of people who've suffered wasp stings or been bitten by
snakes or by cats, those who've been pecked by ravens or kicked by a horse,
A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does
not srgnrfi death. In the presence of signified death-a flat encephalograph, for
those who've been butted by goats or even gored by pigs
instance-l would understand, react, accept. No, as in true theater, without make-
Through no fault of their own
up or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in or-
It's just luck thatwe're caught in the web of comedy
der to live. These bodily fluids, this defllement, this shit are what life withstands,
And poisoned by a spider
hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my
Which raises a welt condition as a living being. My body extricates itself,, as being alive, from that bor-
Which in turn occasions slaPPing der. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains
A moral struggle ensues in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit-codere, cadaver.''
The strugglers succumb to laughter
Kristeva is a bit too serious, perhaps, butyou get the point. Living flesh is al-
Which is to saY each other
most an oxymoron, perhaps because living in flesh is a borderline condition.
since the source oflaughter lies not in the funny situation but in the one who
lndeed, unchecked growth of flesh-uncut hair and toenails, among other
laughs (BC, t55)
protuberances-gives the definition of "monstrous." And flesh is what I must
lf ABorder Comedy has a heroine-hero, it the body, or more exactly the end-
is abject in order to achieve and maintain self-possession, which illness, pain,
less series of anonymous bodies whose various parts, functions, and secretions and agingworkto subvert-and theyworkwithout fail: the trim sculpted body
fill justaboutevery page of the Poem: of youth eventually decays into the loose and bagry monster of an old man
("Excessive change in time will destroy the sensing body parts" [BC, z3])." For
The ineffable poise ofthe cadaver
which there is no remedy (or other ccnclusion) than to put old bones to rest:
Its organs in its naked hand
Making the Familiari$ it had with itself available It should not be surprising then that the skull
Displaying its physicality, a physicaliry it still has in common with us is seen to have a face still
But which is now all we share It's expressive though not ofself(S, z7)
Being otherwise completely severed from each other
But of course there is no rest-restlessness is the engine of Hejinian's poet-
The autonomy and independence (anonymiry) and ultimately the authority of its
ics, and at breakneck speed it drives ABorder Comedy, with its ambulant "border
body parts
to:-+)
ghost" (BC, rz)-"so exhausted by reference it doesn't know it's dead" (BC, 68).
Having become comPlete (BC,
Comedy permeates the border between here and the hereafter as well as every
Indeed, "flesh" would be the more exact term for what A Border Comedy is all other boundary, as when "lucky heads . . . speak, sing, advise, prophesy, and
about. The body (soma) is a Greek and famously heroic concept (although, cntertain / Long after their owners are dead" (BC, r16). Or, again,
interestingly, etymotogically soma refers to a corpse). lt is a masculine figure
Like the ravening thought ofan uttering corpse
of strength and beau{; lean and hard, it is built for action, struggle, and vic-
Showing emotion, stumbling over sounds
tory, and as we know from Homer it never laughs (gods and fools-Penelope's
Soft, breathless (BC, r67)
suitors-laugh; Achilles and odysseus weeP but do not laugh). The body
achieves its apotheosis in marble. Flesh by contrast is a biblical concept (bosor At any rate, flesh is what it comes down to (with apologies to EdgarAllan Poe):
in Hebrew). lt is a figure of passivity and weakness; it hungers and thirsts, it
llctwoen woman and aninral, man and candle
eats and is eaten, it is soft and corpulent, wet and smelly, and subject to com-
llrt'rc shakcs thc cow;rr<1, lk'sh irr liquid, skin in shreds
plaints without number. Defeat is its horizon-mutilated Hcctor and Achilles
 ]'! ::{ l{, ]rt:ii | : : i} ii

Back from the dead mains, not so much a dead author as a figure of catachresis: "Nameless in my-
And smellingawful self but full of synonyms and homonyms" (BC, ro9).
Withoutwarning More ghostly, but on the whole much less interesting because, free of its
People vomit fl esh, no longer comic, or anyhow less memorable than A Bor der Comedy's many
Right there on the dance floor surreal comic turns, ofwhich this is one of my favorites:
Death begins
In church, in the palace, on parade, facing the department head, the policeman,
The promise of resurrection has got to be withdrawn (BC, r4z)
the administrator, no one laughs
"Death begins," as if spreading like a plague, metonymically, indifferent to The serf is deprived of the right to smile in front of the landowner
fences and defenses alike, the paradox being that it cannot itself be termi- So he lifts up his shirt
nated. The dead return, not to life-"The promise of resurrection has got to He is another

be withdrawn"-but as comic ghouls, creatures of the betvveen, "smelling aw- And another, wearing high heels, his sex distending his silk dress, was walking
ful."'a So one might figure death as an ellipsis . . . another species of open toward me while tenderly sucking pearls
more foreign than
-
death?-which, if we follow the Yes, his hands were clammy with fear
form. Anyway, what can be
moral ofthe epigraph above, is one ofthe border zones that poetry "has the He knew damn well what was going on
capacity and perhaps the obligation to enter" (BC, rz6). Surely this accounts for Which was the equivalentof saying, "Nowwe will change"
the many ghosts and cadavers that roam and litter ABorder Comedy: With the tail parting and shrinking into whar humans call nice legs
They had yet to be shaved
Reason is an aid to stories
The thorns on them ripped my tongue (BC, 59)
It's the ghost out of the cell
Reciting what it remembers, ruling nothing out When the serf lifts up his shirt, he reveals himself to be a stranger to the order
Like the narrator known as Anonymous ofthings. He opens in any case a border zone where anything goes, nothing
With his or her anonymous consciousness is forbidden, certainly not laughter or horror or confusion-or whatever a
But ifthe flesh ofthe ghost is no longer under pressure cross-dressing young demon with an extended phallus and metamorphic tail
Male and female might inspire in you. If one asks, irrepressibly, what he inspired in the poet, or
Then, like a ghost, it's gone speaker, or whoever it is that licked his thorny legs, one answer would surely
From its unusual or even downright alien position (BC, 54) be that the spirit ofA Border Comedy is, in the tradition ofAristophanes and Ra-
belais, anarchic, libidinous, and superbly grotesque.
Ghosts are notoriously restless, which in Hejinian's world means discursive,
And I haven't even mentioned the clowns and geese-but time is up and
Iiterary, garrulous, in contrast to the mute or anyhow breathless and palpable
space is at an end.
cadaver:

The cadaver (the original) will not sPeak

The cadaver cannot link imPressions
It is immediate
It lacks habits, is proximate to nothing, will not argue
Norwill it rinse its finger over a word
And mean metamorphosis
Spotting the ironies between aphorisms (BC, ro4)

On this theory it would fo[low that a poet is more ghostly than any fleshly re-
 fail at these things, but it interrupts them. Barnes had difficulty getting her
book published, revising it several times in order to give it the semblance of
Aristotelian virtues that novels-even avant-garde ones-were (and are) still
expected to possess. Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway are, for all their formal innova-
tions, arguably more integrated than Nighnuood, with its peculiar, edgy, often
sarcastic voice that prefers wild commentary to mere storytelling:

She did not smile, though themoment he spoke, she placed him. She closed her
into them intently because oftheir mysteri-
eyes, and Felix, who had been looking
ous and shocking blue, found himself seeing them still faintly clear and timeless
behind the lids-the long unqualified range in the iris ofwild beasts who have not
tamed the focus down to meet the human eye.
The woman who presents herself to the spectator as a "picture" forever ar-
ranged, is for the contemplative mind the chiefest danger. Sometimes one meets
a woman who is beast turning human. Such a person's every movement will re-
AMONG duce to an image of a forgotten experience; a mirage of an eternal wedding cast

THE PAGANS on the racial memory; as insupportable a joy as would be the vision of an eland
coming down an aisle of trees, chapleted with orange blossoms and bridal veil,
a hoof raised in the economy of fear, stepping in the trepidation of flesh thatwill
become myth; as the unicorn is neither man nor beast deprived, but human hun-
ger pressing lts breast to its prey.
the potyvoGal poctry oI karen mac GormaGk
Such a woman is the infected carrier of the past-before her the structure of
our head and jaws ache-we feel that we could eat her, she who is eaten death
"Are you acquainted with Vienna?" Felix inquired' returning, for only then do we put our face close to the blood on the lips of our
peoPle
"Vienna," said the doctor, "the bed into which the common fo refathers. (N ighw o o d, 36)
out of which the nobility fling themselves,
ctimb, docile with toil, and
One can imagine Henry lames admiring this passage, but also puzzling over
ferocious with dignity-l do, but not so well but that I remember some
"a woman who is beast turning human," a metamorphosis that reverses Ovid
to school' flock of
of it still. I remember young Austrian boys going
in different spots in the sun' in a way that a surrealist might envy. Her "every movement will reduce to an
quail they were, sitting out their recess
damp rosy mouths' smelling of the herd image of a forgotten experience." lt's hard to picture what "an image of a for-
.ry-.t..t"a, bright-eyed, with
like sunlight' soon gotten experience" might look like. Iwouldn't have imagined "a mirage of an
chiidnood, facts of history glimmering in their minds
to be lost, soon to be forgotten, degraded into
proof' Youth is cause' eternaI wedding cast on the racial memory" (reference, neither the first nor
thickening of the neck we get data"' Iast, is to Felix's Jewishness) complete with an eland (a species of antelope)
effect is age; so with the
Barnes, Nightwood in a bridal procession, with "a hoof raised in the economy of fear," as if the
-Djuna marriage ceremony were resolving into a sacrificial one. The third paragraph
said that her poetic career be- in the citation is one of my favorites in all of modern literature. Ifyou ask, how
On several occasions Karen Mac Cormack has
Nighwood' a novel Pub- do these sentences hang together (adding up to a portrait ofa lady we would
gan with the reading, at age sixteen, of Djuna Barnes's
in 1936' Nightwood is a do well to avoid but never do: "we feel that we could eat her, she who is eaten
iished by Faber & faber, under T. S. Eliot's imprimatur,
(lcath returning"), it takes some time to answer. One could begin by putting
workwhoseprose(likeDr.MatthewO'Connor'sglorioustalk'citedherein
of consecutive discourse' the question to Gertrude Stein, who was perhaps the first to explore the ways
the epigraph) disengages itself from the grammar
Nichtwood does not words could be made to form dissonantyet self-contained portraits:
inctuaiig especially the logical progressions of narrativc'
74 !-: .i:! !:r rii: t {'
A LITTLE CALLED PAULINE
A tittle calted anything shows shudders.
Come and say what prints all day. whole fewwatermelon' There is no pope'
A
No cut in pennies and little dressing and choose wide soles and little spats really
little spices.
A little lace makes boils. This is not true.
Gracious of gracious and a stamp a blue green white bow a blue green lean, lean
on the toP.
lf it is absurd then it is leadish and nearly set in where there is a tight head.
A peaceful life to arise her, noon and moon and moon. A letter a cold sleeve
blanket a shaving house and nearly the best and regular window'
Nearer in fairy sea, nearer and farther, show white has lime in sight, show a stitch
of ten. Count, count more so that thicker and thicker is leaning'
I hope she has her cow. Bidding a wedding, widening received treading, little
leading mention nothing.
Cough out cough out in the leather and really feather it is not for'
Please could, please could, iam it not plus more sit in when''
I think that the kinship between Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein is intimate
and complementary. Provisionally one could say that Barnes remains within
the horizon of the predicate-subjects, verbs, and objects doing their work of
mediation, however digressively and to whatever many strange purposes: her
reticulated prose retains the form if not always the content of what philoso-
phers call "aboutness"; whereas parataxis-the defeat of wholeness and hier-
archies of every to Stein's phrasings, which interrupt the dis-
sort-is internal
cursive operations that integrate small things into large. Gertrude Stein's is an
insubordinate poetics of the little and the discrete ("a little piece, a little piece
please,,lselectedwritings,4B)),andthisappliestoherwordsandphrasesaswell
asto theworld of dainty Pauline, with her"bluegreenwhite bow." Meanwhile
Djuna Barnes's is a poetics of the long, slow amplification of particulars, as in
the medieval (or is it gothic?) tapestry that the narrator weaves as a gloss on
Felix's gripping encounter with Robin Vote's animal-iris eyes'
Karen Mac Cormack's QuiltDriver Q989) is a text that seems to me to split the
differences (and explore the family resemblances) between Barnes and Stein,
and in the bargain it opens up a conceptual context that helPs us to exPerience
certain kinds of writing that are, even now, more familiar than understood.
Here, for example, is the first paragraph (if paragraph is the word) of Mac cor-
mack's "Reunion the ReProduction" :
75
Further alive. Perhaps when the heart stops beating the
tiredness leaves. There are questions but not obvious ones,
any other yellow centre. The furor she caused in ltaly,
buying daisies for a non-funereal purpose. Two women
equally shocked. She totd me other colours, occasionally
the light would fail. Despite assorted revolutions we order
our lives past, present, future, to apply to what is ongoing
out of the tempest. lf we line these up there's still the one,
two, three ofit but not Van Gogh. (:r)
a
"Reunion the Reproduction" contains twenty-two such paragraphs of vary-
ing length. Like the writings of Barnes and Stein, it lays transparency to rest
but not intelligibility. The task of the reader is (among other things) to under-
stand how such self-interrupting sentences are connected, or at least to ex-
perience the ways in which the passage does not just break down into mere
slivers. (Nonlinearity is not mere dispersal or diffusion.) Close reading in Mac
Cormack's case reveals many small internal coherences such as references to
death, color, correctness, order (and, by implication, anarchy)-we narrate
our lives according to Aristotle's rules, but what if we did so according to Van
Gogh's, color and texture trumping continuity and point? As philosophers of
complex systems have explained, chaos is paradoxically a condition of orderly
arrangements. Foreigners and the weather refuse to act predictably, but if we
follow the two carefully as they proceed we will see patterns develop, even if
no reason (or future) can be assigned to them. Rationality is not rule-governed
behavior but the abiliry to negotiate turbulence (an abiliry Aristotle called
phronesis, or practical reason). The coastline ofCalifornia has a form that frac-
talists can explore in detail, but it duplicates nothing but itself A world of ran-
dom particles can only be described by reproducing it piece by piece. Death to
universals.
Karen Mac Cormack's Quill Driver situates itself within complexities of this
sort. For example, I read Mac Cormack's work as an ongoing exploration of
lean-FranEois Lyotard's anarchic conception of the phrase.'"Phrqse" is the
French term for sentence as well as our term for grammatical relations be-
neath the levelof a complete thought, but Lyotard takes it to be the (indefin-
able) basic unit of language on the hither side of every conceivable grammar,
logic, genre, or norm of discourse, these things simply being some of the
" ph rase regimens" that phrases make possible, but none of these regimes can
s;ry what a phrase is. There is no metaphrase. To be sure, a phrase implies a say-
irrg of something to sonrcone about something (the "phrase universe"), but
 77
76

and performative rather than simply informational. In Lyotard's vocabulary,

nothing can be said about a phrase in general except that it is capable of [ink-
his writing is aform of pagonism. A pagan is someone who thinks, judges, acts,
ing up with other Phrases, and there are multiple and heterogeneous forms
and links phrases together without criterio.z ("Pagan," from pagus: boundary,
of linkages, some of them syntactical (subject-verb-object), some logical (i/i
and some frontier, or edge. A pagan is someone who traverses these things.) ln Lyotard's
then), some propositional(s is p), some hermeneutical (this as that),
point is that there are (indefinitely) sense, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, and Karen Mac Cormack are pagan poets
narrative (this then that), but Lyotard's
phrasing outside the limits of regimens favored by logic, linguistics, Aristo-
more forms of enchainment than those we learn to use in school (reasoning,
telian poetics, structuralist poetics (among other formalisms), and most phi-
describing, questioning, narrating). Phrasing is not systematic construction.
and tan- losophies of language, not to mention current critical methods and numer-
We inhabit a universe of phrases that are rhizomatically proliferating
ous poetical schools, with their suspicion of opaque language. Writing is, as
gling tike crabgrass. There is no first or final phrase-recall Lyotard:
Lyotard says,uneffiired'enchainementdephrasesthatleavesusopentocomplex-
The paradox ofthe tast phrase (or ofthe last sllence), which is also the paradox of
ity. lt is the opposite ofsuch phrasings as calculative reasoning or representa-
also
the series, should not give x the vertigo of what cannot be phrased (which is tional thinking, which are, in contrast to paganism, redeemed beforehand by
but rather the irrefutable conviction that phrasing is end-
called the fear ofdeath), their formal procedures, which simply give us what we want-framing rules,
less. For a phrase to be the last one, another one is needed to declare it, and
it is
this vertigo and this connecting ends and means, constructing models, forming concepts, putting
then not the last one. At least, the paradox should give x both
it is things in their proper places, producing narratives (D, 68-69). Pagans love
conviction. -Never mind that the last phrase is that last one that x saysl -No,
or "current" address' (D,u) category mistakes, or in other words are satirical with respect to forms of cor-
the last one thatx has as its direct
rectness.
Lyotard,s application in our present context lies in his conception of the Here is a portion of Karen Mac Cormack's "Sleep ls Incurable in Our Life-
pure negative freedom of phrasing: "To link is necessary, but how to link is time":
noc,(o,66).Alinkisagapbetweenphrases,whichwefillwilly-nillywith Serenity is unpopular, it distracts from the major ambushes
the
many things, including passage phrases, but without being able to close ofexterior concerns. Never a bugle boy. The manufacture
gap. ForexamPle: of white gauze, its disposal after first time use. Then there
was the birthdaywe went to tattoo you. A flesh wound.
The phrase that expresses the passage operator employs the conjun ction ond
(and

the apposition of one term Deemed eligible, the bank account provides a sense of style
soforth,andsoon). This term signals a simple addition,
(so might a fedora in turbulence). lt's become more than
with another, nothing more. Auerbach (1946: ch. z and 3) turns this into a charac-
six months ago I referred to another sequence ofdaring.
teristicof "modern" sq'le, paratax, as opposed to classical syntax' Conjoined by
ond, phrases or events follow each other, but their succession does not obey a cat- Do men blink more often than women? Certain reflexes

egorical order(because;if,then;inorderto;although loined to the preceding one by

. . .). seem to count as memory in nerve, muscle and example:
ond, a phrase arises out ofnothingness to link up with it. Paratax thus connotes the the cat looks up to a drawing of its counterpart losing
abyss of Not-Being which opens between phrases, and it stresses the surprise that feathers. A title doesn't confer talent conveyed. Calvados
something begins when what is said is said. And is the conjunction that most
al-
from a snifter late into what they also knew last century.
lows the constitutive discontinuity (or oblivion) of time to threaten, while defring
First sip. Not implant but tenacious hamstrings. Complaint
it through its equally constitutive continuity (or retention). . ' . lnstead ofand, and of content-its lack thereof or from. An elegant suppleness
assuring the same paratactic function, there can be a comma, or nothing.
(D, 66)
should be consumed relativelyyoung. Orgasms aren't

paratax: the phrase of modernism. This is a crucial paragraph, if paragraph oblique on the morning o[, or in the night. Sex is precision.
not "No local passengers carried between stations marked A".
is the word, because it describes Lyotard's own poetics, which is to write,
"sketches," "rudiments," "lessons," "discus- It's froth on the inside that's dangerous. Whist, the silent
books, but "notes," "fragments,"
sions,,-these are the terms he applies to his writings (D, xiv-xv). The point
< artl ganre l. . . l The
segmental tlc;rrl rlon't borrow lrorrr rrs,rs wt.rlo lr<lnr them. How
is to avoid "big talk." The structure of TheDifferentt, for cxatttplc, is

different is brooch from broach. The cat rolls on
flowers but doesn't crush the print, as in cotton, not description
ofthe auto-erotic. ln that chair this conversation, a words. So reading becomes itself uneaffaired'enchqtnementdephrases, reweaving
utilizable not employable table. How tender in twelve?
Supplant this with the word terse, or focus on all the
visible points simultaneously. Light doesn't blister itself
but the epidermis becomes disorganised. Pallor, sometimes
misconstrued as a manifestation of missing (QD, t8).
This poem continues for another several sentences before breaking off-Mac
Cormack's poems stop but do not end. Like Dr. O'Connor's monologues, each
of her poems is cumulative rather than conclusive and could still be unfolding
somewhere in a parallel universe. What is compelling about "Sleep ls Incur-
able in Our Lifetime" are the subtle, fragmentary interactions between one
phrase and another. There is a kind of echo principle at work, not so much at
the level ofsound (but by all means keep your ears open) as at the level ofref-
erence, perception, and concept: phrasing here is a kind of thinking (without
criteria)-thinking that proceeds by the proliferation of phrases rather than
by some linear principle of internal necessity (phrases do not add up to state-
ments, except under severe coercion). I'm not sure why serenity is unpopular,
but I know serene people are less shaken by "ambushes ofexterior concerns"
than I am, and maybe serenity is just another form of superciliousness' Coin-
cidentally just the other day I was listening to the Andrews Sisters sing their
great World War II hit, "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy [of Company B]." A bugle
boy is certainly a source of external ambushes, as, for example, at 5:oo a.m.
Meanwhile bandages made of gauze had bexer be discarded "after first time
use." Amateur tattoo artists are apt to cause "flesh wounds" requiring, and so
forth. "Do men blink more than women?" ltdepends onwho we think is more
reflexive in "nerve, muscle and example." Talent trumps pedigree, except in
the hierarchies of academic life. "First sip" is of "Calvados [a splendid cognac]
from a snifter late." "Orgasms aren't oblique" because "sex is precision." "Sex
is precision" is at once erotic counsel, an elegant piece of graffiti, and a philo-
sophical theory. "Not implant but tenacious hamstrings" may be for all I know
a source of sexual precision. A tenacious hamstring sounds erotic to me. lm-
plants are for the young.
Players only love you when they're playing: a traditional hermeneuticalway
to respond to pagan poetry is to appropriate a phrase rather than to try to deci-
pher its intention-this means that one makes the phrase one's own by taking
it now this way, now that, the way the ancient rabbis trsctl to rcad scriptural
79
verses: not consecutively, but by linking them with verses from other (some-
times distant) parts of the Bible, finding echoes in words and even parts of
texts into new networks ofphrasing. "An elegant suppleness should be con-
sumed relatively young": such consumption could apply here equally well to
cognac or to sex, although if so the line is apt to make an old man scowl. I'm
sure Mac Cormack didn't have this reading in mind. Hermeneutics says that
the rule of reading to be followed is that of charity, or the invention of truth
conditions-reading does not decipher but improvises supporting languages
(or contexts) that enables the phrase in question to come out true. For some
phrases this is easy: "Whist, the silent card game," fulfills the conditions of
a true statement for the same reasons that "Chess, the silent board game,"
would. Likewise "The dead don't borrow from us as we do from them": anaper-
cu worthy of TheTstler. "'No local passengers carried between stations marked
A"' is true just as a rule is true ifenforced and obeyed; anyhow the phrase is a
citation, which technically cannot be false ("British intelligence reported that
' lraq has weapons of mass destruction"' is a true statement about false intel-
Iigence, and also, therefore, a classic piece ofofficial rhetoric).
But Mac Cormack eludes even the most charitable hermeneutics. Most of
her phrases play with truth conditions, multiplying rather than just fulfilling
them: "Light doesn't blister itself but the epidermis becomes disorganised.
Pallor, sometimes misconstrued as a manifestation of missing." My counsel
is to construe these sentences lightly, keeping to one's breast thoughts of
sunburn and anemia, allowing the phrases to percolate their nuances, since
the superformation of nuances is pretty much the poetics at work here. Ap-
propriation, after all, is a form of regimentation, settling what is mobile into
place-an execution of nuances in both the formal and the lethal sense. As
Lyotard says (in a section of The Differend devoted interestingly to Gertrude
Stein's phrases), "A phrase is not mysterious, it is clear. It says what it means to
say. No 'subject' receives it in order to interpret it. lust as no 'subject' makes it
(in order to say something). It calls forth its addressor and addressee, and they
come to take their places in its universe" Q,AZ).This is good anthropological
.rdvice: the idea is to learn how to inhabit the milieu of this strange language
rrntil one feels at home-Clifford Geertz calls it "becoming real," feeling the
l)urpose and pleasure ofthe Balinese cockfight, no longer having to justi$ it.
l'xplanations have to come to an end somewhere. The point is to change one-
sclIso as to experience the thing as it is. And if you keep changing, so will the
pocnr. Think of reading as a practice of musical accompaniment.
l)agan poctry is lrcr;rrcrrtly tlrc work of great comic writers, owing perhaps
80
to the anarchy of it unregimented phrases are usually (and unusually) funny:
.,Furniture isn't everything. Did Eve enjoy the first orgasmZ Accompaniment
/
ends in isolation from the event. Then / dovetail. Percussion in the anteroom
to conger the doctors" (QD, rS). Conger? Conger is a species of eel. Congeries
are aggregates ofheterogeneous elements, so "conger" used as a verb would
mean "to gather together." But one can also imagine percussion in the an-
teroom conjuring doctors-conceivably a more efflcient way of getting to see
them than we Presently have. "A bale of direct contraries" (QD, t5)'
Which is most interesting. From tricycle to try sexual. (QD, zE)
(Could someone be quadrisexual? Perhaps a quadropedophile')
lnheritance is the cleaning process our forebears foreswore,
occupied as they were, in each other's esteem. Not that
society is polite, it is rude to those who don't agree with
its particular modes of savagery. I don't wear pearls. All
those articles of torture. A man once slept in a room with
a cow's skull suspended by transparent fishing line above
the mattress on the floor. Hopefully height is not crucial as
I don'twant to lie. There's the biography minus the kittens.
Why was the amethyst thought to prevent intoxication? (QD, eZ)
Reconstruct the spiral stare. (QD, :g)
Who invented the first commercial weed killer? (QD, 53)
Of course, in a certain sense it is a distortion to cite these lines out of their
contexts, for doing so subverts their resistance to interpretation, because in
context each phrase works as an interruPtion (a shift from one context or reg-
ister to another)-"Who invented the first commercialweed killer?" is, all by
itsel[ without complication, but as situated it pops like a gun:
An aberration in the earth's crust, for
example. Who invented the first commercial weed killer?
Recitals. Written in front ofyou not as a door but a latch,
now lift it. (Qo, Sa)
lnterruption: we tend to be bothered by interruptions, but they are crucial
to sociability, as is brevity, which interruption makes possible. Recall Mau-
rice Blanchot on the absence of interruptions: "l wonder if we have reflect-
ed enough upon the various significations of this pause that alone permits
speech to be constituted as conversation, and even as sllccclt. We end up by
confining someone who speaks without pause. (Let us recall Hitler's terriblc
monologues. And every head of state participates in the same dictare, the rep-
etition of an imperious monologue, when he enjoys the power of being the
only one to speak and, rejoicing in the possession of his high solitary word,
imposes it without restraint as a superior and supreme speech upon others)"
(lC, lil.One wonders what Blanchot would make of Dr. O'Connor's mono-
logues, those oratorios of purple gusto: "but the interruption was quite use-
less. Once the doctor had his audience-and he got his audience by the simple
device of pronouncing at the top of his voice (at such moments as irritable and
possessive as a maddened woman's) some of the more boggish and biting of
the shorter early Saxon verbs-nothing could stop him" (Nrghtwo od, t4).
Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes have distinctive voices. Karen Mac Cor-
mack is polyvocal, ranging from an avocal or neutral voice in which "no one
speaks" to complex heterophonies culled from the histories of languages,
the writings of ancestors, as well as the idiomatic expressions of old and new
forms of popular culture.
At the avocal boundary, Quirks and Quillers (r99r)-tricks and quibbles, quirks
of fate and howwe evade them-is made of forty "sentences," each one oc-
cupying its own page (so that an experience ofwhite space is part of the experi-
ence ofthe poem):
The untried decibeI of seamless hose
unhurried sentence its adjectives the chosen
ladder geological manoeuvre or landing
strip spangles the same man connected
poillenes cramp the page's reproduction not
ours or the level's pinafore before piano
trudgingwords ahead of their names an
algebra ofwhat is scene momentous
underneath. (QQ,9)
Here the challenge would be to know how to read this poem aloud-where
(or whether) to introduce pauses that would shape the sentence rhythmically
iFnot semantically. (Karen Mac Cormack reads the pieces in this volume fairly
rapidly in a cadence that avoids any hint of prosody: no pausing for empha-
ses, so the poem ceases to be made of lines.)+The semantics of this particular
"sentence" lies in "its adjectives" ("trudging words ahead of their names" like
"seamless hose," "unhurried sentence," "geological manoeuvre," "landing
strip," "the same man," "connected poillettes"). The poem contains only one
trarrsitive verb, "cranrp," an<l possibly not even that, since a "cramp" is more
82 B3

often felt as a noun. ("Scene," to be sure, implies "seen.") ln truth Quirksand speare it is still occasionally cited as an archaism. The point is that phrases,
Quillets is not, strictly speaking, made of sentences, but of proliferations of
whether contemporary or archaic, are found objecrs. They are not products or
phrases within loose, unPunctuated periods. Proliferation here is an event of creations-they cannot be traced back to an origin. phrases are, in Heidegger's
complexity, an anarchic defeat of unity, structure, closure, and point (but not, lingo, "at hand": they have an equipmental rather than objective mode of
curiously, ofan internal play): being-that is, we don't hold them up for inspection but rather put them into
play, which is what Lyotard means by phrasing or enchainment. What Karen
Foregoing impartial likeness threads drop
Mac cormack does is alter the field of play by
citing (and rephrasing) texts from
where the thermometer left off it only
both past and present.
matters to someone else that the door is
Recall the concept of poetic diction. This was, in the eighteenth century, a
closed upon leaving for now the
circle drawn around our vocabulary that excluded certain words as flatly un-
proliferation of exits is grief enough arms in
poetic: duck, toe, fart, potato, intestine-make your own list. Modernism did
these leaves drying an open solitude in
not reject the idea of poetic diction, but it enlarged the circle so that its cen-
increments the belief that there's paint on walls
ter would be everywhere and its circumference inaccessible: hence "etherized
paintings patching anomalies or
upon a table." The purpose of much of Karen Mac Cormack,s recent work has
marbles in the mouth a fast-growing
been to develop new forms of poetic diction out of found texts. In Fitto print
background attention span in the form of
(1998), writtenin collaboration with Alan Halsey, the found texts are news-
everyday objects of a giving culture basting
paper items-news stories, advertisements, notices, but also forms of layout
corrects this sink is full. (QQ, +Z)
that makes the page the basic unit ofverse:
Notice that the phrases here all make a kind of sense-"Foregoing impartial
EMANCI-PATIO
likeness," "threads drop where the thermometer left off," "it only matters to
someone else that the door is closed upon leaving," "for now the proliferation
roots dangler lowdown upstart fermi down and roar

ofexits is griefenough," "arms in these leaves [read it as a verb] dryingan open

drawbackcocksure live to-die-for
oral stroller recovery in times of duress
solitude in increments," "the belief that there's paint on walls," "paintings
aggregates anoint conundrum loans abstrusity
patching anomalies," "marbles in the mouth," "a fast-growing background,"
balanced marshiest oasis hard-to-get comparison
"attention span in the form of everyday objects of a giving culture," "basting
outsourcing deliverables as if a mistake could "improve"
corrects [dehydration]," "this sink is full." The poem appropriates the seman-
virtual courseware to encash outdo
tic ingredients that go into sentences-the readym ade enchainements that make
sharpshooter's clone day-to-day tread
possible everyday speech (about "everyday objects of a given culture"). The
estop "Hurricane buys site" subject crop weedy
phrases ofQuirks ond Quillets are not poetical, but they are tricky and evasive (no
now inhale finalize greetings uncouple prefer (Fp, 35)
pinningthem down). The point is thateach one (almosteach one) is recogniz-
able: these are phrases that, but for a tr,vist here and there, we ourselves might A footnote explains that the title of this poem was originally a typo in the To-
have used. ronto Globe E Msil, and that "Hurricane buys site" was a "headline for a Globe E
After all, where do phrases come from? From our various discursive envi- Moilarticle statingthat Hurricane Hydrocarbons Ltd. wins right to become ma-
ronments, which Karen Mac Cormack seeks to reconstruct and explore by jor oiI producer in Kazakhstan in 1996" (Fp, 6r). Likewise Mac cormack'sArlssue
investigating several centuries of linguistic usage as well as the idioms of (zoor) is, she says, "a series of poems most of which (but not all) utilize the
contemporary popular culture. Her poetry is, among other things, an archae- vocabulary and spelling found in magazines of a diverse nature,,-Vogue, for
ology of language, as the title of Quirk and Quillets suggests-it takes a good t'xample, and others even more strictly "geared to a female readership,, (AI, 9):
deal of searching among dictionaries to find the word quillet: thanks to Shake-
 j. r rt,,,i.i
85
84

AT ISSUE III communities. Certainly one can make fun of the idiom of Vogue and Sel,/i but
that the appropriation of these idioms is also a form of redemption, because now
Putting shaPe into getting without Perfect in a culture
face of rate one experiences their peculiar comedy, richness, and even utopian potential.
doesn't think, pumPs up, the two traits go at the
lohn Cage perfected the form ofthe found text after having invented the
themselves, cropped by impasse, express your monochromatics
mesostic by "writing through" modernist texts like loyce's FinnegansWake, using
from within, discover it blushes, reduce the signs to
surface'
face extra- loyce's name as the spine along which his (loyce's) text is reassembled:
sharing space in a new high-tech fabric, the pale
prevent every day year after year, retreat returns by
filling out wroth with twone nathandJoe
sways'
advance notice, since seeing is oxygen more supple' A
big' stable rattles Malt
iusttake graceful, tilt feature-controls are
a story' jhEm
accept different speeds sing, sprawl-moguls seized
turned'
raking in celebrity, heat-activated genre, hands full Shen

loops removable gusseted, postpone television' revelations' pftlschute

cross-over
introspection, an assemblage not incidentally imposed' sOlid man
(Al' r7)'
success, so many boxesyet smashes toward toward ' ' ' that the humptYhillhead of humself
is at the knoCkout
Twopoints:Theexhibitionoffoundtextsisaformofsatire-thephrasesof in thE Parks
thetextarejumbledinawaythatexposes(andsodefeats)theirrhetoricalpur-
pose ("expres, you, from within")' At Issue is' among other Writing throughfound texts is, as Cage argued, a way of escaping the confine-
^ono.hrorn.ti.t from publications ments of subjectivity, in which confinement means repetition, self-imitation,
iningi, ,n urr"y on cultural narcissism (culling its language
interesting' By appropriating the articulations of style, identity, and tradition, and where escape means
like lelfl. But perhaps the formal point is more
Karen Mac Cormack accom- bringing oneself arbitrarily under the discipline of the environment of an-
her volabulary and spelling from found texts'
she other's language in which one is (anthropologically) free to explore, expand,
plishes two (paradoxically clmpeting) things: in the spirit of modernism'
-to
enlarges the field of poetic diction include the language of everyday life and rearrange. Here the transfer of composition is from a Chomskyan linguis-
same t'T:' tic competence, in which the subject is able to produce an infinite number of
(whatever its virtues or comedy). However, at the lrr:ltjL'llt"t
such writing communities original sentences from the deep structure of linguistic rules, to the pragmatic
traditional poetic diction 1rt *Li as in the spirit of
Cage and lackson Mac Low) she discourse that appropriates and renews what is given in the discourse that
as oulipo oi the "chanc" op"r.tions" oflohn
(no phrases allowed constitutes a social and culturalworld. A poetics ofthe lively surface of histori-
subjects her writing to a system of arbitrary constraint
or found language is a po- cal particulars in this event replaces a structuralist poetics ofinnate rules and
thai don't apPear in Selfl. Recourse to source texts
language (or linguistic conventions that mechanically reproduce a history of universal forms.
etics that subjects the writing subject to an objective
openness of chance with the Found texts are archaeological artifacts. Mac Cormack didn't find her texts
field). lt is a poetics of finitudl thaicornbines the
what has not' in some sense' by accident. lmplexures (zoo3) is an exploration of her ancestry, which evidently
confrnement of originary stipulations: no saying
citations taking goes back to Elizabethan times (when the word "implexure," meaning fold or
already been said, but doingso without repetition-imagine
seems to be to find a new folding, was still, if only rarely, in use). The poem is in part a series of "histori-
the form not of quotationiut of collage' The idea
than romantic because it is a cal letters" made of heterogeneous voices from many sources and periods-
form of originality, one that is more rhetorical
been written "To absorb a history of family through the centuries requires a forebear's at-
form of writing that interrupts and recomposes what has already
language is not internal tention to facts and no fear of paper" (lM, ro). The voices (and years) cannot
and not a form of creation ex nihilo' As I said earlier'
phrases capable of open-ended always (and never easily) be identified or distinguished from one another-
to the writing subject but is an environment of
are local rather "'l-anguage as primary environment' applied to re-reading letters (one's own
redistributions. The crucial point is that these environments
,rrrrl others') the rlccrrlt's itrtcrlcavcd on every surface to blur and redefine the
thanglobal:onewritesfromtheStandpointofinhabit;rti<lrlwithindiscursive
86 87

living in & perception's architecture" (lM, 44'45)-except perhaps for the phantom noun-a found word that eludes lexicography. (Karen Mac Cor-
as a
mack tells me the word means "jaunt," an aimless stroll.)
(italicized) letters home from a modern youngwoman traveling to places Iike
Mexico, ltaly, Greece, and TurkeY: Speaking of dictionaries, one section of lmplexures is called "DEVELOPMEN-
TAL DICIIONARY (from ry67 to circa r98z)." It is a text in two parts. part Two
t enjoy travelingsolo.There are problems,butthey are notinsurmountable.Theltqlian and 6reek
consists ofwhat looks like a random series ofwords:
men are totally perplexed by single women going around the world E it seems to unnewe them that
there are so many. (lM, si) contiguity induction chimerical inimical didactic vicissitude pithy maxim apho-
rism portentously sedition sedulous irascible specious plausible esoteric contrite
But mostly the language is incremental in its phrasing, as if a collage (or per- intellect intellectuaI faculty usurp sagacious discernment artifice contrivance ne-
haps "implexions": entanglements, interweavings, interfolds) were being gate glaucous rapacious respite retrieve vituperative obsequious euphemism as-
constructed fro m ancestral fragments: cribe disparate acumen ingenuous expunge intrinsic tacit cogent denote acquisi-
tion peripatetic ebullient anomalous pullulating extraneous jejune hyperborean
Form at certain taverns never documentary during their scramble. To the west
abstruse incondite tantalum acronychal erudite tautophony (lM, 59)
spell jeopardy and drop to [ower ground rasp's running with a lantern. Later
through the front door, down the hall and out again, coach, frills adhere to it' Mostly familiar words, perhaps used less commonly than others-appearing,
Horn of boxwood and in existence a diary usua[[y is a provoking document. Hov- I would guess, more often in writing than in speech. Some you'd not think to
ered very much to the fore and exasperating. Consentwithheld and why? Every re- use ("incondite tantalum acronychal"), and you'd want to consult a diction-
cord drawn a blank and so impossible to forgive her being a Perfect Lady. Drifting ary before deploying a number ofothers. And that appears to be the point of
coming on to the answering mountain made no picture. Into three editions and their appearance in lmplexures. Part One of "Developmental Dictionary" is a list
many infidelities (the former begot missiles). An independent line . . . freedom of
(three-and-a-half pages in length) of definitions, synonyms, or instances of
outlook (not one but two bribes of peerage failed) and then the Repeal ofthe Salt
the words in PartTwo. So in reading one applies the following to the first five
Tax. Meanwhile, diligent in her Latin and "very new-fangled of my ltalian," she
didn't object to his taking a sprogue now and then. A "nip" appeared in the pit
words of the series-
and he was then alone. Trappings beyond perennial drain, the dusk, in his chair, contact, proximity
but no marker or tablet, it being December what flowers could there have been? prologue, introduction
(lM, t9) production (offacts) to prove
general statement
Again: a portrait of a lady-but as in Gertrude Stein's portraits the subject here
offanciful conception
is integrated into her environment, and so the collage is of a time and place
hostile
and not simply of a subject, meaning that the references are local and tempo-
meant to instruct (lM, 56)
ral, embedded in lost contexts, and thus outside the glossing capabilities of
modern readers-and most libraries, although industrial-strength research these to the last five:
-and
will turn up some interesting connections: "sprogue," for example, is hard ill constructed, crude, unpolished
to find anywhere except in FinnegansWake (5o7.t9: "A strangely striking part of rare white metallic element
speech for the hottest worked word of ur sprogue."). Every dictionary I know highly resistant to heat &
of rejects it. The context in Mac Cormack's Poem suggests that it could mean action ofacids
"a drink now and then," but loyce's context makes it more likely a word for happening at nightfall
language ("sprog" is Danish for language, so "ur sProgue" would be something learndd
like Ursprache). "Sprogue" is also probably a loycean pun (sprog, brogue). Dili- rcpetition of the same sound (1M,59)
gent polyglots won't mind a pun now and then, or a gJre and gimble in the
"l)cvclopmental Dictionary" is an archaeological document-as is, when
wabe, norwillspace Rogues (or "sprogues," as they call themselves). Sprogue
is a common surname, evidently originally Cornish, but it is tttort' itrtcrc'stittg orrc corrsidcrs it, any dictiorrary, cspecially one that supplies the meanings of
B8
words with a history, allowing one to dig up old uses or to discover thatwords
are protean, owing to their multiple and heterogeneous etymologies: "in-
duction" is not just one word but several, depending on the context. ln the
Elizabethan theater, it means "prologue, introduction." It is also, of course,
a term of art in togic and the foundation of the empirical sciences' And it is
also how one gets into a Hall of Fame (or, worse luck, into the military). As a
good archaeologist, Karen Mac cormack gives us the Middle English meaning
of"specious" ("ofgood aPpearance" Ittvt, 56]), and in the bargain alludes to its
proximity to the nextword in the series, "plausible" ("seemingly reasonable or
probable" [f fvr, 5O]), which "specious" in our current use of the word must be:
a baldly incoherent explanation, incredible from the start, would not
be "spe-
cious." Plausibility is a condition of deception.
lust so, the words in PartTwo of "Developmental Dictionary" do not
make
up a random series but are internally connected-phonetically, morphemical-
ly, semantically: "induction" is an instance of "contiguity"; "inimical" echoes
"chimerical," and so, more subtly, does "didactic" (the series is an example of
"tautophony"). Maxims are pithy, and so, being maxims, are aphorisms' "Ob-
sequious,, is a reversal of "vituperative." And without doubt the series grows
more "abstruse" or "erudite" (recondite but by no means "incondite") as it
draws to a close. "Acronychal"-"happening at nightfall"-concerns the ris-
ing or setting of stars, as opposed to their rising or setting at sunrise (which is
,.cosmical,,). The )xfordEnglishDictionary'sentry is worth a moment ofyour time
$ou,ll be hard pressed to find the word anywhere else). while in the neighbor-
hood, consult "acroPhonY. "
poetry as an archaeology of [anguage brings new life to the now tired con-
,,open
cept of form." The idea is to recover and explore different linguistic en-
vironments, whether ancient or modern, high or low, lost or forgotten. Let
me conclude by citing Voniry R elease (zoq), in which Mac Cormack appropriates
'sourced'
a number of unique vocabularies. She begins with "a statement: re
poems in VANITY RELEASE":
I have become increasingly intrigued by tate rgth and early 2oth century short-
hand dictionaries and manuals (and most recently a mid-zoth-century typewrit-
ing manual), in addition to phrase books for travelers through the zoth century.
The choice ofword lists, sentences to learn by, and the exercises in these respec-
tive manuals reflect not only the ongoing changes in North American English for
this period, but also shifts in educational, business, and technological terminol-
po-
ogy. To engage with these terms in a context of contemporary investigational
etic practice is one way to perplex meaningfully what is so easily taken for granted
technologically, linguistically, and socially in our own tinrt's (Vl{' ';)
89
"UP," my favorite poem in the volume, takes its words and phrases from Uniyer-
salPhonography, H. M. Pernin O 1886, Sixth Edition, 1893. Phonography, liter-
ally sound-writing, is a form of stenography invented in 1837 by lsaac Pitman.
"UP" begins:
Phonography dispenses with useless letters by recording the sounds ofwords only.
In practiceyou should endeavor to forgetthe ordinary spellingofwords, and think
only of the sounds of which they are composed. Remember always to write whot
youhear and notwhatyousee. Accuracy is the first essential. . . . "Make haste slowly."
Sz sh zh, j ch, are horizontal curves traced from left to the manner indicated on
page 36 facing the right. The sound ofx is a combination ofthe sounds k s
Get the doctor a cup ofblack tea, Harry feared the boat would veer to the left. A red
leaffell at the foot ofthe oak. (VR, 3r)
The first "stanza" gives us the basic rule ofphonography, which is to forget the
phonetic alphabet and to replace it with minor strokes of the pen or pencil, as
indicated in "stanza" two: the sounds "sh" and "zh" are written as curves like
the lower right quarter of a new moon. The first sentence of the third stanza
would be written as follows:
l(rf / _lr/, \,1'r _l.
-
However, what matters in Mac Cormack's archaeology is not simply the recov-
ery of the forgotten text but the recuperation of its peculiar idiom-namely,
the pedagogical sound ofthe late-nineteenth-century office manual:
The majority of business houses prefer their correspondence rypewritten, it
be-
ing not only more tegible than ordinary longhand, but also much more rapidly
executed. Comparatively few people are really good spellers, a fact due in a great
measure to the absurd construction ofthe language and partly to early neglect of
this important branch ofeducation. The stenographer who would keep abreast of
the times should also be acquainted with the shorthand literature in general. The
word ushas been inadvertently omitted from theLord's Prayer. (VR, 36)
The "absurd construction ofthe language" indeed. It turns out that what Kar-
en Mac Cormack's poetic research recovers from these manuals is the struggle
between the rationalization of the world, the programs of efficiency, control,
and split-second reproduction on which our modernity depends, and the es-
sential paganism of language-the sheer excess and unmanageability of a
language not really made for literacy, legibility, or the various technologies
of'word-processing. Thc. attempt to streamline human speech, including the
90

manufacture of buzz words, acronyms, sound bites, not to mention email and
who knows how many new forms of digital shorthand, fails because, asVanity
Release shows, streamlining produces its own special forms of comic materi-
ality, as in the penultimate poem inVonityRelesse,"WE-23."4 The source-text
for this poem is a ryPing manual, GenerolTyping, t9r Series @ 1965 by the
McGraw-Hill Company of Canada, Ltd., filled with finger exercises, helpful
hints, moraI encouragement, cautionary notes, and useful examples for the
eager secretary.

BODY centered opposite the J key, a hand-span from the machine

She fed us egg salads. Ed fed us eggs.

Fred sells red jugs; red jars are free.
Ask Dr. Grass. Dr. Grass leads us all.

This book has many "clinics." THE ROGUE POET'S

area dear drag flu gush gulfhire huge RETURN
idea jugs lark kill read selfside drug

Errors should not alarm you; insteod, they should guide you.

Control Hyphen, Q, and ? keys olt iohn matthiasts poetic anecdotes

Can you keep your elbows still?
sofa soap sock soak son sod sox sow . . . which word, by the way, Johnson always condemned.
side ofthe center Lrfe of )ohnson
-Boswell,
STRESS: Continuity
Watch for it. Get set. (VR, at) l'I start by citing one of lohn Matthias's earliest poetic anecdotes, "Alexander
Kerensky at Stanford," from Turns (r975):
The poem continues for several pages, concluding with what is surely the
twentieth century's most important advice: "REMEMBER: Don't give in to the He rose one Winter from his books
temptation to look upl" (VR, SZ). To sit among the young unrecognized.

Itwas 1963. ltwas 1917.

He sipped his coffee & was quite anonymous.

Students sat around him at their union

Talking potitics: Berkeley, Mississippi.

A sun-tanned blonde whose wealthy father

Gave her all his looks and half his money

Whispered to her sun-tanned lover:

"Where is VietNanr?"

ltt
 93
92 :1 ir i) ; il i'

Meanwhile, inThePound Era, figures like "patterned energy," introduced with

He thought no thought oftheirs.
an anecdote about Buckminster Fuller on "knots" OCS-56), displace catego-
ln his carrel atthe Hoover lnstitute
ries and distinctions; luminescent particulars do the work of universals, as
He had the urns of all his ancient enemies. they do in Pound's poetry. ln fact, as Kenner once said to me,ThePoundEro isa
Their dust was splattered on his purple tie. (T, 57)' workof literary history modeled on The Cantos,"a poem including history," but
including it chiefly in the form of synecdoches gathered from below:
Kerensky was the Russian prime minister in the Provisional Government
(luly-september rgrT) that ruled briefly after the czar's overthrow. when Lenin So this is (we may take it) Mitteleuropa:

i.rn" to po*.r in October Kerensky fled to Paris, then to NewYorkwhere he fi- Mr Corles was in command of machine guns

nally settled. He was a fellow at stanford University's Hoover lnstitute between butwhen the time came to fire
rgOr and 1966 while lohn Matthias was at Stanford (1963-65) working
toward he merely lit a cigarette and walked away from his battery and seated himself in

his M.A. in English. a field,

About this same rime $96z-6$ I was at the University of Virginia studying So some subaltern gave the order to fire

with Hugh Kenner, whose books on Pound, Eliot, loyce, and Beckett gave us and Mr Corles did not suffer the extreme penalty

our first detailed examination of modernism-this against the background because his family

of the New Critics who found these writers, even Eliot (whose critical writ- was a very good bourgeois family in Vienna

ings they substantially appropriated), mostly unreadable. what I chiefly

recall and he was therefore sent to a mind sanatorium.a
in complete sentences (without ems and
abtut Kenner was his ability to speak What is an anecdote? The historian Lionel Cossman notes that we lack any
ahs), each of which was apt to contain (verbatim) a lengthy citation. lnvited
clear concept or definition of the anecdote, arguably one of the oldest forms
he would not recite from a prepared text but would compose as
he
to lecture, of narrative (recall the laconic Cain and Abel story), but one that only came
closely
spoke, then later write up a text for publication that matched pretry under theoreticaI scrutiny in the early nineteenth century as a briefinciden-
what he had said extempore.' Milton is said to have committed the Bible to
tal tale that sometimes underwrites but also frequently undermines the grand
memory. Kenner did pretty much the same with most of what he read, includ-
narratives of history as when Procopius supplements his laudatory history
ing, if you can believe it, much of Pound's contos. A corollary of his fabulous of Emperor lustinian's wars with anecdota ("secrets," or "unpublished tales")
memory is that Kenner cultivated a Baconian disdain for general ideas; con- about .lustinian's private life, especially the extravagant sexual appetites of
cepts and theories turned his face into a death mask. ("Clich6s of theory,"
as
his wife, Theodora.s Just so, sex and the anecdote are traveling companions:
Matthias says in "Private Poem" [sM, 136].) lt is no wonder that his master-
both belong to the nether regions of gossip and jokes-although according
work, The Pound Era, is essentially a book of anecdotes-it begins with an ac- to P6ter Hajdu anecdotes also (as in nineteenth-century Hungary, forexample)
resid-
count of a chance meeting between Henry lames and Ezra Pound' then function as a medium of "national consciousness."6 Both Matthias and Pound
ing in London, sometime around r9o8:
capture the form's essential mischief, but also its classical decorum-the im-
The Chelsea street that afternoon however had stranger riches to offer
than had personality ofits narration and its Aristotelian structure ofexposition, crisis,
"society." Movement, clatter of hooves, sPutter of motors; light grazing house- and resolution. So here, in Matthias's poem, is the old democrat, Kerensky,
moving; faces in a crowd, their apparition: two faces: Ezra Pound half a century after his moment in history, anonymously (anomalously) sip-
fronts, shadows
(quickjauntyrubicundity)withalady.Eyesmet;thecoupleshalted;ritualswerein- ping his coffee among Stanford's students (hedonists turning into dissidents
to
cumbent. Around them Chelsea sauntered on its leisurely business. lames Play: and back again), then repairing, as if to a time machine, to his carrel at the
.,Mr. . in his searchingvoice, torch for unimagined labyrinths; and
Pound! . .,, Hoover lnstitute, with its vast archive of dusty Russian documents. An anec-
on, to the effect of his niece Margaret; whereupon Mr' Pound pre-
Presenting dote of survival, as is Pound's, which is also a kind of anti-Msuberly in its story
n€e
sented to Mr. Iames his wife Dorothy; and the painter's eye of Dorothy Pound,
"A lairly portly ol'a separate peace.
shakespear, "took in" as lames would have phrased it, Henry larlcs.
Anecdotes arc historical, but, being local and particular, they stand at the
figure"-:
94 95

intersection of history and memory; or perhaps one should say that the anec- Caily, daily, in Vitebsk,
dote is a certain way of relating (to) history with the immediacy of memory. lt Cows & horses danced in the air.

could be that "proximity" is the word I'm looking for, but proximity to what? Superstructure he hopelessly
Matthias's poems are sometimes anecdotal memories, but what truly makes a Muddled with structure.
memory anecdotal, its basic condition of possibiliry, is the presence of a cer-
Gaily, daily, in Vitebsk,
tain kind of proper name-7
Cows & horses danced in the air.
First time I saw
After October, Chagall was
him, Segovia,
Commissar for the arts for a year . . .
he wouldn't play.
But was dismissed: The Man
Now he probably
Leaping Over the City.
can't.
Daily, daily, in Vitebsk,
ln from the wings,
lcons ofLenin & Stalin objectivety stare. (T, 56)
holding the
thing like a chalice, This poem, as the notes to Turns indicate, is the third in a sequence derived

as if it might spill,
or devolved from Matthias's reading of Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Stqtion,
the music, out,
which is a sort of anecdotal history of revolutionist thought, or more exactly a
before he played-
book of stories about revolutionaries from Michelet and Marx to Trotsky and
Lenin-the subtitle of Wilson's book is A Study intheWriting and Acting of History,
you weren't supposed which is to say that the question for Wilson is not so much "What did Lenin
to breathe. think or do?" as "What was it like to be Lenin (disembarking, for example, at
Maybe he only noticed the Finland Station), and thus to think and act like him?"'o Or, as per Matth-
somebody blink ("Tunes for Iohn Garvic" [T, tt]) ias's "Bakunin in ltaly," which (anecdotally) crosses the history of revolution-
aries with that of music:
The name Segovia belongs to the history of music, but, except in passing (mak-
Wagner's face is still illuminated
ing room for the odd eye- or ear-witness), official histories of music are not
Over Dresden in that fire I fed
usually anecdotal.s One question is how, when, or why events of history or
memory take (or are given) the form of anecdotes, as against that of extended And in the glow of it I see my sister
narratives or, conversely, of fragments, vignettes, or montage. One answer Walking through the snow beside Turgenev.
is that mischief must be quick, as Matthias is quick in his skewering of Sego-
Did I spit my teeth out in the Peter-Paul
via (lohn Cage would have loved this poem). Anecdotes are a species of dev-
Only to release the homicidal genius
ilry with respect to whatever is worthy, serious, or officially above reproach.s
The poem on the page facing "Alexander Kerensky at Stanford," for example, OfNachaev? I should have been a lesuit,

is a paratactic anecdote in which an artist aPpears momentarily in the public A mason. Castrati sing the Internationale

realm (as Kerensky, the public man, had reemerged in the private): And dance the choreography oFKarl Man.

A PAINTER I should have been a tenor playing

Marc Chagall knew nothing Sophie Hatsfeldt in an opdra-bouffe

About dialectics. lly Ferdinand l.:rss;rlt'. (I, 54)
 97
96

by the army "G.B." and the world's population is estimated at around 3-4 billion.
No doubt the glossing of proper names is a necessary if insufficient way of
Rep. Robert L. F. Sikes, D-Fla, said he thinks the U.S. is not doing enough in the
readingan anecdotal poem (cf. Terrell'sACompaniontoTheCantosof EzraPound,
field. Sikes said it is estimated that the Russians have "seven to eight times" the
cited above). During the May r84g "Uprising in Dresden" the anarchist Mikhail
capability of the United States. The U.S. has enough "G. B." to kill the world's
Bakunin (r8r4-76) manned the barricades with Richard wagner $es, that Rich-
estimated population about 3o times. Russia, on the other hand, has enough to
ard Wagner: a leftist in real life, did you know that?), and later he lost his teeth
kill the world's estimated population, say, 16o to r9o times. (T, z9)
while imprisoned in the Fortress of Peter and Paul in St. Petersburg-actually,
it was the Castle of Shlisselberg near St. Petersburg that claimed his teeth. Ba- U.P.l.: for United Press International. Karl Kraus (187r-1936) was the famous
kunin admired, perhaps loved, but then condemned the young agitator Sergei Austrian satiristwhose periodical, Die Fackel(The Torch), was the vehicle for hi-
Nachaev Q8a7_76), for whom yiolent revolution was a good in itself. Bakunin larious attacks on the banality ofViennese social life-in particular the fatuity
was against violence, and thus a critic of Marx-hence the joke about Marxist and hypocrisy of its public discourse (Rede). "This quibblea" Walter Benjamin
castrati. Meanwhile Sophie von Hatzfeldt (r8o5-8r) was a German aristocrat said of Kraus, "probing between syllables, digs out the larvae that nest there in
("the red countess") whose opdra-boffi divorce was handled by the socialist clumps. The larvae of venality and garrulity, ignominy and bonhomie, child-
Ferdinand Lassalle $825-46), who founded the first German workers' pargr, ishness and covetousness, gluttony and dishonesty."l'?Among other things.
the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein. Karl Kraus wrote: "You can expect no word of my own from me." Kraus's
ln his bibliographicalnote to Turns Matthias indicates that he is (like Pound) rogue method of citation and parody is a source or model of Matthias's attrac-
basically a documentary poet-one who writes things down instead of think- tion to "quotation, commentary, pastiche" (C, 8r), or what Matthias would
ing them up: later call "cuttings," as in "A Civil Servant," a Pakistani hangman's tale lifted
verbatim (so a note tells us) from the Times of London:
I have plundered various sources as indicated below (r) to get my general bearings
in the course of a composition or (z) for passages and fragments which provide Because the Muslims and the Hindus cannot
documentary material in which Poetic enerry can be isolated so as to expand the do this job, they turn to me-
voicing of particular parts of this book-sometimes quoting, sometimes translat- a poor, impoverished Christian. They pay me
ing or transmuting them (videTurns). A poet's random, pretty unscholarly (though ten rupees each time, some fifty pence.
sometimes purposeful) reading over certain Periods of time when engaged in as-
sembling certain kinds of structures' (T, ro9)" And look at this-one mud room, two beds,
.,Poetry a Pepsi calendar, a Coca-Cola
Northrop Frye: can only be made out of other poems; novels out of
poster and the crucifix. My father, an
other novels,, (Anatomy,gT). This seems right, but Matthias operates within a
untouchable, cleaned the toilets in Lahore
larger system-for example, a library (close to the one imagined by Borges)
whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is indeterminate, re- and then converted. The British brought in
calling again Williams's motto that "A poem can be made of anything," even hangingwith the cricket, but they
newspaper clippings (1, 7o): couldn't find a hangman. My father volunteered.
He'd rather hang a man than clean latrines.
THREE LOVE SONCS FOR U.P.I.
They never tell me whom I'm going to hang.
(i.m.RarlKraus)
They come and get me, or they send me
r. The ArmyTold Congressmen money for the bus or train. l'm the only
The army told congressmen yesterday it has enough of a single nerve gas in its hangman in the country; I'm on call.
chemical biologicatwarfare arsenal to kill the world's population many times
They got me up at2 A.M. for Bhutto. Itwas
over. But Russia, one lawmaker rePorted, may harbor an even more lethal
rrining, and they brorrght him on a
capabitity in this little discussed and highly secret ftel<l. l hc \rrl)sllrrcc is Iabcled
98 ii.:i,i !: t: / 99

stretcher. He wore the shalmar-kameez border, the outlying region beyond the control of administrative centers).r+
and traditional long shirt. He was steady Writing, Blanchot says, is ddpaysement, "a habitless inhabiting" (lC, 3o8). Mat-
thias is famously unsettled, aboard ship, following ancient and modern itin-
as I fastened up the hood around his head
eraries across layered or legend-laden landscapes, as in Bathory and Lermontov
and then put round the noose. He didn't
(r98o) and in much of AGatheringofWcys (r99r).'s But the point here is that the
say a word before I Pulled the lever,
voices ofpoetry and anecdote singa kind ofduet upon the same contrary, cen-
but somehow lwas certain he was innocent.
sorable, underground plane, as in Matthias's "scherzo Trio: Three at the Villa
I went home and drank all night and drank Seurat"-blue unquotable monologues by Henry Miller, Laurence Durrell,
so much I woke uP in the wards with and Anais Nin (PlM, t6-tl); or, somewhat differently, the first poem in Kedging
alcoholic poisoning. They came to get me (zoo7):
there to hang the officers who gave
POST.AN ECDOTAL
the evidence convicting Bhutto. They'd been I

promised pardons butwere being hanged And then what? Then I thought of
instead. They repudiated all their evidence What I first remembered:
before I hanged them, one bY one. Underneath some porch with Gide:
Oh, not with Cide. But after years & years
What kind of country is this anyway? l'm 65
I read that he remembered what he first
l've been the hangman here since mY
Remembered, and it was that.
father died. When they came to get me in the
wards, I told them I was far too sick to go. tl
Not this: Someone calling me,
But this is Pakistan. l'm Christian. So I went. (PIM, 34-35)
lohnny,lohnny. I was angry hid.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (Benazir Bhutto's father) was president and later prime Itwas humid, summer, evening.
minister of Pakistan during the rg7os. ln ry77 he was overthrown by a mili- I hid there sweating in the bushes
tary coup let by General Muhammad Zia-ul Haq. Bhutto was then accused
of As the dark came down. I could
conspiring to assassinate a political rival and imprisoned in Rawalpindi
jail' Smell the DDT they'd sprayed
After a rigged trial and failed appeal, he was executed on April 4, 1979' There That afternoon-it hung there in
is an account of the execution by the superintendent of Rawalpindi, Colonel The air. But so did the mosquitoes
Rafl ud Din, entitled (in Urdu) Bhutto kay akhn 34 din ffhe Last3z3 Days of Mr' That it hadn't killed. lohnny!
Bhutto;.': The executioner, whose name was Tara Masih, gives us an alterna- Oh, l'd notgo backatall. I'd
tive version-an expos6 from below, up close and yet detached, including
the Slammed the door on everyone. (K, :)
story, not mentioned by colonel Rafi ud Din, of the subsequent execution of
What is Andr6 Gide doing in this poem? Possibly only to pose the question
the officers who had testified against Bhutto. on luly 8, rg8+, the NewYorkTimes
of first or early memory: "Not this"-young Gide seems never to have been
ran the following obituary: "Tara Masih, the offlcial executioner who hanged angry-but that: a young boy hiding somewhere:
ousted Prime Minister ZulfikarAli Bhutto in r979 and an estimated 5,ooo other
people over 25 years, died Friday ofheart disease in Pakistan's northern city of I remember [Gide writes] a biggish table-the dining-room table, no doubt-with
its table-cloth that reached nearly to the ground; I used to crawl underneath with
Lahore, jail officials said today'" Obituaries are a species of anecdote'
the concierge's little boy, who sometimes came to play with me.
The French writer Maurice Blanchot championed the argument that Poet-
"What are yorr doing under there?" my nurse would call out.
the pagarr (from p0.gus: the
ry'svoice is thatof the alien, the exile, the misfit,
 101
100

,,Nothing; we're playing." And then we would make a great noise with our Hero of my childhood, limmy Stewart's Friend,
reality, we
playthings, which we had taken with us for the sake of appearances. ln Star of Broken Arrow which l'd seen a dozen times.
otherwise, beside each other but not with each other; we had I could feel myself perspiring, and
amused ourselves I

what I afterwards learnt are catled "bad habits""6 Couldn't think ofanything to say. AldousHuxley is quite

uni- 0ld, he sniffed. So is Ch arlie Chaplin, who is ov er ther e.

one has to be out of place (an anomaly) in order to enter the anecdotal
He's talking with Marlene Dietrich, Chandler said-
verse. For example, imagine young Matthias in Hollywood:
lsherwood still standing on his head. (K, 9)
CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD STANDS ON HIS HEAD
title'
Names fall off the screen, or out of history, into the anecdote. One could
Half way to a doubte dactyl with that
give this screw another turn by way of Mikhail Bakhtin's take on the Platonic
I think he stood like that for ten or fifteen minutes,
dialogue and its effect on the Athenian public sphere, whose epic songs and
Which is almostworthy of hexameters'
long-winded orations are brought down to street-level talk and made thereby
Whywas he standing on his head?
palpable and mute: roguish Socrates relocates lon and Protagoras offstage in
mightily
(l was standing on my feet, and
an everyday life-world that Plato's writings transcribe as if overheard.'8 Recall
Perplexed-a student down from Stanford
how casually the Symposium is framed (t7za-t74a): Apollodorus is asked about a
ln 1.A., lookingatanother kind of life')
banquet atwhich Socrates and others discussed the question oflove, and after
He said he's finished his new novel
some sorting out as to when exactly the banquet occurred (some fifteen years
lust that day and thought he ought to celebrate'
earlier, it turns out), he proceeds to relate the entire conversation-as he had
And then he stood on his head. He told me
heard it from Aristodemus ("in his exact words"). The Symposium, like most of
That he'd Picnicked recentlYwith
Plato's dialogues, is an extended anecdote.
Atdous HuxteY-meant to be there at
Matthias's "Automystifstical Plaice" (zooz) is collage of anecdotal pieces
The party-and the aging Chaplin, when they
about the early Parisian avant-garde that links Georges Antheil's Bolletmdca-
Found themselves on someone's private property
nique j9z4) to the invention of radio-guided torpedoes, a connection made
Accosted by the police' They were told they'd have
possible by Hedy Lamarr's descent from the screen back into the time of her
To leave. Huxley said: Do just let us finish lunch:
life when she was wife to the Viennese arms manufacturer Friedrich Mandl,
This is Charlie Chaplin, back for a visit to America'
him- from whose business she learned a great deal about weapons technology. An-
The cop damn well knew Chaplin when he saw
theil's Ballermdcaniquewas (and is) itself a piece of high-tech weaponry, scored
Little guy with a derby, cane & funny walk-
for sixteen player pianos accompanied by two grand pianos played by live
These three tresPassers could
musicians, as well as three xylophones, seven electric bells, three airplane
Pack it up and move it out, he said-and that
propellers, and a siren.'e If I follow the narrative correctly, the problem with
Included Charlie Chan . . .'z
guiding torpedoes via radio signals is that the enemy could easily jam the air-
An anecdote aboutbeingout of placel It continues (sorry, but an anecdotal ways. Hedy Lamarr's idea was to prevent jamming by communicatingwith the
poem has to be cited in full, since it has, after all, a beginning, middle, and torpedoes via changing (or "hopping") frequencies-but how to synchronize
end, each of which is indispensable to the whole)- these frequenry changes in both transmitter and torpedo? Antheil's solution:

And I thought slotted paper rolls of the kind one would need to synchronize the sounds pro-
duced by multiple player pianos.'o
I knewAldous HuxleYwhen I saw him-
Antheil is much the most interesting figure here. Born in Trenton, New ler-
Approached a tall man in a corner sipping wine
sey, he was a quintessential American in Paris, where, in ry23, a performance
Who said-Bu t t' m leff Chandler, actually!
oIhis dissonant sona(as (he was himself the soloist) became the scene of a riot
Astonished, I stared atChiefCochise, noble lndian
102 103

Ezra Pound and lames loyce-and fitmed by nique whose sounds ("clickityclack") follow one another the way notes in An-
staged by his friends-including
theil's Sonaresauvage (tg4) do:
the French auteur Marcel L'Herbier to provide footage for his film L'lnhumoine

(1924), starring Georgette LeBlanc as Claire Lescot (an automaton ofsorts- Great Lord, she says, Mon Dieu.
,.the girl without any mother born a machine"-who occasionally is given
That must have been one nine two three, the year I went
lines to speak in Matthias's Poem):'' to the races with Hem at Anteuil, the year
youngAntheilwas going to play Cyclops for iim.
Thddtre des Champs Elysdes. Everyone's there. The soloist
A working title indeed, she says, a walking tittle or tattle l'd say
doesn't know that he is a she. He doesn't know
he's set up, doesn'tyet know they've scripted him in a riot to your automystifsticaI plaice-
you're fishing again in some pre-Riemannian river
(those lights are too many, too bright.)
and don't understand the riviters have it all over
Mere human being he sits there robotic she looks like
out of Bohemia via Berlin's RUR. the rhetors who can't even master the minor recursions
a presence
with Sonata Sauvage. while minding the algorithmical gaps.
He begins
pick out the famous: No one could actually ploy that piano roll A wrote into the score,
A camera's panning the audience,
the digitals moving at speeds and at intervals
Picasso and loyce, Duchamp, Milhaud and Satie'
nobody's ten carboniferous digits could match.
We see them there with Leblanc as Lescot in the film
So down at the hurdle went Manzu, tossing his jock,
butwe don't hear a sound Mr. Pound leaping
and Hdros the Twelfth and L'Yser dashed at long odds
right out ofhis seat and shaking his fist as people begin
for the finish. Seining out in the sea near Le Havre
to walk out on Antheil himself at his Airplane Sonata
you wouldn't net any sonnets much less Seigneurs
by now sweating and sweating away but we don't hear a thing as we gaze

without any mother born a machine out of Proust. You understand, she insists,
at the girl
there are no parallel lines in rivers thatwind & nothing butnorhing
who would sing out success du scandale a clickityctack
my love appears to cohere from inside the system
ofthe dactylicanapests jerking the film
through a circle oflight the soloist booed from the stage
trust me l'm a truffler I know my way around. (WP, 6)

the piano rolls looping their loops

Georgette LeBlanc is the name Hemingway gave to a prostitute in The Sun Also
in tlvelve Pianolas electronic bells and a xylophone siren
Rises. The real Georgette LeBlanc Q875-tg4r) was the lover of Margaret Ander-
another Picabia made from the parts
son (1886-1973), editor of the Litde Reyiew. Antheil composed some music for
of a Model-T Ford. (WP,5)
an (unfinished) opera based on the "Cyclops" episode of .;oyce's Ulysses. Hdros
Ezra Pound on Antheil: "Antheil is probably the first artist to use machines. XII was a celebrated racehorse at Anteuil (France) during the years following
"Ma-
I mean actual modern machines, without bathos." To which he adds: World War t (but the race in question was won by L'Yser, owned by Louis,lean
chines are musical. I doubt if they are even very pictorial or sculptural, they Victor Sdv6re Decazes de Ghicksberg, 4th Duke de Decazes and 4th Hertig of
have form, but their distinction is not in form, it is in their movement
and Gliicksberg). Oddly, the 1xford English Dictionory doesn't recognize the word
enerry; reduced to sculptural stasis they lose raison d'orre, as if their essence."" "truffler" (a mycologist of sorts, connoisseur of edible fungi), which other-
That grinding sound you hear as you read this isTheodorAdorno turning in
his wise might pass as the name for a trickster (to truffis to deceive), or maybe
grave (,.As little as art is to be defined by any other element," says Adorno,
"it is someone who just deals in simulacrs-images for which there are no originals
simply identicalwith form" [AT, r4o]). (pre-Riemannian or Euclidean rivers), which in a way is what movie stars and
In this same modernist spirit, one might say that while "Automystifstical rnaybe all sights and sounds and words of verse are: electro-mechanizations
Plaice" is anecdotal, its connective tissue is material rather than [ormal, more oIthe world-picture.
acoustic or even percussive than narrative-think of it ;rs .t kirrtl ol pot\ma
mdco'
104 105

Where EP is Express Pdquette. Who plays, thatwhore, for larks. Your laundry list-and took away the twig. lmpressed, she
That open door ofMontparnasse. And Harpo Marx. These sparks Bathed the stranger in the stream where she had washed
that fly. And A s pneumatic-driven notes become electric quotes Her under things along with father's robes and brother's
from 1923. ln r94r it's done in spite of Paramount for Miss Lamarr. Cricket togs. But soon she realized she's left the list itself at home
And then it's done for Milstar in the sky or Disklavier that's clear With half the things the whisperer had spoken of. (K, ro6)
on time's uncertain rhymes. Twelve hundred measures in your file
I think of Matthias as the incarnation (perhaps better to say: the rejuvenation)
for sequencing. Select your samples from a hand-cranked siren and
of the rogue poer, a scholarly Petronius upending from within the gated com-
orchestral betl and biwing props. Prepare a click track and beware
munity of a universiry the hallowed or hollow missions, not to mention the
the signatures that change six hundred times. Calculate in
self-importance, of official culture, whether academic or literary, ail of course
milliseconds and deploy the sixteen retrofitted grands. Clap hands. (WP, za)
without those in charge knowing a thing about it, and now much too late to
On the afterlifeof Balletmdcanique: in the digital age "As pneumatic-driven stop it:
notes become electric quotes" driving both the satellite Milstar (launched in
Clans ofcourtesans and baseball fans hurrah
rggO) and Yamaha's pianolas that are synchronized by electromechanical so-
Among the tangled wires and brachia
lenoids and optical sensors, thereby making it possible at last to realize An-
The polys, seriations, pleonasms in extreme
theil's score as originally conceived.
Ofthe quantum ofthe zero ofthe one ofthe watcher
All of this tends toward the conclusion that John Matthias writes a special
Of the disambiguating
kind of comic poetry, different from Charles Bernstein's stand-up routines,
decoherence ofthe end ofthe beginning
Steve McCaffery's ludic wordplay, or David Antin's talk. l've mentioned that
and beginning ofthe end
the anecdote belongs to the common world of gossip, joking, the backsto-
Ofthe letrer ofthe law ofthe laughter of
ry, street-talk. Bakhtin would locate the anecdote within the topside-down the lawless . . . (K, tz6),+
history of laughter, which is to say among "the forms and variations of
parodic-travestying, indirect, conditional discourse" that have been the irre- "Laughter of the lawless": that's it, exactly. Let's hear it for the reprobate.
pressible gadflies ofthe serious, straightforward word, especiallysince Roman
times-"ltwas Rome," Bakhtin says, "that taught European culture to laugh
and ridicule."': (Recall that neither the Homeric heroes nor the church fathers
ever laugh, while "loking lesus" was born in an Irish pub.) Here is Matthias at
his most Roman, translating the 0dyssey into "Laundry Lists and Manifestoes"
(and Nausicaa into a California Girl)-

Meanwhile in the elsewhere, Nausicaa was playing

With her beach ball having done the wash and laid it out on
Rocks to dry: her thong, her super-low-cut jeans, her black-lace
Demi-bra and other things she's ordered from the catalogue
She read with flashlight underneath her sheet.
Suddenly a stranger came out ofthe bushes holding
lust a leaff twig to hide his genitals. She told him that her name was
Nausicaa and that she'd come to do the wash. Then
She asked to see his manifest. Alas, he said, l've lost it with
My ship and all my men, but you can put this on

ADDING GARBAGE
TO LANGUAGE
olr i. h. pnynnG's "not-youtt
f . H. Prynne's "Not-You" (1993) begins with two epigraphs, the first by David
Lewis and the second byThomas Nagel:
Truthfulness-by-silence is truthfulness, and expectation thereof is expectation of
truthfulness; but expectation of truthFulness-by-silence is not yet trust.
Love of semiconductors is not enough.'
point in this chapter is to see whether the first of these epigraphs
My starting
sheds any light, or has any bearing, on Prynne's recondite poem.' (Let us
bracket, for the present, the second epigraph.3) "Not-You" is made of a series
of austere, mostly minimalist lyrics whose arrangement seems to have been
given careful architectural attention. lt begins and ends with a series of eight
neatly lineated nine-line poems, each divided into three stanzas; in between
these book-ends are a number of free-verse and even fragmentary pieces, but
also a sequence of five eight-line lyrics, some of them with end-rhymes.a Ex-
egesis from scratch does not appear to be a useful way to approach this mate-
rial. So the idea here is to begin by asking what sort of material have we got in
this assembly. The epigraph from David Lewis (r94r-zoor), who is sometimes
t06
107
thought of as the Leibniz of twentieth-century analytic philosophy, may offer
some preliminary suggestions. Prynne is citing one of Lewis's essays, "Lan-
guages and Language" 0g1il, which takes up once more a question Lewis had
asked in his first book, Convention (1969): namely, "What is a language?" The
first form of Lewis's answer (in its analytic idiom) had looked like this: "L is
an actual language of P if and only if there prevails in P a convention of truth-
fulness in L, sustained by an interest in communication."s The idea is that a
language is not (just) a formal system for framing representations; it is also
a social activity governed by whatever it is that governs social practices so as
to ensure that a population P will hold these practices in common and do its
best to make them work. Lewis's definition aims to identifu the social condi-
tions that make an "actual" language L possible: specifically, "a convention of
truthfulness," that is, a presupposition (underwritten by "an interest in com-
munication") that a spoken or written sentence will be, whatever its defects,
true. (lt might be interesting to speculate, however contrary to Lewis's inten-
tions, as to what would follow from a practice of falsehood, or maybe just a
congenital failure of truthfulness: not surprisingly Swift's Gulliver'sTrqvels, with
its Houyhnhnms and Yahoos, springs to mind.) In the revised version of the
definition of L that appears in "Language and Languages," Lewis added the
necessity of trust: "My proposal is that the convention whereby a population
P uses a language L is a convention of truthfulness and trust in 1," where the ob-
ject oftrust is the truthfulness ofpropositions uttered in 1.6 Speaking, under-
standing, or having a language means, in other words, having confidence in
your conventions and practices (trusting, for example, that people more often
speak like Houyhnhnms than like Yahoos).7
Lewis's essay, "Language and Languages," is an attempt to answer, among
other things, a variety of unsurprising objections to his assertion of a "con-
vention of truthfulness," since, after all, much of human talk is not proposi-
tional (logical and cognitive) in its form but is "untruthful" in all sorts of free
and easy ways-irony, metaphor, hyperbole, joking, tall tales, and white lies
ilrc some of the "nonserious" utterances that Lewis mentions. Lewis does not
cxamine conditions, perhaps of the kind Samuel Beckett imagines, in which
,rrry confidence in language seems altogether foolhardy-a condition that,
r ounterintuitively, does not inhibit various kinds of garrulity (think of The Un-
mnoble). But Lewis does address an interesting issue, which he frames first as
.rrr objection to his thesis:
ofP; that is, the language that ought to count as
Oltjccrion. Let L be the language
rlrc most inclusive language used by P. (Assume that P is homogeneous.) Let L+
 109
108

by to very long and difficult

L: some extra sentences,
invite his enjoyment. Neither is a wicked irony to be dismissed out of hand:
be obtained adding gorbage
to pronounce, and hence never uttered by P, with arbitrary chosen meanings in depending on conditions, "truthfulness-by-silence" might be, in practice,
L+. Then it seems that L+ is a language used by P, which is absurd.
(My emphasis') hard to distinguish from one of its companions, for example, a mental reser-
A sentence never uttered at alt is a fortiori never uttered untruthfully. So vation once associated with the f esuits (can one trust silence?). But there is in
truthfulness-as-usual in L plus truthfulness-by-silence on the garbage sentences addition Lewis's intriguing concession (see note 8) that garbage sentences, de-
constitutes a kind of truthfulness in L+; and the expectation thereof constitutes spite appearances, enlarge the possibilities ofwhatcan count (logically, philo-
trust in L+. Therefore we have a prevailing regularity of truthfulness and trust in sophically) as a language. A garbage sentence, remember, is not false, if only
L+. This regularity quatifies as a convention in P sustained by an interest
in com-
by default ofnever being uttered in L (what is called "truthfulness-by-silence");
munication. (r87) nor, evidently for the same reason, does garbage conflict with the "interest in
communication" (being, after all, a possible-successful-speech-act in L+).
without trying to master the technicalities here, I want to extract the point
So the inference would be that, counterintuitively, we ought to judge Prynne's
that L+ is a language never "used" by a population (that is, anyone we know
own sentences, such as they are, if that is what they are, as philosophically
o0; it is obtained by adding garbage to a language we actually speak-"some ex-
justified according to analytic arguments that, paradoxically, these sentences
tra sentences, very long and difficult to pronounce, and hence never uttered
appear to confound and confuse, if only by shaking our trust in L. The upshot
by P. " What about this garbage? The objector proposes that garbage sentences
"con- is that coping with L+ (that is, coping with a language that we [P] do not use)
are not false; they are rather examples of"truthfulness-by-silence" that
is not a matter of mastering rules and understanding systems but a pragmotic
stitutes a kind oftruthfulness in L+; and the expectation thereofconstitutes
matter of trial and error, the more so because, after all, the problem is how to
trust in L+."
deal with a language to which garbage has been added, not just as a thought
Now part of Lewis's reply to this obiection is whatwe are given in Prynne's ep-
experiment (Lewis) but to make a poem (Prynne). lf I have this right, Prynne
igraph, to wiI "Truthfulness-by-silence is truthfulness, and expectation there-
is on the side of Lewis in thinking that, whatever our theories of language os
ofis expectation oftruthfulness; but expectation oftruthfulness-by-silence is
such might propose, 0 language is a practice with innumerable alternative pos-
notyettrust."The replycontinues: "Expectation of(successful) truthfulness-
sibilities as to how conventions of truthfulness, and so forth, might be, if not
expectation that a given sentence will not be uttered falsely-is a necessary
satisfied, then at least acknowledged and maybe even celebrated by the way we
but not sufficient condition for trust. There is no regularity oftrust in L+, so far
foolwith them (which is surelywhat Prynne is doing).'o
asthegorbagesenrcncesarcconcerned. Hence there is no convention of truthful-
ln any case, imagine this complexiry that I have just tried to describe (sup-
ness and trust in and L+ is not used by P" (r87; my emphasis)' The question
L+,
the posing that it makes some sense) as the conceptual background against which
is how to read the sentence "There is no regulariry oftrust in L+, so far as
or some of it, is that "Not-You" starts out:
garbage sentences are concerned." Evidently the difficulty,
garbage sentences render truthfulness (and therefore trust) vacuous, since The twins blink, hands set to thread out
there will never be an occasion in which such sentences are Put to use
"in any
a dipper cargo with tithium grease enhanced
reasonable sense" (Philos ophical Papers, r87), whatever that might mean.8 But to break under heat stress. Who knows
then of course there is the problem of what to do when garbage sentences
do turn up in one,s L. what might "adding garbage to language" actually
look what cares arise in double streaks, letting
the door slip to alternative danny boy in-
like? Naturally, since we are trying to read Prynne, thoughts fly to Poetry's
decision. She'lI cut one hand offto whack

the other same-day retread, leaving its mark

two transfiguration at femur tength. Ahead
possibly Prynne's choice of Lewis's difficult sentence as an epigraph for his
the twins consult, shade over upon shade. (P, :8:)
poem is just another instance of the wide range of his arcane discursive plea-
sures; or maybe it is iust the sound and shape of the wor<ls itl t hc cpigraph
that
110
Someone, but probably not David Lewis, might say that "conventions of truth-
fulness and trust, sustained by an interest in communication," urge us to read
these lines as a narrative (which is, in its Aristotelian form, a species of propo-
sitional language). This urge is what "trust in L" might be thought to entail.
So (we may ask) what about the twins? Are they assigned an assembly-line
task of tubricating tools or machinery, which is what "lithium grease" is
for? The verbal details in these lines are obviously in excess of anything so
straightforward-here the "dipper cargo" is "enhanced / to break under heat
stress,,,which makes a hash of "lithium grease"-but no doubt a certain inge-
nuity could continue to play about with possible plots: that the twins "blink,"
for example, might be a sign of hesitation or anxiety-who knows, after all,
"what cares arise in double streaks," as opposed to cares felt only in one? one
wonders whether "letting / the door slip to alternative danny boy in- /deci-
sion" turns on a colloquialism (concerning whether to head out the door or
not). Meanwhile the woman possessing (one infers) some sort meat-ax and
corresponding thoughts of dismemberment is cause enough for blinking. lt
may or may not be superfluous to add that ifyour hands are removed your up-
per limbs may no longer quite reach "femur length." Hence "the twins con-
sult, shade over upon shade," putting their heads together, cheek by jowl, try-
ing to decide what to do next. As for the bloody event: Arrive-t-il? In a possible
world perhaps.
Of course, one could also try to read the poem as if the twins were a pair of
eyes: possibilities, Iike worlds, are without number.
The problem with trying to make these nine lines come out true (in some
sense of truth as coherence) is that the effort, however customary in a disci-
ptinaryway, is as tedious procedure as it is trivial in its results. Besides, trying
a the old alchemist, wants to turn gangue into gold.) Traditional hermeneutics
to read garbage sentences as if they could be made into sentences of L seems
to be a way of missing the point of Prynne's invocation of David Lewis, whose
counsel, if I follow him, would be thatwe should tryto emigrate to the alterna-
tive universe in which L+ is a possible language instead of allegorizing garbage
by mapping onto it grids that fit the sentences we construct here at home'"
some semblance of an alternative world might be extracted from lean-
Frangois Lyotard's TheDffirend,with its conception of phrases whose linkages
"obey other regimens than the logical and the cognitive [and] can have stakes
other than the true," as in the case of parataxis, which for Lyotard is one of the
distinctive features of modernism:
The term lparataxlsignals a simple addition, the apposition of one term with the
"mod-
other, nothing more. Auerbach [Mimesis] turns this into a characteristic of
ern,,style, paratax, as opposed to classical syntax. collioirrt'tl hy rtrtd, phrases or
111
events follow each other, but their succession does not obey a categorical order
(because; if,rhen; in order to; olthough . . .). ;oined to the preceding one by ond, a phrase
rises out of nothingness to link up with it. Paratax thus connotes the abyss of
Not-Being which opens between phrases, it stresses the surprise that something
begins when what is said is said. And is the conjunction that most allows the con-
stitutive discontinuiqr (or oblivion) of time to threaten, while deffing it through
its equally constitutive continuity (or retention). . . . lnstead of and, and assuring
the same paratactic function, there can be a comma, or nothing. (D, 65-66)
Nothing, says Leibniz, is without reason. So whywrite paratactically? What un-
derwrites or justifies the juxtaposition rather than interconnection ofphras-
es? Not an easy question: parataxis is the figure or form ofwriting that defeats
the giving of reasons (the question of why) because it breaks up consecutive
reasoning (because,if-then,inorderto), which is to say itdefeats the integration
of parts into a whole, or the formation of contexts, on which intelligibility de-
pends (the venerable hermeneuticalcircle). Meaning just means belonging to
a context, but in parataxis the part is insubordinate to anything larger than
itself, which is the basic anarchic principle of fragmentary writing-writing in
which contexts fail to form. From a Leibnizian standpoint, the juxtaposition
rather than interconnection ofphrases is just adding garbage to [anguage.
Lyotard turns Leibniz's world upside-down. The purpose of paratax is: "To
save the phrase: extract it from the discourses in which it is subjugated and re-
strained by rules oflinking, enveloped in their gangue, seduced by their end"
(D, 68). ("Gangue" is the worthless material-sand, rock, or other impurities-
surrounding a mineral of interest. The OED calls it "the earthy or stony mat-
ter in a mineral deposit; the matrix in which an ore is found." Lyotard, like
"saves the text" (makes it come out true) by finding a reasonable place or con-
text for the aberrant phrases that inhabit it-what used to be called "allego-
ry." In Lyotard's hermeneutics freedom trumps truth. Paratax confers upon a
phrase-a word or meaning or maybe just the sound or shape of some lin-
guistic material-an autonomy otherwise foreclosed by the principles of in-
ternal necessity that motivate grammatical formations and lexical coherence
(hypotax).'' lnstead ofdisappearing into the crowd a phrase is, so to speak,
exhibited or theatricalized as a thing in itself.';
"Not-You" is, whatever else it is, a paratactic poem ofsaued phrases. Here
lre some samples: "he does well / at the promise line" (P, 384); "everything
titillates to the contrary" (e,385); "a pervasive overtone" (P,386); "portico
pay-outl Creep reductionl" (P,3BB); "refitcrooked intercession" (P,389); "to
strip choicc lornratior.r / front its blister pack" (P, 39t); "the flush deepens to
112 113

(P' :g8); "the Marking up assertion's vapour why don't

ingot words under / killed steel" (P, zsl); "some indrawn spine"
they gain back anyway, in belligerent cover
.lipsn.gs"ttheferrule" (p,4oz);"critical flowtore-mapasoftverge"(P,+oq).
sentence (or' more plan to tall command; front load later added
None oithese phrases is grammatically coherent with the
accurately, the period) that contains it; each is what one might call a singuloriry,
better to sour rack division. That's to sell
or for no
which is (in catastrophe theory) a point at which, without warning' out attainmentwashes at silver top debate,
to the contrary).'4
reason, something changes into something else ("titillates curtly in set-aside bit, bit, soon to beam
A singularity is a break in the order of things-where the word "break" is as
jailbreak or when one takes this family in main display. Few laps ring
much a term of freedom as of destruction, as in
job of work. And then of course there are "epis- the order teeming with order ranking, though
a break from one's routine or
or for all sad at critical flow to re-map a soft verge (P, 4o4)
temological breaks,,' as from one picture of the universe to another,
ofthat from one word to another, as when (see above) "overtone" usurps
the
How one might go about "Marking up assertion's vapour" is a nice question,
"tine breaks" are what poems are
semanticthrone of "undertone." Meanwhile unless one were to imagine that "assertion's vapour" is cousin to the nominal-
pages quite fearless:
made of, on which point "Not-You" is for a couple of ist's flatus yocis, which is one way to describe the material of Prynne's poem:
namely (in by no means a descending order of importance), phrases, words,
Her pan click
syllables, consonants, vowels, phonemes, letters-elements that in other
elb
contexts are defined by their work of mediation, but which here enjoy the free-
second fix
dom (or anarchy) that open or paratactic forms make possible.
forthem
pencil
breather Park
over
entertain this hermeneutic possibiliry, namely that we should try to
So let us
tatk at small to
read "Not-You" serially, that is, not by trying to integrate phrases into larger
better or yet
units (as we do in L) but to take them, willy-nilly, as they come (L+): fragments
in hours
that are not broken pieces of something conceivably whole but singulorities
boiling as
whose virtue lies in their abruptness, their interruptions ofusual sense, their
as sun wi[[ on
anomalous refusal ofany categorical order ofsuccession. Like "Not-You" as
ban
a whole, "Marking up assertion's vapour" is a series of small catastrophes-
herlinker'''(P'Sgz)
"why don't / they gain back anyway," "front load later added / better to sour
.,Not-You,,
Another way to Put this is that none of the phrases that make
up rack division," "to sell / out attainment washes," "curtly in set-aside bit, bit,
only or mainly in its "relation" to the soon to beam / this family in main display." The task would then be to pick
is (merely) nonsensical by itself but
line" every bit "new
phrar"s that surround it: "he does well at the promise is a up on things (anomalies, lunacies, echoes) thatwhirlwithin this turbulence.,6
that are re-
sentence,, in Ron silliman's famous description of constructions It seems important to advise that lohn Wilkinson, not to say Prynne him-
sistant to context-formation because of their "torque"
("promise" dislodging sel[, would reject this way of reading the poem as a "wallow in unearned prod-
,.finish,, is atorque,a singularity).,5The Point is doubly interesting igality" ("Counterfactual Prynne," r95), which would mean reading Prynne
the expected
because, with the exception of the fragments
just cited' Prynne frames his ec- as if he were just another "language poet" championing aleatory combina-
stanzaic
centric phrases within what look for all the world like conventional tions and "the rejection of closure." ln his "Letter to Steve McCaffery" Prynne
groups of eight nine-line poems that begin and end the stands against "the totalising rebuttal of grammar accompanied by an unca-
forms, particularly the
poem as a whole: rronical employment o[ its phrasal serialism" (44). Meanwhile in "Counter-
 115
114

in "Not-You" (or at least line clasp essentials," where "clasp" substitutes for "grasp," which idiomati-
factual Prynne" Wilkinson argues that the Poems
to an "algebra" ofthe kind cally is what one usually does with "essentials." The whole idea of "lines" is to
the first eight ofthem) are stiuctured according
and of thoughts when we keep them clear, but here the "sentence" is not an orderly sequence ofwords
that governs the combination of images in dreams
in W' R' Bion's terms' as in a line but a series ofoverlapping or self-interfering layers punctuated by a
are awake: "The poem's activity could be conceived'
sensory impression into a variety of echoes-"all the claim to same" is a local echo, whereas "to shun
marked by alpha-function, that is as processing
during the waking day" (tgS)' this terrible cure" is one of the many free infinitives that appear in "Not-You,"
dream-work which according to Bion is active
is going on despite' among and it reminds us that "seeking the cure" is idiomatic but not always the best
The idea is that a systematic linking of phrases
nouns [that proposes] course when it may prove lethal, as cures frequently do ("there are plagues in-
other things, "the deployment of uncontextualized
(rS8)''' Wilkinson doesn't tent on this" [386]).
connections made in a space we do not inhabit"
W' R' Bion's Learnin g from Experience:8 The poem continues:
give us a reference, Uut hL is thinking of
(or brain,s) alpha-function works on
I-f I und",,tand Bion,s theory, the mind,s Across clouded
in order to turn them
sensations or the elements of immediate experience skies the current lies at
up both our dreams
into cg-elements-memories, for example-that make crossed tiving abruptly, outshining
does not always function (or not
and our waking life. But the alpha-function the smart pulse in its sheltered prospect,
transformed into memories or
always in everyone). lf not, sensations are not not like shoes and food in a clamour of
calls these unused and unus-
materials we might dream or think with' Bion spent cases by rounding up
ablematerialsB-elements,whicharemorelikemerethingsthanthoughts. to the last place defence.
syntax or algebraic
So one might ask, arguing in favor of paratax rather than Each says the same, applying to take
up "Not-You" are not more
d"ep stru.irres, whether the phrases that make out ofthis bruised event the frame ofprovoked
thinglike phrases not ame-
like B-elements than oa-elements, that is, opaque' aversion. Ablative child care bleeds tonightl
nable to mentalfunctions-or, in David Lewis's
metaphor' garbage'
poem composed inwhat Sound and sense play off one another in a series of collisions, confusions,
Atthe centerof"Not-You" there is a thirty-two-line ..sentence,, reads as fol[ows:
,.free
verse.,, lts first
echoes, and turnabouts that keep the lines from forming a sentence, which
one might just as well cal[
they nevertheless threaten to do as thecurrentliesacrosscloudedskies,outshiningthe
With an eye turning for entry, mostwill smartbutshekered pulse,whileshoes andfood do their bitofclomoring, roundingup nothing
gather as others have, from the spicy bed loose norwinding downto alastditch defense, or words to that effect-all this, more-
ofa risingvertical trust: enough to clear over, against the recurring background noise of a bruised body's exposure to
line to line clasP essentials, all its undoing, or perhaps its dissolution into the fluid state:
the same to claim Plus set-off
They all got blood delay
to shun this terrible cure' (394)
at the wrist insert marker, lifting a cover
Are there meanings (or "readings") available
for the words or phrases that ap- over blackswilled albumen. (386)
what is the difference be-
pear in this paratactic arrangement? For example'
"Ablative child care bleeds tonight!" is one of the oddest of these echoes.
tvveenaneyethatturnsandonethatlooks?onelooksforanentrance,escape,
or event (say a noise or The line blares like a headline or marquee inviting us to come and watch. To
or opportunity, but one turns toward an apPearance
possibilities fan out in what noun does one's ear assign the adjective? Do I know or have I heard of
,ou.n1. lnstead of categorical orders of succession'
..turning,, could thus be a substitute for .,looking,,, as oblative children? The ablative case is one that most languages have lost, a fate
multiple directions.
.,trust,, could be a substitute ior "thrust" in the phrase that follows, depend- many children share. But the word is also a medical term: "ablation" means
playgrounds or herbal gar- removing the causes, symptoms, or consequences of some disease or disor-
ing on what we take "spicy beds" to be-erotic
"t'llotrlllt to clcar / line to dcr, which is what carc of children, but perhaps not in a day-care center, aims
dens? There is no context, only serial formations
116 ,r: 1;' 1i ;:'j t ,i. t17

to achieve (by blood-letting?). lncongruities accumulate the more one stares These lines (mostly) give us gentler, more subtle forms of motion, promises of
deferral or return ("winding / up to replace a slipped bracelet")-perhaps this
at the line, but that's what liberated phrases add up to, and it is what we are
meant to experience. The poem in any case shows that dissonance is a form of
even applies in some way to the "yawning astragal": "astragal" sounds pasto-
ral, coming as it does off the "mutual / fond delay" in which "the day advanc-
wit (which is, whatever else it is, an unexpected experience of meaning):
es," but in fact it is a piece of bone, the heel or "huckle-bone," from which dice
No grip frightens the one falling were once made-hence astragalomonq, the art of forecasting by the casting of
bymild derision, the acts have dice, which is an ancient form of "provision, " coping with the unforeseeable
been performed in mimic (as one must do with parataxis); butthe OfD abo lists it as an architectural term
troop tint delaY affront, there for section that separates different parts ofthe architrave in ornamental en-
a
is no default position at true discount tablatures (hence "yawning"). None of these possibilities, however, is meant
up to innumerably more. Stop the boat to displace the unfamiliar sound and look of the word itself, with its soft allu-
with a plug for floatation: the mothers assemble sion to the stars. The word is not a function but an experience.
at the sorting office, provably liquid he says On the facing page the poem either continues or is followed by another in
in pro tanto extinction. (394) the same free-verse form:

"No grip frightens the one falling" is, having the form ofa proverb, as true a From whose seed spread out
proposition as David Lewis could wish for. But it is one thing to fall and be bend and cut, in the field, in far

caught, quite another to be succeeded "by mild derision," among other non rows sideways

sequiturs. The term "anacoluthon" means "want of grammar," but the aim of partingwith the left
paratax (certainly in Prynne's case) is not just the mixing of word-salads but to hand, in plane or out over, the movement
play the meanings of words agoinst their syntactic positions, if only to see what ofa deep-shaded allocation: but grind
happens: "Stop the boat / with a plug for floatation": "boat" occupies the place at the back, to the root, ofone chilci
of "[eak," while "a plug" is not, strictly speaking, a floatation device, although in the profile sombre to black
properly placed it will prevent sinking the way a grip will keep someone fal[- where section presides willingly, so they

ing from descent. Meanwhile "the mothers assemble / at the sorting office," go to bend with the overt

no doubt searching for their ablative children (who are, as all of us are, "prov- sway of a little dust
ably liquid" and,"protqntg" [sooner or later], doomed to "extinction" like as- marked by croud
sertions that vaporize). Likewise, like a "default position" (but unlike falling, now invisible in the furious storm. (395)
with its horror of the fateful bottom), Something like the open distribution of a (rural) landscape seems to form in
Blind these lines without, however, cohering into a settled state of affairs. One has
wiltingly, no fear to wonder, amongotherthings, how"partingwith the left/ hand" differs from
transfer goes ahead
tripping the snug instep to a price floor,
partingwith the right, which somehow has a biblical intimation, as of sheep
From goats. Of course one parts with a hand that is cut of[, which seems to be
gentle planets counting, rates mounting, winding
the fate of hands in this poem, and notof hands only: atone pointsomeone or
up to replace a slipped bracelet. Thus in mutual
fond delay the daY advances something is "found dead in a bundle" (388). And then there is the recurrence
yawning astragal with due otthe child, who seems ablative just in the sense of being in a "profile sombre
race to provision beyond the fixed mark of to black." Occlusion is certainly a recurring effect-"Not-You" is a very cloudy
break-out liable detachment, laid apart. (394) ;roem, although here the cloud is made invisible by a "furious storm," which
118 "J ": '
;" l

ilt 119

iswhat happens when skies darken at midday, as do rooms at night or stairs at \ side the dentist's office, and which here seems to have overtaken the respira-
tory work of "intakes." The word perhaps invokes once more the background
their top, and as one's old mind does without warning ("darkness shades the
figure of a stressed body-"this once beaten frame," the "indrawn spine," the
witless question" [ao7]).
"cut-out hand," "fear," "missing parts / inturning as with new eyes" ("inturn-
The free-verse poems are, interestingly, followed by five eight-line lyrics,
the first, third, and fifth of which are distinctive for their end-rhymes:
ing," as in "indrawn" and "inlays"),
Of course, "background" is another word for "context," any formation
Their catch-up is slow and careful of which the poem aims to confound with its relentless miscombination of
to limit levels in thick shade words, many or some of which, depending on one's mood or frame of mind,
fallen there but untouched Yet ring "true" for comical rather than logical or cognitive reasons:
by the hot slants which fade
Both coming and going. On a stair
Based on new-for-old
organ barrage, alderwithout heartoryoung
or quickly the defined
cheese without bone (4o3)
several inlays make a breath
of so much ascent, in mind. (396) The organ here doesn'tsound like a Hammond, despite its "barrage"-maybe
it's a street grinder, unless it's a body part; the "alder without heart" might be
Adversely so far, so and
slight to salute the brow
the black alder, which does, however, have red berries; and "young / cheese
given, this once beaten frame
without bone" should not be waved aside with a superior gesture just because
will permit next to now it brings us up short (l'll have the young boneless cheese, please), as do these

some indrawn spine, in due

lines-
allowance. Match on less Avian protection like court plank / as much as I do (38a)
a
for the doorway, void of light they / don't think he's more casual by i the hour on low heat (387)
and even traPPed excess. (398) Finger prints up with the scratch attack (389)
to stay calm as / milk solids (aor)
Aswill go to staY back,
at a cute burr segment / able grains prevail (4oz)
to tell ofa cut-out hand
No acts / rot more slowly in memory (4o7)
which well and hardly long
in this, laying the band The Avian Protection Society is dedicated to the protection of parrots in pet
of colour marks, no thought stores (see http ://www. avianprotection. homestead.com/). But how "to stay
can swell a fear to rise calm as / milk solids"? Milk solids are the fat and proteins floating in your cup,
up to early missing Parts or mother's breast, and for all I know are conducive to sleep; but of course the
inturning as with new eYes. (4oo) poem isn't asking a question or even constructing a sentence-whatever it
is, "So to stay calm as / milk solids in defect control amendment" (4or) is a
Again, the point to mark is that the (relatively) closed verse-form of these lyr-
ics makes the paratactic play of their periods seem all the more aggressive.
complexity of thought rather than a complete one. The poem is just adding
garbage to language-"scratch attack," "able grains prevail"-bits of which,
There's no telling here whose "catch-up is slow"-one can imagine some fond
nevertheless, ring disturbingly true: "No acts / rot more slowly in memory"-
or maybe not-so-fond pursuit taking place up or down a stairway whose "thick
a phrase that surely opens up an endless series of possible worlds, in most of
shade,,is..untouchedyet/ bythe hotslants" of light; but in factnoword falls in
which I can do little without embarrassment.
comfortably with its fellows, leaving us not iust to wonder how "several inlays
make a breath / of so much ascent, in mind" but to puzzle over, among other
things, the word "inlays" itself, which is not a word onc cl]corlnters much ottt-
120 ,.",.': 1 21 .r ::..! ,::' ; r'i \:.1

indeterminacy, and of self-reference." Underdetermined texts, like Gertrude

Where does all of this leave us with respect to where we started, namely
Stein's, produce "eye-skid" and "mind-wilt.""
with David Lewis and his conventions of truthfulness and trust in L? A pos-
But of course McCaffery's position is not that the poetry that he writes and
sible answer is that for all of his miscombination of words in "Not-You," not
writes about is meaningless. He frequently cites Leon S. Roudiez's definition of
to mention the now legendary difficulry of his Poems as a whole, Prynne re-/
mains something of a realist with respect to the language in which he writes.
paragrammaticwriting whose "organization of words (and their denotations),
grammar, and syntax is challenged by the infinite possibilities provided by let-
Birgitta lohansson, for example, says that for Prynne "language is a window
ters or phonemes combining to form networks of significance not accessible
through which consciousness verbalises experiences in the world of available
reality, and that it is a means of uncovering the condition of being. The poet through conventional reading habits" (Nl, zo7). As McCaffery says, "Such fea-
tures of general economic operation as I've outlined do not destroy the order
formulates existential issues in endless combinations; 'the language of the
world' as Prynne terms it, is proper poetic diction."'g The phrase "living dabs of meaning, but complicate and unsettle its constitution and operation" (N I,
zo9). The idea (as in Lyotard's notion of phrasing) is to enlarge our concept
ofsky-colour" (:sS), after all, retains its "aboutness" despite its fragmentary
of meaning beyond the limits of the "logicaI and cognitive phrase regimens"
appearance. ln his "Letter to Steve McCaffery," Prynne is responding to some
whose purpose is to put a stop to the proliferation of meanings that we ex-
of McCaffery's essays in Northoflntention-for example, "Diminished Reference
perience in puns and anagrams, among other derangements of philosophical
and the Model Reader" and, particularly, "Writing as a General Economy,"
reason.
which draws upon Georges Bataille's concept of ddpense, the nonproductive
Perhaps one could split the difference between Prynne and McCaffery, or
expenditure of energy, which is an expenditure that cannot be utilized or for
between Wilkinson and the language poets, by invoking Alfred Jarry's 'Pata-
which one cannot expect a return as uPon an investment-a gratuitous expen-
physics, the "science of imaginary solutions, " which seeks out the anomalous
diture outside any economy of exchange- or use-value.'o It is predicated upon
"The Notion and the exception as against whatever belongs or fits in place.': Arguably Da-
a principle of loss rather than on the accumulation of capital. ln
of Dd.pense" Bataille lists jewetry, religious sacrifice, kinky sex, gambling, art, vid Lewis's doctrine of possible worlds and his preference for the pragmatic
as against the systematic is 'pataphysical just in the sense that for him real-
and (in particular) poetry as examples of free expenditure: "The term poetry,
applied to the least degraded and least intellectualized forms of expression of
ity requires us to inhabit, or at all events to imagine or anticipate, alternative
states of affairs. McCaffery thinks of poetry as a movement from the nomic to
a state of loss, can be considered synonymouswith expenditutelddpense);itin
the ludic, from categories and distinctions to the singular and irreducible (that
fact signifies, in the most precise way, creation by means of loss'"'' ln a word'
"poetic expenditure ceases to be symbolic in its consequences": here words which, as Adorno expresses it, is nonidentical with respect to itself). Prynne
cannot be exchanged for meanings, much less for things; instead they have thinks this is all very well but the nomic, the semantic, and the reference point
are ineliminable forces that, in any case, do not foreclose "innumerable com-
become events of communication, where the term "communication" means
binations within the mapping projection of the language surface and its fold-
contagion, as in "communicative disease"-something very different from
ings." How, after all, would we recognize the anomalous and the exception
what David Lewis had in mind'
prynne rejected this line of thought. of the language-centered poets whom (the nonidentical) except in the form of"S is P except in the case ofy"? Anarchy
is only possible in a rule-governed space; or, as the poet Christian Bdk says,
McCaffery is discussing, he writes: "None of them goes all the way to a general
"anomalies extrinsic to a system remain secretly intrinsic to such a system"-
economy of de-signification, not for lack of daring or will to testing extreme
and thereby confound its operations and deform its results: "The onomalos is
but because I believe that language itself finally resists this singularity"-that
the repressed part of a rule that ensures the rule does not work. ltis a dffirence
is (for prynne), language is a "pluralised system" whose operations are geared
which makes a difference and is thus synonymous with the cybernetic definition of
to ,,energetic over-determination": not loss but excess of meaning. "More-
,,there is scope for innumerable combinations within the i nterferential information-the very measure of surprise."24
over,,, he adds,
lnterferentialis a pun that one mightwellthink of applying to Prynne's meth-
mapping projection of the language surface and its foldings; yet external ref-
erence is one of its stabilising axes, just as are also the internal enrichments of
od or practice o[ putting words together by keeping them apart-running
122 ,., ,. ., q$::rrtr]

them one after another, not as if by chance but as ifwords were running inter-
ference for one another, warding offcapture by the system ofthe sentence'
ln
this respect one might say that Prynne extends or enlarges the conventions of
truthfulness and trust in language to include conditions offreedom that are
implicit in the very concept of possible worlds. Think of poetry in this event
as a practice of language that brings these conditions into play as
part of the

candor of poetic or, for all of that, human experience'

The cure is won across twice, in glitter

patches so cheap they thrill to each bidder,
staring ahead to the empty room where

brightness is born and tagged; to beat

the windows of the dYingYear's fast
turn to a faction cut-back. Ever so

smiling at this sudden real candour, ANOMALIES OF DURATION

what to shun of this set cure's topmost IN CONTEMPORARY POETRY
retort: remember me: and give now over (P, 39o)

Let us imagine a duration without any regular pattern. Nothing in it

would ever be recognizable, for nothingwould ever recur. ltwould
be a duration without measure of any sort, without entities, without
properties, without events-a void duration, a timeless chaos.
Kubler, TheSha pe of Time
-George

The poet Michael Palmer cites this passage from Kubler in "Period (Sense
of Duration)," a talk given in r98z whose topic is (roughly) "the inconstancy
and mutability of our measures" when it comes to our experience of sounds,
words, or constructions of any sort.' ln the background of his talk is the fact
that much of modern and contemporarywriting is an exploration of the con-
flict and interplay among temporal and spatial forms-perhaps most notably
in experiments in typography, collage, seriality, and line breaks. Palmer's talk
is itself interesting because of the way it drifts or meanders, and one is led to
ask whether the drift or the meander isn't a way of defeating the measurement
of duration. Drift, after all, is lateral rather than linear: being at sea, it means
idling or sidling until a breeze develops. If meandering has a rhythm it is be-
cause it winds like a river or a snake, but its path is usually aimless or passive

t23
124 f I ;j l-! i. ,i ":' ii : j:'r l! i
t 125

"meander" is related We pass through it in false flight, relieved

with respect to the surrounding terrain-etymologically
(or talk) mindlessly (wandering or rambling): to be there, to be bearing
to "maunder," which is to move
once again at least
Well the hearts are-is-
the tick ofthe cup at the Clarion
whereyou find'em
The coffee sPilled Clouds are not spheres we know
all over the table now and mountains not cones (6r)
a calculus of variations
I was taught (c. r95o) that poetry is Euclidean by nature-in school one learns
in itself chiefly scanning and the names of figures-but Palmer is interested in turbu-
bears no requirement lence and unpredictability, that is, singularities in which without warning a
as to number, form sequence of something turns into something else (catastrophe). Timekeep-
This error we insist on ers (clock-keepers would be a more accurate term) keep or capture very little,
as we insist on almost nothing, of time, which simply unfolds and never gets anywhere (or,
torn pockets, one like sound, it "has no boundary" but just dissipates). Meanwhile we are merely
passing through it "in false flight," idlers rather than refugees, stopping here
to each hiP
causing us to walk
and there, say at one ofthe links in the chain ofClarion hotels that dot the

somewhat differentlY
earth where we run up the "tick"-that is, tab-at the bar. ln his brief glance

than before' at "Fractal Song" the poet Albert Cook mentions that the last two lines are a
citation from the fractal king Benoit Mandelbrot.a "Sam said or said Sam" is (if
"Multiples." lts form
This unperiodic poem by Palmer is appropriately entitled I understand) a geometric as opposed to a random fractal (fr. L. for fragment); at
to
is perhips reflected in the figure of spilling, another movement indifferent any rate it is self-replicating, although perhaps not like a hotel chain.
Accordingly its cadences are irregular-in reading one is apt silently
,n.rrur".
orinvisiblytorewriteatleastoneofitslinestomakeitcomeoutright,.asto
its two or three
form or number," but this would deprive the poem of one of Emphasis cannot but claim that our experience of duration is real. When
pieces ofpunctuation, depending on how one reads the odd first line' Still'
hours, minutes and seconds drain away in front ofus as this sequence
Given the context of
ihe poernis divided neatly into three five-line stanzas. of nothings universalised into the measure oflife, then outworn iambs,
palmer's talk on duration, over which the number 7 mystically presides, one trochees and dactyls carry the promise of a real duration.
since the lines
could reflect on the numerical weight of 3 and 5, Particularly *Simon f arvis, "Prosody as Cognition"
syllables-one of the exceptions
are composed mostly of either three or five
turn: "a calculus of
being the line that gives the poem its principal conceptual
poem). (A "calculus of
variaiions,, (interestingty, the most melodic line in the Possibly a "calculus of variations" could be developed to measure Simon
thatthe poem
variations,, is a branch of higher mathematics.3) lt is no accident larvis's The Unconditionql: Alyric, a poem of some 240 pages (in very small point
,,Fractal is also a poem
on the page facing,.Multip[es,, is entitled Song,,,which
rype) that begins as follows:
about immeasurable durations:
Data float down; the own rote load doles out
I do not know where I will be in lulY a doubt-loud flow into the overload.
Sam said or said Sam Facts, moping at their blindness diurn, tread
the light to dumb muck for cash in one line.
The sound so measured has no boundary,
Hush dim glut nraking a linear red.
is not triangle or square
126
Hush now to a mindless luckY smash'
lnfi nitesimatlY aPerture
the single seamless of the done told world
or prise the top offthe creep in one dull'
Now, last lowvocative of the ending-cult,
blow out the Pilot light.
Disintermed iate the vocoders.
Empty this Plea of efflcacitY.s
As the endnote to the poem advises, "This poem is metrical" (heUnconditional,
z4z); thatis, it is mostly iambic all the way to the end with variations from
three to ten feet, and virtually each line sets up its own echo chamber. Depend-
ing on one's ear, the poem also articulates the paratactic idiom of "Cambridge
poetry," whose Homer is l. H. Prynne, who writes as follows in "Her Weasels
Wild Returning":
At leisure for losing outward in a glazed toplight
bringing milk in, another fire and pragma cape
upon them both; they'll give driven to marching
with wild fiery streak able. (P, 4to)
,,prosody as Cognition" in mind one could say that larvis's lyrical aim in
with
The Unconditional is to retrieve meter from the oblivion into which so much
of
modern and contemporary poetry is imagined to have cast it, and how more
dramatically to accomplish this than by writing a Poem that gives us, if noth-
ing else, the experience of time, both the footstep of its progress-"the own
rote load doles out / a doubt-loud flow into the overload"-as well as its in-
terminability? The poem begins in media res, and, although it stops eventu-
ally, it never really comes to a close: the last lines are a recitation of the initial
verse paragraph; the page that follows is a vast white space broken only by
the
orthographical marks of closed parentheses))))); the next Page is blank; the
final page contains the endnote. Whatever the beating temporality of the in-
dividual lines, the whole work occupies what one could call, borrowing from
Maurice Blanchot (the Newton ofparentheses), a vast entretemps that separates
a past that never was from the indecisive Messiah who postpones his real exis-
tence, bewildering those of us in the "ending-cult" who refuse to believe there
is no end of history.6 This open-ended betr,veen-time is felt most strongly in
those pages whose lines are unpunctuated by any period. ln an extensive (and
indispensable) review of The Unconditionol the poet lohn Wilkinson provides a
description ofthe poem that can't be bettered:
127 !:! 11 ;r i?} r': i i rj ,r' ;: i' il ir r {:i iit l;" ti i l* t: {} i: i ,.,1 -it! :j
To describe the poem's prosody in terms of its metrics would be inadequate, for
what it engenders in the reader's breast is far from the regularity and assurance
of Alexander Pope's numbers or from the stabbing and poking of a satirist like
charles churchill. when it comes to low-life novels it may be commonplace to talk
oFa literary experience as a roller-coaster ride, butTheuncondirionol fully justifies
the figure. Pages of impossibly headlong rhythm will be startlingly blocked, for
example, by three or more lines ending with the same monosyllabic word, and
after turning on this dime, will again charge off harum-scarum through a 3oo-
word rhyme-propelled sentence. The poem transits between rhyming couplets
and blank verse, with these transitions often near-imperceptible; caesuras are ex-
tremely rare and rhymes almost always monosyllabic, hence at once thumpingly
marking the lines' enjambment and rushing across such traffic calming measures.
Here are iambics with the insistence of rap.z
Recall Kubler: "Let us imagine a duration without any regular pattern. Nothing
in itwould be recognizable, because nothing it in would ever recu r." TheL)ncon-
ditionalis a poem of irregularities, but things do, in a manner of speaking, re-
cur. There are, as Wilkinson notes, fragments of a narrative whose characters
are named, wildly, "=x.," "Agramant," "Qnuxmuxkyl," and "lobless." But like
time the narrative, if that is what it is, is a sort of road movie that doesn't go
anywhere-randomness, contingency, interruption, singularities: these are
what time (and the poem) is made of.8 Near the very end of the poem each of
the characters is given a nine-line lyric in which, in some cases, there is the
sound of winding down or wrapping things up:
AGMMANT
I join no chorus; I pretend no love,
My book is written and my bills are paid.
Iseal up all my legacy in packs
I rubberize my fingerprint
and label tersely first before I send
some to a lasting name and some to dust.
Then I increase my fold or print of mind
burning all sectors which might hanker back
to any taste of origin or end. (TheUnconditional,46lT)
But otherwise The unconditionol is a prolonged middle that mirrors itself from
time to time in jokes about horizonless places-"So this is whatAllegory, Ne-
braska looks like" (rra)-and episodes that dissipate into cloudy air:
Light from a depressed angle swept far across the lake.
Small craft could over an expanse ofwater be seen
 q 129 t:tlfJti:.- t1:'
t2B li i ill ili 1
.ti

To give this line of thought another screw-turn, recall Zukofsky's assertion

Plying in apparently perfect contingency
read that a true poem expresses the condition of complete rest (presuppositions+, r3).
Lines whose written total may not be summed or
One could say that in a poem of one-word lines each word is (musically) at rest,
Forwhich purpose the pilots at Ieisure determined
under the breath a particularly when freed (as they almost always are) from any syntactical rela-
Long courses from port to port as though intoning
tion with words above or below. The opening word lines of "' A' -t 4" seem com-
relieving
[ong narrative whose parable in their objectivity and repose to the (rather more polysyllabic) words
lnterval or an interposition or an episode in an incomplete
in 8o Flowers-one of my favorite being "Lavender Cotto n" (CompleteShortpoetry,
charm
326). The poems in 8o Flowers are virtuallyverb-free and so are paratactic rather
Shadesinterstitiallyitschiefpleasureinacoolorshelteredtransitionor
than syntactic in their measure; likewise they are free of the words "the" and
subPlot
of their own final "a" that elsewhere Zukofsky says are as substantive as nouns.,, Accordingly,
Disowning its own crimes as the necessary condition
and in keeping with the paratactic arrangement, syllables in 8o Flowers are pre-
effacement
dominantly stressed, and to make things even more complex one could just
lntoacertaingreythatuncertainlyislitwithaconcealedsun(heUnconditional,
as comfortably read each line backward as from left to right. The odd thing is
153-54)
that the poem does not breakwith but rather gives a new turn to Zukofsky,s
*r!; "Statement for Poetry," namely that the musicality of poetry has little to do
with prosody's melodic metrical arrangements but derives from the words
Louis Zukofsky reading themselves. An ear for the nuances of duration is what makes the poet (preposi-
ln giving his talk on duration Palmer played a tape of
palmercalls.,harmonically one of the mostcomplex poems tions+, z3).': Zukofsky's one-word lines and the poems in 8o Flowers are experi-
his-,.,A,_ir,,,which
and (as Palmer ments in a seriality in which each word, given its unique internal arrangement
in English" (Codeof Signats,2$).s Each line scans differently'
rhymes and uncertain syn- of letters or syllables, is an autonomous duration, that is, a duration that does
notesj the combination of internal rhymes and end
not, strictly speaking, possess a before and after but is simply proper to itself:
taxproducesahighlyvariablemovement-"Theimageoftimesoproposed"'
254) ' Then there is "'A'-r4" anentretemps or, in Kugel's terms, "a duration without measure."
Palmer says, " is multi-directio nal" (Code of Signals' "
lines ("A"'
"beginning An," which starts out with four stanzas of one-word
to two- and then three-word lines that
Tq:rS),afterwhich the poem expands
to be horizontal
continue for more than forty pages' One imagines duration
How-given our Western conventions
(despite the waterclock and hourglass)' Herewearenow atthebeginning ofthe
measure the movement of a vertical poem? Palmer himself
of reading-to
,,(Ryokan,s scroll)" from l's (pronounced eyes),
thirdunit of the fourth large part of this alk.
cites zukJfsky,s similarly vertical More and more I have the feeling that we are getting
andsaysthatthe*u"rrr.ofits"lines"dependsupon"thequantityofindi- nowhere.
Lang reminds us that
vidual syllable s" (Codeofsignols,254))o Meanwhile Abigail *John Cage, "Lecture on Nothing"
forzukofskythesinglewordratherthantheline,breath,orstanzaisthebasic
each word is its own
unit of poeiry, and that, as Zukofsky said (to paraphrase)'
,rrrng"..ni-a fact that, unfortunately, frequently falls beneath the thresh- Zukofsky's vertical poems suggest a comparison with the British poet Tom
that a word is an ar-
old of our attention." A poem of one-word lines suggests Raworth'sAce (r97r):

rangementnotsomuchofsyllablesasofletters,andthatasinglelettercanbe
for that
thearbiterofwhatwordaparticularwordbecomesasitarrangesitselfonthe
page, which suggests in turn that the written or
printed word is rather more contest
of the llo
.ont"*t-fr.. than the spoken: the printed word "sea" is independent
be' rrrarl
predicate "he sees" in a way the spoken "sea" would not
 131
130

might
has seen
well
the island
for it
ends
let
he
go
she
un
it hand me
i
mygood man
i
i'ma
i
trinity Meanwhile, as often reported, Raworth reads this poem very rapidly, produc-
wins ing the sound-poem effect of a verbal stream rather than the staccato of line
by length breaks suggested by the printed page.'s (lmagine a speedpoem.) One could say
he said that the verticality of the poem is compromised both by one's own reading of
this line it, which is geared to sentence-formation between left and right margins, and
has no beginning by the poet's pell-mell performance. Relevant to this context are Raworth's
no short-duration poems in Big Slipperc 0n: Fourteen Poems-" Attitude," for exam-
end ple, is a two-second poem ("Attitudes must be interesting"),"Belt" is five sec-
for furniture onds in duration; others range from fourteen to twenty-five seconds.'6 Com-
that pare the following from Raworth's Mouing:
doesn't 8.o6 PM lune ro, r97o
breathe'a
Poeml7
"'A'-t4"'but other
This page of Ace seems more discursive, syntactical' than
or listlike: Or recallAram Saroyan's one-word poems-
prg.r rf,r, rr. relatively free of nouns are more elliptical
eyeye'8
nothing
behind Poetry cross the threshold into concrete poetry where simultaneity elimi-
-which
look nates the sense ofduration, or very nearly so: the peculiariry of"eyeye" is that
a the first three letters spell out the word "eye," as do the last three, but (as in
like Wittgenstein's duck-rabbit) only if one's focus moves from the one "eye" to
or is it the other, and back again. So "eyeye" could be said to possess a rhythm after
an an all.
but Ace, for all its top-to-bottom arrangement, is a poem in four "movements":

why " in think," "in mind," "in motion," "in place," together with a fare-thee-well ("Bo-

so livia: another end of ace"). In the first a nomad (or, more frequently, a"no I
there mad") has experiences like the following:
fore
no
because
mad
maybe if awakes
now
132 133

can also
we do not feel
mean
strangeness
PAUSE
he wakes
PAUSE
in terror
from a dream [. . .] Pause: as in obdurqte duration or, as Clark Coolidge says, ")bdurotion. Hard
he think time"-thirtyyears to life in a sequence of caesuras.2o
alone
in the honey
combo[...]

see clearly
Polyrhythms' spatialcounterpart, lack of (regular, traditional) closure as
nomad generative, tensions restored. lt foregrounds an artificial, constructed
your name process, a denatured measure of kinetic shifs, registers of differentiation.
nothing This pluralism of incident, refusing all packages-not "cut to fit"-a
new luxu;iant anarchy, a ful ler flowering or speclficity of internal rhyth ms and
see semantic red istributions.
as far as Andre ws, Paradise and Method: Poetics and Praxis
-Bruce
yucatan [. . .]

no
Steve McCaffery's "Beethoven Sonnets" is an arrhythmic poem about mu-
mad on
sic. lt begins by breaking up a musical term (rollentando) meant to indicate that
grass
time is gradually to be made slower:
breathing
returns to his
ralletand o you wagon lit vir
senses [. . .]
tuosa vox humana in two notes the
In the second movement, in which gendarme on thecornerofopus z
mr raworth where the provenance is the
continues symphony' s resumd the composer of
to believe naive styles is also the
every compositor of ennui which ends
thing atl codas"
possible
Naturally the question is: how to comprehend the temporality of McCaffery's
,,nomad a narrative hovering somewhere (but
/ meets ace," as if there were poem, which is a construction that requires us to measure (in pauses) the
apparently there is not).19 As in Zukofsky, each word is a poem unto itselfl, even
spaces that separate its words, syllables, and letters. But because the spaces
when it momentarily stops to coin a phrase or crack a joke, as at the outset of
are irregular, one confronts the spaces without a scale to time them. And since
"inmotion": the words defeat syntactical arrangements, one's reading, supposing it to be
butwhat silent, produces somethingvery like a verbovocovisual poem. The poem turns
is happening lhe reader into a sound poet Iike McCaffery himself in the sense that one has
134 ,t it .t) 1:t ,': i.: !'
"''.'.rli
il 135

to take the poem script to be converted into a kind oftheater, however

as a One and

private: that is (like one of lackson Mac Low's poems), one has to perform the one, two,

poem in order to read it." The space-breaks urge a syncopated performance' three.'3

And mind the jokes go- as You at the other end are the long lines composed by poet, painter, magi-
-while
it was an ear lier song in
cian, and circus clown Gerald Burns (d. 1998):
patois the tYmPani used suede the SURREALISM AT MENIL
ersatz finale wa s I acuna
is a dozen Cornell boxes including homages A ballet and the renaissance pinball,
d'amore die meistersinger [. . .]
broken
ctapping on his cactus Pant s panes; all frames ached to have been found, exhibiting themselves like faces in
violin and choral mausoleum Dante's
hell's lambent light, blue or pale peach-rose liquids in apothecary bottles never
monoc hrome in the motherland in
green or brightyellow,
communicado for strings and wind my
specimens always white, tinted by pickle. ln an adjacent chamber nail fetishes,
father's blue kite for ian
verygood ones,
hamilton finla Y it was
stood (vertically if littte men) furred with nails bigheaded and bent, a few blades,
no more tha n merelY
rusted to one
vowels from the violin via the
tone like Gillettes in a built-in motel tile slot. We frame it all as art. . . .'+
soiree (Seuen Poges, 83-84)

Except for its ludic character, this is not a representative poem of McCaffery's The poem refers to an exhibition of modern and contemporary art at the Menil

butonly because no two of his poems look (or sound) alike. As McCaffery says, Collection Museum in Houston, Texas, particularly some of Joseph Cornell's
"nomad- boxes, with their ballerinas and Medici portraits set among pinball machines,
he has "no steady poetics," rather he is Heraclitean or, as he prefers,
ic,,: have a constant stream of feelings and ideas that constantly change,
..1 among other found objects. Burns's poems are themselves filled with found
modifi and carry into action as techniques for living. what I try to do is under- objects, his idea being that anything can be a work ofart: all that is required is
stand this flux and develop for myself a thoroughly nomadic consciousness;
a that you pick it out from its surroundings-merely taking it up, as one would
mind in constant movement through stoppings and starts, with the corollary a stone or an article at a yard sale, is a kind of framing or staging that recon-

of a language art in permanent revolution, contradiction, paradox, and trans- textualizes the mere thing as an art object ("today in Goodwill / I saw a typed
form,, (seuen Pages, 35g). As per Kubler, his mind moves without any regular hornbook text on a wood paddle, under plastic laminate with upholsterer's
pattern, producing turbulence, complexity, random forms' tacks" [Shorrer Poems,37)). One virtue of Burns's long lines is they can carry a lot
ofstuff:

FIREPLACE POODLES

What's (Cavell in Arrspace) a proper subject for philosophy, profound question

you might revise
A line is the smallest unit of a poem which might collect dust'
to what is the difference between a proper subject for philosophy and ditto for
*Gerald Bums, "A Line Primer"
art [. . .]

It shouldn't matter what a museum has in it-anything, your kitchen chair

(certainly mine, spray-painted black over black to repair the damage done by
So at one end of the scale we have one-word poems, and minimalisms like
rubber-base enamel,
Robert CreeleY's "A Piece"
136 i, r,. :1. al ; i.. i' rii ! :.i

the bentwood chairs Flora Searcy gave me when lwas poor in Dallas ditto, from
their green and yellow Pea
to catch us up to deco), our Hopi teacup on a bookcase in the living room as iffor
reference.
It's magical to turn and see things [. . .]

Anderson's exPort tea caddies Iike

three-leaf clovers translated up leaving a plasma trail, lobate body in pewter
suggests a shaPe
to a sculptor's already a sublect, exPloited in the act ofrecognizing it as a subject
(Shorter Poems,' 4t)'s

These lines, despite enjambments, sound like prose, but Burns says that they
are "mixed measures" that can be scanned. ln an essay titled " Lines as Entities"
he writes (of an earlier poem made of seven-beat lines): "You can describe iust
^
about any syllable-stress line ifyou allow a below-line caret [ ] for off-syllable
" '
beats, the little cupshaped thinry [ ] for light stress, plus acute [ ] and grave NOMAD POETRY
.
[ ] accents. My own is a measure occupying a felt duration"
(AThing AboutLan-

guage, 4o). He cites a letter from Donald Hall, who says that he can't see or hear
anything metrical in Burns's lines-"'l don't call it meter. I would only call
(AThingAboutLanguage, +o). To
ludic miscellany f nom steve mccaff ery
meterthatwhich can be reduced to arithmetic"'
which Burns replies that mixed measure is "anomalous by definition," but it
a
is nevertheless a system. "l realize that given Creeley Snyder Olson and always A nomadic consciousness welcomes the unsettled, the debrisured and
pound that my favoring of a regular line at all is counter-Modernist. . . . [Never- disintegrative and feels the need to experience incompatibles together

theless] I think making the line in that old Yeatsy classroom sense is still nearly -Steve
McCaffery, "Poetics: A Statement"

the best thing to be about" (AThingAboutLanguage, 4l-42).

"The Abstract Ruin" (r97r-78) is one of Steve McCaffery's unfinished long po-
ITSELF DEFINED
ems, only pieces of which have appeared in print. In a note to the poem Mc-
I sdw an 6ggshaped stdinless c6ntin6ntaI c6ffeemdker, orgdnic as this
a weaving (not
Caffery says that his work is not "a composition with words" but
p6ppershdker sh6wing
exactly together) of "found texts" (SPM, 372-:3).'To which he adds that the
sdxifrage dppositif6tia, fivepetaled it seems, the risual fiit r6seleaf sh6pe, c6ming poem is a serialwork-in-process that "is expanding non-developmentally and
to P6ints crying out for tighter coherence. lt is self-generating towards a randomness
(the s6tt is bdrage, sdt before r6al ivy in wicker, unndticed becduse not p6rcelain) which may or may not be exciting in itself" (SPM, 372). Randomness (that is,
and s6 singularities):wanderingwords ratherthanwords fixed in place. "TheAbstract
we s6e the 0npredictabitity ofwhat c6nstitutes a sdt (5horrcr Poems,36)
Ruin" is, to all appearances, a "nomadic" poem-a poem made of variables
placed in a constant state ofvariation.'
Anomqlous meter sounds a bit like Williams's "variable foot," or say it sounds
The part of the poem published in the second volume of McCaffery's Seven
about right: the anomaly or exception is extrinsic to the system of which it is,
Poges Missing, "on glossolalia" (SPM, 372), is something like an archaeology
as Christian Bok says, "secretly intrinsic."'6 And so, as Michael Palmer would
con- that traces the Babel-like dispersal of languages from prehistoric times (and
say, we see the unpredictability, or perhaps the immeasLrrability, of what
stitutes a measure, or duration.
places)-

I :l /
138 {l}{!ir}t{il'l?i11,*
il 139

In the mouth ofthe cave, in sPeech local archaicisms of escarpment

known as the Grotte du Renne, at Arcy sur Cure
in the valley ofYonne tvvo thousand postholes . . . (SPM, too)
classical antiquity-
-through
From Kentum through the Satem
the end ofTocharian in the documents of Hesiod
Herodotus atAthens in an Attic branch
the four tesseras in lonian into the Koine
tilt the long migrations through the place names
pronouns in speech apart the bodies ofthe walkers
journeys through Cettiberian destroying Detphi,
Rome, the region of the Galatia. . . '
a northern European darkness:
-into
abandoning the sites at
Rhine, Main, Melibokus and Worms
the Churwelsh heard in Rhaetia, forms of the tongue in
Breton, the Ogham sticks a melting down
into Germanic time ladders
warped northeastern shores of
Elbe where speech cannot move the deich to the taihun.
of farmsteads seen vertically still in situ
the bronze circle ofCarlisle inside a coin
beside magnetic
consonants of total weight. (sPM, ro4)
Carlisle is a city in cumbria in the north of England, and likewise the name of
a nearby castle, possibly memorialized on a coin, But what might.,magnetic
/
consonants" attract? (No doubt the attention ofyoung children passing by a
refrigerator door to which magnetic m's and p's are attached.)
Recall the epigraph above-"A nomadic consciousness welcomes the un-
settled, the debrisured [unhinged] and disintegrative and feels the need to ex-
perience incompatibles together." Mccaffery is a nomadic contriver of verbal
catastrophes, not only the usual confusions of words and things, numbers
and tongues (and occasional puns)-
Semantic fadings in South Africa blank spaces
cut out
time appears in a specific number the word
"thousand" said in seconds the symbol to conundrum
countless beavers letters on the faces ofwomen
bodies of type implanted vowels for their movement
fading pictures in the phones a sequence lost
(SPM, to5) toliveon...

"History," McCaffery says in his note to the Poem, "is essentially a linguistic especially the demonic inventions of acoustic verse:
-but
thing" (SPM, 37r), but perhaps not simply because it is filled with exotic place hebdomenda ennenenta
names. Languages wander and split, as when lndo-European divides the num- yan tan tethera oethera pimp five
ber ten into lrish "deich and Gothic "taihun." lmagine the state of things if
six sethera lethera hovera covera dik ten
numbers could not survive the mortality of their incarnations.3 eleven yan a dik tan a dik-bumpit fifteen
Likewise "The Abstract Ruin" is itself a dispersion of fragmentary epi-
sixteen yan a bumpit-figitt twenty (SpM, ro6)
phenomena-for example, "a sleep-inducing syntax" (SPM, ror). Which might
be a tautolory, since syntax is made of repetitions, or at all events it assimilates Not surprisingly, nomads appear in "The Abstract Ruin," practicing their
words into rational and predictable formations. A syntax of surprises could not ebb and flow-
proceed without interruption. Another fragment gives us "the word badbh / They had never known a city
committed to writing" (SPM, roz). Badbh (from an Old lrish word for "crow") is only page and shifting pronouns street gangs
the name of an lrish goddess who can suck the warmth out ofyour body. Possi- through the utterances and times
bly committing her name to writing is a magicaI form of self-defense. Or, again:
"a janiform tense / of pastoral declension" (SPM, ro3). Whatever is "janiform" when they were men with voices

is two-faced. A pastoral declension might proceed as follows: bucolicus,bucolica, limbs in common with

bucolicum. Or it might be a vernacular refusal of courtly love. Meanwhile, humanity

1 40 t:'r; l ;:, I.ii :, ii ; i. i:

but on the frontiers ofthe verb
rhey stopped (StUt, ro5)
lmagine a philosopher saying, "The limits of my language are the limits of no
man's land," where words come to an end. The nomads, if that is what they
are, are elsewhere, maybe "on their way to language" (derWegzurSprache), or
waiting restlessly on a verbal frontier for some kind of Pentecostalevent:
"The Elsewhere of Meaning" is the title of a brief essay by McCaffery on lappe-
ments d ls lune, a collection of eight short poems by the Quebecois poet and
playwright Claude Cauvreau Qgz5-7r), one ofwhich reads as follows:
n16m atila atiglagla 916 6mect tufachiraglau dgondz-apanoir tufirupipldthatgou-
loumeirector ezdannz ezddoucrdmouacptteu pif-legoulem 6z nionfan nimarulta
apiviavovioc tutul Iatranerre ddgwobz choutss striglanima uculpt treflagamon4

They were the settlers here the pioneers McCaffery describes this poem as "an unmediated inscription of the materi-
who took ality of the letter" (Nl, r7r). This materialiry enhils the idea that none of the
page for their land. . . .
letters is to be spoken or heard as a phoneme but is just meant to be seen:
"thelappements are decidedly not sound poems; they are texts to be understood
Their speech a common code
primarily as a writing, a differentialorganization and dissemination of sound
ofsneezes gargles
under the specific conditions of inscription and within an extended theory of
a curious wink ofthe eye.
the image" (NI, r7r). "lmage" here is to be taken in the surreal sense of some-
They hold hands when they leave thing retinal that has ceased to be ofanything. Gauvreau was a member of the
and on the margins of some shoreline automatistes, a Canadian offshoot ofthe French surrealists, and he developed a
kneel for rninutes in a private speech. theory of the "explorational image," in which (as McCaffery figures it) "a total
transformation of the elements occurs to such a degree that they are no longer
lfa sky turns grey their hands
recognizable" (Nl, r73). Adorno's nonidenticalthing (ofwhich we do not know
go cold and follow
what it is) is once more in play (AT, rr4).
their parents to the station.
The paradox that interests McCaffery is that letters that fail to combine into
When the grarnmar arrives they come back words are nevertheless not meaningless, since it is impossible (or self-contra-
in six weeks for three hours dictory) for a letter to be unintelligible: we know it, whichever one it is, for
at a time. what it is, if not always, given the odd context, what it is for. Thus/ oppements are
not just scribbles; rather, as McCaffery says, the letters "serve as graphic indica-
They stay outside words
rions not entirely contained within the category of 'meaning' but constantly
in warm ink or milk
suggesting it as a juxtaposed elsewhere" (Nl, r75). Recall Mallarm6's concep-
and soon l1yiys
tion of the alphabet as a system that contains within itself the metaphysical
at land or speech possibility of allbook-an idea that lorge Luis Borges elaborates or parodies
or in America. (SpM, rog_9) in his story "The Libraryof Babel," where the universe is a "total library" whose
"shelves contain all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthograph-
lmpossible to construct a narrative thatwould contain these (or any of the
ical symbols (whose number, though vast, is not infinite); that is, everything
poem's) lines, which are full of anomalies, as "When the grammar arrives ' ' '":
that can be expressed, in all languages."s
imagine such an arrival-no doubt of a regiment (recall the famous etymol-
Meanwhile the word " jappement" is onomatopoetic, beingthe sound a small
ogr of syntax). Or imagine arriving at speech, as if at a crossroads or crisis; or
dog makes (yapping at the moon), but its English equivalent also refers to talk
at an American frontier, which requires one to begin all over again: itineration
that is not so much meaningless as idle or endless (going nowhere).6 Hei-
becomes itineration.
degger'sGerede comes to mind, "idle talk" being thatwhich everyone has heard
before because it is in everyone's mouth: buzz or chatter that is passed along
without thinkirrg./ ldle talk is perfectly intelligible, and utterly insignificant.
142
Heidegger says that it is "the possibility of understanding everything without
previously making the thing one's own" (Being andTime, zr3). Heidegger's dos
Mon is oblivious with respect to language, to which Dosein alone can give its ear.
Of course if we follow this line of thought the title of Gauvreau's poem be-
comes ironic, or-much to the same point-his poem becomes satirical with
respect to talk, whose distinctive feature is its transparency, its inability to
bring anyone up short; whereas Jappements dlqlune is, among other things, un-
speakable, not to say inaccessible except across an extended aesthetic distance
where it reposes sui generis-something other than even a Lettriste Poem, to
which it bears some resemblance without being a member of the family: in
other words, singular and irreducible, notwithstanding the fact that, as an 0u-
rhor's composition, it is entirely superfluous, since it already exists on one of
the shelves in Borges's universal library, where it would be virtually indistin-
guishable from among the vast number of typographical variants that would
naturally surround it.
McCaffery's "Three Stanzas" (rgZS) is worth citing in this context:
i.
pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis
ii.
aequeosalinocalcalinoceraceoaluminosocupreovitriolic
ii i.
lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimhypot-
rimmatosilphioparaomelitokatakechymenokichlepikos-
syphophattoperisteralektryonoptekephalliokigklopelei-
M, zzz)
olagooiosiraiobaphetraganopterygon (SP
It would take some practice to turn this into a sound poem, but doubtless
McCaffery could do it. Unlike Gauvreau's lappements, the letters that make up
"Three Stanzas" occasionally coalesce into words ("microscopic," "volcano,"
"vitriolic"), although the last stanza is headed elsewhere, perhaps toward a
possible world in which "traganopterygon" is a many-sided illusion.
McCaffery's "Apropriopriapus: Prefatory Notes on Stein & the Language Hy-
giene Program" 0gZz-lZ) calls our attention to a disorder known as "semi-
vision":
semivision is adjectival retinal illusion-a typographically indtrccd condition aris-
ingfromcontinuedexposuretothelangttagevirtrs. llowst('illw;tstltclirstperson
143
to recognize these viral capacities of language and to see how they were funda-
mentally connected to the referring function of words when a word is granted the
power to signi! it's given the liberty to assume a role as active virus extending se-
mantically along a trajectory out of itself into exterior (nonverbal and therefore
uncontaminated) reality the world that it "verbalizes" becomes unwitting host to
the viral activity that will eventually destroy it. (SPM, r99)
The idea of a "language virus" belongs to William S. Burroughs. ln "The Ameri-
can Non-Dream" 0S6S) Burroughs proposed that languages are essentially
forms of social control, but some are worse than others. Modern syllabic
languages are more insidious than earlier hieroglyphic ones, because, being
more phonetic than visual, theyget inside us more easily and take us over more
completely. "An essential feature ofthe Western control machine," Burroughs
writes, "is to make language as non -pictoriolas possible."s As ifthe transparency
of language made it more difficult to resist it, whence it would follow that the
destruction of transparency would be an achievement of freedom, or at any
rate a form of cure, which is what Burroughs soughtwith his dada-like practice
of cut-ups: breaking up texts and randomly recombining their elements.
(Deleuze and Guattari: "Language is made not to be believed but to be
obeyed. . . . Words are nottools, yetwe give children language, pens, and note-
books as we give workers shovels and pickaxes. A rule of grammar is a power
marker before it is a syntactical marker. The order does not refer to prior sig-
nifications or to a prior organization of distinctive units. Quite the opposite.
lnformation is only the strict minimum necessary for the emission, transmis-
sion, and observation of orders as commands."e)
However, McCaffery introduces a modification into this line of thinking:
language does not just infect the hosts who have internalized it; its predica-
tions consume the world of things (and people) as well. Recall Maurice Blan-
chot's critique of Hegel's dialectic in which the naming of anything, even mere
reference to it, is likened to murder:
For me to be able to say, "This woman," I must somehow take her flesh-and-blood
reality away from her, cause her to be absent, annihilate her. The word gives me
the being, but it gives it to me deprived of being. The word is the absence of that
being, its nothingness, what is left of it when it has lost being-the very fact that
itdoesnotexist....lnatextdatingfrombeforeThePhenomenologyHegel...writes:
"Adam's first act, which made him master of the animals, was to give them names,
that is, he annihilated them in their existence (as existing creatures)." Hegel
means that from that moment on, the cat ceased to be a uniquely real cat and be-
came an idea as well. (WF, 323-24)
144 :;' 145

As carriers of language, we are the instruments of its devastation: "When I If it and as if it, if it or as if it, if it is as if it, and it is as if it and as if it. or as if it.

speak," Blanchot says, "death speaks in me. My speech is a warning that at this More as if it. As more As more, as if it. And if it. And for and as if it.
very momentdeath is loose in theworld, thatithas suddenlyappeared between If it was to be a prize a surprise if it was to be a surprise to realize, if it was to be
me and the being I address. . . . Death alone allows me to grasp what I want to if itwereto be, was itto be. Whatwas itto be. ltwas to bewhatitwas.
attain: it exists in words as the only way they can have meaning" (WF, 325)' And it was. 5o it was. As it was. As it is. ls it as it as. It is and as it is and as it is. And
However-here is Blanchot's main point, and McCaffery's as well-we can so and so as itwas.
nevertheless save things from this work of negation, and ourselves from com- Keep it in sight all right.
plicity, by turning (in writing) against transparency: Not to the future but to the fuchsia. (WL, zz8)

My hope lBlanchot says] lies in the materiality of language, in the fact that words since the nouns are for playing rather than naming or portraying or say-
-but
are things, too, are a kind ofnature. . . . Just now the reality ofwords was an ob- ing something of someone, the language virus is contained or dormant, and
stacle. Now, it is my only chance. A name ceases to be the ephemeral passing of Carl Van Vechten is saved. More radical is the later poem, Stcnzos in Meditation:
nonexistence and becomes a concrete ball, a solid mass of existence; language,
abandoning the sense, the meaning which is all it wanted to be, tries to become STANZA XXIX

senseless. Everything physical takes precedence: rhythm, weight, mass, shape, What lwish to say is this of course
and then the paper on which one writes, the ink, the book. (wF ' 327) It is the same of course
Not yet oIcourse
Much of literature, to be sure, is "turned toward the movement of negation
But which they will not only yet
by which things are separated from themselves and destroyed in order to be
Ofcourse.
known, subjugated, and communicated" (WF, 33o). Blanchot thinks of this as
This brings me back to this of course.
literature that inhabits the light of day illuminated by Hegel's Spirit-most
It is the same of course it is the same
novels, or any "meaningful prose" (WF, 332), or indeed the whole Aristotelian
Now even not the name
line of mythos and mimesis. But poetry of a certain kind (Blanchot will men-
which
tion Ma[[arm6 and Francis Ponge) "allies itself with the realiry of language, it
But which is it when they gathered
A broad black butterfly is white with this.
makes language into matter without contour, content without form, a force
Which is which which of course
that is capricious and impersonal and says nothing, reveals nothing, simply
Did which of course
announces-through its refusal to say anything-that it comes from the
Why lwish to say in reason is this.
night and will return to the night" (WF, 33o)'
When they begin and I begin and win
McCaffery says that Gertrude Stein "was the first to recognize these viral ca-
Win which of course.
pacities of language"; she was in any case among the first to put into play the
It is easy to say easily.
"Language Hygiene Program," and she did so in a way that anticipated Blan-
That this is the same in which I do not do not like the name
chot. Her idea was to restore the singularity of things (and people) by eliminat-
Which wind of course. (SM, r8r-82)
ing (largely if not entirely) the use of nouns: "And so inTender Buttons and then
on and on I struggled with the ridding myself of nouns, I knew nouns must go Notice that a full-fledged noun, when it appears, suffers a kind of de-nomina-
in poetry as they had gone in prose if anything that is everything is to go on tion: "A broad black butterfly is white with this." White with what? you may
meaning something"("Poetry and Grammar" [WL, r+S]). As for prose, "Van or that is, not a functional
ask, but the this is, like the poem itself, a word-event,
Twenty Years After: A Second Portrait ofCarl Van Vechten" (r923) contains a few pointer but a singular word passing freely in a medium of white space, but al-
nouns- lowing nevertheless for a certain ludic reading: "What I wish to say is this of
Twenty years after, as much as twenty years after in as t.ltttch as twcn ty years after, course," as opposed to thotof course. "lt is the same of course," this one and
after twentyyears and so on. lt is it is it is it is. on ly oFcourse, because not each ofcourse is identical to every other.
146 {i${r+}r'*r,lti,t!ri
il
Here we need to consult Gertrude stein at one of her most philosophical
points: "l am inclined to believe there is no such thing as repetition" (WL, too).
Each "which" in "Which is which which of course" is different because each
receives a different emphasis (which of the two "whiches" is the "which" you
mean to say?). Speaking of her portraits she writes: "lf this existence is this
thing is actually existing there can be no repetition. There is only repetition
when there are descriptions being given of these things not when the things
themselves are actually existing and this is therefore how my portrait writing
began" (WL, roz). Stanzssin Medit0tion aPPlies this same principle of singularity
to words, and in particular to words other than nouns-although it is also true
that nouns for stein (as for her mentor, william James) are not to be thought
of as concepts or categories but as loose terms susceptible to shifting like pro-
nouns. ln any event, emphasis that changes from word to word (whatever the
word) breaks the routine of repetition. Moreover, emphasis is what replaces
syntax as the way to put words together. Thus language is freed from its preda-
tory function of predication-and so are we.
As a hygienic practice, McCaffery's Poems might be said to explore forms of
impossibiliry (supposingwe actually know what this word means, orwhat condi-
tions bringthe impossible into play). Agood textforstudy in this regard might
be McCaffery'sTheoriesofsediment (r99r), which contains a number of poems in
prose whose words are almost always, in various ways, at cross-purposes with
the sentences that combine them-for example, "Hegel's Eyes," whose first
segment ("The Code of System Four") begins as follows:
we entered a city consisting entirely of grey thursday mornings. But the verb en-
ter seems partly inappropriate plus appropriate itself seems wrong. So it would
be wrong to say the city itsetfcould be entered though all its thursdays are grey
and though grey itself consists entirely of its mornings. Today then is the morning
when the verb to enter will seem wrong. Today as the day plus all the inappropri-
ate parts themselves that still seem proPer.
So we can leave the city alone. Plus by ourselves. And having reached another
city on a day like any other day we can stoP to say we can drop in on a day whose
morning registers an off-white mood entirely. Plus we can entered a
say we have
verb which seems wrong and wrong in the entirely correct sense of wrong. Wrong
being wrong and day being day. Hence tautological' Plus inappropriate' (TS, rr)
Assume this as a poetic principle: The breakdown of human beings is (variably)
tragic, pathetic, mental, mechanical, inevitable, atr<l so lortlr, l;ttt the break-
147
down of systems is invariably comic-or, as McCaffery would prefer, ludic (a
word, according to the 0ED, that was first used in English in r94r, in a diction-
ary of psychiatric terms, and which refers to the pointless expenditure of en-
ergy;lunaticcomesquicklyto mind, alongof coursewith ludicrous);o Of course,
Samuel Beckett's dilapidated characters are canonically comical-they are,
after all, clownlike-but unlike one of Beckett's narrators the speaker in the
text above seems like one of philosophy's disengaged obsewers of "the pass-
ing show""-so disengaged as to be undisturbed by what passes (impossibly,
incongruously) for a fact, as when "Eighty-six windows show the noun to be a
house" (TS, z9). Characteristically, McCaffery's text is a fabric of category mis-
takes- "That then is the cheese you asked for in linguistics" (TS, :Z).
Taking a cue from the poem's title, we could imagine a world in which
Hegel's system begins malfunctioning, so that instead of working dialecti-
cally to produce a coherent totality, words and things, concepts and events,
grammar and narrative, run afouI of one another. Each segment of "Hegel's
Eyes" seems to explore some version of misrule, as in "Collateral Mimesis with
Subordinated Ambiguity," which offers us "Contradictory formats throughout
each semantic space":
Proper names: withheld. Prolepsis on demand at horizon analogue aperture.
Clinamen remains classic but developing hydro-concave algorithms as accredited
mutisms. SociaI systems accessed via prior deletions. Amalgamated sememes
incorporating zero referential certainty. Governing code word: Voltaire. Pronoun
connection: siamese. Errant synthesis as fo[[ows:
tough thea eaditor auph tie foughnotipick
jolonal: Syrhh, eye obzewe yew proepeaux
two introwduice ay nue sissedem ov righting
bigh whitch ue eckspres oanly theigh sowneds
anned not thee orthoggrafey oph they wurds
butt igh phthink ugh gow to fare inn
cheighnjing owr thyme-onird alphahbeat (TS, r8)
Read these last seven lines aloud and you will notice that they comprise a let-
ter to an editor complaining against a project to introduce, in defiance of the
law of noncontradiction, a nonvisual form ofwriting.'' Perhaps such a project,
whatever it might look like (or not), would be meant to avert the following
(" Discrete Taxonomic Focus") :
Entomologically a class of non-reliable bodies incorporating energy reversal
systems: puns, palindromes, chiasma, fissures, verbo-voco body traps through
148
ecophonesis, pragmatographia triggered to koiros ("il momento buono") concu-
binage of dissimilar lard-packs or polyptoton through teguments inducing tem-
porary cacosyntheton (TS, z4)
An energy reversal system would be, for example, a species of echolalia, as are,
in their different ways, puns, palindromes, chiasma, among other figures of
speech (like polyptotons); and of course reverberations and repercussions
come to mind, as well as the endless cacophenomena that bedevil one's life
and times, and which pragmatographia (writing down actions and events)
would record-if possible. The difficulty is that the rule of identity that is said
to drive the Geistesgeschichte on its way has been suspended, whence identity is
indistinguishable from entropy:
Competitions of speed and the body of police coercive and compulsive, effica-
cious and effective, beginning at the same particular place and leading to the
monotonous, uniform, unchanged and identical same dot. Lines alongwhich the
people move do not begin and are said to end at the monotonous, uniform, un-
changed and identicaI same dot with the same weariness conforming to the same
rule unmodified undiversified sufferance and exhibition ofno change no fluctua-
tion from the previous state ofconsideration. (TS, z5)
To which a philosopher might respond that McCaffery's poetry reverses the
logicalenergy that holds together our conceptualschemes, turning thinglike
words loose in (on?) the world, producing an infernal (or maybe purgatorial)
chaos, as in the title poem, "Theory of Sediment":
Welked moons through portage flowing. Stone surged pestilence is singed. Foul
thicket's rabblement burnt in. There is a height a felness would affray. Waste mea-
sures tolled or bleak cast-logs on ground. Stretched foot to seeming head-craig
handiworks. Wine-wind trussed opened cleft from sea-deep angry leak. Root-stop
in mood and muled-swart suture. Head-hinders shouldering a heaved on-nape.
Down glow and pierce flank tributary lair. Flint-pan to ice. Shard cities sink. Each-
other once as eye poised hitl is set. Mustered by wile. Flood herded tread infran-
gible on nouns. (TS,93)
"fabric of category mistakes." One could make
I described "Hegel's Eyes" as a
the case that the category mistake is the keystone of McCaffery's Poetics, par-
ticularly in the way that words and things exchange their modes of existence.
"Breakthrough Nostalgia" provides a compelling example:
A long and drawn-out rustle shakes the leaves and bottles. The oldest and most
stately boxes open up to make way for words which each of them contains. The
appearance of these words differs according to thc ap;rcrrrttcc;rnd character ol'
149
the boxes they represent. The word in the bottle "box" for instance is a pursey
stunted disheveled potbeltied gnome. The word for oak is tall lean and taciturn.
Some emerge slowly from their boxes as from sentences. They can't be dcscribcd.
As they come out they stand in a circle around two children as near as thcy ciln
to the box in which they were born. Words smoking pipes. Words ad justing cye '
glasses. A word hobbling along in a pair of old wooden shoes. Onc nran is blirrtl.
Impossibilities. (TS, r66)
"Words smoking pipes. Words adjusting eyeglasses": categorica lly itrr possiblc.
The basic philosophical problem (or defect) of language, however, is tlrat it
canextendthelimitsofthepossibleasfaras-well,asfarasthclirnitsol Ilorg-
es's universal library (limits that are evidently inaccessible). One olMcCal'[ery's
ways ofarticulatingthis fact about language is the concept ofparagrant that he
found in a footnote to lulia Kristeva's Reyolution in Po eticLanguage'. "A text is para-
grammatic, writes Leon S. Roudiez, 'in the sense that its organization of words
(and their denotations), grammar, and syntax is challenged by the infinite
possibilities provided by letters or phonemes combining to form networks
ofsignifications not accessible through conventionaI reading habits.""3 The
task of poetry (or anyhow McCaffery's task) is simply to expand these uncon-
ventional"networks of significations"-these limits of the possible-in every
direction (until, at last, the limits give way).
"Poetry is the subject of the poem," Wallace Stevens says.'a A recent collec-
tion of McCaffery's, Slighdy Left of Thinking, contains a section entitled "Ghost
Poems," several of which are poems about poems that we cannot actually
read-not secondhand poems, exactly, but poems at secondhand;
This first poem occupies a single page; there are twenty-eight lines, u9 words, r6
commas, 8 full stops, z sets of quotatlons enclosing r7 words, and zr different al-
phabetic characters. It seems to be a parody of Cicero's presentation on Academic
Skepticism, but it's only partly written in Latin. One line proposes clouds are ac-
tually contradictions o[the sky and that good deeds are best explained against a
background of evil. The poem's dominant sense is acoustic, closely followed by
the olfactorial and visual. l'm uncertain why the reference to Aristophanes fo[-
lows a brief allusion to the geometric probabiliqr that hens'eggs can be naturally
geodesic, or why an unnamed subject tries to find two identical leaves in a forest
before lunch in the Caf6 Pyren6es. My favorite line is the eighth that ends with the
word "indiscernible." My least favorite is the single line that reads "the square's
two sides." (SL, 39)
1 5 0 ,r: ;+ ,:i :.i: ;: i: i ;':, :: rr il 151

Of course, following the moral of "The Language Hygiene Program," to de- maybe it just has something fishy about it, like the line about "the square's two
scribe a poem is to kill it-hence (plausibly or possibly) the title: "Ghost Po- sides." But perhaps in the possible world in which this poem exists, and in de-
ems." As if what we had in the text above were not a description but a destruc- fiance of Wittgenstein's famous remark about describing the smell of coffee,
tion. Alternatively, "ghost" poems are conceptual poems, or poems in spirit odors can (literally) be committed to writing.
only: a conceptuaI poem, by definition, has only to be thought; a reading of it Unfortunately no philosopher of possible worlds would admit such a pos-
would be superfluous, a failure of possibility, as all things are. sibility, since (theoretically) possible worlds can only be made of true proposi-
Recall one of the poems from Dan Graham's "Schema March 1966": tions, meaning that in all possible worlds propositions must abide by the law
of noncontradiction-in other words, like married bachelors, no rwo-sided
r adjectives
squares are possible anywhere. But impossibilities of this logical sort are what
z adverbs
set Mccaffery's poetry in motion, taking us elsewhere. Let these lines, from
rrgz % sq. ems. area not occupied by type
"Teachable Texts," stand for the ludic whole:
337 % sq. ems. area occupied by type
1 columns Okay i'm wrong
o conjunctions but who are you?
nit depression oftype into surface ofpage in this respect seduction is potential
o gerunds the Copernican shifter shifts at will
o infinitives snip hocter prop with ferocity in traces
363 letters ofthe alphabet but i left speech in the corrida
27 lines supposing friends were me as entities in puzzle shapes
2 mathematical symbols magna civitas magna solitude
38 nouns the soul versus destiny in a sort ofacademic
52 numbers sloppiness gone off.
o participles A tiger is as flat as a page
8%x5 Page in the precise way puce relates to Schoenberg
r7%x22% paper sheet pages turn the way lions turn
offset cartridge paper stock and look at their prey. (CW, Bz)
5 propositions
o pronouns
10 pt. type size
Press Roman type face
59 words
1 words capitalized
o words italicized
57 words not capitalized
o words not italicized'5

One could conceivably flesh outsuch a schema (de-conceptualize it) bywriting

something to match its measures. McCaffery's poem is perhaps more concep-
tual or ghostlier than Graham's in virtue of its "olfactoria l" dimension, un less
of course this only means that the poem, being dca<|, has bcgutr to stirrk, or
 153

minds us, "lurks in art, awaiting ever recurring opportunities to spring forth"
fAT,239]). Form is the transformation of what is given into somethingother,
that is, something unreal, nonidentical, outside the grasp of concepts, cat-
egories, distinctions, not to mention purposes, functions, or positions in any
standing order of things. This radical exteriority is what Adorno means by the
autonomy of art. But the paradox of autonomy is that it leaves us with almost
nothing to say about what a work of art is. lt is possible that a purely autono-
mous work would be a nonentity, as if autonomy were a limit-concept rather
than a positive property of art. The end of art-"'To make things of which we
do not know what they are"' (AT, rr4)-is antinomic, like my two epigraphs.
This indeterminacy of art is, of course, the premise that initiates and, in-
deed, regulates Adorno's AestheticTheory: "lt is self-evident that nothing con-
cerning art is self-evident anymore" (AT, r). The self-estrangement of the work
of art (as we have known for more than a century) is the distinctive feature of
ON THE GONUNDRUM modernism: nothing, "not even the aesthetically central concept of the law
OF FORM AND MATERIAL of form, names the essence of art" (AT, 7). The modernistwork is precisely
that for which there is no general concept as to what counts as art, which
also means that there are no criteria that could exclude anything as a work of
art. The difficulty is that it is precisely the thesis of aesthetic nominalism (in
adorhots aesthetic theonY which onythin g goes as a work of art) that Adorno wants to contest (perhaps
without hope of defeating it). Marcel Duchamp's name is nowhere mentioned
As little as art is to be identified by any other element, it is simply identical in AestheticTheory, but there is no doubt that Duchamp's role would be that of
with form. Adorno's chief nemesis, precisely because what Adorno seems to reject is the
Ado rno, AestheticTheory very idea that a work of art can simply be a "found object," that is, something
-Theodor
ofthe merely empirical or a mere social product, like the urinal of Duchamp's Foun-
For no select category, not even the aesthetically central concePt
law of form, names the essence of art and suffices to judge its products' toin. Hence Adorno's apparent complaint against the more extreme forms of

Ad o rno, AestheticT heo ry

modernism: "Actionpainting,l'artinformelle, and aleatoricaIworks [in which the]
-Theodor aesthetic subject exempts itself from the burden of giving form to the contin-
form-or, gent material it encounters, despairing of the possibility of undergirding it,
My ambition in what follows is to elucidate Adorno's conception of
and instead shifts the responsibiliry for its organization back on the contin-
failingthat, antinomy orcontradiction suggested by my
at least to examine the
gent material itself. . . . [ln] its literalness fcontingent material] is alien to art"
two epigraphs from Aestheri cTheory. Adorno leaves no doubt that form is a prin-
(N, zzr).2
cipal concept of his aesthetics: art is, whatever else it is, "identicaI with form"
The notion of "giving form to the contingent material" is all very well, but
(AT, r4o).' But Adorno was, as we know, a dialectical rather than an analytic
unfortunately what Adorno means by this is no more self-evident than is the
thinker; that is, his practice was not to clarifr concepts but to put them into
nature of art. What exactly is his idea of form, and-while we are at it-is there
play in a movement in which nothing is abte to appear except in virtue of what
anything in his theory that applies specifically to literary or poetic form? Be-
it is not., And so form is never a concept that stands on its own; it is always
fore I conclude I want to take a look atAdorno's essay on paratactic form in
mediated-for example, by the artist's assorted materials of construction, or
Holderlin's late hymns, as well as his essays on two modern Cerman figures
by the artist's subjectivity, or for alI of that by the modern world in all of its
scldonr studied outside of Germany, Rudolf Borchardt(r877-t945), an early or
administered, commodified, not to say popular renditiotts (Kitsch, Adorno re-

llti)
154
quasi-modernist poetwhose politics and poetics are Perhaps beyond clarifica-
tion, and Hans G. Helms (b. tg3z), a poet, musician, and avant-garde perfor-
mance artist who flourished after world war Il, and who also happened to be
one ofAdorno's students at Frankfurt. ln these essays, in contrast to Aesthetic
Theory,Adorno gives us some extended examples of the complex relationship
between form and materiality; that is, he addresses specifically the idea that
in poetry language is not made of concepts but is (relativgly) free of the forms
and conventions of discursive intelligibility, as if the task of form were to ma-
terialize language (and thereby free it from utility or systems of exchange). ln-
deed, Adorno never descended more deeply into darkest modernism than he
did in these essays (which show how wrong it is to think that Adorno accepted
only Proust, Kafka, loyce, and Beckett into his modernist canon).a As Adorno
puts it in the essay on Hcilderlin, in poetry language "becomes a constitutive
dissociation" whose paratactic forms "evade the logical hierarchy of a subor-
dinating syntax" (NL, z:t3o1t).lt is this insubordination or evasion of hierar-
chies (and therefore of totality) that is perhaps a key to Adorno's conception of
form.
I have said that Adorno's way of thinking is dialectical (in its own eccentric
way) rather than analytic. What this means is that (among other things) his
conception of form is not formal, at least not in the classical or Aristotelian
sense of an artifact reposing in the uni{, integrity, and harmony of its dispa-
rate elements. On the contrary Adorno calls each of these classical terms (uni-
ty, integriry, harmony) into question, or perhaps one should say: he subjects
each of them to a dialectical reversal or determinate negation. Consider these
passages (where the emphasis in each case is mine):
What is heterogeneous in artworks is immanent to them: It is that in them that
opposes unity and yet is needed by unity if it is to be more than a pyrrhic victory
over the unresisting. That the spirit of artvyork is not to be equated with their im-
manent nexus-the arrangement of sensuous elements-is evident in that rhey in
nowa)t constitutethatgapless uniE, that type ofform to which aesthetic reflection has
falsely reduced them. (AT, 89)
Dissonanceisthetruthaboutharmony. . . . Art, whatever its material, has always desired
dissonance. (AT, tto)
Form is the nonviolent synthesis ofthe diffuse that nevertheless presewes it [the
diffuse] as what it is in its divergences and contradictions, and for this reason form
is actually an unfolding oftruth. A posited unity, it constantly suspends itselfas
such; essential to it is that it interrupts itself through its other iust as the essence
its cohe r ence is th at it d o es n ot coh ere. (AT, I 43)
r
!r i
155
Art that makes the highest claim compels itself beyondformostotality ondintothefrag-
mentary. (N, Ul)
Artwork . . . that negate meaning must also necessarily be disrupted in their uni-
ty; this is the function of montage, which disavows unity through the emerging
disparateness of the parts at the same time that, as a principle of form, it affirms
unity. . . .[Inmontagethe]negailonofsynthesisbecomesaprincipleofform. (AT, r5a-55)
And once more: "The articulation, bywhich the artwork achieves its form, also
always coincides in a certain sense with the defeat of form" (N , 46).
The analytic thinker lives or dies by the law of noncontradiction. But not
Adorno. In his case dialectical thinking is governed by a rule of nonidentity
and, as Hauke Brunkhorstsuggests, bythe transgressionorliquification ofbound-
aries.s "To proceed dialectically," Adorno says in his Negotive Dialectics, "is to
think in contradictions," which is to say according to a "logic of disintegra-
tion" that aims at the breakdown of every sort of totality; or, to put it in a
slightly different way, it is thinking whose goal is to avoid closure, resolution,
or synthesis (ND, raa-a5).6 This is how I read him anyway: myAdorno is a serial
thinker (using the word "serial" in its poetic rather than twelve-tone musical
sense) whose desire is to stay in motion (that is, to keep pace with the history
of art).2 Adorno's motto, "The whole is the false" (MM, 5o), turns Hegel on his
head (and overturns Hegel's aesthetics, with its end-of-art thesis).
To gain some purchase on Adorno's paradoxes, we might begin by observ-
ing that, in keeping with dialectical procedures, the work of art for Adorno is
as much an event as it is an object; that is, it is somethingwhose mode of exis-
tence is fluid, dynamic, and irreducible to the thinglike condition in which it
is nevertheless constituted as a work. And this is the case in at least two senses,
namely with respect to our relation to the work (that is, in our experience of it)
but also objectively in terms of the work's relationship to itself.
For example, it is in the nature of the work (as a fact of its autonomy) to
resist our efforts to objectifr it either empirically or conceptually, which is
why nominalism can never be defeated (Adorno, to add one more paradox to
the inventory, is an antinominalist who says: "Art has no universal laws" [AT,
3o8]).8 ln the section of AestheticTheoryr on "semblance and Expression" (Schein
und Ausdruck) Adorno writes:
When artworks are viewed under the closest scrutiny, the most objectivated paint-
ings metamorphose into a swarming mass and texLs splinter into words. As soon
as one imagines having a firm grasp on the details of an artvyork, it dissolves into
of the indeterminate and undifferentiated, so mediated is it. This is the manifesta-
tion of aesthetic semblance in the structure of artworks. Under micrological study,
156 157 ii ,.! :1 :j i, ,i.l ,1i:, ili I i i:! lr

the particular-the artwork's vital element-is volatilized: its concretion vanish- ever, thereby release the artwork from its participation in the world of things.
es. The process, which in each work takes objective shaPe, is opposed to its fixation For scores are not only almost always better than the performances, they are
as something to Point to, and dissolves back from whence it came. (AT, tot) more than simply instructions for them: they are indeed the thing itself" (AT,
roo). (To which one might add that for Adorno this superiority of the score is
itwere in the nature of the irftegrated work to disintegrate uPon contact.
As if
emphatically so in the case of a work by Sch<inberg, which, as the saying goes,
What Adorno has in mind, of course, is that the work of art is not an intention-
no one knows how to interpret.)
al object in any phenomenological sense; that is, it is not strictly a phenom-
However one figures it, forAdorno the modernistwork is one that is divided
enon at all but is, on the contrary an illusion of objectification. This is what
against itself or, to put the matter dialectically, it is constituted as a struggle
"aesthetic semblance" means: "Artworks become appearances lErscheinung),
between "the law of form" (AT, 3) or the "rationality of construction" (AT, 35)
in the pregnant sense of the term-that is, the appearance of an other [eines
and the anarchic resistance of material to any effort to bring it under control;
Anderen]-when the accent falls on the unreality of their own reality. Artworks
and the idea is not to resolve this struggle or overcome resistance but to reg-
have the immanent character of being an act, even if they are carved in stone,
ister it as the truth (the truth-content, or WahrheitsgeholQ of the work of art.
and this endows them with the quality of being something momentary and
We could call Adorno's theory an aesthetics of resistance, but perhaps this is
sudden fPlittzliches). This is registered by the feeling of being overwhelmed
not to say very much, since "resistance" is the one of the clich6s of modern-
when faced with an important work. . . . Under Patient contemplation art-
ism, as Iohanna Drucker has recently argued.s Perhaps itwould be more apt to
works begin to move" (nf, Zg).As Brunkhorst has pointed out, "Adorno has a
think of it as an aesthetics of freedom, or of the agitated and unruly. The task
strong predilection for romantic metaphors of fluidity and amorphousness,
of art is to preserve what is refractory to the formal conditions that make art
of the diffuse and the impulse which overwhelms the ego" Qhe ActualiE of Ador'
possible-to preserve what resists the crueky of art ("The purer the form and
n0,46).
the higher the autonomy of the works," Adorno says, "the more cruel they are.
However, this mobiliry or instability of the work, its epiphanic aPpearance,
. . . What art in the broadest sense works with, it oppresses" [AT, 5o]). As Ador-
is not just an event in our subjective experience; it is what the work is in itself:
no says very early in Aestheti cTheory (in a passage that contextualizes the second
The artwork is a process essentiatty in the relation of its whole and Parts. without epigraph for this chapter):
being reducible to one side or the other, it is the relation itselfthat is a process of
becoming. Whatevermoyintheartworkbecalledatotaliqisnotastructurethqtintegratesrhe In artworks, the criterion of success is twofold: whether they succeed in integrat-

sum of itsparts. Even objectified the work remains a developing Process by virtue of
ing thematic strata and details into their immanent law of form and in this in-
the propensiti es ffendenzenf active in it. Conversely, the parts are not something tegration at the same time mointain what resists it and the figures that occur in the process of
given, as which analysis almost inevitably mistakes them: Rather, they are centers integration. Integration as such does not assure quality; in the history ofart, inte-

ofenergy that strain toward the whole on the basis ofa necessity that they equally gration and quality have often diverged. For no single select category, not even
perform. The vortexofthis dialectic ultimately consumes the conceptof meaning. the aesthetically central concept ofthe law ofform, names the essence ofart and
(AT, r7B; my emphasis) suffices to judge its products. Essential to art are defining characteristics that con-
tradict its art-philosophical concept. (AT, 7; my emphasis)
Of course-or, as one might say, asusuol-Adorno here is less than clear. It
By "its art-philosophical concept" I take Adorno to mean (at least) the classical
is not just that the work of art is temporal rather than spatial in its constitu-
ideal of unity that, for example, remains the centerpiece of Hans-Georg Ga-
tion (although Adorno certainly inclines toward this view, since music is for
damer's philosoph ical aesthetics (as in The Releu ance of the Beautiful). By contrast,
him-despite his rejection of hierarchies-the Prototype of allart [AT,122]);
constituted as an antinomy of objectification and it is the breakup of unity, that is, the resistance of materialto integration into
it is rather that the work is
incompletion, closed and open form. Hence this (famously) paradoxicalstate-
atotaliry-the autonomy of parts with respect to the whole-that sets the
modernist work apart from the classics of tradition. lt is also what makes the
ment: "That in drama not the text but the performance is taken to be what
matters, just as in music not the score but the living sound is so regarded, tes-
work oIart an allegory of critical theory, that is, a critique of a modernity for
which integration into a totality gives the definition of order, rationality, and
tifies to the precariousness of the thing-character in art, wltich docs not, how-

things as they are. ln modernism (as distinct from moderniry) art confounds
the order of things by way of "the aesthetic conception of antiart; indeed with-
out this element art is no longer thinkable. This implies nothing less than
that art must go beyond its own concept in order to remain faithful to that
concept" (AT, zg).As if the task of form were to articulate the materiality of
the artwork in all of its heterogeneity and fragmentation.'o Hence another of
Adorno's mottos: "Only what does not fit into this world is true" (AT, Sg).
This is perhaps what Adorno means when he says that what characterizes
modernist art is a "crisis of semblance," which is something like the Russian
formalist (and also Brechtian) notion of estrangement or the disruption of il-
lusion (that is, the illusion that the work is not an artifact): "The strict imma-
nence of the spirit of artworks is contradicted . . . by a countertendency that is
no less immanent: the tendency of artworks to wrest themselves free of the in-
ternal unity of their own construction, to introduce within themselves caesu-
ras that no longer permit the totality of the appearan ce fErscheinung]" (AT, 88)."
The caesura is a paratactic event, a break in the integrity of what is formed.
The point here is that the modernist artwork, in contrast to tradition, does not
form a hermeneutical circle, a subordination of parts to a whole; this is the
source of its enigmaticalness or Rritselch arakter (N , rr8), that is, its "fractured-
nesslAbgebrochenseinl" (AT, rz6), its repudiation of the concept of meaning (AT,
r5z), and its refusalofclosure: "Artthat makes the highest claim," Adorno says,
"compels itself beyond form as totality and into the fragmentary. The plight of
form is most emphatically manifest in the difficulty of bringing temporal art
forms to a conclusion; in music composers often speak of the problem of a
finale, and in literature the problem of a denouement, which came to a head
in Brecht. Once having shaken itself free of convention, no artwork was able
to end convincingly" (N, ul). Hence the definitive importance of open forms
like that of the cubist collage, with its dissociated surface of "found" materi-
als, as well as that of montage-"the sudden, discontinuous juxtaposition of
sequences" (AT, r5a): "all modern art," Adorno says, "may be called montage"
(AT, r55), which has its equivalent in the seriality of certain forms of modern
music as well as many examples from modern and contemporary Poetry, start-
ing perhaps with Pound's Contos and fanning out in all directions-from Louis
Zukofsky's "A" (tg78) and Charles Olson's Maximus Poems (r95o-7o) to Iack Spic-
er's Language (1964) and Lyn Hejinian's recentA Bord er Comedy (1994-97)-
I beganall this months ago, years maybe-in lune, anyway, of t9g4
I thought I could, as it were, follow a poem that kept itself apart from me
And from itself
159
A short lyric of shifts
A page or two at most
A poem of metamorphoses, a writing in lost contexts
lwould write a line or two
No more
And go away
And come back another day only to add something that would change everything
On the scale ofpoetry (BC, 63)
(Meanwhile, Adorno's Philosophy of New Music contains this intriguing foot-
note: "The closed artwork is bourgeois, the mechanical artwork belongs to
fascism, and the fragmentary work-in its complete negativity-belongs to
utopia" [PNM, r83].'')
Here perhaps would be the place to refer at last to Adorno's essay titled
"Parataxis: On Holderlin's Late Poetry" 0g6+), which aims to refute Hei-
degger's reading of Hdlderlin by treating Holderlin as an avant-garde poet for
whom "the category of unity, like that of the fatherland, is not central" (NL,
z:u9). What is central is the refusal of the hierarchical or architectonic form
of the Ciceronian period in favor of something Adorno calls "subcutaneous
form" (NL, z:r3o). Subcutaneous form is an anarchic formation that cannot be
closed in a synthesis. Hcilderlin's late hymns, Adorno says, "may be constitu-
tively incapable of completion" (NL, z:r38).'a Whereas discursive language "is
chained to the form of judgment and proposition and thereby the synthetic
form of the concept," in poetry "aconceptual synthesis turns against its me-
dium; it becomes a constitutive dissociation" (NL, z:r3o)-in other words, a
paratactical "transformation of language into a serial order whose elements
are linked differently than in the fform of] judgment" (NL, z:r3r). Hence "the
anticlassical quality" of Hdlderlin's late poetry-"its rebellion against harmo-
ny" (NL, z:r33), its fragmentation, and above all its displacementof the lyric
subjectonto longuageossuch (language freed from its function ofdiscursive sig-
nification and the norms of semantic transparency):
Linguistic synthesis contradicts what Holderlin wants to express in language. . . .
Whether intentionally on H<ilderlin's part or simply by the nature of things, this
occasioned the sacrifice ofthe period, to an extreme degree. Poetically, this rep-
resents the sacrifice ofthe legislating subject itself. lt is in Holderlin, with that
sacrifice, that the poetic movement unsettles the category of meaning for the first
time. For meaning is constituted through the linguistic expression of synthetic
unity. The sublect's intention, the primacy of meaning, is ceded to language along
with the legislating subject. (NL, z:r36)
164
So Holderlin is the first modernist. Anyhow the idea that paratactic form dis-
places the writing subject onto language is one of modernism's most vener-
able doctrines, incarnated perhaps most perfectly in many of the writings of
Gertrude Stein (but one should also consult Maurice Blanchot on the theory
and practice of the fragment).'a The idea presupposes (that is, opposes) the
thesis, proposed by various versions of logic, linguistics, and philosophy of
language, thatthe subject is constituted bythe logical form ofthe proposition:
the ability to say " 1" and to recognize oneself as such is entailed in the power of
the predicate. The "1" is what is imPlicitly asserted in every assertion.'s But the
dissociation of fragmentary writing-the juxtaposition or, as Adorno might
put it, the constellation as against the interconnection of phrases-deprives
the subject of a place to present itself. There is no starting point, end point,
or any standpoint in between. As lean-Frangois Lyotard says ofparatax in The
D'rfferend: "Conjoined by and, phrases or events follow each another, but their
successiondoesnotobeyacategorical order(because;if,then;inorderto;akhough
. . .). Ioined to the preceding one by and, a phrase rises out of nothingness to
link up with it. Paratax thus connotes the abyss of Not-Being which opens be-
tween phrases, it stresses the surprise that something begins when what is
said is said. And is the conjunction that most allows the constitutive discon-
tinuity (or oblivion) of time to threaten, while defring it through its equally
constitutive continuity (or retention). . . . lnstead ofand, and assuringthe same
paratactic function, there can be a comma, or nothing" (D, 65-66). "Abyss of
Not-Being" is perhaps a bit of Gallic hyperbole, but the point is that paratax
is outside the logical and cognitive "phrase regimens" on which identity de-
pends, so nothing follows from the I think, just as nothing makes it possible.
Je estun autre, in Rimbaud's famous line, and so is everything else-including
language, which no longer operates in the service of meaning.
But then what is language when it is no longer in the service of meaning?
This, basically, is the question at work in Adorno's essays on Rudolf Bor-
chardt (1967) and Hans G. Helms (r96o). Not surprisingly, Adorno's answer has
Iargely to do with music, which means (for him) atonality. "ln everything he
wrote," Adorno says of Borchardt, "he made himself an organ of language'
. . . Language murmurs and rustles through him like a stream. . . . The speaking
gesture of almost every line he wrote is not so much the gesture of a person
speaking but rather, in its intention, the epiphany of language" (NL, z:t93)'
Hence the Rijtselcharakter of his poems: "They are not objects of contemplation,
especially by the criterion ofvisuaI concreteness, but linguistically they are full
ofsensuousness. . . . The speaking energy that holds language to its obiectifi-
" nrea [ormulat hodie, par me donc, nec splendordivinus nec regina caelitum
cation in his poetry causes the poems to approxinratc tttttsit (N l., z: r93 94)
not, however, in terms of the "music-like effects" that one finds in Rilke and
Trakl, but rather in virtue of their dissonance: "ln Borchardt's work, reconcili-
ation consists in giving artistic form to the irreconcilable. As poet, Borchardt
vibrates between two poles and appropriates the antithesis as a formal law,,
(NL, z:r99).
In fact, Borchardt's poems do not seem especially dissonant-Marjorie
Perloff tells me (in conversation) that I should think of them as colloquial in
comparison with Brecht, as in this genial apostrophe to the sonnet form:,6
ABSCHIED VOM SONETT
Sonett, als alle sagten, du bist tot,
Sprach ich "steh aufl" Als sie dich beinern nannten
Nahmst du mir Herz und Adern fort: da brannten
Dir Puls und Mund von neugeborner Not.
Sie schmdhlten: "Das ist alles? Das ist Brot
Ftir Durft?" Und dein strengen Arme spannten
Sich doppelt und erschufes; die dich kannten,
Hast du erndhrt, con Hand zu Hdnden bot.
Dein Becher sich; den ich das letzte Mal
Heut frille: es ist aus. Musik und eual
Der grof3en Zeiten ward dir vollgemessen:
Der gief3e nichts Cemeinres in das MaB,
Drau sich die Minne trank: was ich besessen
rtirl
Ward in dir ewig: Gcitter, nehmt das Glas.,z
i
Helms is another thing entirely. The work to which Adorno proposes to in- L
troduce us in his essay on Helms is unpronouncably entitled FA: M'AHNIES6w0W
(1959), is at once a concrete or visual poem made of orthographic and typo-
llri
graphical constructions, with large helpings of white space, and is a work of
sound- or acoustical-poetry (Lautpoesie) in the tradition of the German Hlrspiele
or "hear-plays" that have flourished on German radio since the r95os (Helms's
published text is accompanied by a ten-inch disk recording). The text (a
,oyce-
like mulligan stew of skewed languages-cerman, French, English, Latin) be-
gins as follows:
r) Haud ego terrerbar, sed mater mea tassam coffeae effundibat. Tat, quae
lamentation infibatr Mais non-; da mi livae mille, mater o tam magnanima
mea, sic ut posit cylindriculos herbarum nicotianarum emere. Hoc delicatum
eral ita simili: terque vita mihi ante acta (PRAETERITA) in facultate recordante

illic est, tror mig. Ma cosi un'argentum habebande, more than ego, real'n
armum VAUVOW, dej cHffit innerte taschum schajtis er dande.
z) Was wird er den machen? Wenn ers macht, macht ers fein, lieb Michaelilein
Krummndschenbohr, ein tauwer sottive im Herzen der Bltischen
gtugluhicksodorhiiiit (h); studierimek trirkiyimac indiliiftikugg approtzikaq
ohrnientallistikick?
3) "Gellltl" her midde Penunse, barraufn Tisch oder Ware zurlick. Betriiger?
Neiin, nie, nur Suhmklein philanthropikuss: herrrr-: nuja bittischeen ei'-
dankrifiil - pflegeh....'8
Perhaps understandably, Adorno himself does not cite, much less analyze,
any "passages" from FA: M'AHNIESGW0W; instead he restricts himself to the
statement of some "Presuppositions (Vornsseuungen)" (the title of his essay),
the first ofwhich is that the concept ofverstehen, understanding, has no ap-
plication to such a work: "Essential to such a text is the shock with which it
forcibly interrupts communication. The harsh light of unintelligibility that
such a work turns toward the reader renders the usual intelligibility suspect
as being shallow, habitual, reified-in short, preartistic. To translate what aP-
pears alien in qualitatively modern works into current concepts and contexts
is something of betrayal of the works themselves" (NL, z:95).
a okaykes H-flowered, purrhushing'eir goofhearty offan-on-beats, holding mois-
To be sure, as Adorno says, "language cannot completely dispense with its
significative moment, with concepts and meanings. . . . Even a stammered
sound, if it is a word and not a mere tone, retains its conceptual range, and
certainly the internal coherence of a linguistic work, without which it could
not be organized as a linguistic unity, cannot dispense with the conceptual el-
ement" (NL, z:98-99). Gertrude Stein made the same pointwhen she said that
one has to write in English; poetry is not labberwocky. But in FA: M'AHNIESGW0W
the materialof language (letters, phonemes, morphemes, words) is organized
serially rather than discursively, which enables Adorno to link Helms to mod-
ern (or modernist) music. With respect to poetics Adorno seems very much
to follow PaulValdry, who solidified the poetry/music analogy introduced by
Mallarm6 (and by Walter Pater somewhat earlier and perhaps to less effect),
except of course that Adorno has a very different theory of music; one can't
imagine what Val6ry would have made of Adorno, much less of Helms. At any
rate this is how Adorno describes the form of Helms's work:
The whole is composed in structures, Put together in each case from a series of di-
mensions, or, in the terminologr ofserial music, parameters, that appearautono-
mously, or combined, or ordered hierarchically. A model may help to clari! the
affiniq/ of this procedure with the serial techniquc irr nrusic. Ihc crisis o[meaning
163
as a phenomenal whole perceptible in the texture of its parts did not lead serial
composers to simply liquidate meaning. [Karlheinz] Stockhausen retains mean-
ing, that is, the immediately apperceptible context, as a limit value. A continuum
extends from this to structures that renounce the customary mode of hearing
meaning, namely the illusion of a necessity linking one sound to another. These
structures can be grasped only in something like the way the eye surveys the sur-
face of a picture as a whole. Helms' conception stands in an analogous relation-
ship to discursive meaning. Its continuum extends from quasi-narrative portions
intelligible on the surface to parts in which the phonetic values, the Pure expres-
sive qualities,completelyoutweigh the semanticvalues, the meanings. (NL, z:ro4)
ln other words, in keeping with the concept of form developed in Aesrhedc
Theory, the parts are autonomous and in motion with respect to the whole,
thus breaking with "the illusion of a necessity linking one sound for word, or
letter] to another." Not surprisingly, Helms was a great admirer of John Cage,
whose recourse to chance operations in the composition both of sounds and
texts seems to be one of the principal models on which FA: M AHNIESGWOW is
based-as much Cage as loyce's FinnegansWake (to which, to be sure, Helms
pays tribute with some obvious parodies):
Mike walked in on the : attense of Chlazzus as they sittith softily sipping sweet
turize'-palmy sticks clad in clamp dresses of tissue d'arab, drink in actionem
fetlandi promoting protolingamations e state of nascendi; completimented go
Iscene of hifibrow 'n' teasuckers tits slips peeptwats enthralled, all that snifflin'
e-van beshmoosed kinda; lus'bearinnanals figs fags rue-sodomighties, gomor-
rhoeae, trip-blades nymphridgs painseederastless, senily hardchancryote apper-
civerts, her-mac-pros'a-dishts faetishits snarks chromosollipsists. . . .
so on, for a full page, before breaking into new or different configura-
-and
tions of noise.
It appears to be a common practice among Adorno scholars to fold Aesthetic
Theory back into his earlier writings on modern music, as David Roberts does
when he writes that "the elaborations of the late AestheticTheory add nothing
essentially new. . . . Not only is AestheticTheory incapable of going beyond the
limits of the earlier construction, it even retreats from its logic to circle end-
lessly, inconclusively, in the empry space of a modernism which has lost all
historical contours, has been evacuated of all historical events and figures
merely as a backdrop to the invocation of the exclusive pantheon of authentic-
ity"--namely, Kafka, Beckett, and so forth (Artond Enlightenment,5g). Likewise
the recent CambridgeCompanionto Adorno contains several entries on Adorno's
thcories of music but none on AestheticTheory, which generally is mentioned
164
only in passing throughout the volume.'e contrast, I think it's important
By
to attach the example of Helms to AestheticTheory as a reminder that Adorno's
great abstract work, arguably the most important work of philosophical
aesthetics since Kant and Hegel, is also very much an expression of its time,
namely that of the turbulent European and North American art worlds of the
r95os and r96os-John Cage and Jackson Mac Low, Guy Debord and the situ-
ationists, Henri Chopin and acoustical poetry, the "verbovocovisual" poems
of the Brazilian Noigandres group, Fluxus, the Vienna Aktionists and other
performance- and body-art figures, minimalism and the various Conceptual
Art movements, the New American Poetry and the New York School of Poets,
particularly lohn Ashbery's poetry, among many other examples of formalan-
archism. (Here I would recommend a very provocative essay by Mary Caputi
entitled "Theodor Adorno and the Performance Art of Cindy Sherman."'o) ln
his essay on Helms Adorno writes: "The moment of the absurd, which is con-
stituent of all art but has hitherto been largely hidden by the conventional mo-
ment, has to emerge and express itself. The so-called unintelligibility of legiti-
mate contemporary art is the consequence of something peculiar to art itself,
Its provocativeness carries out the historical judgment on an intelligibility
that has degenerated into misunderstanding" (NL, z:97-98). Likewise in Aes-
theticTheory he writes that "art is now scarcely possible lwithout] experiment"
(N,ZZ), particularly as this means thatthe production of the work is not under
programmatic control and thatwhatwill emerge cannot be foreseen.
The argument here seems to be that the work of art, if it is art at all, should
be in advance of our capacity to receive it. "Works are usually critical in the era
in which they appear; later they are neutralized, not least because ofchanged
social relations. Neutralization is the social price of aesthetic autonomy" (AT,
zz8). (Recall the artist Lawrence Weiner's remark: "When mywork is assimilat-
ed into the art context, itwill change something. I hope itwon't be considered
viable living art in ten years. . . . As what I do becomes art history the minute
culture accepts it, so it stops being art. "'') But more than this it appears that the
work of art always constitutes a limit of philosophical aesthetics, that is, a lim-
it of the explanatory power of aesthetics, and that the experience of this Iimit
is part ofwhat constitutes an experience ofart: "The better an artwork is un-
derstood, the more it is unpuzzled on one level, the more obscure its constitu-
tive enigmaticalness IRritselhafies] becomes. lt only emerges demonstratively in
the profoundest experience of art. lf a work opens itself completely, it reveals
itself as a question and demands reflection: then the work vanishes into the
distance, only to return to those who thought they understood it, overwhelm-
ing them for a second time with the question: 'What is it?"' lcin zwoites Mul nit
165
demWssistdaszuiiberfallenl (AT, rzr). ln other words, the work of art provokes
aesthetics by producing things "of which we do not know what they are." In
this respectAestheticTheory is a determinate negation of aesthetics as a positive
theory, as if it were Adorno's thesis that, contra Hegel, the movement of the
history of art always and repeatedly brings the philosophy of art to an end.
This seems at any rate to be the upshot of Adorno's "Draft lntroduction" to
AestheticTheory, which begins by saying that the task ofaesthetics is self-critical:
"Art does not stand in need of an aesthetics that will prescribe norms where it
finds itself in difficulty, but rather of an aesthetics that will provide the capac-
ity for reflection, which art on its own is hardly abte to achieve. Words such
as material, form, and formation, which flow all too easily from the pens of
contemporary artists, ring trite; to cure contemporary language of this is one
of the art-practical functions of aesthetics" (AT, 34r). It seems to me that one
achievement of Adorno's theory is to defamiliarize the traditional concePts
of aesthetics-unity, integrity, harmony, but also form and material-and to
give us in their place an aesthetics of the fragment, arguably the once and fu-
ture formal category of modernism.
A modernist aesthetics, like modernist art and music, is under a standing
obligation to reinvent itself as it goes along-a phenomenon that one sees
in contemporary poetry, with its strong commitment to poetics (writings on
poetry by poets) as a way oftracking or even initiating the changes in form
and materiaI that keep the practice of poetry from becoming self-evident in
its procedures and results. In one of his later essays, "Vers une musique in-
formelle" (r96r)-in part a polemic against the rigid use of the twelve-tone
system of musical composition-Adorno recurs to the term" musique informelle"
"as a small token of gratitude towards the nation forwhom the tradition of
the avant-garde is synonymous with the courage to produce manifestos. ln
contrast to the stufry aversion to 'isms' in art, I believe slogans are as desir-
able now as they were in Apollinaire's day. Musique informelle resists definition
in the botanicalterms of the positivists. If there is a tendency, an actual trend,
which the word serves to bring into focus, it is one which mocks all efforts at
definition" (QF, z7z). Musiqueinformelle is "athematic music," a "free atonal-
ity": "What is meant," says Adorno, "is a type of music which has discarded all
forms which are external or abstract or which confront it in an inflexible way"
(QF , z7z). It is an instance of open form-"music whose end cannot be fore-
seen in the course of production" (QF, :o:). "From this point of view musique
informelle wou[d be the idea lVorstellung] of something not fully imagined [uor-
4cstelltl. lt would be the integration by the composer's subjective ear of what
sirrrply cannot be imagined at the leveI of each individual note, as can be seen
166

from Stockhausen's'note clusters' lTontrauben). The frontier between a mean-

ingless objectification which the composer gaPes at with open mouth and
closed ears, and a composition which fulfills the imagination by transcending
it, is not one that can be drawn according to any abstract rule" (QF, 3c6.-0.
Here perhaps one could begin to imagine aesthetics as a kind of negative the-
ology: that which in the end does not actually predicate anything of the work
of art-as, for example, in the case of one ofAd Reinhardt's "Black Paintings,"
which Reinhardt describes as follows:

A square (neurral, shapeless) canvas, 5 feet high, as high as a man, as wide as a man's
outstretched arms (nor lorge, not small, sizeless), trisected (no composirion), one hori-
zontal form negating, one verticaI form (formless, notop, nobottom, directionless) three
(more or less) dark (lrghtles$ noncontrasting (colorles$ colors, brushwork brushed
out to remove brushwork, a mat flat, free-handpainted surface (glossless, textureless,
non-lineor, nohard edge, no softedge)which does not reflect its surroundings-a pure,
abstract, non-objective, timeless, spaceless, changeless, relationless, distinter-
ested painting-an object that is self-conscious (no unconsciousness) ideal, tran-
scendent, aware of no thing butArt (obsolutely no onttart)."

One wonders what Adorno would have made of this. lf we follow the dialectic
of AestheticTheory, Reinhardt's work is a purely antinomic artifact, an iconoclas-
tic icon: in other words, a perfect work of art.

PREFACE

Jean-Frangois Lyotard and .lean-Loup Thebaud, lust Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, r985), r6.
So Clifford Ceertz trumps Claude Ldvi-Strauss. See Geertz'sThe lnterpretation ofCul-
rures (NewYork: Basic Books, 1973), esp.3-3r.
Cited by loseph Kosuth, "Art After Philosophy," in Conceptual Art: ACritical Anthology,

ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999),
165.

Philosophicallnvestrgorions $67-68, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (NewYork: Macmillan,

lg::f),32-33.
"Program for Literary Criticism," trans. Walter Livingston, in Walter Benjamin:
ed. Michael W. lennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary
SelectedWritings,ll:rgzl-t934,
Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), z9o.

r: WHAT ARE POETS FOR?

The anecdote foreshadows Duchamp's LargeGlass, of which Duchamp once said:

"Ycs, and the more I look at it the more I like it. I like the cracks, the way they fall.

t(;1
168
You remember how it happened in 1926, in Brooklyn? They put the tvvo panes
on top ofone another on a truck, flat, not knowing what they were carrying, and
bounced for sixty miles into Connecticut, and that's the resultl But the more I
look at it the more I like the cracks: they are not like shattered glass. They have a
shape. There is a symmetry in the cracking, the two crackings are symmetrically
arranged and there is more, almost an intention there, an extra-a curious in-
tention that I am not responsible for, a ready-made intention, in other words,
that I respect and love." TheWritings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and
Elmer Peterson (New York: Da Capo Press, rg73), tz7.
See William A. Camfield, "Marcel Duchamp's Fountain: Its History and Aesthetics
intheContextof rgr7," inMarcelDuchamp:AnistoftheCentury,ed Rudolf Kuenzli and
Francis M. Naumann (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, t98fl,64-94.
ln "The Creat American Novel," Williams writes: "Here's a man wants me to re-
vise, to put in order. My God what I am doing means just the opposite from that.
There is no revision, there can be no revision" (lmaginations, 176). See Gerald
Bruns, "De tmprovisatione: An Essay on (oro in Hell," in lnventions: Writing,TextualiE,
andUnderstondinginLiterary History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, r98z),
t4;-5g; and Stephen Fredman's chapter on Koro in Hell in Poet's Prose:The Crisis in
AmericanVerse, znd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, r99o), rz-54.
Adorno'sAestheticTheory begins famouslywith the statementthat "it is self-evident
that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore" (AT, t), and later he adds:
"Art responds to the loss of self-evidence not simply by concrete transformations
of its procedures and comportments but by trying to pull itself free from its own
concept as from a shackle: the fact that it is art" (AT, 16). See Arthur Danto's treat-
ment of this paradox, "Works ofArt and Mere RealThings," inTheTransfigurationof
theCommonplace (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, r98t), t-32.
See Fredric f ameson's discussion of "aesthetic nominalism" inLate Marl.ism: Ador
n o, o r, Th e Persisten ce of th e Di alecric ( Lo nd on : Verso, r 99 o), esp. t 57 -6
On conceptual art, see loseph Kosuth, "Art after Philosophy," in Conceptual Art: A
CriticalAnthology, ed. AlexanderAlberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1999), t58-77, esp. 164: "The event that made conceivable the realization
that it was possible to 'speak another language' and still make sense in art was
MarceI Duchamp's first unassisted readymade. With the unassisted readymade,
art changed its focus from the form of the language to what was being said.
Which means that it changed the nature of art from a question of morphology to
a question of function. This change-one from'appearance' to'concePtion'-
was the beginning of 'modern' art and the beginning of 'conceptual' art. All art
(after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually."
See Marjorie Perloffl, "Marcel Duchamp's Conceptual Poetics," inzrst-Century Mod-
ernism:The"New"Poerics (London: Basil Blackwell, zooz), ll t20.
169
See M. Mitchelt Waldrop, Complexiry:The Emerging science at the Edge of Choos (New
York: Simon & Schuster, r99z).
ThePoemsofMarianneMoore, ed. Grace Schulman (New York: Penguin Books, zoo5),
135.
"f erboas, Pelicans, and Peewee Reese: Marianne Moore," inSelectedProse' ed' Eu-
gene Richie (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, zoo5), 8z'
10 After retiring from years ofteaching at the Brooklyn Polytechnic lnstitute Zukof-
sky turned (like Candide) to gardening. There does not seem to be a flower he
and his wife, Celia, could not identifr. See Zukofsky's "Eighty Flowers," inComplete
ShortPoetry (Baltimore: lohns Hopkins University Press, r99l).
1l "Poetry and Grammar," inLecturesinAmerico (NewYork: Vintage Books, 1975), zto.
However, this taboo applies chiefly to the writing of prose' In poetry the business
of nouns is more complex: "Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with
losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adorning with replacing
L. the noun" (z3r). Consider the austerity ofnouns instanzasin Medirotion:
Iittle daisies very well
She may count three
By multiplying to either six nine or fourteen
Or she can be well mentioned as twelve
Which they may like which they can like soon [ . . . ]
Or they can attire where they need as which say
Can they call a hat or a hat a day
Made merry because it is so. (SM, 3t-32)
t2 See Stephen Fredman's discussion of Three Poems in Poet'sProse, rct-35.
13 This is the thesis, interestingly, of the first part of Martin Heidegger's "The Origin
of the Work of Art," which celebrates the way the singularity of things escaPes
the grasp ofpropositionat thinking: "The unpretentious thing evades thought
most stubbornly. Or can it be that this self-refusal of the mere thing, this self-
4. contained independence, belongs precisely to the nature ofthe thing? Must not
this strange and uncommunicative feature of the nature of the thing become in-
timately familiar to thought that tries to think the thing? If so, then we should
not force our way to its thingly character." Poetry, Language,Thought, trans. Albert
Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, r97r), 3t-32.
r4 On the problem of form in Ashbery's poetry, Particularly in the early poems, see
Marjorie Perloff, "'Mysteries of Construction': The Dream Songs of lohn Ash-
bery," in The Po eticsoflndeterminaE:Rimbaudto Coge (Princeton, N.l.: Princeton Uni-
versityPress, r98t),248-BT. lnarecentPaper,"LaGrandePerrnission:lohnAshbery
in the zrst Century" Perloff gives us something of a retrospective on Ashbery's
work, meanwhile bringing us uP to date on "the self-contradiction of Ashbery's
poetics" (unpublished ms. cited by permission, 4).
r5 "On the Treatment of Complex Entities," in When Music Resisrs Meaning:The Maior
170
Writingsof HerbertBriln, ed. Arun Chandra (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univer-
sity Press, zoo4), z5o.
l6 See Daniel Kane,All PoetsWelcome:TheLowerEastsidePoetrySceneinthery6os
ley: University ofCalifornia Press, zoo3), t87-zot.
17 See http://www.writing.upenn.edu/library/Mayer-Bernadette-Experiments.html.
A revised and abridged version of"Experiments" appears in Bruce Andrews and
Charles Bernstein, eds., The L:A=N=G=U=A=G=EBook (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1984), 8o-83. References here are to the online version. Compare
Charles Bernstein's "Experiments List," http://wvvr,v.writing.upenn.edu/bernstein/
experiments.html.
r8 (Paris: Gallimard, 1969). See Gilbert Adair's translation, A Void (London: Harvill,
lss4).
19 Warren Motte lr. has assembled an anthology of Oulipian "poetics" in
Motte |r. (Normal, lll.: Dalkey Ar-
APrimer of PotentiolLiterature, trans. Warren F.
chive Press, r99B). See especially Marcel Benabou's contribution, "Rule and
Constraint": "All these obstacles that one creates for oneself-playing, for ex-
ample, on the nature, the order, the length, or the number of letters, syllables,
or words-all these interdictions that one postulates reveal their true function:
their final goal is not a mere exhibition of virtuosity but rather an exPloration of
virtualities" (qr-qz).lnterestingly, Mayer's inventory of experiments contains a
variation on one ofOulipo's signature procedures, N+7: "Take a traditional text
like the pledge ofallegiance to the flag. For every noun, replace it with one that is
seventh or ninth down from the original one in the dictionary. For instance, the
word 'honesty'would be replaced by'honey dew melon.' Investigate what hap-
pens: different dictionaries will produce different results." http://www.writing
.upenn.edu/library/Mayer-Bernadette-Experiments. html.
zo (Ioronto: Coach House Books, zooz), rz.The Mahabharotl is not likely
been sung by a "skald." lt is a Sanskrit poem (4th c. BCE) of nearly nvo million
words.
zr "French Oulipianism," inPataphysics:ThePoeticsoflmaginaryScience (Evanston,
Northwestern University Press, zooz), 65.
zz See Lewitt's "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art," in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology,
r4-r5. Compare Paul Val6ry's idea that a work of art is great to the extent that it
defies "all practice." "Memoirs of a Poem," inTheArtof Poetll, trans. Denise Fol-
liot(Princeton, N.l.: Princeton University Press, 1958), 147-48. See Lucy
SixYeors:TheDematerializationoftheArt1bjectfromry66totgT2(Berkeley: Universityof
California Press, r973); and Lucy Lippard and.lohn Chandler, "The Dematerializa-
tion ofArt, " in Conceptuol Art: A Criticol Anthology , 46-50 .
z3 "General Aims and Theories," inTheCompletePoemsandSelectedLettersofHortCrone,
ed. Brom Weber (New York: Anchor Books, r966), zzt.
il
"Sporting Life, " inThe Colleued Bools of lockSpicer, ed. Robin Blaser (Santa Rosa, Ca-
lif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1989), zr8. See also My VocabularyDidThisro Me:TheCollected
(Berke- Killian (Middletown, Conn.:Wesleyan
Poemsof )ackSpicer, ed. PeterCizzi and Kevin
University Press, zoo8),3p. On dictation, see Spicer's "Vancouver Lecture, l: Dic-
tation and a'Textbook ofPoetry,"' inTheHouseThotJackBuilt:TheCollectedLecturesof
lackSpicer, ed. Peter Cizzi (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), r-48,
esp. z: "instead oFthe poet being a beautiful machine which manufactured the
current tor itself,, did everything for itself . . . instead there was something from
the Outside coming in. . . . I think the source is unimportant." See Peter Gizzi's
"Afterword," r87: "Radio offers the simplest analory for Spicer's practice of dic-
tation as it literalizes the actual transmission of words from elsewhere through
technologr and reinforces the notion that language itself is an alien medium."
See also Robin Blaser, "The Practice of the Outside," inTheCollectedBoolsof )ack
oulipo: Spicer, z7t-329.
25 The poet Charles Bernstein writes: "Poetry is turbulent thought. . . . lt leaves
things unsettled, unresolved-leaves you knowing less than you did when you
started." See "What's Art Got to Do with lt" (MW, 42-$).Compare Robert Cree-
ley's idea that poets and artists "have a much higher tolerance for disorder than is
the usual case." "A Sense of Measure," inWasThataReol Poem E ?therEssays (Bolinas,
Calif.: Four Seasons Foundation, ry79), 14.See Michael Davidson's discussion
of Spicer in The San Francisco Renaissonce: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, t989), r5o-7r; and Ron Silliman's "spicer's
Language," in The NewSenrence (New York: ROOF Books, tgSg), t47-66.
z6 Goldsmith is the founder and curator oIubuweb.com, a site devoted to contem-
porary experimental poetry. His Trilogy has been published in three separate vol-
umes byMake Now Press (LosAngeles). See Marjorie Perloff, "Conceptual Bridges
/ Digital Tunnels: Kenneth Goldsmith's Traflc," in Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by lther
to have
Means in th e N ew Century (Chicago : U niversity of Ch icago Press, zo r o), r 46-6 5.
21 (New York Granary Books, zoor), r5. Also available at http://www.epc.buffalo
.edu/authors/goldsmith.html. See "A Silly Key: Some Notes on Soliloquy by Ken-
lll.:
neth Goldsmith," OpenLettert2,no.T (Fall zoo5): 65-76. This is a special number
of 1penLetter on "Kenneth Goldsmith and Conceptual Poetry" ed. Lori Emerson
and Barbara Cole.
The text of "Being Boring" is available on Goldsmith's webpage at Buffalo's
Electronic Poetry Center, http://www.epc.buffato.edu/authors/goldsmlth/
Lippard,
gotdsmith_boring. html.
"Paragraphs on Conceptual Writing," 0penText 72, no.7 (Fall zoo5): ro8. Gold-
smith, true to his poetics, is plagiarizingSol Lewitt's "Paragraphs on Conceptual
Art": "The idea becomes a machine that makes the art" (Conceptuol Art: ACrirical An-
thology, tz). See lohanna Drucker, "The Crux of Conceptualism: Conceptual Art,
172 173

the ldea of ldea, and the Information Paradigm," in Conceptual An:Theory, Myth,
andPracrice, ed. Michael Contis (Cambridge: Cambridge Universiry Press, zoo4),
z5r-68; and "Un-visual and Conceptual," )penLetter o, no. 7 (zoo5): t38.
3o Marjorie Perloff rejects the Sisyphusian thesis and reads Trffic as a book about
the absurd incoherence of New York traffic rePorts. See Unoriginal Genius, esp.
r57-6t.
See Kenneth Goldsmith, "A Conversation with Kenneth Coldsmith," with Mar-
jorie Perlof[, zoq),http:lliacketmagazine.com/zr/perl-gold-iv
Jockerzr (February
.htmt. "f could have easilykeptFidgetas potential Iiterature by issuingthe instruc-
tion 'Record every move your body makes for a day.' But if I hadn't gone through
the rigorous process of actualizing it, the writingwould have been very different.
I certainly could never have invented feeling so fed up with doing the exercise
that I couldn't help fgetting] drunk!"
Virginia QuarterlyReview 38, no. 4 (Autumn ry62):597-613.
2 : SHOULD POETRY BE ETHICAL OR OTHERWISE?
See (in chronological order) Krzysztof Tiarek, lnflecred Language:Toward a Herme'
neutics ofNearness in Heidegger, Levinas, Stevens, ond Celan (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press,
(Chicago: University of
rgg+);fill Robbins, Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature
Chicago Press, 1999); Peter Nicholls, "Of Being Ethical: Reflections on George
Oppen," inThe 1bjectivist Nexus: Essoys in Cukural Poetics, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis
and Peter Quartermain (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), 240*53;
Michael Eskin, "A Survivor's Ethics: Levinas's Challenge to Philosophy," Dialectt
calAnthropology 34 0999): so7-So, esp. 44-28; Steve McCaffery, "The Scandal of
Sincerity: Toward a Levinasian Poetics," in Priorto Meaning: Protosemantics andPoetics
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, zoor), 204-29; G. Matthew len-
kins, "saying Obligation: George Oppen's Poetry and Levinasian Ethics," /ournol
of American Studies 37, no. 3 @oq): 407-33; Tim Woods, The Poetics of theLimt Erhics
andPoliricsinModernandContemporaryPoerry (Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Press,

Wott (New York: Grove Press, 1959), 165-68. See l. Alane Howard, "The Roots of 2oo3); Matthew Sharpe, "Aesthet(h)ics: On Levinas's Sh adow," Colloquy:Text,Theo-
33
Beckett's Aesthetic: Mathematical Allusions in Watt," Papers in Languoge and Litera- zg-47;Timothy Clark, The Po eticsof Singularity (Edinburgh: Edin-
ry,Critique, g (zoo5);
ture 30, no. + (tggg): 346-56. burgh University Press, zoo5); Leslie Hill, "Distrust ofPoetry: Levinas, Blanchot,
Celan," MIN rzo (zoo5): 986*roo8; Xiaojing Zhou, The Erhics ondPoeticsofAkerityin
34 See Johanna Drucker, TheVisibleWord: ExperimentalTypography and Modern Art, ryo9*
Asian American Poetry (lowa City: University of lowa Press, zoo6); Robert Kaufman,
r9z3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); lean-Paul Cuttay, Letterism and
"Poetry's Ethics: Theodor W. Adorno and Robert Duncan on Aesthetic lllusion
Hypergraphics: The tJnknown Avont-Garde, ry45-tg&5 (New York: Franklin Furnace,
and Sociopolitical Delusion," NewGermanCritique33,no. t (zoo6):73-trB; Marshall
1985); and Mary Ellen Solt, ed., ConcretePoetry: AWorld-View (Bloomington: lndiana
Brown, "The Case forVertical Ethics," Boundaryz,34,no.3(zoo7):16r-88; G. Mat-
University Press, 1968). See also Kaldron On-Line, which has a large archive of
thewfenkins, PoeticObligation:Erhicsin ExperimentalPoetryafterry45 (lowa City: Uni-
visual poetry: http://rwvw.thing.net/-grist/l&d/kaldron.htm. A valuable recent
versity of lowa Press, zoo8).
study is LizKotz,WordstoBeLookedAt:Languagein rg6osArt(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, zooT). Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the lJnderstanding ofEvil, trans. Peter Hallward (Lon-
don: Verso, zoor),28.
35 SeeAppel, wordless(poems) (NewYork Press Rappel, zoog), and Gaze'sAsemicmag-
azine, whose first number provides the image in Figure t. 3 TimesLiterlry Supplement, no. 5494 (luly r8, zoo8), tt.
Antholog, ed. Eduardo Kac (Chicago: Intellect Books, 4 See especially the chapter "substitution" in Emmanuel Levinas, OtherwiseThan Be-
36 Media Poetry: An lnternational
zooT),:-3't. ingorBeyondEssence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, t98t),

(lvry-sur-Seine: EditionsAction Po- 99-102.

37 See Eduardo Kac, HodibisPotox:PoetryAnthology
etique, zooT). See Emmanuel Levinas, TotaliE and Infinity: An Essoy on Exterioriry, trans. Alphonso
Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Universiry Press, 1969), 43: "We name this calling
38 Films o[ Kac's holopoems can be found online at ubuweb.com. See especially
"Adhuc," at http://www.ubuweb.com/fi lm/kac-Adhuc. html.
into question ofmy spontaneity by the presence ofthe Other ethics. The strange-
ness of the Other, his irreducibility to the l, to my thoughts and my possessions,
39 (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, r99B), 3zo. See chapter 6, "After
is precisely accomplished as a ca[[ing into question of my spontaneity, as ethics."
Free Verse: The New Nonlinear Poetries," 14r-67.
See 0therwiseThan Being,5-9, esp. 5-6: "saying is not a game. Antecedent to the
4o See facques Derrida, "Khora," in0nthe Nome, ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. David
verbal signs it conjugates, to the linguistic systems and the semantic glimmer-
Wood, John P. Leavey lr., and lan Mcleod (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Universiry
ings, a foreword preceding languages. lt is the proximity of one to the other, the
Press, r995), 89-t28.
commitment of an approach, the one for the other, the very signiflingness [stg-
nificonce\ of signification. . . . The original or pre-original saying, what is put forth
174 175

in the foreword, weaves an intrigue of responsibility. It sets forth an order more r6 There are a number of useful discussions of "Der Meridian," among them: Da-
grave than being and antecedent to being. By comparison being appears like a vid Brierley, "Der Meridian": Ein Versuch zur Poetik und Dichtung Paul Celans (Frankfurt:
game. Being is play or d6tente, without responsibility, where everything possible Peter Lang, rgSq); Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, "Catastrophe," in Poetry asExperi-
is permitted." ence, trans. Andrea Tarnowski (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999),

which Levinas adds: "The subject in saying approaches

Othervtisethan Being, 48.To
4r-7o; f acques Derrida, "Majesties, " in Sov ereignties in Question, r o8-34; Dennis l.
Schmidt, "Black Milk and Blue: Celan and Heidegger on Pain and Language," in
aneighbor in expressing itself, in being expelled, in the literal sense of the term,
ReadingsofPaulCelan, ed. Aris Fioretos (Baltimore: lohns Hopkins University Press,
out o[any locus, no longer dwelling, not stomping any ground. Saying uncovers,
tgg4), tro-zg; Nicholas Meyerhoff,, "The Poetics of Paul Celan," Twenrieth-Century
beyond nudity, what dissimulation there may be under the exposedness of a skin
Literature, 27, no. 1 (t98t):72-85; Helmut Mriller-Sievers, "On the Way to Quota-
laid bare. lt is the very respirorion ofthis skin prior to any intention" (C8*qg).
tion: Paul Celan's'Meridian'Speech," NewGermanCritique,y(zoo4): r3t-5o; Ray-
See lavant Biarujia's inventive discussion of this "poetic play," "Charles Bern-
mond Ceuss, "Celan's Meridian," Boundary 2,33, no.3 (zoo6): zto-26. I devote
stein: Creating a / Creative Disturbance," Boxkite #3 (Australia zoo6), http://www
some pages to Celan's speech in "The Remembrance of Language," the introduc-
.pepc.Iibrary. See also lerome McGann, "Private Enigmas and Critical Functions,
tion to Gadamer on Celan: "Who am I andWho areYou?" and )ther Essays, trans. Richard
with Special Thanks to the Poetry ofCharles Bernstein," inThePointlstoChongelt:
Heinemann and Bruce Krajewski (A[bany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1997), r*5r.
Poetry and Criticism in the Continuing Present (Tusca Ioosa: University of Alabama Press,
t7 "On the Addressee," in ComplereCriticalProse, trans. Jane Gary Harris and Constance
zooT), g8-r24.
Link (Dana Point, Calif. : Ard is Publishers, 1997), 43-48, esp. 47.
Feeling and Form: ATheory of Art (NewYork: Charles Scribner's Sons, r953). 5ee McCaf-
See the poem "Blume [Flower] ," fromsprachgitter, with Felstiner's translation:
fery, "Scandal of Sincerity."
Der Stein. The stone.
10 " No ldentity, " in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alp honso Lingis (The Hague :
Der Stein in der Luft, dem ich fotgte. The stone in the air, which I followed.
Martinus Nijhofl rg87), t46.
Dein Aug, so blind wie der Stein. Your eye, as blind as the stone.
11 Charles Bernstein and Susan Bee, The NudeFormalism (Los Angeles: zo Pages, r989),
Wiewaren We were
n.p. Hinde, hands,
12 ProperNames, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, wir schcipften die Finsternis Leer, we scooped the darkness empty,
tgg6),4o-46. wir fanden we found

t3 Compare lohn Felstiner's translation ofthese passages (SPP, ao8-9), where the
das Wort, das den Sommer heraufkam: the word that ascended summer
Blume. Flower.
poem is said to be speaking "in its very selfmost cause" and "in the cause ofthe
Blume-ein Blindenwort. Flower-a blindman's word.
Other." It has to be mentioned that speaking "in behalfof'or "in the cause of"
Dein Aug und mein Aug: Your eye and my eye:
an Other (in ein Anderen Sache zu sprechen) is not exactly vocative but is rather more
sie sorgen they take care
like a form ofrepresentation, taking up the cause or res (Soche) ofanother, as in a
fi..ir Wasser. of water.
legal proceeding. See also lerry Glenn's translation, which appears as an appen-
Wachstum. Growth.
dix to facques Derrida's Sovereignties in Question:The Poetics ofPaul Celan, ed. Thomas Herzwand um Herzwand. Heartwall by heartwall
Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, zoo5), r8o-8r. bldttert hinzu adds on petals.
See Bernard Fassbind, Poetik des Dialog: Voraussetzungen dialogische Poesie bei Paul Celan Ein Wort noch, wie dies, und die One more word like this, and the
(Mtinchen: Fink, r995).
und konzepte von lnrersu Himmer schwingen im Freien. hammers will be swinging free
L4 See "Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry," trans. Douglas Scott, Existence and Be' (CWl, r6a) (SPP, ro5)

ing (Chicago: Henry Regnery, $49),304-5; or, more recently, Martin Heidegger,
Elucidations of Hdlderlin's Poet,y, trans. Keith Hoeller (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanities
Books, zooo),56-59.
r5 See James K. Lyon, Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: An Unresolverl Conversorion (Balti-
more: lohns Hopkins University Press, zoo6).
See Rochelle Tobias, The Discours e ofNaturein thePoetry ofPaulCelan:TheUnnaturalWorld
(Baltimore: lohns Hopkins Universiry Press, zoo6).
r9 See "The Nature ofLanguage," in 0ntheWaytoLanguage, trans. Peter Hertz (New
York: Harper & Row, r97r), 75-76. For an example of how poetry's "ground-level
nrode of responsibility" looks in practice, see G. Matthew lenkins's reading of
176
il 177 ;lj

Susan Howe's poetry, "The Nearness of Poetry: Susan Howe's Nonconformist's Me- transcendentaI lyric." Bernstein proposes thatwe read Celan, not in isolation (as
morial," in Poetic )bligation: Ethics in Experimental American Poerry after 1945 (lowa City: we almost always do), but in the context of contemporary North American po-
University oflowa Press, zoo8), t59-8t. etry, with its attention to the materialiry of language and the seriality of form.
zo On Celan's compound words, see, for example, "herzschriftgekrtimelte" (GWIl, 24 Compare Felstiner's:
r74), which Pierre Joris translates as "the heartscriPtcrumbled" (TC, r59), while Etched away by the
Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh translate it as "broken / into heartscript," radiant wind ofyour speech
Glottalstop:rotPoems (Hanover, N. H.: Wesleyan University Press, zooo), 62. ln their the motley gossip ofpseudo-
note to this poem Popov and McHugh have this to say: experience-the hundred-
Here and elsewhere Celan's idiosyncratic compounds (herzschriftgekriimek, tongued My-
Zilndschltisselschimmer) pose an intractable problem. In English compounds are a poem, the Lie-poem. (SPP, za7)

poeticism redolent of the r89os. Even in German where compounding is a com- 25 See Paraji Risdnen, Counterfigures-An Essoy on Antimetaphorical Resistance: Paul Cel'
mon language pattern, and where there is a tradition of Baroque compounding, (Helsinki: Helsinki Universiry Printing
an'sPoetryandPoeticsattheLimitof Figurality
Celan's compounds are exorbitant; one might even suspect his excesses ofvindic-
House, zooT). See also Harold Rhenisch, "Anti-Lyric: Translating the Chost of
tive intentions. His compounds often destroy reference as such and focus on what
Paul Celan," available at http://www.haroldrhenisch.com/translation.html.
makes it possible for Ianguage to exceed its instrumentaI and/or utilitarian uses.
z6 See Shira Wolosky's discussion of this poem in "The Lyric, History, and the Avant-
It is, ofcourse, possible to follow Celan to the letter and do excessive compound-
ing in Engtish (we have G. M. Hopkins), but that leads nowhere because transla- garde: Theorizing the Poetics of Paul Celan," PoericsToday,22, no.3 (zoot): 65t-68.
tion changes the ground from and against which Celanian compounding derives 27 "A Certain lmpossible Possible Saying of the Event," trans. Gila Walker,inTheLate
its power and inventiveness. Compounds thus leave a choice between bad and Derrida, ed. W. T. l. Mitchell and Arnold Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago
worse solutions. Most translators (into English and, especially, into French) Press, zooT), z3r. See also Derrida, "To Forgive: The Forgivable and the Impre-
choose to render Celan's compounds as genitives, such as (the) A ofB. We, too, scriptable," QuestioningGod, ed. lohn D. Caputo, Mark Dooley, and Michael l. Scan-
have had to resort to that solution more often than we'd like. Q3o) lon (Bloomington: lndiana University Press, zoor), zr-5r. See FranEois Raffoul,
zr Thereisatranslation(ofsorts)of"Kalk-Krokus"bytheNewZealandpoetlack "Derrida and the Ethics ofthe lmpossible," ResearchinPhenomenology, 38 (zoo8):
Ross: 27o-9o.
CHALK-CROCUS at z8 "From Anguish to Language" (tgq), FauxPas, trans. Charlotte Mandel (Stanford,
daybreak your Calif.: Stanford University Press, zoor),3.
multidimension/[ocational WANTED 29 Transition, no. 5 (1949):98.
poster vitaI statistics
3o "The Fragment Word" (lC, 3o8). Compare "The Absence of the Book": "The more
stop
the Work assumes meaning and acquires ambition, retaining in itself not only
bombs
all works, but also all the forms and all the powers of discourse, the more the ab-
smile atyou
sence of the work seems about to propose itself,, without, however, letting itself
the dent ofDasein
helps the radar out be designated. This occurs with Mallarmd. With Mallarm6, the Work becomes
the Manukau aware of itself and thereby seizes itself as something that would coincide with
silts up the vaults. the absence o[the word: the latter then deflecting it from every coinciding with
itself and destining it to impossibility" (lC, aza).
The poem is available online at http://titus.books.online.fr/Percutio/Percutio.htm
31 I devote two chapters devoted to Blanchot and Celan in MouriceBlanchot:TheRefusal
#Celan.
of Philosophy (Baltimore: lohns Hopkins University Press, rg97),8r-ror, ("Blan-
zz The title of a small collection of poems, illustrated by his wife, Gisele Celan-
chotiCelan: Unteruegssein [On Poetry and Freedom]"), and 45-72 ("Blanchot/
Lestrange (Frankfurt: Suhrkampl rSSo).
Celan: Driseuvremenr [TheTheory ofthe Fragment]").
z3 See Charles Bernstein, "Celan's Veils and Folds," Textuol Prrtclicc, rB, rro. z (zoo4):
Sun (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988), 35.
zor: "Celan provides little comfort for those who scck;t tttorlt'l lot spiritual ot
178 179

3: VOICES OF CONSTRUCTION ro I eanne Sieg el, Amuorlds: Discourse on the 6osond 7os (Ann Arbor, Mich. : UM I Research
Press, 1985),25.
On self and alterity in Howe's work, see Nicole Marsh, "'Out of My Texts I Am Not
What I Play': Politics and Self in the Poetry of Susan Howe," College Literature 24, 11 On Howe's use of chaos theory, see Ming-Qian Ma, "Articulating the lnarticulate:
no. 3 (Spring, ry97): rz4-37; and Marjorie Perloffi "Language Poetry and the Lyric Singularities and Counter-method in Susan Howe," Contemporary Literature 36, no.
Subjecl Ron Silliman's Albany, Susan Howe's Buffalo," Criticallnquiry 25, no.3 3 (Autumn 1995): 466-89.

(Spring 9gg): 4o5-34. Howe "rarely speaks in her own person," preferring in- o lnTheMidnightHowecitesThomasSheridan'sACompleteDictionaryoftheEnglishLan'
stead "the voices ofothers." guage,bothwith regardro SOUND and MEANING;One main objectofwhich is, to establish o

See Susan Howe, "lnterview with lon Thompson," FreeVerse 9 (Winter zoo5): ploinandpermanenrSTANDARDofPRONUNCIATI0N. "The lrish lexicographer's princi-
http://www.english.chass. ncsu.edu/freeverse/Archives/Winter-zoo5/interviews palworrywas the deplorable state to which the pronunciation ofwritten English
/5_Howe.html; and Kaplan Harris, "Susan Howe's Art and Poetry, 968*t974," had sunk in his time. He yearned for the days of the reign of Queen Anne when
Co nte mporary Liter ature 47, no. 3 (zo o6) : 4 4o-7 1. he believed the language was spoken 'in its highest state o[perfection.' lona-
than Swift's pronunciation (Gulliver'sTrovels was proofed for the press at Thomas
On the spatial-visual character of Howe's poetry, see Atan Golding, "'Drawings
Sheridan senior's chaotically shabby country house in Quilca, County Cavan) was
with Words': Susan Howe's Visual Poetics," inWeWhoLovetoBeAstonished:Experi
mentalWomen'sWriting and Performance, ed. Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue (Tus-
for him the supreme example of elocutionary excellence" (M, 5t-52). See also
caloosa: University of Alabama Press, zooz), rsz-64; Craig Dworkin, "'Waging
Howe's interview with lanet Ruth Falon: "Having an Irish mother and an Ameri
can father, I have a special feeling for the English language. Each spoke it differ-
Political Babble': Susan Howe's Visual Prosody and the Politics of Noise," Word
n,
no. 4 (Fall 1996): 389-4o5. See also Hank ently and well." To which she later adds, ofher experience in the Irish theater as a
EImage: AlournalofVerbol/Visuallnquiry
young girl: "lwas enthralled, happy, and at the same time not really lrish. I knew
Lazer "'singing into the Draft': Susan Howe's Textual Frontiers," in 0pposing Po-
there was no way I could be so clever, I knew I was a foreigner. I couldn't change
etries, z: Readings (Evanston, I [[. : Northwestern University Press), 6o-69, esp. 65:
"Howe's work represents a revisualization of notions of field-composition. As myvoice" (4r).

with similar writings by Olson, Williams, and Duncan, or more recent work by r3 "Transcending Words: Concerning Word-Erasing," trans. Didier Maleuvre, Yole

Tina Darragh, Howe expands the notion of field to a composition with the page as F rench Studies h (r992) : r48.

unit of composition, not a line or a syllable-count or a sentence." Kathleen Fraser See William Butler Yeats, "The Circus-Animals' Desertion," in Poems, ed. David
offers a number of examples of "visual poetics" in "Translating the Unspeakable: Albright (London: Dent, 199o), 395. Compare "Ego Dominus Tuus," in Poems, zrz,
Visual Poetics, as Projected through Olson's'Field'onto Current Female Writing where the poet summons
Practice, " inTransloting theUnspeokable: Poetry ond thelnnovotive Necessig/ (Tuscaloosa: the mysterious one who yet
University of Alabama Press, zooo), t7 4-zoo. Shall walk the wet sands by the edge ofthe stream
Agnes Martin, "Answer to lnquiry," in Lucy Lippard, "Homage to the Square," Arr And look most like me, being indeed my double,

inAmerica55, no.4 (r967): And prove of alI imaginable things

55.
The most unlike, being my anti-self.
Brian Reed, "'Eden or Ebb ofthe Sea': Susan Howe's Word Squares and Postlinear
Poetics, " ostmo der n Culture 1 4, no. z (zo n.p. 15 Anatomy ofCriticism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 196r), 96.
P o 4) :

6 "lnterview with Lynn Keller," Co ntemporary Literature 36 (tgg5): 5. 16 Dfficulties3, no. z (1989): zo.

"The E nd of Art," Ar chiv es of American Art I ourn al t 4, no. 4 (rg7 4) : z. 17 See Steven Collis, Through Words of )thers: Susan Howe and Anarcho-Scholosticism (Vic-
7
toria, B.C.: English Literary Studies, zoo6); Marjorie Perloffi, "'Collision or Co[-
8 "For Wallace Stevens," in Prepositions+:TheCollectedCriticalEssays (Hanover, N.H.:
lusion with History': The Narrative Lyric of Susan Howe," Contemporary Literature
Wesleyan University Press, zooo), z4-38.
3o, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 518-33; Ming-Qian Ma, "Poetry as History Revised: Susan
Compare the interviewwith lanet Ruth Falon, "speakingwith Susan Howe," ln-
Howe's'scatteringas Behaviortoward Risk,"'AmericanLiteraryHisrory6, no. a(Win-
terviewwith lanet Ruth Falon,Diffrcukies3, no. z (1989):3s-42, onwhata painting
ter r994): 716-37; Peter Nicholls, "Unsettling the Wilderness: Susan Howe and
ofoneof Howe'spoemswould looklike: "Blank. ltwould beblank. ltwould bea
American History," Contemporary Literature 37, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 586-6or; Paul
white canvas. White" (az).
Naylor, "Susan l-lowe: Where Are We Now in Poetry?" inPoeticlnvestigotions:Study-
180

in g the Holes in History (Evanston, I ll. : Northwestern U niversity Press, 1999), 43-7o; 6 Compare the following:

and Elizabeth Frost, "'UnsettlingAmerica': Susan Howe and theAntinomianTra- Or again, a human tells a story to another human being, beginning, "A certain
gentleman.. ."
dition," inThe Feminist Avdnt-Garde in American Poetry (lowa City: University of lowa
Which two dogs under the table overhear
Press, zoo3), 105-35. I would emphasize the antiquarian character ofHowe's his-
The human story promPts one of the dogs to tell a story of its own (BC, 7t)
toricism rather more than these writers do.
25,no.3 7 "A Textbook of Poetry," inThe Collected Books oflackSpicer, ed. Robin Blaser (Santa
18 See Robert Baker's review ofThe Midnight, "Ghosts," AmericanBookReview
Rosa, Calif.: BlackSparrow Press, r975), r76.
(March/April zoo 4): r8-zt.
r9 Lionel Gossman, "Anecdote and History," History andTheory 42, no. z (zoq): ryr- 8 How the first-person singular works in A Border Comedy is an oPen question: the
"1" sounds sometimes like it must be the poet herself-"1 too have been too self-
52.
expressive, self-exposed" (BC,:r); "But I should explain how l've written this"
(BC, ro8)-but more often it is as mutable or protean as the language:
4 : A POEM ABOUT LAUGHTER AND FORGETTING
Silently the word dives
See "The Rejection ofClosure": "Language is one ofthe principal forms our cu-
Fantastica[[y spent
riosirytakes. lt makes us restless" (Ll, qg); "Language itselFis never in a state of "l" am time after all
rest" (Ll, 5o); "Even words in storage, in the dictionary, seem frenetic with activ- With the usual confusion of identities
ity, as each individual entry attracts to itself other words as definition, example, Leading to absurd consequences
and amplification" (Ll, 5t). And the carrying out ofdeath (BC, 88)
"A Poetics of the Frontier," a talk Kenner delivered at the University of ldaho Or, again:
in 1975 but, to my knowledge, never published. The idea is that a poetics ofthe Friend, familiar, self rumored
frontier would be modernist in its amnesiac relation to the past-starting liter- Running
ary history over again (almost) from scratch. ln rubber shouts
"Parataxis," Hejinian writes, "is significant both of the way information is gath- Applying estrangements
ered by explorers and the way things seem to accumulate in nature. Composition Willing to smash it, "1" .. .

by juxtaposition presents observed phenomena without merging them, preserv- t...

ing their discrete particularity white attempting also to rePresent the matrix of
"|',,,,
I
their proximity" (LI, r55). Likewise: "The popularity of the explorers' writings was
But that's just wordptay (BC, rg)
due, at least in part, to the narrative tension that was established between Per-
ceptualty immediate details (events) and the suspenseful deferral of complete A sentence from My LifeintheNineties sPrings to mind: "l 'talk to myself' and as my-
comprehension" (Ll, t57). self,, too, notyet knowing what I myself (or better, selves) will say, what the rules
are and will become, first thought flowing in imitation of a previous thought of
Time and Narrarive, trans. Kathleen Mclaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: Uni-
a previous self one could say with equalaccuracy scrawling or sPrawlingwithout
versity ofChicago Press, r984).
limit, and yet that's not right" (MLN, 46). The moral perhaps is that no one can be
ln fact, the magician later performs a hat trick (and turns into a Pun on imagin-
contained within any pronoun.
ation):
g StoriesandTexrsprNothing (New York: Crove Press, tg67), trr.
Then with a stage wink the magician's assistant hands her the hat
The magician looks into it, removes her glove, reaches in, and gently removes a
ro Seelean-FrangoisLyotardonphrasing:"Theparadoxofthelastphrase(orofthe
spider last silence), which is also the paradox ofthe series, should give x not the vertigo

With the allegoricaI practice that magic demands ofwhat cannot be phrased (which is also called the fear ofdeath), but rather the
And sets it on a surface that's either glass or a lens irrefutable conviction that phrasing is endless. For a phrase to be the last one,
As the imagination's assistantwaves the wrinkled scarf and signs another one is needed to declare it, and it is then not the last one" (D, rr).
CAUTION STEPS r r "Short Review of Lyn Hejin ian's A Bo rder Comedy," Boston Review 28, nos. 3-4 (zoo3):
ANIMAL XING (BC, to5) 59.
182 183

12 "Found objects," in Prepositions+:The Collected Criticol Essoys, ed. Mark Scroggins That tragic writers have merely to let their characters announce who they are for
(Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, zooo), 168. the audience instantly to know everything
13 It is important to notice thatA Border Comedy concludes with an extensive bibliog- Whereas comic writers use original plots
raphy ofsource-texts (and conversations). So (as ifit were possible) we need to And start from scratch

read or re-read the poem as a vast collage ofquotations. Shifting points ofview with uninterrupted sincerity as in dreams (BC, 78-79)

14 See Martin Heidegger, "The Nature of Language," in 0n theWay to Language (New r8 (London: Routledge, zooz), esp. to7.
York: Harper & Row, r97r), 57-uo; and lacques Derrida, "Proverb: 'He thatwould r9 On of the riffs in A Border Comedy is a series of citations on xenophobia, starting
pun . . .,"' in l. P. Leavey lr., 6lossory (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), with Stendhal ("Sometimes you just start feeling it" [BC, rz8]) and concluding
77-20. with Virginia Woolf: "The presence of strangers may silence it, but when alone
15 Here is the poet as a creature of memory: together the group of friends, with their clear complexions, sound teeth, 'tun-
I Iike to work every day able voices,' and plain way of speaking, grows merry in the fun of judging, admir-
After a number ofdays have gone by, I am able to establish a set ofdemands- ing, condemning, approving, commending, ridiculing, and deriding" (BC,tzg).
beckonings, prompts See Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, "On Wit and Humour," in
Which I regularly update, maximize, and then allow to intensifr in the course of CharacteristicsofMen,Manners,)pinions,andTimes(r7rr), ed. lohn M. Robertson,43-
several hours into absolute imperatives (lndianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, rg6+). lt was Shaftesbury's idea that the great
99
Which llongto follow man is one who is undisturbed by being laughed at. Socrates at the hands ofAris-
And what is a prompt if not something in itself
tophanes is the classic example.
Which gives way
The selfitself 21 Powers of Horror : An Essay o n Abjecrion (New York: Colu mbia University Press, r g8z), 3.
Now Iooking back 22 Cf. "The Person": "But is it aggressive to be old / ls it pitiless, incited" (CPH, 16o).
To remember 23 One of the source-texts Hejinian frequently cites is lalal Toufic, (/ampies): AnUn-
What it will say (BC, tz5-26) eosy Essay on the U ndead in Film (Barrytown, N.Y. : Station H il t Press, 1993).

Compare this to "Comments for Manuel Brito" concerningWriting Is on Aid to

remember that the momentum of the cadence, with its departures
Memory: "1 do
within arrivals and arrivals within departures, was intended to push time in both 5 : AMONG THE PACANS
directions, 'backward' toward memory and also forward toward 'writing,'which Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten (New York Vintage Books,
is always (for me) indicative of future unforeseen meanings and events." To 196z),473*74.
which Hejinian adds, anticipatingthe last four Iines just cited: "Writinggives one See Steve McCaffery, "Phrase Propulsion in the Writing of Karen Mac Cormack,"
something to remember" (LI, r9z). in Prior to Meaning: Protosemantic and Poetics (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University
r6 See My Lrp in ihe Nineries: "Shall we do some ungendering, shall we gently cross- Press, zoor), esp. 154-57.
dress" (MLN, 4r). See also "The Strangeness": "ln dreams, the opposition be- lust Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
tween objectivity and subjectiviry is a false one. ln fact, the dream's indepen- r985), 16.
dence from binarisms like form-content, male-female, now-then, here-there,
See Marjorie Perloff, "After Free Verse:The New Nonlinear Poetries," inPoetry0n
large-small, social-solitary, etc., is characteristic and makes polarity irrelevant j

8 off the Page: Essays for Emergent occdsions (Evanston, I ll. : Northwestern University
or obsolete" (Ll, t4o-4t). Recall that the border landscape is like the dream
Press, r998), 14r-67.
landscape-unstable, incomptete (Ll, 327).
EmptyWords:Writings'p:78 (Middletown, Conn.:Wesleyan University Press, r979),
17 lnTheFatalist"One's fate is what has happened to one, notwhat is going to hap-
137.
pen" (F, 59). It can only be experienced in retrospect-except by those in a posi-
The last line of the poem explains the title: "inwez3 the z3 is typed by the same
tion to know better:
fingers, in the same manner, as the word we" (VR, 57).
Like other comic poets
I should point out here
184 185

6: THE ROCUE POET'S RETURN
For an account ofAlexander l(erensky's years at Stanford, see Bernard Butcher,
"A Doomed Democrary," Stanford Magazine (lanuary/February zoor), http://www'
stanfordalumni.org/news/ma gazinelzootlianfeb/features/kerensky. html.
See,forexample, "The Next Hundred Years," BulletinoftheMidwestModernLanguage
Association 1o, no. l (1977): t-ro ("The following is a variation in writing of the Bi-
centennial Lecture which Professor Kenner presented on November 5, ry76, at
the Eighteenth Annual Meeting of MMLA in St. Louis, Missouri").
3 ThePoundEra (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, r97r), 3-4.
4 TheCantosofEzra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1948), XXXV, zz. See Carroll
Terrell, A Comp anion toThe Cantos of Ezra Pound (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993), 139: "Mr. Corles: Alfred Perlds, Austrian-born writerwhom Pound
met at a restaurant in ry34. During lunch Perlds told the anecdote about his
World War I experience as a line officer lPai, z-3, 4rr-r4)."
5 "Anecdote and History," History andTheory 4z(May zoq):43-68.
6 Pdter Hajdu, "Hungarians' National Feryour for Anecdotes," Neohelicon 32, no.
(zoo5): tzt-27.
ings,ll: rgzT-rg34, ed. Michael W. lennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cam-
bridge, Mass. : Harvard U niversity P ress, rggg), 442.
r3. A translation ofthe chapter that details the execution is available online at http://
www. bhutto. org/lastmoments. htm.
t4 See Maurice Blanchot, TheSpaceofLiterarure, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, rg8z), esp.237-38. Compare Georges Bataille's depiction of
the poet: "The poet frequently can use words only for his own loss; he is olten
forced to choose beflveen the destiny ofa reprobate, who is as profoundly sepa-
rated from sociery as dejecta are from apparent life, and a renunciation whose
price is a mediocre activity, subordinated to vulgar and superficial needs." "The
F.
Notion of Expenditure lDdpensel," in Visions of Excess; Selecred Writings, tg27-tg3g,
trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: Universiry of Minnesota Press, t985), rzo.
15 See Matthias's essay "Places and Poems: A Self-Reading and a Reading of the Self
in the Romantic Context from Wordsworth to Parkman," in which he remarks
on his relation to Suffolk, England-his wife's "place": "l arrived in Suffolk, after
all, unconsciously seeking 'a refuge or escape from an unmanageable or unlov-
1 able society or nation' [leremy Hooker]. And I didn't live there like a native of the
place-whether a farmer, a craftsman, a doctor, or a teacher-but as a relative

See Brooke Bergen, "A Gathering of Proper Names: The Onomastic Poetics of and friend of natives and writer who, though he might experience and describe
a

fohn Matthias, " inWord, Play, Place: Essays on the Poetry of )ohn Matthias, ed. Robert Ar- the place in fresh and unfamiliar ways, would never be fully integrated with its
chambeau (Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, r998), r33-53. Bergen emphasizes, quite life unless he stayed and worked there. I was more than a tourist but less than
rightly, the prominence of place-names in Matthias's poetry. Anecdotes, how a citizen ofthe place." Reading1ldFriends: Essoys, Reviews,andPoemsonPoetics,rgT5-

ever, have usually more to do with persons than with places orthings-although r99o (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, r99z), 53.

see Matthias's forthcoming poem, "Cafd des Westens: Kurfurstendamm," where r6 IfItDie: An Autobiography, trans. Dorothy Bussy (New York: Vintage Books, rg6g), s.
Berlin is the name of a carriage (LaBerlinorrltdedanslanuit) and Berlinerthe name of t7 In an unpublished poem, "Caf6 des Westens: Kurflirstendamm," Matthias writes:
a doughnut. Did you know I wrote an honors thesis
See, however, Mumar Prasad Mukherji, The LosrWorld ofHindustoni Music (New York: at Ohio State on lsherwood?
Oxford University Press, zooT). Yes and met him once or twice. Flakey don'tyou know
but helped me out a lot and introduced me
SeeAnton Z. Capri, who writes serious histories of physics, but who is also the
to his more important friends.
author of Quips, Quotes, and Quanta: An Anecdotal History ofPhysics (New York World
More important any-lvay than he was.
Scientific Publishing, zooT), where seriousness would be seriously out ofplace.
to (New York Harcourt Brace, r94o). See also Bruce Adams, Tiny Revolutions in Russia: r8 "Epic and Novel," inTheDialogiclmagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael

Twentieth-Century Soviet ond Russia n History in Anecdotes (New York: Routledge, zoo5).
Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, tgSt), z4-26.

l1 The bibliographical note to Crossings reads similarly: "l am indebted,

as in Turns 19 Balletmicaniquewas never performed as originally conceived until the r99os when
and Bucyrus, to an odd assortment ofbooks and authors for facts, fancies, passag- the composer PauI Lehrman produced a version electronically, which is available

es ofverse or of prose, translations, information, scholarship and scandal which

on YouTube in tvvo versions: as the restored soundtrack to Fernand Ldger's ry24
I have had occasion in these poems to quote, plagiarize, wiltfutly ignore, tact- film of the same name, and as a "robotic" performance at the National Gallery
fully modifr, stupidly misconstrue, or intentionally travesty" (C, rzr)' The poet as of Art in zoo4, both produced by Lehrman. See http://www.americancomposers

Hermes, or thief. .org/antheil/lehrman.htm for Lehrman's account of his digital reconstruction of

Antheil's work.
12 "Karl Kraus" (r93r), trans. Edmund lePhcott, in Waltt'r llt'tri,rtttitr, Sclcrtrrl Writ-

*
186 t 187

20. An account of their invention, for which they received a Patent in ry42, is avail- i
7 : ADDINC GARBACE TO LANCUAGE
able online: http ://inventions.org/culture/female/larmarr. html. I Cited by Prynne (P,38r).
zr Claire's lines describe a scene from L'lnhumaine; 2 ln his long "ovewiew" of Prynne's work that appeared in Jocket z4 Kevirr Nolrn
It's me, it is l, on the screenl proposes the final couplet ofShakespeare's sonnet r45 as the source oI l)ryttttc's
They catt me the austere Mademoiselle Claire Lescot. title: "'l hate,' from hate away she threw, / And saved my life sayirrg'trot you."'
I
I'm some kind of cubist cotd fish, the girt Other possibilities include Samuel Beckett's mouth-play, Nor l.
without any mother born a machine who can nevertheless sing
The epigraph is taken from Thomas Nagel, Equoliry and Panioliry (Oxtbrtl: Oxlorl
and I stare down those rioting plebs at the Champs Elysdes
University Press, r99r), rzr. The problem underdiscussion is what ntotivates l)eo-
alive in the intervalA absconditus diminished i ple in an egalitarian society that is also market-driven:
howeveryou tike (WP,8)
Each ofthe hundreds or thousands ofparts that go into a washing nrach i ne or
zz Antheil,andtheTreatiseonHarmony (Chicago: Pascal Covici, rgzT),5t-52. See William t a truck or a ball-bearing factory has to be motivated by economically expresscd
Carlos Williams, "George Antheil and the Cantildne Critics: A Note on the First demand. They are not going to do it as a form ofselFexpression, and even ifthey
Performance of Antheil's Music in New York City (April ro, ry27)," inlmaginations wanted nothing better than to contribute to the well-being of mankind, this
I
(New York New Directions, tgZo), :S:-SZ. would nottell them what to make in their semiconductor plant.
z3 See " From the Prehistory of the Novel, " inThe Dialogic lmaginotion, 5S-59. Benevolence is not enough. Even love of semiconductors is not enough. Among
those who have to think ofnew things to do and new and more efficientways to
z4 To which Matthias adds a lengthy endnote comprising twenry-six Iines of permu-
do them, there seems no substitute for the market as a source of information
tations. A couple ofexcerpts:
(tzr-zz; my emphasis).
g84z: . . . of the decoherence of the kedging
The epigraph from Nagel might be related to the fact that there is, as elsewhere
9843: ofthe quantum ofthe zero ofthe one ofthe watcher
of the disambiguating of the decoherence
in Prynne's work, a good deal of industria[-technological-economic vocabulary
ofthe one in "Not-You," as in the following:
9844: ofthe end ofthe quantum ofthe zero
of the watcher of the disambiguating Lights go forward to flight assessment checks

9845: ofthe beginning ofthe end ofthe quantum ofthe zero up to roof limit, will rake up the card for
ofthe one ofthe watcher new scores in anti-trust recita[. A timid start

9846: ofthe law ofthe beginning ofthe end ofthe quantum for integer placing, spurred on by incessant
ofthe zero ofthe one false alerts at re-entry: diagnose and record
I
9847: ofthe laughter ofthe law ofthe beginning ofthe end atthe same overlay. (P, aor)
ofthe quantum ofthe zero. . . .
ln valiant (and ground-breaking) essay on "Not-You," the poet Iohn Wilkinson
a
9858: ofthe virus ofthe tool ofthe groin ofthe depth
observes: "The sum of the lines of the middle suite and the sum of the lines of
ofthe surface ofthe language
I the two suites of eight poems with epigraphs, are equal to t49." See "Counterfac-
9859: ofthe hand ofthe virus ofthe tool ofthe groin
I tual Prynne: An Approach to Not-you," Parataxis: Modernism and ModernWriting, no.
ofthe depth ofthe surface
g (rg96): 196. A counterfactual is (loosely) a state of what might-have-been, or
986o: ofthe foot ofthe hand ofthe virus ofthe tool
ofthe groin ofthe depth what could be, given a different set of conditions, which Wilkinson associates
986r: ofthe squeeze ofthe foot ofthe hand ofthe virus (rightly) with David Lewis's arguments in favor of possible or alternative worlds.
ofthe tool ofthe groin An alternative world is what, for Wilkinson, the second epigraph, "Love of semi-
9862: ofthe toe ofthe squeeze ofthe foot ofthe hand conductors is not enough," refers us to, namely the formalized world of digital
ofthe virus ofthe tool (K, 175-76) interactions (as opposed to the social order ofspeech-acs) that make possible
algebra-like transactions that, on Wilkinson's reading, hold "Not-You" together.
Wilkinson's essay is reprinted in his recentvolume of essays,TheLyricTouch:Recon-
srrucrions (Cambridge: Salt Publishing , zooT),5-2o. See Robin Purves's response
188
to Wilkinson, "Apprehension: Or, I. H. Prynne, His Critics, and the Rhetoric of
His Art," 6ig, no. z (March 1999): 45-6o, esP. 58-59: "lt is nevertheless the case
that the features whose foregrounding constitutes poetry as Poetry are features
which, in their subordination of communicable meaning to visual and acoustic
patternings, to semantic and syntactic ambiguities, by definition must gener-
ate a surplus of variable, complementary and contrasting meanings along the
course oFeach reading, a surplus which increases in line with the relative density
of those patternings and ambiguities." This seems on the mark: indeterminacy is
not a loss but a gain in determinability. See also a whimsical essay on " Not You, "
entitled "Knot-You!" by Ben Watson, writing under the name of Out to Lunch
(a frequent contributor to Parataxis: Modernism and ModernWriting), pubtished in
lnvolution 22, no. 4 0Sg6): r-g, which approaches the poem as a series oftexts
whose spatial and visual features form a graph that "variously resembles: a tran-
scendent experience (drug-triggered, psychic or sexual) followed by a period of
depression before resuming'normality'; the comPuter'blip'of a heartbeat; the
lie detector's response to the voice calling Carlsberg 'the best lager in the world.'
Using this graph as a'map,'the language of the poems becomes less discursive
efflorescence than wordplay under duress, commenting on the structure as it
both forms it and beats against its limits" (5).
Convention (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), r94. See Stephen
Sch i ffe r, "Actua l- Lan guage Relatio ns, " Philo sophical Perspectiv es
esp.23z-3g ("Lewis on the Actual-Language Relation").
York: Oxford University Press, 1983), r:167. The essay is
Phitosophical Popers (New
atso widely anthotogized, as in Heimir Geirsson and Michael Losonsky, eds.,
Readings in Langua ge and Mind (Oxford : Basi I B lackwe I [, I 996), t38.
ln his essay on "Not-You" Wilkinson writes: "A catastroPhic collapse in the
conditions of trust is a given in contemporary cultural commentary" (t94). For
Wilkinson this collapse is one of the implications of Prynne's title-a reiection
of social conditions (and therefore of Lewis's actual-language theory)-in favor
of computational languages of artificial intelligence, among other forms of rule-
governed discourse, including various versions ofstructuralist linguistics against
which Prynne had aimed his arguments in his Birkbeck lectures, Stars,Tigers, ond
the Shapes ofWords (London: Birkbeck College, 1993).
David Lewis is famous for his arguments in support of possible worlds with vari-
able and even bizarre truth conditions that are (somewhere) as actual as the one
we inhabit, which answers more or less to the laws of scientific reason and the
propositional style of philosophical reasoning. Our universe is only one among
an infinity ofalternatives, and the same goes, as he says, with our languages:
"l
agree that L+ is not used by P, in any reasonable sense, but I have not seen any way
to avoid conceding that L+ is a possible language [thatl might really be
189
that there does prevail in P a convention oftruthfulness in L+, sustained by an
interest in communication" (r87). It is possible that there is a L+ whose sentences
are garbage in t (the language used, for example, by you and me, or P) but which
is nevertheless usable somewhere as a language, that is, able to satis! the "con-
vention of truthfulness . . . sustained by an interest in communication."
On the question ofgarbage, see Ben Watson, "Garbage: A Discussion ofValue,"
Pores:AJournalofPoeticsResearch, no. r (October zoo3), http://www.bbk.ac.uk/pores/.
See Prynne's Stars,Tigers, and the Shapes of Words, r "Does the form of the written
word have a sense-bearing relation to its meaning? Does the sound of the word
express, or modifi, or in any way contribute to, its sense?" An answer of sorts is
given on page r8:
Literary uses oflanguage, and literate ways ofreading and interpreting the effect
ofsuch language, are a challenging test to this hypothesis [that language is a
selFregulating system ofdifferences more or less refractory to the uses made
ofitl, because the forms and devices ofliterary discourse bring forward with
especial prominence a range ofmaterial effects (echo, repetition, sound-devices
and positionaI patterns) which seem conspicuously arbitrary. At the same time
the distinctively literary nature of the literary text marks it for reading with a
heightened sense ofthe accumulated layers and aspects ofassociation which
form the significatory resonances ofprevious usage: the whole prior history of
the language-community can be tuned to allow and invite the vibrations of sense
7 (1993) : 4r-58,
and suggestion and historical retrospect. lt is not the lexicon which carries these
data so much as the encyclopaedia and the historical thesaurus and some ide-
ally synoptic dictionary ofquotations: to the functions of language as code and
framework have been added those ofdep6t-inventory and memory-theatre.
11 In "Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy" Stanley Cavell makes the point
that there is no way we can make modernist art (for example, serial music) co-
herent with traditional concepts of what counts as art. In order to come to terms
with modernism, he says, we need to change-to "naturalize ourselves to a new
form of life, a newworld." MustWeMeanWhatweSay? (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versiry Press, 196g), B+.
12 In contemporary poetics parataxis is often cited as the principal technique of
collage, metonymy, open form, and so on to no definite term. Gertrude Stein's
Tender Buttons (r9rz) is the locus classicus. Recall, for example, Lyn Hejinian, "The
Rejection ofClosure" and "strangeness" (Ll, 4o-58, 135-6o). See also Rosmarie
Waldrop, "Thinkingof Follows," in Dissonance(ifyouareinteresred) (Tuscaloosa: Uni-
versity of Alabama Press, zoo5), esp. zro-rr. For a brief polemic against "open-
ness," see lohn Wilkinson, "Tenter Ground," inTheLyricTouch, zr-32. The idea
well but one should not read too much
seems to be that open forms are all very
into them, much less suppose that "anything goes" with respect to what we can
used-and
say about them. ln Wilkinson's view, open forms encourage altogether too much
190 r,; ii J !r: .,; i i1 r:; :; :.: * i: 191

special pleading, as, for example, in behalf of pointless egalitarianism and the Durqtion: nextmonthQuonriry: one, a bundle

body as the last remnant of authenticity. See, however, page 154 on "mestastasis"
as a process of poetic composition. Compare Prynne's "A Letter to Steve Mccaf-
fery," dated lanuary z, ry89, reprinted in 6ig, no. 7 (November zooo)'. 4o*46, a
dense and gnarly complaint against the idea that in poetry "the text is released
from its fixed displacement out of a function-relation, its tokenised status as
fetish, by beinggiven overto readers as a class ofindividuals actively installed
in the position of controlling the choices of their own consumPtion, to be re-
named as production: the open text, the inventive, selective teader, free to opt for
useful waste or wastefuI utility" (41).
13 See Charles Attieri, "An Aspect of Prynne's Poetics: Autonomy as a Lyrical ldeal,"
Gig,no. ro (Decemberz oot):42-43: "Autonomy for Prynne is nota matteroFmas-
tering the reaI nor ofcreating an adequate self-referential alternative to the real.
Rather it is a way of defining one's strength precisely by the degree to which one's
poem can encompass the semantic dispersal created by the effort to match lan-
guage to experience. . . . Autonomy is what poems accomplish as linguistic struc-
tures, not what selves can use as mirrors for their own imaginary projections."
r4 See Ren6Thom, StructuralstabiliryandMorphogenesis:An lutlineofaGeneralTheoryof
Models, trans. D. H. Fowler (Reading, Mass.: W. A. Benjamin, 1975).
r5 The NewSentence (New York: ROOF Books, r9B7), 8t-82.
16 Inafineessay,"lnterlocatingl.H.Prynne,"DavidPunterwrites: "Letmesuggest
that Prynne's poetry is a poetry of ruins. lt is a Poetry that realises that meaning
is not something to be coherently constructed; on the contrary, it is a continual
process of falling down, and the most that can be done is to attempt to prop up
bits ofthe collapsing landscape, to seek form in the very process ofthings melt-
ing away or prodigiously multiplying." CambridgeQuarterly 3r, no. z(zooz): rz5-26.
Poem 7: Tronsocrion; market Intenrion: to pitch, to packDirecrion: turning, falling
Durqtion: so soon, no more Quontigl: too high, lesser
Poem 8: Tronsoction: won, bldder lnrention: to beat, to shun Direction: ahead, over
(c/f poem r) Duration'. cut-back, dying year Quanti4r twice (c/f poem r) ("Counterfactual
Prynne," r98)
It would be churlish to complain about the complexity of Wilkinson's system-
invoking, like a dreary schoolmaster, the iron rule Occam's razor-because the
system forces one to attend closely to the words of the poem, which do seem to
be governed by some echo principle. Whether the system turns garbage into a
garden will depend on how patient one is with the workings of the system. As for
reading Prynne as if he were a language poet: there are certainly family resem-
blances, and the paratactic form of Prynne's sentences would likely prove posi-
tive in any DNA test.
r8 (London: Heinemann Medical Books, 196z).
19 TheEngineering of Being: An7ntological Approachtol.H. Prynne (Ume5, Sweden: Swedish
Science Press, r997), r7o.
N o rth of lntention : Criticol W riti n gs, 1gt S-tg 86 ( New Yo rk: ROO F Boo ks, r 986), r 3-29,
20t*2t.
VisionsofExcess; SelectedWritings, lgzl-tg3g, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: Uni-
versityof Minnesota Press, 1985), rzo.
22 Gig, no.7 (November zooo): 45.
23 See SelectedWorls of Alfred larry, ed. Roger Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor (New
York: Crove Press, 1965); and Christian Bok,'Pataphysics:ThePoeticsofanlmaginary
Science (Evanston, Il[.: Northwestern Universiry Press, zooz).

r7 Wilkinson constructs a rather interesting model of systematic operations linking
the phrases that make up the first eight lyrics of the poem:
Poem r: Transaction: in/decision lntension: to thread-out, to whack, to break Direction:
ahead, over Durarion: at femur length Quonrio,: double, twins, alternative, two
24 Bcik, 'Parophysics, 9, 38. The word "interferential" means: "Of, pertaining to, or
operating by, wave-interference: spec. belonging to interference of light waves"
(oED).

Poem z: Tronsaction: promise lnrention: to praise, to please Direction: inside, together

Duration'. time rate Quantiry: fifty more, poly 8: ANOMALIES OF DURATION IN CONTEMPORARY POETRY

Poem 3: Transocrion: choose lntention: to observeDirection: end-up, in front Durorion: to Codeof Signals:RecentWritingsin Poetics, ed. Michael Palmer (Berkeley, Calif.: North
length Quonriry: everything, more or less, nothing Atlantic Books, r983), 244.
Poem 4: Tronsocrion; in decision, intent Inrention: to reach back Direction: on the low 2 Michael Palmer, FirstFrgure (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984), 60.
side, lifting, altitude, next Duration: be ready Quanriry: the amount 3 See l. M. Gelfand and S. V. Fomin, AColculusofVariations, trans. Richard A. Silver-
Poem 5: Transoction: the best we took it Intention: to step Direcrion: front, back, beneath man (Englewood, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1963).
Durotion: by the hour, quite slowlyQuontity: one, one "After Olson and Celan: The Breadth and Twist of the Referent," AmericanPoetry
Poem 6: Transcction: pay-out lntention: to play, to eqtral, to brcak l)irt'rtion: hack, rises Review 24, no. 4 (luly/August r995): 9-16. See Alice Fulton, "Of Formal, Free, and
192 193

Fractal Verse: Singing the Body Electric," in Feeling as a Foreign Language:The Good The notion that most ofcontemporary poetry has abandoned issues ofprosody

Strangenessof Poetry (St. Paut, Minn.: Crapvolf Press, 1999), 43-6o. . . . may not only be mistaken, but fails to recognize the narrow way in which
modern and contemporary critics define prosody" (ro). One should also consult
5 (London: Barque Press, zoo5), 5.
the chapter titled "Rhythms" in Hugh Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (London:
6 In "The Creat Refusal" Blanchot speaks of impossibility as a dimension of time
Faber & Faber, r95r; repr., Lincoln, Neb.: Bison Book, 1985), ro9-r8.
in which time is "the dispersion of a present that, even while being only passage
r4 (Washington, D.C.: Edge Books, zoor), n.p. A fact aboutTom Raworth that is fre-
does not pass, never fixes itselfin a present, refers to no past and goes toward no
quently cited is that he was one ofthe first people to undergo open-heart sur-
future: rheincessont" (lC, 45).
gery, and that he suffers from cardiac arrhythmia (his heart-rate can vary from
7 "The Unconditional," ChicagoReview nos' z-4 (Autumn zoo6): 37t.
52,
twenty to hundreds of beats per minute). See, for example, Marjorie Perlofl
B See Tom lones's review of the poem in Jocket 3r (October zoo6): "The poem is "Filling Space with Trace: Tom Raworth's 'Letters from Yaddo,"' in Differentiols:
constituted by an account of its own accidental relations in coming into being, Poetry,Poetics,Pedagogy (Tuscaloosa: University ofAlabama Press, zoo4), zz\-zg.
an awareness ofthose contingencies oflanguage, script, and print that make up 5o naturally one asks-as did Charles Bernstein in an interview-whether there
the relational landscape of poetry." http://www.iacketmagazine.com/3r/jones is any connection betvveen his heart condition and the irregularity of his poetic
-jarvis.htmt. Early in the poem these lines appear: line (Raworth answered, "No."). See "Tom Raworth, Conversation with Charles
Iwrite whatgets taken into my mouth. Bernstein on Close Listening, March 13, zoo6," http://www.writing.upenn.edu/
lust as it is I can and do affirm, Pennsound/x/Close-Listening. php.
just as it undelimitably is,
15 Peter Middleton gives an account of Raworth's reading of Ace at Birbeck College,
just as a single affirmation sings
London, in zoo3, in "How to Read a Reading of a Written Poem," 1ralTradition zo,
the tunelessest selected tesserel
no. r (zoo5), 7*34, esp. r7-zt.
or Age ofProse like no prose ever heard
age not ofprose but rather ofa dim 16 Bigslippers 0n is also available at http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/
laborious deafness as the condition oF- Raworth.html.
just as it is or just as it is not- t7 (London: Goliard Press, r97r), n.p.
as at some point I false first person must
r8 Aramsaroyan (NewYork Random House, 1968), zo. See Curtis Faville's review of
gutter to drop the outsided double me
Saroyan's Complete MinimalistPoems, "stone Cutting All the Way," )acket34 (October
so this parenthesis wilI never close. (The Unconditionol, zg-3o)
zooT), http://lvww. jacketmagazine.com/34/faville-saroyan-grenier.shtml.
Here the reader should consult'A" (Berketey: University ofCalifornia Press, 1978),
r9 However, Iohn Wilkinson does not think the poem is quite so abstract. See his
rz4. (Copyright restrictions prevent me from citing passages from Zukofsky's
essay, "Tripping the Light Fantastic: Tom Raworth's Ace," in Removed for Further
work.)
Study:ThePoetryofTomRaworth, ed. Nate Dorward (Toronto:The Gig,zoq),45*6o,
rc CompleteShorrPoer,y(Baltimore: lohns Hopkins University Press,rggT),2o3. esp. 153-54; and also in this volume, Tom Orange, "Notes for a Reading ofAce,"
n See Abagail Lang, "The Remembering Words, or 'How Zukofsky Used Words,"' r6r-69.
Jacket3o (luly zoo6), http://www.jacketmagazine.com/3o/z-tang.html;
and Louis
20 See Clark Coolidge, "From Notebooks (r976-tg8z)," inCodeofSignals, t74.
Zukofsky, "An Objective," in Prepositions+, ed. Mark Scroggins (Hanover, N'H':
21 seuen PogesMissing,l:SelectedTexts, 1969-1999 (Toronto: Coach House Book, zooo),
Wesleyan University Press, 20oo), 13.
83.
rz See "Poetry: ForMySonWhen He Can Read," in Prepositiot'ts+, to' See Mac Low's performance directions for his "Asymmetries": "fhe duradons of
r3 on the fate of meter in contemporary poetry see Douglas Messerli, "The Rhythms
silences (or instrumentaI tones) are dt leasr those of single words or word strings
ofthe'Language' Poets," Paper presented atthe rgBz annual meeting ofthe Mod- that might be printed in equivalent spaces, as they would be spoken aloud by
ern Language Association, http://www.greeninteger.blogspot.com/roo8/o9/ the individual reader. That is, the reader is silent or prolongs sounds at least as
rhythms-of,language-poets.html. Referring to the poetry of Charles Bernstein long as it would take him to speak such space-equivalent words. However, one
and Ted Greenwald, Messerli writes: "l am only speculating that the rhythms of may, in performance, extend these durations whenever one feels that the total
such poets may have prosodic roots in traditions othcr th;ln spccch an<l song.
194 195

performance would be 'better' if one remained silent or continued to prolong Meanwhile ioppementsdlalune is also the title of a musicalwork (for mezzo-sopra-
the sound one is making." RepresentativeWorks, 1938*1985 (New York: ROOF Books, no and nine instruments) by the contemporary Canadian composer Christopher
tg86), zo7. Butterfield.
23 Selected Poems (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, t976), 5o. BeingandTime, trans. lohn Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper &
24 ShorterPoems (Normal, lll.: DalkeyArchive Press, 1993), 93' Row, 196z), zu-r4 (section 35).

25 A tea caddy is a (frequently silver or pewter) container for tea leaves. "Lobate" WordVirus:The Willionr S. Burroughs Reader, ed. James Grauerholz and lra Silverberg

means "having or characterized by lobes" (0ED). Plasma is "a green variety of (NewYork Grove Press, zooo),289.
chalcedony, a semi-precious stone, and formerly used for carving into intaglios 9 " Postulates of Linguistics, " in AThousand Plateaus,76.

[engravings]" (0ED). 10 Georges Bataille's concept of ddpense, or the nonproductive expenditure ofen-
26 'Pataphysics:ThePoeticsof anlmaginaryScience (Evanston, Il[.: Northwestern Univer- ergy, wealth, words, work, and so forth, is essentially ludic. See "The Concept

sity Press, zooz),8. of Expenditure," in Visions ofExcess: SelectedWritings, r9z7-rg3g, trans. Allan Stoekl
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), tr6-29. See also McCaffery,
"Writing as a GeneraI Economy" (NI, zor-zt).
9 : NOMAD POETRY ll See W. V. O. Quine, Word and )bject (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 196o), z:
Aware of the points thus far set forth, our philosopher may still try, in a spirit of
McCaffery's method is not exactly citational but work as a kind of erasure. In an
rationaI reconstruction, to abstract out a pure stream ofsense experience and
essay titled "lackson Mac Low: Samsara in Lagado," McCaffery notes that "Mac
then depict physical doctrine as a means ofsystematizing regularities discernible
Low's writings are produced only atthe expense ofthe lossofonorhertext" (PM, r96)'
in the stream. He may imagine an ideal "protocol language" which, even if in
See Gilles Deleuze and F6[ix Guattari on "nomadology" inAThousandPlateaus:Capr
fact learned after common-sense talk of physical things or not at a[[, is eviden-
talismandschizophrenia,trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: universityof Minne- tially prior: a fancifully fanryless medium of unvarnished news. Talk of ordinary
sota Press, tg87),369. physical things he would then see as, in principle, a device for simplifring that
lf one follows that quintessentiaI nomad, Walter Benjamin, one would say that disorderly account ofthe passing show.
"deich" and "taihun" are merely adumbrations of the "pure language" in which t2 See the Czech poet Ladislav Nebesky's "Non-written Words," http://www.thing.
whatwe call "ten" reposes in immobile, unspeakable serenity. ln "TheTask ofthe net/-grist/ld/czech/Nebesky. pdf.
Translator" Benjamin writes: t3 Trans. MargaretWaller (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1984),256.n85. The
Whereas in the various tongues that ultimate essence, the pure language, is tied citation is from Leon S. Roudiez, "Twelve Points fromTelQuel," L'EspritCreateur4,
only to tinguistic elements and their changes, in linguistic creations it is weighted no. z (Winter r974):3oo. See McCaffery, "The Martyrology as Paragram" (NI, 63-66).
with atien meaning. To relieve it of this, to turn the symbolizing into the
a heavy,
"The Man with the Blue Guitar," inThe Collected Poems of Wallace Steuens (New York:
symbolized itsetf, to regain pure language fully formed from the linguistic flux,
Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), 176.
is the tremendous task of translation. ln this pure Ianguage-which no longer
means or expresses anything but is, as exPressionless and creative Word, that 15 Art-Longuoget, no. r (1969): t4.
which is meant in all [anguages-all information, sense, and all intention finally
encounter a stratum in which they are destined to be extinguished.
1O : ON THE CONUNDRUM OF FORM AND MATERIAL
SelectedWritings,l: 1913-19z6, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W.
Perhaps not many will agree that form is a key concePt for Adorno. Lambert
lennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), z6t. One might say ;
Zuidervaart touches on form only in passing inAdorno'sAestheticTheory:TheRedemp'
that McCaffery's poem traverses this stratum in which "all information, sense, l
r99r), esp. rz3-25, rz8-3o, 166-68 (see
tion oflllusion (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
and all intention" are finally "extinguished." l

l note 2 below). Christopher Menke, meanwhile, think that form and material
Cited by McCaffery (Nl, t7t).
l
4 are "borderline" concepts. See AestheticTheory: AexhericNegativiE in Adorno ond Der'
l

5 lorge Luis Borges, Ficciones, ed. Anthony Kerrigan (New York: Grove Press, t96z), rida (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1gg8),74.Shierry Weber Nicholson attaches
83. more importance to the question of form in Exoctlmagination,LateWork:OnAdorno's

ff
 q 197
Aesrhetics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), ro3-35 ("ConfigurationaI Form in
the Aesthetic Essay and the Enigma of AestheticTheory"), where configurational (or
constellational) form is paratactic, like the form ofAesthericTheory itself. See Ninhi
Kinya, "Form Should Not Be Tautological: Hegel and Adorno on Form," Japanese
lournol of Aesthetics 47, no. r (1996): 2536.1am indebted to l. M. Bernstein's discus-
sion ofAdorno's aesthetics in TheFateofArt: AestheticAlienationfromRonttoDerrido and
Adorno (Cambridge: Polity Press, r99z), esp. 197*2o6.
"Art," says Adorno, "can be understood onty by its laws of movement, not ac-
cording to any set of invariants. lt is defined by its relation to what it is not. The
specificatly artistic in art must be derived concretely from its other; that alone
would fulfill the demands of a materialistic-dialectical aesthetics. Art acquires its
specificity by separating itself from what it developed out of: its law of movement
is its law of form. lt exists only in relation to its other; it is the process that tran- I Adorno's is, to be sure, a "negative aesthetics" in lohanna Drucker's sense of
spires with its other" (AT, 3).
Actually, I think Adorno could find a place for Duchamp in his aesthetics by ob-
serving that the readymades are not just pund objects but have been staged, that
is, recontextualized and, therefore, implicitly conceptualized as art. Founrdin may
be, empirically, a urinal, butwith its signature, "R. Mutt," and its displacement
from the world of commodities to the exhibition, gallery, studio, museum, or
history of art, it has been transformed into something other. See Marjorie Perloff,
"The Conceptual Poetics of Marcel Duchamp," inztst-Century Modernism;The"New"
Poetics (Oxford : Basi I B lackwe I l, zo oz), 7 8-tt 4.
(Lincoln: Uni-
See David Roberts, ArtandEnlightenment:AestheticTheoryafterAdorno
gz.
versiry of Nebraska Press, r99t),
ro
See Hauke Brunkhorst, "lrreconcilable Modernity: Adorno's Aesthetic Experi-
mentalism and the Transgression Theorem," trans. Colin Sample, inThe Actualiry
of Adorno:CriticalEssaysonAdornoandthePostmodern, ed. Max Pensky (Albany, N.Y.:
q-il,
SUNY Press, rggT), esp. 46. See also Susan Buck-Morss, TheOriginofNegative
Dialectics:TheodorW. Adorno,Walter Benjamin, and the Fronkfurr Instirure (New York: Free
Press, r977),63-8r ("The Logic oIDisintegration: The Object").
lndeed, as l. M. Bernstein says, the aim of dialectical thinking is not to resolve
I its form must preserve traces ofthe amorphousness that form tends to repress."
contradictions but to experience them reflectively. See Bernstein, "Negative Dia-
lectic as Fate: Adorno and Hegel," inThe Cambridge Companionto Adorno, ed. Thomas
Huhn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, zoo4). 19-50, esp. 35-39.
See foseph Conte, "seriality and the Contemporary Long Poem," Sogetrieb u,
Ir
(Spring/Fall rygz): 35-45, esp. 37: "The series describes the complicated and
often desultory manner in which one thing follows another. lts modular forrn
I the"crisisofschein" inLateManism:or,AdornoandthePersistenceoftheDiolecric(New
which individual elements are both discontinuous and capable o[
-in
recombination-distinguishes it from the thematic development or narrative
rz
progressionthatcharacterizeothertypesofthelongpocnt. Iltcst'ricsrcsistsa
J
systematic or determinate ordering of its materials, preferring collstarr t t lr.t trlit'
( ()lrl("\
and even accident, a protean shape and even aleatory method." see also
book on serial form, unending Design:The Forms of Postmodern Poetry (lthaca, N.Y.:
CornelI UniversitY Press, r99r).
In the section of AestheticTheo6r on "Universals and Particulars" Adorno writcs:
"That universal elements are irrevocably part of art at the same time that art op-
poses them, is to be understood in terms of art's likeness to language. For lan-
guage is hostile to the particular and nevertheless seeks its rescue. Language
mediates the particular through universality and in the constellation of the uni-
versal, but it does justice to its own universals onlywhen they are not used rigidly
in accord with the semblance of their autonomy but are rather concentrated to
the extreme on what is specifically to be expressed" (AT, zo4)'
this term in her critique of the snobbery of academic theory, which (like Ador-
no) wants to keep the work of art separate from the social order (mass culture,
consumer culture, the art market), and which "has rigidified into predictable
categories of thought, each identifiabte by their characteristic vocabulary of the
'abject,' the'subversive,' the'transgressive,' the'resistant,' or other negative
keyword." see sweet Dreams: contemporary Art and Compliciry (chicago: university of
chicago Press, zoo5), xv. ButAdorno's aesthetics is also negative in the sense in
which his dialectical thinking is negative, namely that he conceives the modern-
ist artwork as an expression of the struggle of form and material-in contrast say
to the classical or humanist (or Yeatsian) aesthetic ofspreaachura, where the idea
is to conceal the Iabor of art-making.
67-68: "The best works ofart respect the
See Zuiderv aart, Adorno's AesrheticTheory ,
unique identity ofthe nonidenticaI and do not force an identity ofform and con-
tent. They achieve a peaceful fragile reconciliation ofthe one and the many. In
such works, artistic form is a nonviolent synthesis Preserving divergent and con-
tradictory impulses, somethings even susPending itself for the sake of disparate
content. Adorno thinks of artistic form as an identity that makes the nonidenti-
cal less alien but lets it remain distinct. " Cf. r99: "For an artwork to be successful,
"AWriting of the Ruins": Essays on Modern
See also f ames Martin Harding, Adorno and
(Albany, N.Y.: sUNY Press, 1997),
AexheticsandAnglo-AmericanLiteratureandculture
z6-47 (" AestheticTheory and Fragmenting the Unities of Negation")'
See Thomas Huhn, "Adorno's Aesthetics of lllusion," lournal of Aesthetics and Art
criricism 44, \o.3(winter 1985): t8r-8g. See also Fredric lameson's discussion of
York: Verso, r99o), t65-76.
Recall Adorno on the essay as form: "Even in its manner of its presentation, the
198 199

essay may not act as though it had deduced its object and there was nothing left
to say about it. lts self-relativization is inherent in its form: it has to be construct-
ed as though it could always break off at any point. lt thinks in fragments, just as
reality is fragmentary, and finds its unity in and through the breaks and not by
glossing them over" (NL, r:16).
ShierryWeberNicholson,"AestheticTheory'sMimesisofWalterBenjamin"(ss.)z);
and Heinz Paetzold, "Adorno's Notion ofNatural Beauty" (213-36).
Ren6e Heberle, ed., FeminisrlnrcrpretationsofTheodorAdorno (University Park: l\'rrrr
sylvania State University Press, zoo6).
Quoted in willoughby Sharp, "Lawrence Weiner in Amsterdam," Avokrulrc 4

13 Compare this to what Adorno says in his essay "schcinberg and Progress": after (Spring r97z): 7r.
complaining that the twelve-tone method is simply the working of a "self-pos- "Art as Art," ArtNews 65 (September ry66):72. See also "The Black-Sqtlarc l)ainl-
ited system of rules," he goes on to observe the ways in which in his late work ings," in ArtasArt:TheselectedWritingsofAdReinhardt, ed. Barbara Rose (Ncw York:
Schonberg would interrupt the system. ln particular: "The need to finish works Viking Press,'rg7 5), 8z-83.
was unknown to him." Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, zoo6), 94.
See Blanchot, "The FragmentWord (ltorole de fragment)": "A new kind of arrange-
ment not entailing harmony, concordance, or reconciliation, but that accepts
disjunction or divergence the infinite center out ofwhich, through speech,
as
relation is to be created: an arrangement that does not compose but juxta-
poses, that is to say, leaves each of the terms that come into relation ourside
one another, respecting and preserving this erterioriry and this distance as the
principle-always already undercut-of all signification. luxtaposition and in-
terruption here assume an extraordinary force ofjustice" (lC, 3oB)
15 ln his Negoriue Dialectics Adorno writes: "Except among heretics, a[[ Western
metaphysics has been peephole metaphysics. The subject-a mere limited
moment-was locked up in its own self by that metaphysics, imprisoned for all
eternity to punish it for is deification. As through the crenels ofa parapet, the
subject gazes upon a black sky whichin the star ofthe idea, or o[Being, is said to

rise. And yet it is the verywall around the subject that casts its shadowon whatev-
er the subject conjures: the shadow ofreification, which a subjective philosophy
will then helplessly fight against" (ND, t39-ao).
r6 See Ulrich Plass's discussion ofAdorno on Borchardt inLonguageandHistoryinThe-
odor Adorno'sNotes to Literature (New York Routledge, zooT), 73*87.

t7 Gedichte, ed. Cerhard Schuster und Lars Korten (Stuttgart: Verlag Klett-Cotta,
zoo3), tto.
r8 (Koln: M. Dumont-schauberg, 1959), l, n.p.
19 the entries by Robert Hullot-Kentor ("Right
The CambridgeCompanionto Adorno: see

Listening and a New Type of Human Being"), Max Paddison ("Authenticity and
Failure in Adorno's Aesthetics of Music"), Lydia Goehr ("Dissonant Works and the
Listening Public"), and Andrew Bowie ("Adorno, Heidegger, and the Meaning of
Music"). With one or two exceptions, there is Iittle close readingof AestheticTheory
in Thomas Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart, eds., TheSemblance ofSubjecriuiry: Essays
onAdorno'sAestheticTheory, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, r997)--see particularly
 Adams, Bruce. Tiny Reuolutions in Russia:Twentieth-Century Soviet and Russion History in Anec'
dotes. New York: Routledge, zoo5.
Adorno, Theodore. AestheticTheory. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: Uni-
versity ofMinnesota Press, 1997.
7i51hgd5 cheTheorie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, r97o.
Trans. E. F. N. lephcott. London:
lrlinivnq Moralia : Reflections from a Damaged Life.
-. New Left Books, 1974.
-. Trans. E. B. Ashton. NewYork: Continuum, t983'
Notes fo Literlture. z vols. Trans. Shierry weber Nicholson. New York: Columbia
-.NegativeDiolectics.
University Pres s, lggt-g2.
-. Philosophy of New Music. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, zoo6.
-. Quosi unaFantosia:Essoyson ModernMusic.Trans. Rodney Livingstone. London:
Verso, 1998.
-.
Alberro, Alexander, and Blake Stimson, eds. Conceptual Art: ACritical Anthology. Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, t999.
Allen, Donald, ed.TheNewAmericanPoerry:ry45-r96o. Berkeley: UniversityofCalifornia
Press, r999.

?o t

*l
Altieri, Charles. "An Aspect of Prynne's Poetics: Autonomy as a Lyrical ldeal." 619, no. "hpsliments List." http://vwvw.writing.upenn.edu/bernstein/experiments
ro (December zoor): 38-5t. .htm[.
-. My w aj eeches an d P o ems. Chicago : iversi ty of Chicago Press, 1999.
Andrews, Bruce, and Charles Bernstein. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. Carbondale: : Sp Un

Southern Illinois University Press, r985. fipsg1is1 Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.
New York: Press Rappel, zoo9.
-. Republis of Reality: Poems, ry7s-tggs. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, zooo.
Appel, Rosai re . Wordless (poems).

Moon Press, r99r.

-. RoughTrades. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, r99r.
Armantrout, Rae. Necromonce. Los Angeles: Sun &
Artaud, Antonin. AntoninArtaud:SelectedWritings. Ed. Susan Sontag. Berkeley: Univer-
-. Wirh Srrings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, zoor.

sity ofCalifornia Press, r988.

-.
Bernstein, Charles, and Susan Bee. TheNudeFormalism. LosAngeles: zo Pages, 1989.
Ashbery, lohn. HouseboatDoys. NewYork: Penguin Books, 1977.
-.
Bernstein, l. M. The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida ond Adorno. Cam-
gslsslsi Prose. Ed. Eugene Richie. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, bridge: Polity Press, 1992.
20O5. "Negative Dialectic as Fate: Adorno and Hegel." lnCombridgeCompanionto Ador-
-. g slf- psnrait in a Co nv ex Mirror. New York: Pengui n Boo ks, 1975. no, ed. Thomas Huhn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, zoo4.

NewYork: Penguin Books, 1972.

-.
Biarujia, lavant. "Charles Bernstein: Creatinga Disturbance." Boxkite#3. http://vwvw
-.
Badiou, Alain. Erhics:An EssayontheUnderstandingof Evil.Trans. Peter Hallward. London: .pepc.library.
-.ffiysspsems.
Verso, zoor. Bion, W. R. LearningfromExperience. London: Heinemann Medical Books, r962.
"some Remarks on Marcel Duchamp." symptom 9 (spring zoo8). http://lvww Blanchot, Maurice. The6ozeof )rpheus.Trans. Lydia Davis. Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill
. lacan.com/symptom/?=39. Press, r98r.
-.
Bahktin, Mikhail. The Dialogictmogination Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Min-
Austin: University ofTexas Press, r98r. nesota Press, 1993.
-.ThelnfiniteConversotion.Trans.
Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
Baker, Robert. "Chosts." American BookReview zs, no.3 (March/April zoo4): r8-zt.
Barnes, Djuna. Nighnuood. Normal, lll.: DalkeyArchive Press, t995. tg8z.
-.TheSpaceofLiterature.hans.
Trans. Lycette Nelson. Minneapolis: University of Minne-
Bataille, Georges. Visions ofExcess: SelectedWritings, tgzT-tg3g. Trans. Allan Stoekl. Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, r985. sota Press, rgg2.
-.TheStepNotBeyond.
TheWorkof Fire. Trans. Charlotte Mandell and Lydia Davis. Stanford, Catif.:
Beckett, Sa mu el. Sto ri es on d Texts fo r N othing. N ew Yo rk: Grove Press, 1967.
"fh1ss Dialogues." Tronsirion, no.5 (1949): 98. Stanford University Press, 1995.
NewYork: Grove Press, 1959.
-.
Bloom, Harold. TheVisionary Company: AReading of English RomanticPoetryl. Ithaca, N.Y.:
-.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminotions: Esso],s ond Reflections. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Cornell University Press, r96r.
-.Watt.
Schocken Books, r969. B<ik, Christian. Eunoia. Toronto: Coach House Books, zoot.
tPqtuphysics:ThePoetics
Bsflpslions: Essoys, Aphorisms, AutobiographicalWritings. Ed. Peter Demetz. New of anlmaginary Science. Evanston, I[[.: Northwestern Uni-
York: Schocken Books, 1978. versity Press, zooz.
-. gsls6lsi Writings, l: rgr3-tgz6. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Marcus Bullock and Mi-
-. (Asilly
Key: Some Notes onSoliloquy by Kenneth Coldsmith." Open Letter12,no.
chael W. Iennings. Cambridge, Mass.: Haward University Press, r996. 7 (Fallzoo):65-76.
-. gslssssiWritings, lI: tg27-1934. Ed. Michael W lennings, Howard Eiland, and
-.
Borchardt, Rudolf. 6edichre. Ed. Cerhard Schuster and Lars Kurten. Stuttgart: Verlag
GarySmith. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. Klett-Lotta, zoo3.
-.
Bergen, Brooks. "A Gathering of Proper Names: The Onomastic Poetics of lohn Mat- Borges, lorge Luis. Ficciones. Ed. Anthony Kerrigan. NewYork: Grove Press, t962.
thias. " f n Word, Play, Place: Essays onthe Poetry of lohn Matthils, ed. Robert Archambeau, Brierly, David. "Der Meridion": EinVersuch zur Poetikund Dichtung Paul Celans. Frankfurt: Pe-
133-53. Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, r998. ter Lang, 1984.
Bernstein, Charles. Arrrfce ofAbsorption. Philadelphia: Singing Horse Press / Paper Air, Brown, Marshal[. "The Case for Vertical Ethics." Boundory 2,34, no. t (zoo7): 16r-88.
1987. Briin, Herbert. When Music Resists Meaning: The MojorWritings of Herbert Brlin. Ed. Arun
"(sl3n's Veils and Folds. " Textuol Practice 18, no. z (zoo4): r 99 2o5. Chandra. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2oo4.
DarkCiry. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, tg<)4. Ilrunkhorst, Hauke. "lrreconcilable Modernity: Adorno'sAesthetic Experimentalism
-.
-.

sl
 Ctiti./,ltltsyonAdomoand the Putnodsn, ed. Max Pensky, 43-61. Albany, N.Y: suNY Meadow Press, 2oor.
press, r99t Gesrnnrke We ., Llll. Ed. Beda All€mann and Stelan Rcich.!1. I r.nr k lu! I :

Bruns, GeEld L. lryentions: vttiting,Tdinli}, andunde':,'anding in Lir€mry Hinory. N€w Ha_ suhrkamP, t9&.
ven, Conn.: Yale Uniyersity Press, 1982. -. . Glonol Sop: ror Po€ms. TEns. Nikolai Popov and Heather McH ugh. I lr r!)vo,
' ranguage, Pain, and t€ar." lox,, Reri€rl7 u, nos. 2-3 (1980): 131-32. N. H.: w€sleyan UniveEity Press, ,ooo.

-. gia Press,2oo5. North Point Press, 1986.

press, 1992 SelededPoety ondPnte. Trans. lohn F€lstiner. New York \ ,. w. Norton, 2oo r.
Modern Wefr! ond fre td@ ol &nguog?: A (titicol
qnd Historicol 5.!d]. New Haven, Th,?odrum. TEns. Pi€nE Joris. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 2ooo.
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974. -.
Chalfen, hr.el. Ftrl C?ldn: An Autobiogtophl ofHis Youtt.I:lrns. Maximilian Bl€yleben.
-. on np Anarclry of Poety and Phihsolly: A cuide for the Unrur. New York rordham -. New York Pers€a Book, leer.
uni!€rsiry Prcss, 1999. Clark, Timothy. l1le Ftsri6 ofsinglldrig. Edinburgh: EdinbuBh Univ€rsity Press, ,oo5
-.
ifieFmnfrntnsria/t!. NewYork: Free Pr€ss, 1977 B.c.: tnglish Lit€rary 5tudie6, 2006.
Burns, Oerald. srofter Po?mr. Nornal, Ill.: Dalkey tuchit€ Press, 1993. Conre, loseph. "seriality and the Cont€mponry tong Po€m." sorstris, n (SPringi rall
AThingAbotntanglr{].. Qrbondale: South€rn lllinois UniveEity Press, 1990. 1992): 3s-4s.

-. and 1rl Silverberg. New York Grove Press, 2ooo. Press, r99r.
Buskirh Martha. f€ contingentobierof|nntpnrmr Af Canbridge, Mass : MIT Press, Cool, Alb€rt. "Atr Olson and Celan: Ite Breadth and Twist ofthe Referent. " Ameti_
2oo3. cnnPo?n|R2view,24,r]0.4(l,ulyll gust1995);r16.

1979. Calil: North Atlantic Book, 1983.

Posti6, ed. Michael Palm€r, r7z--84. Berkeley,
-........._. Silenr?. Hanover N.H.: Wesl€yan Uni\€rsity Press, 1961. Cooper, Anthony Ashl€y. "On wit and Humour." In Chomct?,ini$ of l|pn, Monne[, Opin'
camfield, william A. 'Marcel Duchampt tounein: lts History and Aerthetics in th€ ionr,Tincs. Ed.lohn M. Rob€rtson, 43-.49. Indianapolis: BobbFMedill, 1964.

cis M. Naumann, 64 94 Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989. \€rsity Pr€ss, 2oo{

Sci€ntinc Publishing,2ooz Yor&: Anchor 8ook,1966.

Caputi Mary. -Iheodor Morno and the Perfomance Art of Cindy Sherman.' ln Cr€eley. Roben. l Qd* Groph: Collen?d Noer A Essrys. Ed. Donald Allen. San Francis.o:
Feninittlnteryrctotnnsoflhudor, dono, ed. Rende H€berle,3ol-ro Uni!€Eity Park four S€asons toundation, 1970
Pennsllvania Stat€ unir€rsity Press, 2006. s€ie.r?d Posns. NewYork Charl€s scribnels Sons, 1976.

Celan, Paul. Atemkristall. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, t99o.

-. 1979.
8rcor,rrum. trans. Pierre loris. Los Angeles: sun & lt4oon Pr€ss, 1995. Critchley, simon. On Hrnour. London; Routledge, ,oo2.

-. Pemtio.html€€lan. York Franklin rurnace, re8s.

Collected Prose. Trans. Rosmarie Waldrop. Riverdale-on-Hudson, N'Y': Sheep Danto, Arthur. TheTransfgurationoftheCommonplace. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
--.Meadow Press, t986. versity Press, t98t.

"f
206 207 !l

malistPoems. lacket34 (October zooT). http://vuww. jacketrn;r1i;ru iltr'.t otrt/t,l/l.rvlllt'

Davidson, Michael. The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and CommuniE at Mid-Century.
-saroyan-grenier. shtml.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
F6ti, V6ronique. "Pau[ Celan's Challenge to Heidegger's Poetits." ltt lr'rltvitlr rrf ltttr't
Deleuze, Gilles, and FelixGuattari. Rafta:TowardaMinorLiterature.Trans. Dana Polan.
pretation:EssaysonHans-GeorgGodamer'sWork, ed. Kathleerr Wri11lrl, tll(r .'ol{ Allr.rrrv,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
N.Y.: SUNY Press, t99o.
ffllsu5and Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenio. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minne-
Four Horsemen (RafaeI Baretto-Rivera, Paul Dutton, Stcv(' M((,lllt'ry, lrp Nlr lrol),
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
-.
Derrida, lacques. "A Certain lmpossible Possible Saying ofthe Event." Trans. Gila
Horced')euvres. Don Mills, Ont.: Paperlacks, r975.
Fraser, Kathleen. "Translating the Unspeakable: Visual lttt't it s, ,tt l'l o;r't lr,r I I ltl or tlilr
Walker. lnTheLateDerrido, ed. W. T. l. Mitchelt and Arnold Davidson. Chicago: Uni-
Olson's 'Field' onto Current Female Writing Pract icc. " I tt I t rtttrlrtt tttr; t ltr' I itrr1rr'rllrtlrfi'
versity ofChicago Press, zoo7.
PoetryandthelnnovofiueNecessig/,t74-2oo.Tuscaloosa: llttivt'tsityol Al,tlr,tttt,t l'tt",r,
"Khora ." lnOntheName, ed. Thomas Dutoit. Trans. David Wood, lohn P. Leavey
2000.
Ir., and lan Mcleod, 89-t29. Stanford, Calif,,: Stanford University Press, t995.
-. Fredman, Stephen. Contextual Practice: Assembloge nnd thc l.rotir iu llxtt,trrtt l\tr'tty ml fut.
"p16vsrb: 'He thatwould pun . . ."' ln J. P. Leavey lr., Glassary, r7-zo. Lincoln:
Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, zoto.
University of Nebraska Press, t986.
-. Schibb oleth p our Pa ul Celon. Pa ri s : Ga t t i ma rd, 1986.
znd ed. Carnbridgc: Canrbri<lgc Urrivcrsil.y

gignqsnge/Signsponge. Trans. Richard Rand. New York: Cambridge University Press, r99o.
-.pssg'5pysse:TheCrisisinAmericonVerse.
Frost, Elizabeth. "'UnsettlingAmerica': Susan Howeand theAntinomianTradition."
-. Press, r994.
-. In The Feminisr Avant-Garde in American Poetryr, to1-35. Iowa City: University o[ lowa
Quesrion: The Poerics of Paul Celon. Ed. Thomas Dutoit and outi Pas-
g6vsvsignfies in
Press, zoo3.
anen. New York: Fordham University Press, 2oo5.
-.
Din, Colonel Rafi ud. Bhuttokay akhn34din $he Last 323 Days of Mr' Bhutto). http://
Frye, Northrop . Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 196r.
Fulton, Alice. FeelingasatoreignLanguage:TheGoodStangenessofPoetry. St. Paul, Minn.:
www. bhutto. org/lastmoments. htm.
craywolfPress, r999.
Drucker, lohanna. "The Crux ofConceptualism: Conceptual Art, the Idea ofldea, and
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Gadamer on Celan: "Who Am I and Who Are You?" and Other Essays.
the lnformation Paradigm." ln Conceptual Art:Theory, Myth, and Practice, ed. Michael
Trans. Richard Heinemann and Bruce Krajewski. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, t997'
Contis, z5r-68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2oo4.
Wer bin lch und wer bist Du? Ein Kommentar zu Paul Celans Gedichtfolge "Atemkristall."
Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Ar( and Compliciry. Chicago: university of Chicago
Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, r973.
Press, zoo5.
-. r'un-vi5ual and Conceptual." )penLetter, no.
-.
Gavronsky, Serge, ed. PoemsETexts:AnAnthologyofFrenchPoems,Translations,andlnter'
7 (zoo5): r38.
Roche, and Pleynet. Trans.
viewswirh Ponge,Follain, Guillevic, Frdnaud, Bonnefoy, Du Bouchet,
f 11 s visible W o r d : Experim ental Ty po gr aphy an d Mo d ern Art, ry o 9-1923. chica go : u ni-
-. versity ofChicago Press, 1995. Serge Gavronsky. NewYork: October House, 1969.

-.
Duchamp, Marcel. TheWritingsof MarcelDuchomp. Ed. Michael sanouilletand Elmer Pe-
Caze, Tim, ed. Asemic, no. r. KentTown, Australia: n.d.
Ceertz, Clifford.ThelnterpretarionofCultures. NewYork: Basic Books, 1973.
terson. NewYork: Da Capo Press,1973.
Gelfand, f . M., and S. V. Fomin. ACalculusof Variations. Trans. Richard A. Silverman.
Dupont, Albert. "etude de rythmes ampliques." http://rarww.lelettrisme.com/pages
Englewood, N.l.: Prentice Hall, 1963.
/or_accueil.php.
Geuss, Raymond. "Celan's Meridian." Boundary 2,33, no.3 (zoo6): zto-26.
Dworkin, Craig. "'Waging Politicat Babble': Susan Howe's Visual Prosody and the
Gide, Andr6. IfltDie: An Autobiography.Irans. Dorothy Bussy. New York: Vintage Books,
Politics of Noise." Word E lmage: Alournal ofVerballYisual lnquiry 2, no. 4 (Fall 1996):
1963.
389-405.
Golding, Alan. "'Drawings with Words': Susan Howe's Visual Poetics." lnWeWho Love
Eskin, Michael. "A Survivor's Ethics: Levinas's Challenge to Phitosophy." Dialectical An'
to Be Astonished: ExperimentolWomen'sWriting and Performance, ed. Laura Hinton and
thr o polo gy 3 4 (1999) : 5o7-5o.
Cynthia Hogue, 15z-64. Tuscaloosa: University ofAlabama Press, zooz'
Fassbind, Bernard. PoetikdesDialog:VorassetzungendialogischePoesiebeiPaulCelqnundkonz'
Miinchen: Fink, r995.
Coldsmith, Kenneth. "Being Boring." http://www.epc.buffalo.edu/authors/
epte von lntersu.
go ldsm ithigoldsmith_boring. html.
Faville, Curtis. "Stone Cutting All the Way": Review of Aranr Srroyatt's Complete Mhi-
208 209 r':'!:iI

'tAConversation with Kenneth Goldsmith." lacketzt (February zoq)' http:ll Howe,Susan.TheBirth-mark:lJnsettlingtheWildernessinAmericonl.itr'trttyllttlrrtv ll,tttilvrt,
jacketmagazine.com/zr/perl-gold-iv. html. N. H. : Wesleyan University Press, t993.
-. tt
Pangraphs on conceptual writing." openLetter 12, no.7 (Fall zoo5): ro8-rz' "The End of Art. " Archiv es of American Art Journal 4, no' 4 (t97 4) : t 1'
gslil1qyy. New York: Granary Books, zoor. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, r()lJ()'
-. "g6ms Notes on Soliloq uy." openLetter 12, no.7 (Fallzoos): 6s-26'
-. I v q ms gtructures : Early Po ems, 1g7 4-7 g. N ew Yo rk: N ew Di rectio n s, I 996'
-. Sporrs. Los Angeles: Make lt New, zoo8.
-.fllsfvvlpeofTrusts:SelectedPoems.
"lnterviewwith Lynn Ke[[er." conremporaryLiterature36, no' r (1995): r-36'
-. Los Angeles: Make lt New, 2oo5.
-. rrlnterview with susan Howe." Freeverse 9 (winter zoo5)' http://ww'english
-.
Gossman, Lionel. "Anecdote and History." History andTheory 42, no. z (May zoo3):
-. .chass. ncsu.edu/freeverse/Archives/winter_2oo5/interviews/5_Howe. html.
-.Theweather.
r43-68.
-. " l nterview with To m Beckett. " D iffrculties 3, no. z (tg9g) : t7 -27'

Craham, Dan. "schema March 1966." Arr- Language r, no. r (1969): t4. Midnight. New York: New Directions,2oo3.
Hajdu, Pdter. "Hungarians' National Fervour for Anecdotes." Neohelicon 32, no' 1
-. MyEmily Dickinson. Berkeley, Calif': North Atlantic Books, t985'

(zoo5): rzr-27.
-.Theffis flsnconformist's Memoriol. New York: New Directions, t993'
Halsey, Alan, and Karen Mac Cormack. Fitio Prinr. Toronto: Coach House Books, t998'
-. isy6s- lrrow. New York: New Directions, 1999.
p

Harding, f ames Martin. Adornoond"AWritingof theRuins": Essoys onModernAestheticsand

-. $ingvlsvities. Hanover, N. H' : Wesleyan U niversity Press, 1990'
An glo' American Liter ature on d Cuku re. Al ba ny, N.Y. : S U NY Press, 1997. -. J6vf5 ef theLabadieTract New York: New Directions,2ooT'

Harris, Kaplan. "Susan Howe's Art and Poetry, l.968-tg74." Contemporary Literature 47,
-. .,gps2king
with Susan Howe." lnterview with Ianet Ruth Falon. Drffrcupies 3,
no. 3 (Fall zoo6):44o-7t.
-. no. z (1989):35-42.
Heberle,Rende,ed. FeministlnterpretationsofTheodorAdorno.UniversityPark:Pennsylva-
-.
Huhn, Thomas. "Adorno's Aesthetics of lllusi on." Journalof Aestheticsand AftCriticism 44,
nia State University Press, zoo6. no. 3 (Winter 1985): t8t-89.
Heidegger, Martin. BeingandTime.Trans. lohn Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New ed. Cambridge Companion to Adorno. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
York: Harper & Row, r962. 2OO4.
r'The
Nature of Language." In on the waytoLanguage, 57-rro. Trans. Peter Hertz'
-,
Huhn, Thomas, and Lambert Zuidervaart, eds. The Semblance of Subjectivity: Ess0Js on
NewYork: Harper& Row, r97r. Ador no's AestheticTh eory . Cambridge, Mass. : M IT P ress, t 997'
-. psslry, Language,Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row, lsou, lsidore. Essaid'histoirecompareduLettrisme,del'Informel-d-signesetdequelqueslePein'
197r. tr es-d- signes in d epen dents. Pa ris : I. C. P., t 963.

-.
Hejinian, Lyn. ABorderComedy. NewYork: Granary Books, zoor' "The Manifesto of Letterism." Kaldron Online. http://www.thing.net/-grist/
Poetry. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1994. l&d/kaldron.htm.
The F atalisr. Richmond, Calif. : Omnidawn Press, 2003.
-. lq po dtrie lettr iste, fo rm e sonore (r 9a6). hnp //www. : le lettrisme' co m I pages I oz
-
-.Thecoldof
lsnguage of lnquiry. Berkeley: University of California Press, zoor. creations/poesie.PhP.
-. My LW. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, t987.
-.abes, Edmond .TheLittleBookofunsuspectedSubversion.
f
Trans. Rosmarie waldrop. stan-
-.fl1s My Life in the Nineries. New York: Shark Boo ks, zoo3. ford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1996'
-. Slowly.Tuumba Press, zooz. Iameson,Fredric. LateMaaism:Adorno,or,ThePersistenceoftheDialectic. London: Verso,
-. writing Is on Aid to Memory. Los Angeles: sun & Moon Press, 1996. 1990.
-.
Helms, Hans G. FA: M AHNIE56W0W. Koln: M. Dumont-Schauberg, t959. |arry, Alfred. selectedworlsof Atfredlarry. Ed. Rogershattuckand
simonwatsonTaylor.
-.
Hilt, Lestie. "DistrustofPoetry: Levinas, Blanchot, Celan." MLN tzo (zoo5):986-too8' NewYork: Grove Press, 1965.
larvis, Simon. "Prosody as Cognition." CriticalQuarterly 4o, no' 4
(1998): 3-t5'
Holdertin, Friedrich. HymnsandFrlgments. Trans. Richard Sieburth. Princeton, N.l.:
Princeton University Press, rg84. u nsonditional: A Lyric. London: Barque Press, 2005'

Ed. Friedrich Beissner and lochen Schmidt. Frankfurt: lnsel, Jay, Martin. VisionqndVisualiE:DimensionsofContemporaryCulture. Seattle: Bay Press, t988.
1982.
-.'ll1s
fenkins,G.Matthew. Poetic}bligation:EthicsinExperimentalAmericanPoetryafterry45.lowa
-.tllsyftsyndBriefe,I.
Howard, l. Alane. "The Roots of Beckett's Aesthetic: MathematicalAllusions inWatt'" City: University of Iowa Press, zoo8'
Papers in Lanquaqe an d Literlture 30, no. 4 (r 999) : 346 56
 ,*i

"saying obligation: George oppen's Poetry and Levinasian Ethics." lournalof Langer, Susanne. Feeling and Form: ATheory ofArt. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,
AmericanStudies 31, no.3 Qoq): 4o7-33. 1953.
-.
fohansson, Birgitta. The Engineering ofBeing: An )ntological Approach to l. H. Prynne. Umei, Lazer, Hank. "'singing into the Draft': Susan Howe's Textual Frontiers'" ln lpposing
Sweden: Swedish Science Press, r997. Poetries,z:Readings,60*69. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.

lones, Tom. Review of The Unconditional: A Lyric, by Simon larvis. lacket 3t (October Leavey, l. P.Glossary. Lincoln: Universiryof Nebraska Press, 1986.
zoo6). http://www/jacketmagazine.com/3r/jones-iawis. html. Lecercle, Iean-facques. PhilosophythroughtheLooking-Glass:Language, Nonsense, Desire. La-

loris, Pierre. "From labberwocky to Lettrism ." Transition, no. r (lanuary r 948): to4-zo. Salte, lll.: Open Court Press, t985.
t{6palpoetics. Hanover, N.H.:Wesleyan University Press, 2oo3. Levinas, Emmanuel. CollectedPhilosophicalPapers. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. The Hague:
Kac, Eduardo. "Adhuc." http://vwvw.ubuweb.com/fi [m/kac-Adhuc.html. Martinus Nijhofi tS8z.
-. Poetry Anthology. Ivry-sur-seine: Editions Action Po6tique, zoo7. En dicouverantl'existencelvecHusserletHeidegger. Paris: Librairie Philosophique
"Holopoetry." ln Medio Poetry: Anlnternationol Anthology, ed. Eduardo Kac, ng- l. Vrin, t967.
-.llsiifii5pstax:
56. Chicago: Intellect Books, zoo7.
-. ls5 impv(vus de l'histoire. Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1994'
-.
Kane, Daniel. AllPoetsWelcome:TheLowerEostSidePoetrySceneinthery6os. Berkeley: Uni- lustifications de l' ithique. Brussels: Editions de Universit6 des Bruxelles, 1984.

versity ofCalifornia Press, zoo3.

-. Ed. Sdan Hand. NewYork: oxford University Press, 1987.

Kaufman, Robert. "Poetry's Ethics: Theodor W. Adorno and Robert Duncan on Aes-
-. QlllsrwiseThan Being or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Mar-
thetic lllusion and Sociopolitical Delusion." NewGermonCritique33, no. r (zoo6):
-.'tllslsvinasReader.
tinus Nijhoff, r9Br.
73-u8.
-. Proper Nomes. Trans. Michael B. Smith. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Kenner, Hugh. "Art in a Closed Field." VirginioQuonerlyReview 38, no.4(196z)'.597-69. Press, r996.
"The Next Hundred Years." Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Associotiott ro,
-. fslsliE and Infinity: An Essay on ExterioriE. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh:
no. r (1977): r-ro. Duquesne University Press, t969.
-. of Ezro Pound. London: Faber & Faber, r95r. Reprint, Lincoln, Neb.:
-. "f12n5cending Words: Concerning Word-Erasing." Trans. Didier Maleuvre.
Bison Books, r985. Yale French Studies, no. 8r Qggz): t 45-5o.
-.ThePoetry
ffi p psynd Ero. Berkeley: University of California Press, t97r.
-.
Levine, Philippa.TheAmateurandtheProfessional:Antiquarians,Historians,andArcheologists
The stoic Comedians. Berkeley: University of California Press, t962. inVictorianEngland,fi38-t886. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
-.
Kinya, Ninhi. "Form Should Not Be Tautological: Hegel and Adorno on Form." /opo- Lewis, David. Convention. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, t969'
-. neselournalofAestheics 47, no. r (1996): z5-36. Philosophical P ap ers. N ew Yo rk: oxfo rd U niversity Press, t983.

Kirsch, Adam. "The Poetry oFEthics." Times LiterorySupplement, no.5494,luly r8, zoo8. Lewitt, Sol. "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art." In Conceptual Art: ACritical Anrhology, ed.
Kosuth, foseph. "Artafter Philosophy." lnConceptualArt:ACriticalAnthology, ed. Alexan-
-. AlexanderAlberro and Blake Stimson, r4-t5. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, t999'
derAlberro and Blake Stimson, r158-77. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999. Lippard, Lucy. Six Years:TheDematerializationoftheArt1bjectfromry66to 1972. Berkeley:
Kotz, Liz. Wor ds rc Be Lo oked At: Langu a ge in ry6 o s Art. Cambrid ge, Mass. : M lT Pre ss, zo 07. Universiry of California Press, r973.
Krieger, Murray. The New Apologists for Poetry. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Lippard, Lucy, and lohn Chandler. "The Dematerialization ofArt." ln Conceptual Art:
Press, r956. A Critical Anthology, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, 46-5o. Cambridge,
Kristeva, f ulia. Powers of Honor: An Essay in Abjection. New York: Columbia University Mass.: MIT Press, 1999.
Press, r982. Lyon, f ames K. Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: An Unresolved Conversation- Baltimore:
MargaretWaller. NewYork: Columbia Uni- lohns Hopkins University Press, zoo6.
versiry Press, r984. Lyotard, f ean-Frangois. TheDiffirend: Phrasesin Dispute.Trans. George Van Den Abbeele.
-.BsvslvlioninPoeticLanguage.Trans.
Kubler, George.TheShapeofTime. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, t962. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. Poetry as Experience. Trans. Andrea Tarnowski. Sta nford, Ca- Trans. Wlad Codzich. Minneapolis: Universiry of Minnesota Press,
lif.: Stanford University Press, 1999. 1985.

Lang, Abigail. "The Remembering Words, or 'How Zukofsky Ilsctl Wortls. "'
-.lustGlming.
Ma, Ming-Qian. "Articulating the Inarticulate: Singularities and Counter-method in
/ockct 3o
(l uly zoo6). http://vwvw. jacketmagazi ne.conr/z-lang. h i rn l. Srrsan Howe." ContemporaryLiterature36, no. 3 (Autumn 1995): 466*89.

-:
i?{
 #, .i

212 213

"Poetry as History Revised: Susan Howe's 'scattering as Behavior toward slightly Leftof Thinking.Tucson, Ariz': chax Press, zoo8.
fl1s6vis5 of sediment. vancouver, B.c' : Talon Books, r 99 r .
Risk."'Anrerican Literary History 6, no. 4 (Winter ry94):716-37.
-. -.
McGann,Jerome.ThePointlstoChangelt:PoetryqndCriticisminrltcCottlirrrrittrll'tr'rt'ttl, lrt"t,t
Mac Cormack, Karen. At lssue. Toronto: Coach House Books, zoot.
-. loosa: University of Alabama Press, zoo7.
llnplsyyres. Tucson, Ariz.: Chax Press, 2oo3.
Menke, Christopher. A estheticTheory: AestheticNegativiE in Adorno ond t)ttrirlrr. ( ,r tr rhl ir l;I',
QuillDriuer. Toronto: Nightrvood Editions, 1989.
-. QuirkondQuillers. Tucson, Ariz.: Chax Press, r99r.
Mass.: MIT Press, t998.
-. Berkeley, Calif.: Zasterle Press, zoo3. Messerli, Douglas. "The Rhythm of the'Language'Poets." http://www.1itt'('||irrl('11('t
-.
Mac Low, ackson. RepresenruriveWork, 1938-1985. NewYork: ROOF Books, r986.
f
blogspot.com/roo8/o9/rhythms-of-language-poets' h tm l.
.

-.VaniryReleose.
Mallarmd, St6phane. G.uvrescomplites. Ed. Henri Mondor and G.-lean Aubrey. Paris: Meyerhoff Nicholas. "The Poetics of Paul Celan." Twentieth-Cenury l-ittroture 27, t'to. t
(r98r):72-85.
Gallimard, 1945.
MaryAnnCaws. NewYork: NewDirections, 1982. Middleton, Peter. "How to Read a Reading of a written Poem." )rolTrqdition 20, no. I

"'Out (zoo5):7-34.
Marsh, Nicole. of My Texts I Am Not What I Play': Politics and Self in the Poetry
-.gslsslsiPoetryondProse.Trans. Moore, Marianne. ThePoemsof MarilnneMoore. Ed. Grace schulman. NewYork: Penguin
of Susan H owe. " College Liter atur e 2 4, no. 3 (Spring, t ggT)'. rz 4-37.
Books, zoo5.
Martin, Agnes. "Answer to Inquiry." ln Lucy Lippard, "Homage to the square." Arr in
Motte, Warren, lr., ed. 1ulipo:APrimerofPotentialLiterature. Normal, lll.: DalkeyArchive
America 55, no. 4 (luly-August, 1967): 55.
Press, t998.
Matthias, lohn. Bothory 6 Lermontou. Ajus, Sweden: Katejdoskop forlag, r98o.
Mu kherj i, Mumar Prasad . The Lost W o rld of Hi n dustani Musi c. N ew Yo rk: Oxfo rd U n ive rsiry
B'sl1q n s st Aphelion : Lo nger Poems. Athens, O hio : Swa I low Press, t995.

gyEy115. Press, zoo7.

Chicago: Swallow Press, r97o.
-. Mtiller-Stevens, Helmut. "On the Way to Quotation: Paul Celan's 'Meridian' Speech."
Os55ing. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1979.
-. New German Critique y (zoo4): gt-5o.
AGatheringofWays. Athens, ohio: Swallow Press, r99r.
-. Nagel, Thomas . EqualityandParrialig/. Oxford: Oxford University Press, t99t'
l(pflging. Cambridge: Salt Pu blishing, 2007.
-. NewselectedPoems. Cambridge: salt Publishing, 2004.
Naylor, Pau[. "susan Howe: where Are We Now in Poetry?" ln Poeticlnuesrigations:study'
-. ingrheHolesinHistory,43-7o. Evanston, lll.: Northwestern University Press, 1999.
f'lsnfisvn Summer: New and Selected Poems. Athens, ohio: Swallow Press, 1984.
-. pqgs5; tlew Poems E Cuttin s. Athens, ohio: Swallow Press, zooo. Nebesky, Ladislav. "Non-Written Words." http://vww.thing'net/-grist/ldlczechl
-. Beqfling 1ld Friends: Essoys, Reviews, and Poems on Poetics, tg75-rg9o. Albany, N.Y.:
Nebesky.pdf.
-. SUNY Press, rg9z. Nichol, bp. The AlphabetGome: Abp Nichol Reader. Ed. Darren wershler-Henry and Lori
-. Jy7i111111ingqtMidnight:SelectedShorterPoems. Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 1995.
Emerson. Toronto: Coach House Press, zoo7.
Nichotls, Peter. Modernisms: ALiterary 6uide. Berkeley: University of california Press,
fyyp5. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1975.
-. working Progress,WorkingTitle. Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2ooz.
1995.
-. "Of Being Ethical: Reflections on George Opp en." lnThe 1bjectiuisi Nexus: Essoys
Mayer, Bernadette. "Experiments." http://www.writing.penn.edu/bernstein/
-. experiments. html. inCulturalPoetics, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain, z4o-53. Tusca-
-. loosa: UniversityofAlabama Press, t999.
McCaffery, Steve. The Cheorofwords. Toronto: ECW Press, 1996.
"Unsettling the wilderness: Susan Howe and American History"' Contemporary
NewYork: ROOF Books, 1986.
Literature3T, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 586-6ot.
ls t/reaning: Protosemantics and Poetics. Evanston, lll.: Northwestern Univer-
pvisv
-.
-.Northoftntention:CriticalWritings,tgl3-1986. Nicholson,ShierryWeber. Exactlmagination,Latework:OnAdorno'sAesthetics.Cambridge,
sity Press, zoor.
-. ed. Rationol GeomanE:The Rids of the Book Machine:The Collected Research Repors of the
Mass.: MIT Press, 1999.
Nolan, Kevin. "capital calves: Taking the overview." lacket z4 (November zoo3).
Toronto Research 6roup. Vancouver, B.C.: Talon Books, t992.
-, http ://vwvw. jacketmagazine.com/24/nolan. html.
Seven Pages Missing, I: Selected Texts, tg6g'tggg. Toronto: Coach House Books,
olson, Elder. "william Empson, Poetic Diction, and contemporary criticism." ln
2000.
-. gsvsn Pages Missing, 'foronto: criticsandcriticism,AncientandModern,ed. R. s. crane,45-82. chicago: Universityof
ll: Previously Uncollected Texts, 1968 2o()o. Coach
Clricago Press, t952.
House Books, zooz.
-.
214 ::,ti: 215

Ong, Walter, S. l. The Barbarian W ithin. New York: Macmillan, r 96r. Pound, Ezra. AntheilandtheTreatiseonHarmony. Chicago: Pascal Covies, r927.
"Metaphor as Twinned Vision: The Phoenix and the Turtle." SewaneeReview 63 Cantos. New York: New Directions, r948.
(1955): r93-zro. Prynne, I. H. "A Letter to Steve McCaffery." Gig, no. 7 (November zoo9); 4o-46.
-.
Oppen, George. Collected Poems. New York: New Directions, 1975. -.Thepssm5. Newcastle uponTyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1999.
Orange, Tom. "Notes fora Readingof Ace." lnRemovedforFurtherStudy:ThePoetryofTom gsqv5,figers, and the Shapes ofWords. London: Birbeck College, r993.
Raworth, ed. Nate Dorward, 161-69. Toronto: The Gig, zoo3. -.
Punter, David. "lnterlocatingl. H. Prynne." CambridgeQuarterly3r, no. z(zooz):rzt 37.
Osborne, Peter, ed. ConceptualArc. London: Phaidon Books, zooz. -.
Purves, Robin. "Apprehension: or, l. H. Prynne, HisCritics, and the Rhetoricof His
Palmer, Michael, ed..CodeofSignols:RecentWritingsinPoetics. Berkeley, Calif.: NorthAt- Art." Gig, no. z (March 1999): 45-6o.
lantic Books, r983.
Quine, W V. O. From a Logical Poinr ofView: New Logico-Philosophicol Essoys. Carnbridge,
San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984. Mass.: Harvard Universlty Press, 196r.
Perec. Georges. A Void. Trans. GilbertAdair. London: Harvill, 1994. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, r96o.
-.FirstFigure.
Perloff, Marjorie. "'Collision or Collusion with History': The Narrative Lyric of Susan Raffoul, Frangois. "Derrida and the Ethics of the Impossible." ResearchinPhenomenol'
H owe. " Contemp or ary Liter atur e 30, no. 4 (Winter 1989) : 518-33. -.lt/6fi6nd)bject.
ogy38 (zoo8): z7o-go.
Differentials: Poetry, Poefics, Pedagogy. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, Riisdnen, Paraji. Counterfigures-An Essay on Antimetaphorical Resistance: Paul Celan's Poetry
20O4. andPoeticsattheLimitofFiguraliE. Helsinki: Helsinki University Printing House,2oo7.
-. Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, ond theLanguage of Rupture. Chicago: Raworth, Tom. Ace. Washington, D.C.: Edge Books, zoot.
UniversiS ofChicago Press, r984. Big Slippers On: Fourteen Poems. Cassette recording published by Ulli Freer at Mi-
-.ThettLa Grqnde Permission: |ohn Ashbery in the zrst Century." Unpublished manu- crobrigade, n.d. http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Raworth.html.
script. -. (Conversation
with Charles Bernstein on Close Listening, March r3, zoo6."
-. rrLanguage
Poetry and the Lyric Subject: Ron Silliman's Albany, Susan Howe's http://wvrruv.writing. penn. edu/Pennsound/x/Close-Listening. php.
Buftato." Criticallnquiry 25, no. 3 (Spring r ggg)i 405-34. -. f,lsying. London: Galiard Press, r97r.
-. Princeton, N.l.: Princeton University Reed, Brian. "'Eden or Ebb ofthe Sea': Susan Howe's Word Squares and Postlinear
Press, r98r. -. Poetics." Postmodern Culture t4, no. z (Winter zoo4): n.p.
-.ThePoeticsoflndeterminaE:RimbaudtoCage.
Poetry 0n E Off the Poge: Essays Emergent )ccasions. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
for Reinhardt, Ad. "Art as Art." ArtNews 65 (September 1966): 72.
University Press, r998. fivlqsfivt:TheSelectedwritingsof AdReinhardt.Ed. Barbara Rose. NewYork: viking
-. "'jSound Scraps, Vision Scraps': Paul Celan's Poetic Practice." ln Readingfor Press, r975.
Form, ed. Susan l. Wolfson and Marshall Brown, q7*zoz. Seattle: University of -.
Rhenisch, Harold, "Anti-Lyric: Translating the Ghost of Paul Celan." http://www
-. Washington Press, zoo5. . haroldrhenisch.com/translation.html.

"Tatk Poems as VisualText: David Antin's Artist's Books." Review of Contemporary Richards, l. A. PrinciplesofLiteraryCriticism. NewYork: Harcourt Brace, t95r.
Fiction zr, no. r (Spring zo or): rz5-46. Ricoeur, Paul.Time and Narrative.frans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellaver. Chi-
-. 2157-(sntury Modernism:The"New" Poetics. London: Basil Blackwell, zooz. cago: University ofChicago Press, t984.
Chicago: Universityof Rilke, Rainer M aria.TheSelected Poemsof Rainer Morio Rilke. Trans. Stephen Mitchell. New
-. Chicago Press, zoro.
York: Vintage Books, 1989.
-.UnoriginalGenius:Poetryby)therMeansintheNewCentury.
Plass, Ulrich. Language and History inTheodor Adorno's Notes to Literature. New York: yllllsvs gilence Reigns: Selected Prose. Trans. G. Craig Houston. New York: New Di-
Routledge, zoo7. rections, r978.
Ponge, Francis. Mithodes. Paris: Gallimard, 196r. -.
Robbins, lill. AheredReading:LevinosandLiterature. Chicago: Universiry ofChicago Press,
Le parti pris des chose. Paris: Gallimard, 1948. 1999.
The Power of Language:Texts andTranslotions. Trans. Serge Gavronsky. Berkeley: Roberts, David. Arr and Enlightenment: AestheticTheory after Adorno. Lincoln: University of
-. University of California Press, r979.
Nebraska Press, r99r.
-. $s[ss1si Poems. Trans. Ma rgaret G u itot. Winston-sa lenr, N. C. : Wn kc f]orcst U rr i- Rori nrer, An ne. New Arr in th e 6os ond 7 os: Redefining Reality. London: Thames & H udson,
versity Press, r994.
-.
216 217

Terrell, Carroll F. ACompanion toThe Cantos ofEzraPound. Berkeley: University ofCali-

Roudiez, Leon S. "Twelve Points fromTel Quel." L'EspritCreateurt4, no. z (Winter t974):
293-303. fornia Press, 1993.
Thom, Ren6. Structural Stabiliry and Morphogenesis: An 1utline of a GenerolTheory of Models.
Sanders, lay, and Charles Bernstein, eds. PoetryPlostique. NewYork: Marianne Boesky
Gallery and Granary Books, zoor. Trans. D. H. Fowler. Reading, Mass.: W. A. Benjamin, t975.
Thurston, Neil. HistorioAbscondita:Anlndexof)oy. York, England: lnformation as Mate-
Saroyan, Aram. AramSaroyan. NewYork: Random House, 1968.
NewYork: Ugly Duckling Press, zoo7. rial, zoo7.
fivqmgsroyan:CompleteMinimolistPoems.
BsqiingtheRemoveof Literature. Ed. Craig Dworkin. York, England: lnformation
Scappetone, Iennifer. "S hort Review of Lyn Hej inian's A Border Comedy." Boston Review
-. 28, nos.3-4 (zoo3):59. as Material, zoo6.
-.
Tobias, Rochette. The D iscourse ofNature in the Poetry ofPaul Celan:The UnnaturalWorld. Balti-
Schiffer, Stephen. "Actual-Language Relations." PhilosophicalPerspectivesT Qg96):4t-
more: lohns Hopkins University Press, zoo6.
58.
Toufic, falel. (tampires):AnUneasyEssayontheUndeadinFilm. Barrytown, N'Y.:Station Hill
Schmidt, Dennis. "BIack Milk and Blue: Celan and Heidegger on Pain and Language."
Press, 1993.
lnWordTroces:ReodingsofPaulCelan, ed. Aris Fioretos, tto-29. Baltimore: lohns Hop-
Valdry, Paul. TheArtofPoetry.Trans. Denise Folliot. Princeton, N.l.: Princeton Univer-
kins University Press, r994.
sity Press, 1958.
Scholes, Robert. Paradoxes of Modernism. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
Vivas, Eliseo. CreationandDiscouery:EssaysinCriticism ondAesthetics. NewYork: Noonday,
zoo6.
1955.
Sharp, Willoughby. "Lawrence Weiner in Amsterdam." Auolanche 4 (Spring ry72):68-
Waldrop, M. Mitchett. Complexity:TheEmergingscienceattheEdgeof OrderondChaos. New
74.
York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.
Sharpe, Matthew. "Aesthet(h)ics: On Levinas's Shadow." Colloquy:Text,Theory,Critique
g (zoo5)'. zg-47. Waldrop, Rosmarie. Dissonance(ifyouareinterestefl.Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama
Press, zoo5.
Siegel, Jeanne . Artworlds: Discourse on the 6os and 7os. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research
Press, r985.
Watson, Ben. "Garbage: A Discussion ofValue." Pores: Alournalof Poetics Reseorch, no' r
(October zoo3). http://www. bbk.ac. uk/pores/.
Silliman, Ron. TheNewSenrence. NewYork ROOF Books, 1987.
(aka out to Lunch). "Knot-Youl" Involution zz, no. 4 (1996): r-9.
Solt, Mary Ellen, ed. ConcretePoetry:AWorldView. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, r968.
Wetlek, Ren6, andAustinWarren.TheoryofLiterature. NewYork: HarcourtBrace, 1948.
-.
Wilkinson, lohn.TheLyricTouch:Reconstructions. Cambridge: Salt Publishing,2ooT.
Spicer, |ack. TheCollectedBooksoflackSpicer. Ed. Robin Blaser. Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black
"Trippingthe Light Fantastic: Tom Raworth'sAce." ln RemovedforFurtherStudy:
Sparrow Press, r989.
Dorward, t45-6o. Toronto: The Gig, zoo3.
ThePoerry ofTomRaworth, ed. Nate
Ed. PeterGizzi. Hanover,
-. "The Unconditional ." Chicago Review 52, nos. 2-4 (Autumn 2oo6): 37r.
N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1998.
-.ffisflsttseThatlsckBuilt:TheCollectedLecturesof)ackSpicer.
Mlr Vocabulary DidThis to Me:The Collected Poetry of
Witliams, Oscar, ed. ALittleTreasury of American Poetry. New York: Charles Scribner's
lockSpicer. Ed. Peter Gizzi and
-. Sons, r952.
Kevin Killian. Middletown, Conn.:Wesleyan University Press, zoo8.
-.
Stein, Gertrude . Lectures in Americo. New York: Vintage Books, 1975. Williams, William Carlos .lmaginarions. New York: New Directions, r97o'
g,sls61si Writings of 1ertrude Stein. Ed. Carl Van Vechten. New York: Vintage Books, Wilson, Edmund. To the Finland Station. New York: Harcourt Brace, r94o.
1962. Wimsatt, W. K., Ir. The Verbollcon. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954.
-. glqnvs5 in Meditation. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1994. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. CukureandVolue.Trans. PeterWinch. Chicago: UniversityofChi-
Ed. Patricia Meyerowitz. Harmondsworth, Eng- cago Press, r98o.
-. land: Penguin Books, 1967. Philosophicallnvestigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe' New York: Macmillan,
-.writingsandLectures:tgog-tg4s.
Stevens, Walla ce.TheCollectedPoems ofWallaceStevens. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, r964.
r953.
-.
Wolosky, Shira. "The Lyric, History, and the Avant-Garde: Theorizing the Poetics of
Tate, Allan. The ManofLetters[nrheModernWorld:SelectedEssays,rgz9-r955. NewYork: Me-
zz, no. 3 (zoor): 65r-68.
I
Paul Celan." PoeticsToday
ridian Books, r955.
Taylor, Charles.SourcesoftheSelf:TheMakingofModern ldenriry. Canrbri<lge, Mass.: Har- Woods, Tim. Th ePoetics of theLimit: Ethics ond Politicsin Modern and Contemporary Poerry. Bas-

vard University Press, r989. ingstoke, England: Palgrave Press, zoo3.

218
Yeats,William Butler. Poems. Ed. David Albright. London: I. M. Dent, r99o.
Zhou, Xiaojing . The Ethics and Poetics of Akeriry in Asion American Poerry. lowa City: Univer-
sity of lowa Press, zoo6.
Ziarek, Ktzysztof. lnflected Language:Toward a Hermeneutics ofNearness in Heidegger, Levinas,
Stevens,andCelan. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1994.
Zuidervaart, Lambert. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of lllusion. Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, t99t.
Zukofsky, Louis. 'A." Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, r978.
Complete Short Poerry. Baltimore: I o hns H opkins U niversity Press, 1997.
Prepositions+:TheCollectedCriticalEssoys. Ed. MarkScroggins. Hanover, N.H.:Wes-
leyan University Press, 2ooo.
Adorno, Theodor W., zo, 32, tz4, 143,
r9on4, r96nz, r97-98nrz, r98nr5; on art-
works, 155-58, 163-68; on form , $2-54,
r97n1o; on the fragmentary, r55, r58-60,
ry7-98ntz; on language, r6o-63, r97n8
anecdotes, 5o-55, 58-59,9tj6, roz, to4,
r84n6
anomaly, 3*5, 8-9, r8, u3, tzr, t36, rgo
Appel, Rosaire, r4
Ashbery, lohn, +-8, 164; "CrazyWeather,"
5-6; on Marianne Moore, 4; "No Way of
Knowing," 7-8; "Scheherazade," 7 ;
System," 7
Badiou, Alain, r8-r9
Barnes, Diuna: Nightwood, 72-7 4, 77, 8t
Bataille, Ceorges, rzo, r85nr4, r95nro
Beckett, Samuel, 32, 6t, ro7, t47, l87nz;
Texs for Nothing, 6; "Three Dialogues," 3z;
Watt, t2*13
Benjamin, Waltet, 97, ry4n3
Bernstein, Charles, 2, zo-23, rc4, vont7,
qtnz5, q 4n8, r76-77n23, t9z-93n8,
r93nr4; "The Age ofCorreggio and the
Carracci," zt; " Dark City," zz; "Fragments
from the Seventeenth Manifesto of Nude
Formalism, " z3; Poeticlustice, zo-zt
Bion, W. R., u4
Blanchot, Maurice, 32-3j, 98-gg, tz6, t6o,
"The q7nz8, y7n3o, r85nr4, r9zn6, r98nr4;
on fragmentary writing, 53, t6o, t98nt4;
on impossibility ofwriting, jz-3i; on
"language virus ," 143-44; on materiality
oflanguage, r44
Bok, Christian, g, tzt, 136, tgtnz3, 191n24;
Eunoio, g
220
Borchardt, RudolI r53, r6o-6r
Borges, forge Luis, 96, 141-42,149
Brunkhorst, Hauke, 155-56
Burns, Gerald, r34; "Fireplace Poodles,"
221
['
Frye, Northrop,46, 96 atic, t2-73, 56, 77, tzo-zt, 46, r54-6t' r17 4o; "Approprioptl,tptt'.," t4r 4t
q6nzz,r8ont, r88n4; found, tr-rz, "l|('cthovenSonncts," I lt t/l, "lll!,llt
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 27, r57 22, 48-So, 8 4-go, :36-40; as garbage, throtrgh Nostalgia," t48 4r1; "(,lro'.t
Gavreau, Claude, t 4t - 4z ro8-u, r88-89n8; "language virus," Poems," r49-5o; "Hegel's Eycs," r4tr ,17,

t4z-4s;"of theday," 3*6; and Proxim- "Three Stanzas," 142

r35-36; "ltself Defi ned," r36; "Surreal- Gaze, Tim, 4-1S,l-72n31
ism at Menti[," r35 fi7 nt
Ceertz, Clifford, 79, ity, z6-z9, t73-74n6; as social practice,
Burroughs, William S., 5, 14 Coldsmith, Kenneth, rr-r3, r7tnz6, rytnz7, ro7-B; visual, r3-t7 open form, t7,6t-69,88, t37-4o, t56-58,
tnz9, 2n3t laughter, 65-68,7t r65, r89-9on rz, ry6n2, t96-97n7' $7nt o
t7 t7 t -7 znz9, 77
Cage, fohn, Sl,6q,8q-BS,94, tz9, t63*64 Gossman, Lione[,53,93 Levinas, Emmanuel, 1g-2o, 22, 23, 26'29' oulipo, g
Caputi, Mary, 164 Graham, Dan, t5o-5r 33, 43- 44, q 3n4, q 3n5, t7 4n7
Celan, Paul, tB, 24, z7-34, q 4m3, q5nt6, Guattari, Felix. see Gilles Deleuze Lewis, David, to6-to, tt 4-r5, tzo-zt, Palmer, Michael, 24, tz3-25, tz8
q5nr8, q6nzo, q6nzr, t76*77n23, r87n4, r88n7 t88n8 Paragram, 121,149
Lewitt, sol, 10, r.71n29 parataxis, zt, 3o, 38, 59-6o, 7 4*77, tto-l6,
r77nz4; "Blume i' :71ng; "Deine Frage," Heidegger, Martin, 24, 25, z7*28, 64, 83,
z9; "Die Abende," 3r; "Die Fleissigen," Lyotard, f ean-FranEois, 62, lS-ll' tg' 82,' 12g,154, 158*6o, r9tnr7 r96nt
r 4r.* 42, t5g, fi gnq,
ry 4m 4, ]3zm 4
t1o-17, 127, 16o, lBrnro Perloff, Marjorie, 14, t6t, r69n4, qzn3o
z9-3o; " Der Me ridian," z4-25, z8; Hejinian, 56-7r, 158-59, r8o-8rnr,
Lyn,
"Kalk-Krokus, " z7 -28; " Krokus, z5*26; t8on3, t8o-8tnr5, r8znr6, r83nt9, phrase, 5, 8-g, 62,75*84, tro-tg, rzt, 16o,

"Weggebeizt," z9; "Wer herrscht," 33*34 r83nzz, rB9-9on p; "fhe Fatalist," Mac Cormack, Karen, 72-9o; At lssue, r8rnro
complexity (chaos theory), 3-5, $z-$nt7; My Life in rhe Nineties, r8tn8, 83-8+; " EMANCI-PATIO," 83 lmplexures, Pound, Ezra, 3, 92-93,96, loz, r58
7, 12, 31,
r8zn6 8q-88; QuirlcsandQuillets, 8r-83; "Re- Prynne, l.H.,to6-zz, rz6, t87n3, t88n7
42,75,77,82, rz5, tz7, r34
conceptual art, z, ro, t64, 68n6, Helms, Hans G., r54, t6o, t6t-64 union the Reproduction," I 4-lS; " Sleep r89nro, tgonrz
17P72n29 Hotderlin, Friedrich, 154, 159-60 ls lncurable in Our Lifetime," 77'78;Von-
Coolidge, Clark, r33 holopoetry, r4-r7 i0/ Releose, 88*9o Quine, W. V. O., r94ntt
Cooper, Anthony Ashley, r83nzo Howe, Susan, 35-SS, rygng; "Articulation Mac Low, f ackson, Sl,6q,8q,t6q'
Crane, Hart, ro of Sound Forms inTime," 4z;"TheDe- 193-94n22, r94n1 Raworth, Tom, D9-33, $3il 4

Creeley, Robert, 134-35, rTrnz fenestration of Prague," 44-45; " Eikon Mallarm6, Stdphane, g, z8-29, r4t' 144, Reinhardt, Ad,39, t66
Basilike," 39-42; Hinge Picrure, t6-gl;The 762,777n3o
Danto, Arthur, 168n4 Midnight,48, 50-55; My Emily Dickinson,35, Mandelstam, osiP, z4-25, z8 Saroyan, Aram, 131

Davidson, Michael, r7rnz5 37-38; "118 Westerly Place," 38 materiality, 1t-17, 23, 52, 9c., 141-44' 154' Silliman, Ron, rtz
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Cuattari, 46-47 t58, t77 singulariry, 6, 42, 52, 112-13, 125' 127,137'

impossibility, 146 Matthias, lohn, 9r-ro5, 184n2 185n15, t44-46,r69m3

48,t43,ry4n2 3r 13,
Derrida, facques, 3r, 64, yzn4o, q7nz7, lsou, lsidore, r3 r85nr7 r86nzr, t86nz4; "Alexander sound, 4z-46, t4r-42

t8zrr4 Kerensky at Stanfotd," g't; "Automys- B, 14, 47, 59-6o, t59' qtnz4:.
Spicer, lack,
tifstical Plaice," ror-4; "Bakunin in "sporting Life," ro-rl
Drucker, lohanna, 157, t7t-7znzg, vzn34, Iawis, Simon, D5-28, tg2r.8
197n3 Italy," g5-g6; "A Civil Servant," 97-98; Stein, Gertrude, 6, t7, 57, 65, lyl q' n' lg'
Duchamp, Marcel, r-2, r53, r67-68nr, Kac, Eduardo, r4-r7 "Christopher lsherwood Stands on 86, tzr, t4z-t46,16c,162i "A Little Called

r68n6, r96n3 Kenner, Hugh, rz-r3, 53,57,59,92 93, His Head," roo-r; "Laundry Lists and Pauline, " 7 4; Stonzas in Meditotion, 45;

18on2, r93n13 Manifestoes," ro4-5; "A PAINTER," "Van orTwenry Years After: A Portrait of
ethicaliry, 1g-2o, 23-24, z6-27, 3t-gz Kosuth, loseph, r68n6 g+-g5; "POST-ANECDOTAL," 99; "TH REE Carl Van Vechten," 144-45

Kristeva, lulia, 69, r49 SONGS FOR U. P.l.I' g6-St; "Tunes for Stevens, Wallace, 2,38, t49

fragmentary writing, 2,7, n, 26, 32-34, 37,
ro6, rn*r3, r38, t59-6o,
39*q8,16-18,
r77n3o, t98nt4
Fredman, Stephen, t68n3, r69nz
Kubler, George, D3,127, t34 lohn Garvic," 94
Mayer, Bernadette, 8-to, t7ont9 V:ilery, Paul, t6z, t7 onzz
Langer, Suzanne, zz McCaffery, Steve, 1o4, 173,120-27, visual poetry, 11-17, 36-42
language, arrarclrir, .,7 .,lt; lltrirl v. syst('lIl' 133 -34,137-51 "The Abstract Ruin," voice, zr, 35-36, 45-53, 8r, 85, r7gntz
x