On the Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics

on t h e o u t s ki r t s o f f o r m

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b On the

Outskirts of Form

Practicing Cultural Poetics Michael Davidson

wesleyan university press middletown, connecticut

Wesleyan University Press Middletown CT 06459 www.wesleyan.edu/wespress © 2011 Michael Davidson All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Designed by Katherine B. Kimball Typeset in Quadraat and Quadraat Sans by Passumpsic Publishing Wesleyan University Press is a member of the Green Press Initiative. The paper used in this book meets their minimum requirement for recycled paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Davidson, Michael, 1944– On the outskirts of form: practicing cultural poetics€/ Michael Davidson. â•… p.╇ cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8195-6957-8 (cloth : alk. paper)— isbn 978-0-8195-6958-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)— isbn 978-0-8195-7137-3 (e-book) 1. Poetics.╇ 2.€Poetry—History and criticism—Theory, etc.╇ 3.€Literature, Modern—20th century—History and criticism.╇ 4.€Literature, Modern—21st century—History and criticism.╇ I.€Title. pn1055.d38â•… 2011 808.1—dc23â•…â•… 2011027298 5╇ 4╇ 3╇ 2╇ 1

cont e nt s Acknowledgmentsâ•… vii Introductionâ•… 1

I. A Public Language 1. On the Outskirts of Form: Cosmopoetics in the Shadow of naftaâ•… 23 2. The Dream of a Public Language: Modernity, Textuality, and the Citizen Subjectâ•… 51

II. Objectivist Frames 3. Life by Water: Lorine Niedecker and Critical Regionalismâ•… 75 4. “Closed in Glass”: Oppen’s Class Spectaclesâ•… 92

III. Approaching the New American Poetry 5. Archaeologist of Morning: Charles Olson, Edward Dorn and Historical Methodâ•… 121 6. “The Repeated Insistence”: Creeley’s Rageâ•… 142 7. A Cold War Correspondence: Gender Trouble in the Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertovâ•… 159 8. Looking Through Lithium: James Schuyler as Jim the Jerkâ•… 176 9. Ekphrasis and The New York Schoolâ•… 193 10.╇The Pleasures of Merely Circulating: John Ashbery and the Jargon of Inauthenticityâ•… 216 11. “Struck Against Parenthesis”: Shelley and Postmodern Romanticismsâ•… 239 12. “Skewed by Design”: From Act to Speech Act in Language Writingâ•… 249

13. Vertigo: Thinking Toward Action in the Poetry of George Oppenâ•… 270 Afterword: Impossible Poetriesâ•… 279 Notesâ•… 285 Bibliographyâ•… 303 Indexâ•… 315

a c k nowle d g m e n ts This book would not exist without the help of an extensive network of friends, colleagues, editors, and publishers—all of whom have generously supported the project of a counter/cultural poetics. Many of the essays in On the Outskirts of Form began as talks or conference papers and subsequently appeared in magazines and journals. My thanks are extended to conference organizers, gallery curators, and publishers for helping to bring these essays to light. I am especially grateful to a number of friends and colleagues who have been faithful readers and commentators. All these chapters have been aided in one form or another by conversations with Rachel Blau DuPlessis, MarÂ�jorie Perloff, Michael Palmer, Alan Golding, Lisa Lowe, Susan Kirkpatrick, Rae Armantrout, Peter Nicholls, Peter Middleton, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, Dee Morris, Lynn Keller, Charles Bernstein, and Al Gelpi. I want to extend a special thanks to Barrett Watten, who is directly responsible for generating at least three of these chapters and whose advice has influenced many others. I also want to acknowledge the contributions of Bob Perelman and an anonymous reader who reviewed the manuscript for Wesleyan University Press. I have had excellent support from my editor, Suzanna Tamminen, and her colleagues, Parker Smathers and Leslie Starr at Wesleyan, and Lys Weiss and Peter Fong at University Press of New England. Thanks as well to Teddy Cruz for the book’s wonderful cover image and for our ongoing conversations about living in San Diego, on the outskirts of form. Chapter 1, “On the Outskirts of Form,” began as a talk given at the “Diasporic Avant-Gardes” conference at the University of California, Irvine, in 2004. Thanks to Barrett Watten and Carrie Noland, who curated this event, and to Palgrave MacMillan Press for allowing me to reprint the essay from its volume, Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement (2009). Another early version of this chapter appeared in Textual Practice 22.4 (winter 2008). Thanks to Peter Nicholls and Routledge Publishers for granting

viiiâ•… Acknowledgments

permission to reprint. I was aided in writing this essay by conversations with Cristina Rivera-Garza, Mark Nowak, and Lisa Robertson. Chapter 2, “The Dream of a Public Language,” owes its inception to the “Authorship and the Turn to Language” conference held at the Universität Tübingen, Germany, in 2005. Thanks to Barrett Watten for coordinating this event. A version of this essay appeared in Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics 17 (2007). Thanks to the editor, Mark Nowak, for permission to reprint. I was also aided by conversations with Heriberto Yépez and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, to whom I extend my gratitude. “Life by Water: Lorine Niedecker and Critical Regionalism” was delivered as a paper at the Lorine Niedecker Centenary Celebration held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in October of 2003. Thanks are extended to Elizabeth Willis, who coordinated the conference and edited Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place (2008), in which the essay subsequently appeared. Permission to reprint is granted by the University of Iowa Press. I am grateful to Lee Spinks and the University of Edinburgh for inviting me to deliver a lecture, “‘Closed in Glass’: Oppen’s Class Spectacles” at the “George Oppen: A Centenary Conference,” in November 2008. The lecture was subsequently given as a keynote address at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900, at the University of Louisville. Thanks to Alan Golding for inviting me to participate. “Archaeologist of Morning: Charles Olson, Edward Dorn and Historical Method” appeared in English Literary History 47 (1980) and is reprinted courtesy of the editors. Chapter 6, “‘The Repeated Insistence’: Creeley’s Rage,” was written for a Robert Creeley memorial conference held in Buffalo, New York, October 2006. Thanks to Steve McCaffery for coordinating this event. The essay appeared in Form, Power, and Person in Robert Creeley’s Life and Work, edited by Stephen Fredman and Steve McCaffery, University of Iowa Press, 2010. Permission to reprint this essay is granted by the University of Iowa Press. “A Cold War Correspondence: Gender Trouble in the Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov” first appeared in Contemporary Literature 45.3 (fall 2004), copyright by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System, and is reprinted by permission of University of Wisconsin Press. Special thanks to Al Gelpi for his comments on early drafts of this essay. Chapter 8, “Looking Through Lithium: James Schuyler as Jim the Jerk,” was first given as a paper at the Modern Language Association’s annual conven-

Acknowledgmentsâ•… ix

tion, December 2004. I am grateful to Henry Abelove for chairing the panel on James Schuyler and to Eileen Myles, Ron Padgett, Nathan Kernan, Bill Corbett, and Charles North, who helped expand this essay into its current form. “Ekphrasis and the New York School” is an expanded version of an essay first printed in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 42.1 (fall 1983). Thanks to the editors for permission to reprint. I am grateful to Abigail Lange, Antoine Cazé, Olivier Brossard, and Vincent Broqua, who organized “John Ashbery in Paris,” an international conference at the Université Paris Diderot, Institut Charles V, in March 2010, at which I presented “The Pleasures of Merely Circulating: John Ashbery and the Jargon of Inauthenticity.” Thanks also to John Ashbery and David Kermani, who generously provided commentary on various aspects of the essay. A shorter version of chapter 11, “Struck Against Parenthesis,” was given as a paper at the Modern Language Association’s annual convention in December 1991, on a panel chaired by Stuart Curran. The essay later appeared in KeatsShelley Journal XLII (1993), which has granted me permission to reprint. I am grateful to my co-presenter, Michael Palmer, and to Susan Howe for their conversations about this essay. Chapter 12, “Skewed by Design” was delivered at the “Poetic Function€/ Soviet Cultural Foundation” conference, “Language–Consciousness–Â�Society: The Problems of Contemporary Culture,” in Leningrad, August 1989. The essay subsequently appeared in Artifice and Indeterminacy: An Anthology of New Â�Poetics, edited by Christopher Beach (University of Alabama Press, 1998) and was reprinted in Aerial 8 (1995). Thanks to the editors for granting permission to reprint, and to Joan Retallack and Barrett Watten for their helpful comments. “Vertigo: Thinking Toward Action in the Poetry of George Oppen” was written during the dark days following 9/11 and was given as a talk shortly thereafter at the Modernist Studies Association annual meeting in Houston, Texas, October 2001. Thanks to Dee Morris for coordinating the panel at which this talk was presented.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following individuals and institutions for permission to reprint copyrighted or previously unavailable work, beyond the scope of fair use: Linda Oppen and the Estate of George Oppen; Lynda Claassen at the Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego; John Ashbery; Georges Borchardt, Inc.; Rich Jensen; Lloyd Center€/

xâ•… Acknowledgments

clearcutpress.com; Keith Higgins; Lisa Robertson; Coach House Books; Chris Fishbach of Coffee House Books; Mark Nowak; Cristina Rivera-Garza and Jen Hofer; University of Pittsburgh Press; Heriberto Yépez; Art Resource; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; the estate of Larry Rivers; and The Frick Collection.

on t h e o u t s ki r t s o f f o r m

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Introduction “The ╯ Tension That Results” Out west, the frontier is on the edge of form. .€.€. Words push into the new sphere. Tribal means belonging, but not belonging to civilization. This is the tension that results.€—Diane Glancy

W

hen I began writing the essays collected in On the Outskirts of Form, the “outskirts” of poetry were a bit easier to see. In the early 1980s, previously unincorporated literary zones had formed into recognizable communities (Beat Generation, deep image, Black Arts, Asian American, Chicano Nationalist, Black Mountain, confessionalist, New York School, language writing) and the city of official verse culture was within commuting distance. Academic articles, conferences, and books were dividing up the terrain, and turf battles were being fought over the questions of whether—and how much— theory should be brought to poetics, whether identity politics and innovative forms were compatible, whether to build on avant-garde linguistic techniques or return to more traditional forms. And the poetic demographic had changed dramatically. Many of the new suburban denizens had found work in the very citadels of academic authority whose walls they once scaled. In the intervening years, the landscape has changed dramatically: the suburbs have given way to outlying, exurban, off-the-grid, and offshore entities that make my title seem somewhat outdated. Subsequent generations of language-writing, standup, new formalist, concretist, collaborative, flarf, intermedia, performance, transgeneric, Deaf, dub, elliptical, digital, hybrid, postliterary and, most recently, “conceptual” poetries have obscured the outskirts of form and made them difficult to see, if not irrelevant as a descriptor.1 Moreover, my title is inexact since many of the movements that became canonized under the “New American Poetry” label were located less on the outskirts than in heterotopic sites within the metropole. Who, after all, could be more urban than Frank O’Hara or Allen Ginsberg? Thus my title represents more of a horizon than a map.

2â•… Introduction

If there is a coherent narrative that links these rather disparate essays, written over a more than twenty-year period, it is the gradual shift from this spatial or geographic metaphor of poetic culture, based on schools, movements, and aesthetic positions, to a more rhizomatic and ill-defined formation being produced within globalization.2 “Ill defined” because it is in the nature of globalized culture to hide the machinery that produces its effects. In order to see the work of culture in a transnational age, we may need to witness forms that exceed the limits of the page, the sound of the voice, the borders of the gallery space. With the exception of the first two chapters, I only skirt the outskirts of such forms, focusing largely on work produced between 1950 and 1980, from the early cold war to the beginnings of neoliberal globalization. By beginning the book at the global present and then looking backwards, I hope to complicate a certain expressive ideal that has dominated critical discussion of postwar poetry and see the trajectories it inaugurated. One such trajectory concerns the issue of scale. Lisa Lowe cites Anish Kapoor’s vast sculpture, Marsyas, as a significant attempt to represent the historical origins of globalization in the transatlantic slave trade. It is a work that in its initial installation occupied the entire length of the gigantic turbine room on the main floor at the Tate Modern Museum in London where, as Lowe points out “[viewing] the sculpture from a number of perspectives .€ .€. it appear[s] all at once, to evoke the vast hulls and masts of the seventeenth-century ships that had brought African slaves and then Asian indentured workers to the colonized Americas” (“Metaphors” 1). The sheer scale of Kapoor’s sculpture and the “impossibility of occupying more than a single perspective at any given time, of being both above and below the sculpture, or at both one end and the other, instantiated in a striking manner the geohistocial condition of globalization.” If it is the function of globalization to efface the boundaries it secures (privatization, centralization of economies, containment of resources), then it is in the nature of art to make it visible and porous. By this formulation I do not mean to invoke the Russian formalist trope of defamiliarization to describe how art makes globalization strange, while leaving art untouched in its own sacrosanct realm, but to suggest that innovative cultural work makes the problematic of representation upon which globalization depends a factor in its creation. Turning to poetry, we could see a shift in the meaning of scale by thinking of how the term “field composition” has shifted from describing psychological and expressive imperatives to a semiotic or communicational grid. Works

Introductionâ•… 3

like Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems, Frank O’Hara’s “Biotherm,” or Robert Duncan’s various long poems (“Structure of Rime,” “Passages”) are the models for the former tendency in which, as Duncan says, the poem “is not a stream of consciousness, but an area of composition in which I work with whatever comes into it” (vi). Value in such large, process-oriented works is measured not by the ratio of lived experience to textual result but by performative and affective energies generated. Among more recent poets, however, the idea of a “field” poetics has given way to a problematics of representability in which the sheer size and scope of the work defies decoding and for which the conveyance of an expressive subject is only one of its functions. In the last few years a number of long—very long—works have appeared that challenge the generic bounds of poetry and seem to literalize Borges’s “Pierre Menard” by actually writing—not imagining writing—Don Quixote. Although these works may not have globalization as their primary focus, their generative strategies, often based on procedural or conceptual formulas, offer elaborate responses to the decentralized, digitized production of information in the global mediascape. I am thinking, in this context, of a work like Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day, an 836-page retyping of the September 1, 2000, edition of The New York Times, moving from the upper left-hand corner of the paper to the lower right of each page, without stopping for columns. Goldsmith calls his work “uncreative writing” presumably because it is the opposite of the creative-writing workshop poem, with its expressive intent and localized speaker, but it also “uncreates” or deconstructs the newspaper by treating the entire page as a single measure. By making no distinctions between ad and copy, weather report and editorial page, poem and newspaper, Goldsmith recreates the news as poem while underÂ�mining the news as revealed truth. Instead of writing a new poem, Goldsmith “reads through” another text, and in the process creates novelty out of the most concrete example of how the present enters history. A second example is Ron Silliman’s The Age of Huts, which is the first part of a much larger work, Ketjak, each section of which is constructed by a different procedural technique involving a regular ordering of sentences, choice of words, or repetition of syntactic forms. As an autobiographical poem, the work promises to be so long that it will become the poet’s life rather than serve as its description. On the one hand, The Age of Huts and other sections of the oeuvre are based on intimate and detailed records of the poet’s observations and obsessions, yet they are simultaneously endistanced from any possibility of totalization (via autobiography or memoir) by the formal ordering Â�principles of

4â•… Introduction

composition. While these two works, from very different aesthetic fields, do not have a critique of globalization as their expressed purpose, they occupy a particularly complex response to the problem of representability by diverting agency from the one writing to the system of representation in which one is written. If composition by field depends on the localized page and voice (and typewriter), these more recent works seem unimaginable without the file and—in the case of flarf and other digitized forms—the database and search engine. A global perspective on postwar poetics troubles the self-evident status of the Subject and the poetics of presence that it supports. As Diane Glancy indicates in the epigraph to this introduction, writing on the frontiers of form produces a kind of tension that cannot be reconciled by appealing either to the self-sufficient individual or to civilization. Recent work by the poets I discuss in my opening chapters suggest that all is not right with the liberal, individualist model that underwrites both free-trade agreements and expressivist poetics alike. How might it be possible to think outside of the Subject, capital S, and its foundational role in projects of capitalist expansion? What forms of agency exist beyond the lyric “I” but do not, in the process, jettison the collective? How might thinking beyond the Subject provide new understandings of residual and emergent forms of history whose horizon is not the liberation of the individual but the cohesion of the collective? My opening two essays respond to some of these questions by imagining poetics through a hemispheric frame or through new forms of citizenship, but the issue haunts even the earliest essay in this volume. In “Archaeologist of Morning” (1980), I address how Charles Olson built his epic work, The Maximus Poems, as a study of U.S. mercantilism from the maritime trades of the nineteenth century (which includes whaling and slavery) to the present late-capitalist versions in the cold war. His heroes, at least in the early poems of the series, are hardy New England fishing captains who own their own boats and fish the treacherous waters off Cape Ann. They are “isolatos” threatened by the encroachment of finance capital and corporate fisheries that destroy the local economy. What Olson sees as the destruction of the regional and particular in New England coincides with his desire to return poetry to the local body—the breath and musculature of the poet—as he develops the theme in “Projective Verse” and other essays. For Olson the social body and the poetic body are conjoined in a search for a polis of the immediate and particular.

Introductionâ•… 5

When his Black Mountain student, Ed Dorn, began the long poem, Gunslinger, in 1968, he turned away from epic to satire, from oral tradition to cartoon dialogue, recognizing that Olson’s Toynbee-esque historical horizon of entrepreneurial capitalism no longer applied in a global environment. The hero of Gunslinger is not the western gunslinger who imposes rough justice on the frontier but a comic-book version, part semiotician, part jet-setting venture capitalist (his model is Howard Hughes) whose success resides in knowing how to read and manipulate the signs. Capital is no longer located in a ship or fishery but is now exchanged through fiber optics on the stock-trading floor or through intentional acts that have neither origin nor telos but the sheer frisson of exchange. The transition from Maximus to Slinger, from epic to satire, marks a recognition that the historical methodology necessary to narrate the West must include not only a study of the means of production (fishing) but of the means of representation by which that concept is disseminated (code). The West means more than the heroic fulfillment of manifest destiny; it implies the long shadow of Western imperialism as it impacts geopolitical realities globally. Dorn makes his two-dimensional characters out of the very flat surface of the screen on which the global west is being pixilated. If Olson is nostalgic for a polis of the local, Dorn cannot imagine community beyond his band of wisecracking, cynical outsiders. As a consequence Gunslinger remains more a bitter diagnosis of the problem of capital than an imagination of its cultural alternatives. By appropriating Teresa Rivera-Garza’s phrase, “outskirts of form” (las afueras de la forma) as my title, I want to emphasize the implications of experimental form in addressing the geopolitical meaning of poetry. I also want to explore what Fredric Jameson, in another context, calls the “ideology of the text”—the social and cultural meaning of formal operations for specific communities that may exist on the outskirts of the national imaginary. Jameson is speaking of the turn toward textuality in the humanities since the 1960s in which any object of conjecture—a historical chronicle, film, the genetic code of a dna molecule—can now be “read” as a system of signs (18). One could understand this textualization of history as a relativizing of truth such that any interpretation has equal value, what he elsewhere defines as the waning of affect and the flattening of agency in postmodern works. By stressing the ideology of the textual imperative, Jameson calls attention to the one creating the interpretation (his test case is Barthes’s reading of Balzac’s story, “Sarrasine”

6â•… Introduction

in S/Z) and by extension the conditions of its production. By speaking of the “ideology of form” I want to complicate the usual form/content binary by thinking about the ways that formal operations and strategies must be seen in relationship to constituencies for whom they are of value. This is not the same as reader-response theory, often based on an idealized reader-function, nor is it an updated version of the sociology of literature in which the form/content divide is mapped on the base/superstructure economic model. Rather, the ideology of form stresses what in an earlier book I called a work’s “palimtextual” character, to emphasize the multilayered quality of the material text as it annexes the history of its production, publication, and reception.3 To dig down through the layers of the palimtext is to understand its multiple inscriptions in social materiality. Form, in this sense, becomes in-formation about a work’s institutional and pedagogical functions, not a passive container of information that pre-exists the work. As an extension of genre theory, the ideology of form addresses what Tony Bennett calls the “differentiated field of social uses .€.€. prevailing at that time in terms of its influence on both textual strategies and contexts of reception” (110).4 The traditional debates over poetry in binarist terms of formal/experimental, tradition/individual talent, raw/cooked seem no longer relevant if we are interested in what those dichotomies mean for individual readers. One person’s experimentalism is another’s arid aestheticism. It does no good to dismiss a given poetic practice for being retrograde or progressive without understanding the function that this operation has in a cultural setting. Emily Dickinson appropriated the hymn meters of her New England Protestant church to write incendiary poems about masculine power and antinomian presumption. The same dialect traditions that produced racist minstrelsy and white nativism in the late nineteenth century also enabled Charles Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar to signify, through dialect, on the racist assumptions of that same tradition. The collage aesthetic deployed by the royalist, AngloCatholic, conservative author of “The Waste Land” also made possible Muriel Rukeyser’s popular-front documentary poem, “The Book of the Dead,” Louis Zukofsky’s “Mantis,” and Melvin Tolson’s Harlem Gallery. The local-color regionalism that provided a nostalgic look at a lost plantation economy for postReconstruction America becomes, in the work of Zora Neale Hurston or Lorine Niedecker, a critical perspective on the limits of nostalgia itself. The outskirts of form have no more purchase on progressive social movements than do the Doric columns that support traditional verse.

Introductionâ•… 7

A Public Language [I]nstead of the poet being a beautiful machine which manufactured the current for itself, did everything for itself—almost a perpetual motion machine, of emotion. .€.€. Instead there was something from the outside coming in. —Jack Spicer, “Vancouver Lecture I” (5)

What is “the meaning€/ Of being numerous”? George Oppen’s haunting question is left ambiguous, neither resolved in favor of the collective nor the individual (166). In the poem in which this question is asked, the “shipwreck of the singular” is Robinson Crusoe’s sad fate, even if his lonely sojourn on his island provides him with opportunities to test his self-reliance and Protestant economy. According to the eschatology of the Enlightenment that Robinson Crusoe narrates, his “rescue” from the island represents his re-investment in the social contract, but this redemption is no less problematic if, as Marx pointed out, it catapults him into social relations in which the forces of production have mastery over man. Oppen qualifies the idea that we must choose the social over the individual by stressing that when we speak in the collective pronoun “We have chosen the meaning€/ Of being numerous” (166; my emphasis). That is, we have chosen the story of sociality, the fall from grace and the wandering in the desert, over an Edenic solitude. Writing “Of Being Numerous” during the Vietnam War and ambivalently attracted by the New Left and Youth Culture, Oppen observed how the meaning of the social—the narrative of redemption—was being reified either into an ideology of political consensus, in which the outskirts of social form were collapsed into the “vital center,” or one of countercultural community and lifestyle revolt. The question of being numerous continues to remain open-ended for poets of Oppen’s 1930s generation who witnessed the bankruptcy of state-sponsored collectivism, both nationalist and socialist, through the Hitler-Stalin pact, but who also witnessed the human costs of individualism as the default term for unchecked market expansion. “In a curious way,” as Peter Nicholls observes of Oppen’s poem, the “‘shipwreck of the singular’ and the ‘meaning of being numerous’ are not antithetical options, as might first be thought, but are rather mutually implicated possibilities”€(98).5 The “dream of a public language” is the horizon of many poets represented in this book, but it is worth adding that their poetry has often been regarded as hermetic and densely encoded and thereby dismissive of any public

8â•… Introduction

whatsoever. When Frank O’Hara or Jack Spicer address individual friends in their poems, it might seem the most arrogant assertion of coterie identification—as if to say, “reader, this poem is not for you.” Yet the intimate reference to a specific other testifies to the poem’s existence in a social network where apostrophe interpellates not only one other reader (a lover or close friend) but potentially all others. Theodor Adorno speaks of the lyric address as a sign of the absence of a social totality, the negation of an oppressive condition: “[only] he understands what the poem says who perceives in its solitude the voice of humanity” (57). By stressing the lyric form in negational terms, as a reflex of social crisis, Adorno does not acknowledge how even the most hermetic poem imagines an alternative readership or participates in community formation. He can theorize a poem’s registration of what a poem cannot imagine but he cannot imagine a public poetry reading, a printing collective, a poetics blog, a prison writing workshop, a Deaf club performance—those sites and scenes where the poem circulates among its practitioners and readers. The “voice of humanity,” like humanism itself, is an abstraction that will not bear the weight of its multiple aspirants, all of whom speak different idiolects. In chapter 2, I look at the relationship between poetry and public through the citizen subject as produced via the manifesto. The modern manifesto is a manifestly public document—part poetry, part pugilism—and it claims its authority not by reasoned argument but by refusing the normative functions of rational debate. It is a performative genre that must project a historical constituency that does not as yet exist—or that is being interpellated by means of the document itself. Its origins in the nascent public sphere of the eighteenth century, as Jürgen Habermas says, coincides with the emergence of a distinct political force in the coffeehouses, newspapers, and public salons of bourgeois society. We know the limits of this formulation—the non-citizens, slaves, women, disabled, and poor persons who are denied admission to the public sphere—but we may also see in Habermas’s formulation a description of how individuals form themselves into a community through talk, print, and debate. The attempt to secure and stabilize the public sphere, of course, is the province of bourgeois aesthetics, but the model remains viable, as Nancy Fraser and others have pointed out, for the subaltern, queer, and racialized subject.6 The intrusion of the “outside” in Jack Spicer’s epigraph to this section may seem a variation on surrealist automism, but it is equally a way of describing the social heteroglossia of the bar and poetry scene that Spicer inhabited and that enters the poem through debates about art in its various manifestations.

Introductionâ•… 9

Hence one of the consistent themes in these essays is the need to tease out a recalcitrant public address from work that appears more insular or private. It is easy enough to identify such address in the anti-war jeremiads of Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, or Robert Duncan; it is harder to find it in their contemporaries—Robert Creeley, the early Denise Levertov, James Schuyler, or John Ashbery—who utilize a more introspective or speculative voice. As I point out in my chapter on Creeley, however, many of his most self-conscious moments of questioning are addressed to a heteronormative masculinity against which he must endlessly measure himself. In this sense Creeley is always talking to another male, even when (especially when) he is addressing himself. One way of thinking about a public voice in poetry is to consider how poems imagine a Subject constructed not as the caryatid supporting national identity but as a more flexible entity occupying multiple geopolitical sites. Recent debates about global citizenship under the sign of cosmopolitanism provide us with an opportunity to test the role of culture within the realities of social mobility and informational exchange. What I call “cosmopoetics” in chapter 1 refers to recent attempts to think of nonnarrative, experimental forms in terms of cross-cultural and cross-border realities of a new global public sphere. Emergent discourses of cosmopolitanism differ substantially from previous models based on the authority of the nation-state and its organizing dyads: local/global, metropole/province, self/other.7 We can see a transition from modernist master narratives of the nation-state to a new post-national formation in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, whose work offers an obvious instance of avant-garde practice in response to social formations for which there are no adequate narratives. As a Korean-born woman whose parents lived under colonial rule by Japan, China, and the United States, as an American citizen with strong ties to a colonial French Catholic educational system, as a woman under patriarchal rule, she epitomizes a diasporic cultural identity, “fixed on the perpetual motion of search. Fixed in its perpetual exile” (81). In one verse paragraph of her long poem/novel Dictee, Cha sorts through the various categories to which the postcolonial Subject is subject: From A Far What nationality or what kindred and relation what blood relation what blood ties of blood

10â•… Introduction what ancestry what race generation what house clan tribe stock strain what lineage extraction what breed sect gender denomination caste what stray ejection misplaced Tertium Quid neither one thing nor the other Tombe de nues de naturalized what transplant to dispel upon (20)

Cha’s deliberate mistranslations and grammatical errors in Dictee are a performative sign of cultural fragmentation, a marker of the non-citizen subject within a national pedagogy.8 The poem becomes, as Cha’s speaker says, a “Tertium Quid,” a non-categorizable alternative to a world of binaries that does not accommodate the diasporic subject. It is precisely this “third way” that permits Cha to comment incisively on the forces that have constructed an immigrant woman’s voice and enabled her to ventriloquize voices of power. Cha’s work reinforces the need to see new cultural forms through a multiÂ� leveled series of what Arjun Appadurai calls “scapes”—ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes—that frame economic globalization (33). In Dictee, Cha defines her cross-cultural citizenship through the colonial history of Korea that marks her mother’s nomadic youth and forms the ethnoscape through which the poet describes her entry into the United States. She is also marked by the dyadic divisions of cold-war superpower competition, a division vividly displayed by a map of Korea divided along the thirty-eighth parallel which she reproduces in a section devoted, appropriately enough, to tragedy.9 She uses her work as a filmmaker and performance artist to identify the experience of national citizenship as spectatorial, produced through various technological apparatuses. To assist this aspect, Cha reproduces still images drawn from film, journalism, passports, letters, and medical textbooks to show the material forms that mediate and construct her identity. Her interpellation through technoscapes and mediascapes defines a subjectivity by which foreign nationals are passed under the eyes of diplomatic authorities, immigration officials, and language instructors who control and define national citizenship. Although Dictee was written at an early stage of our globalist endeavor that

Introductionâ•… 11

we identify with the Pacific Rim, it anticipates a world already impacted by the shift from cold-war colonialism, marshaled under the aegis of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, to corporate and ideological containment under the aegis of global media and technology.10 As a formal construct Dictee refuses linear, developmental progress, moving between prose and poetry, lyric reflection and public document, text and image, to map a new deterritorialized citizenship, a critical cosmopolitanism at the end of the cold war. A caveat might be in order here. In defining her writing practice as deterritorialized, I risk conforming her linguistic practices to a post-colonial identity, making the two homologous—as though the function of Cha’s textual absences and dislocations is to demonstrate that she is, indeed, absent and dislocated. Writing, in such an interpretation, becomes instrumental, serving only to exemplify displacement rather than theorize an alternative to identity altogether. As a filmmaker, she might prefer to understand her work as creating a “false suture” between discontinuous shots, between a cold-war fantasy of geopolitical containment and a cold-war reality of territorial occupation and perpetual superpower conflict. The two are obviously components of the same film, yet they create the illusion, for any viewer, that the two can coexist, despite their differences. Towards a Cultural Poetics The example of Theresa Cha marks some of the difficulties of configuring U.S. poetry under generic, aesthetic, or national categories. To read her work, as I have done above, is to engage with her own pedagogical intent, one deeply implicated in the conditions of Korean identity and U.S. cold-war policy. My ability to read Cha’s work has been aided by numerous excellent readings by Lisa Lowe, Josephine Park, Shelley Sunn Wong, Elaine Kim, Juliana Spahr, and others whose work has provided a brief on reading poetry through a historical and cultural-studies frame. They remind us of the need for a cultural poetics that takes into account the various frames (in Cha’s case, visual culture, photography, film, historical chronicle, epistle, narrative, pedagogy) upon which Dictee is constructed. In this sense, we need a cultural poetics that performs for poetry what narrative has served for cultural studies. Important recent work has begun to fulfill this need. Barrett Watten’s The Constructivist Moment, Brent Edwards’s The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism, Maria Damon’s The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Â�Vanguard

12â•… Introduction

Poetry, Alan Golding’s From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry, Christopher Beach’s Poetic Culture: Contemporary American Poetry Between Community and Institution, Joseph Harrington’s Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics, Aldon Neilsen’s Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism, Timothy Gray’s Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim: Creating Counter Cultural Community, Deborah Nelson’s Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America, Libbie Rifkin’s Career Moves: Olson, Creeley, Zukofsky, Berrigan, and the American Avant Garde, Alan Filreis’s Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–1960, Fred Moten’s In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, Walter Kalaidjian’s American Culture Between the Wars, Michael Thurston’s Making Something Happen: American Political Poetry Between the World Wars, Cary Nelson’s Repression and Recovery, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry are some of the many recent contributions to a cultural poetics of modern and postmodern poetry. Although each of these books studies “culture” from a different vantage, collectively they mark a cultural turn equivalent to the linguistic turn of the late 1960s and 1970s. The phrase “cultural poetics” was initially used within the New Historicism to describe practices of reading that study the reciprocal relations between text and context, literature and history. Against the New Critical tendency to see meaning produced within the rhetorical and formal terms of the text, New Historicists reverse the productivist metaphor to speak of the ways that texts are produced within their sociocultural moment. But as New Historicists have been quick to point out, the relationship between text and context is never unidirectional; texts are both produced by and productive of power dynamics in the culture at large. In Stephen Greenblatt’s usage, the phrase “cultural poetics” does not refer to poetry, per se, but to a poetics of culture, whether that implies an anthropological study of folkloric materials, a study of gender in Shakespeare, or a monograph on racial science in modernist narratives. Moreover, the study of such relationships implicates the critical project as well, including “the interpretive constructions the members of a society apply to their experiences” (4). Greenblatt goes on to say that a “literary criticism that has affinities to this practice must be conscious of its own status as interpretation and intent upon understanding literature as a system of signs that constitutes a given culture” (4–5). As I have indicated, Greenblatt is not speaking specifically of poetry, and most of the major objects of study in this tendency have been in drama or narrative. What is missing from these approaches, as Barrett Watten observes, “is a specific consideration of literary form; where poetics

Introductionâ•… 13

has generally been taken to derive from considerations of the way that literary work is made, as a form of representation, these studies reposition it in relation to social discourses that contextualize it, while ignoring the concretization of form” (xxv). While the New Historicist use of the phrase “cultural poetics” breaks down the barrier between high art and mass culture, it does leave the issue of poetry’s particularity as a specific kind of discourse somewhat in the lurch.11 As Watten says, in the repudiation of formalist “literariness,” historical critics have jettisoned the particular claims of formal difference while seeking to represent its effects. Thus it remains important to think of what role the aesthetic plays in poetry when seen from a cultural-studies perspective. In their introduction to Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader, Maria Damon and Ira Livingston point out that cultural studies rewrites the category of the aesthetic to place it in active engagement with political, social and economic realms, displacing aesthetic judgment as the centerpiece of analyses of expressive culture. This revision does not necessarily dismiss aesthetics but makes aesthetic judgments and the category of the aesthetic itself .€.€. important objects for analysis rather than givens. Accordingly, cultural studies tends to defer the project of aesthetic judgment generally as an impediment to studying the use-value of cultural productions. By deferring the question of how good a poem is, one can begin to ascertain what it is good for, and how and for whom. One can begin to assess (in Jane Tompkins’s formulation) what “cultural” work it performs.€(2)

While there is a certain functionalist quality to this formulation (“what [a poem] is good for, and how and for whom”), Damon and Livingston point to an important aspect of aesthetic judgment that, while it may validate class interests, may also provide a window on how value is legitimated. Judgment, at least in Kant’s third critique, is not only a matter of private appreciation but, rather, a form of disinterested pleasure that is presumably shared with others. It is in this second stage of judgment—what Terry Eagleton calls the “mirror stage” of the aesthetic—in which the lineaments of our own material reality may be experienced and through which the social contract can be discovered.12 Take the example of Deaf poetry.13 In a world where poetry implies something heard or read on a page, where the poet’s voice is transferred, by means of rhythm, rhyme, and alliteration, to the reader’s ear, poetry created by users of American Sign Language (asl) would not be seen as poetry at all. The work

14â•… Introduction

of Clayton Valli, Debbie Rennie, Peter Cook, Ella Mae Lentz and other Deaf performers is created literally on and by means of the body. In most cases— except when a performance is recorded on camera—the audience consists of other deaf persons who understand asl and who must be present in the physical space where the performer appears. Is the poetry of deaf poets not poetry because it lacks “voice” or does not appeal to the “ear” or because it is not printed in a codex book? The answer to this question is not merely one about form; it involves the cultural meaning that poetry has for a non-hearing constituency and how that meaning is rearticulated through a Deaf optic. Within the Deaf community, a lively cultural politics has developed around such work, some of which has been enlisted in the formation of nationalist positions following the Deaf President Now protests at Gallaudet University in 1988.14 In the terms that Damon and Livingston appropriate from Jane Tompkins, the cultural work of poetry within Deaf culture is to create an identity based not around the presumed normalcy of a hearing world but around sign language in its various manifestations, dialects, and social identifications. A second example of the cultural specificity of formal operations might include the role of the sonnet among writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Poets such as Anne Spencer, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and, somewhat later, Gwendolyn Brooks draw extensively upon the sonnet as the epitome of white Eurocentric formal complexity to write some of their most violent denunciations of racism. Claude McKay’s anti-racist sonnets, “If We Must Die” or “The Lynching,” derive from his own upbringing in Jamaica, where mastering British forms was a component of colonial pedagogy, while subjecting those forms to conditions in Jim Crow America. Although we tend to identify the more radical contributions of the Harlem Renaissance with the emergence of various forms of vernacular and dialect (or what Kamau Brathwaite calls “nation language”) in Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, or Sterling Brown, an equally potent force is exerted through the use of traditional English forms like the sonnet to identify and ironize the situation of the black poet: “Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:€/ To make a poet black, and bid him sing!” Countee Cullen’s witty concluding couplet to his most famous sonnet displays his understanding of the rhetorical conventions of irony (and their use in the sonnet’s conclusion) yet deploys them around race rather than, say, the carpe diem motif in the early modern courtly tradition (531). In doing so he provides a double articulation: he both represents what it means to sing in a Eurocentric tradition and displays himself as a black poet in the act of singing.

Introductionâ•… 15

These examples require at the very least an attention to the various meanings that poetic forms have assumed and the ways that these meanings are changed when used in specific cultural sites. A cultural poetics of poetry must attend to the dynamics of institutional power in which it appears (classrooms, anthologies, debates over nea funding, the Guggenheim Foundation), but it must also ground itself in its own micro-practices of linguistic transformation, whether that includes the choice of writing in a traditional form like the sonnet or of using dialect and vernacular forms. Inside the Outskirts Based on my preceding discussion, one might reasonably expect subsequent chapters to provide practical instances of a cultural poetics. This will not always be the case. While more recent essays reflect my growing interest in globalism, disability, and cosmopolitanism, earlier essays are addressed to more thematic issues involving modernist influence and the claims of theory on postwar poetry. Hence I have chosen to subtitle my book, “practicing cultural poetics,” to emphasize the rather provisional relationship that the essays may have to cultural studies. The participial also emphasizes criticism as a kind of exercise, the process of developing interpretive skills rather than the offering of a grand theory. In revising the essays, however, I have attempted to bring them into line with more recent scholarship and, where possible, with my own reconsideration of their relationship to the larger project. Part I of the book covers issues concerning the various implications of poetry and the expanded public sphere. I have already discussed the background for chapter 1, “On the Outskirts of Form,” an essay that attempts to look at poetics through a hemispheric frame, necessitated by the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement. In that chapter I ask what poetics might look like when it is based not around individual movements, manifestos, and school but around geopolitical policies that impact not only the production of culture but the definition of what it means to be cosmopolitan, a “citizen of the world.” The politics of form addressed by my three hemispheric poets is linked not to a shared aesthetic or literary genealogy but to what I have already described as a crisis of representability brought about by the globalization of exchange and the corporate destruction of local agency. My second essay, “The Dream of a Public Language,” looks at three periods since the eighteenth century in which new ideas of citizenship are produced through the manifesto. I discuss a set

16â•… Introduction

of paired manifesto-poem combinations: the first appearance of the “Declaration of Independence” in Great Britain next to a poem by a planter from the West Indies and Olaudah Equiano’s slave narrative; Mina Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” alongside poems that reflect her interest in Eugenic science; and a border arts performance€/ urbanist manifesto by the Mexican poet and performance artist, Heriberto Yépez. By looking at poetry from three periods of an evolving public sphere and from three versions of citizenship, I hope to show an alternative way of reading the speaking subject through projects of national incorporation. Part II discusses two objectivist poets, George Oppen and Lorine Niedecker, who exerted a formative influence on the New American Poetry and whose literary formation is identified with Michael Denning calls “the Long Popular Front.” Their different approaches to the politics of modernist form offer an opportunity to revisit Pound/Williams poetics from a Left vantage. Chapter 3 continues the geo-historical concerns of Part I by looking at Lorine Niedecker’s regionalism. Her close observation of nature, water, and animal life are seen not as a retreat from society but another modality through which she addressed social agency. By examining her participation in public works projects, surrealism, and the wpa guidebook series, I try to place her objectivism and her regionalism in relation to the Depression era in which her poetics was formed. In chapter 4, I continue the theme by looking at George Oppen’s complex relationship to class and the “class spectacles” through which he observed the possibilities for collective life. His idiosyncratic merging of philosophical skepticism and materialist poetics is often figured through the metaphor of glass, both as a transparent medium for self-consciousness and as a mirror upon social relations. Oppen’s “class spectacles” is the optic by which his own bourgeois upbringing can be seen and his subsequent political activism assessed. Part III consists of essays on individual poets associated with the New American Poetry and with the romantic revival by which they are usually associated. In several cases, I look at the limits of certain hermeneutic models that were deployed to define (and de-historicize) postmodern writing. Chapter 5, “Archaeologist of Morning,” treats the close proximity of poetics and historical methodology in Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems and Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger. In the former, an ideal of heroic individualism is posed against the encroachment of entrepreneurial capitalism whereas, in the latter, the historical methodology is revised to accommodate new forms of capital being produced in an

Introductionâ•… 17

emerging global economy. Chapter 6, “The Repeated Insistence,” considers Robert Creeley’s occasional bouts of rage and anger, both in his personal life and as expressed in his early and middle-period poems. I read his rage through Freud’s essay, “Mourning and Melancholia,” as an affective state without origin but that nevertheless can be linked to the cold-war era’s normative attitudes about heterosexual masculinity. Chapter 7 reviews the correspondence between Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov whose early letters testify to a long and productive friendship and that provide a vivid account of how romanticism was renewed in the New American Poetry. I then look at the impact of the feminist movement and the Vietnam War on this relationship as these old friends and poets turned in different directions, both in the poem and in their public attitudes, leaving scars that could be felt in their later poems. Chapter 8 builds on work in disability studies by focusing on cognitive disability in the work of a New York School poet, James Schuyler. Unlike contemporaries such as Robert Lowell, John Berryman, or Anne Sexton, for whom mental illness and depression often served as agonistic confrontations within a confessionalist ethos, Schuyler represented his bipolar disorder much as he treated his nature poems or his gossipy social poems. I focus in particular on Schuyler’s long poem, “The Crystal Lithium,” where the era’s most famous antidepressant becomes a trope that diverts attention from mental illness onto the daily rituals of hospitalization, medications, and care-giving. The New York School focus continues in chapter 9 which discusses the rhetorical trope of ekphrasis and the tradition of pictorialist poetry as it occurs in the work of John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler. I argue that a spatial thesis about the painterly poem has dominated much contemporary aesthetic theory, but that among New York School poets—many of them close to individual painters and sculptors—the genre is used to reveal the unstable, often critical features of the painting. Instead of rendering the spatial work of art in print, the New York School poem releases it to speculative acts and historical criticism. Chapter 10 studies the “jargon of inauthenticity” in John Ashbery’s work in order to test its resistance to the cold-war era’s valorization of liberal individualism. Rather than seeing Ashbery’s rhetorical indeterminacy, pronominal ambiguity, use of cliché and kitsch as a camp defense against homophobia, I see it as a refusal of the normative Subject category altogether. In an era when poets and novelists were rediscovering the Self in capital letters, Ashbery was showing its frangible, unstable surfaces as a descriptor for agency and in so doing anticipated many developments in post-structural and post-humanist

18â•… Introduction

thought. Chapter 11, “Struck Against Parenthesis,” looks at Shelley’s influence on contemporary poets, with particular attention paid to the ways that American deconstructive criticism dehistoricized the author of “Prometheus Unbound” and “The Triumph of Life.” I then describe an alternative Shelley whose complex wordplay and image-making, far from devolving into a selfreflexive meditation on the limits of language, place this same linguistic complexity in concert with his political involvement in various revolutionary events of the early nineteenth century. Because of the proximity of Shelley’s political views, they can never be dissevered from his poetics, a synthesis that I see active in poets as different as Allen Ginsberg and Susan Howe. The last two chapters confront the meaning of gesture as a term for poetic practice and political engagement. The term “gesture” has a specific resonance for cold-war art and literary history (“action painting,” “gestural abstraction,” “projective verse,” etc.) which is changed by the so-called linguistic turn in postmodern theory and its adaptation by language writing. Chapter 12 looks at the transition from “act” to “speech act” in language writing, specifically in Barrett Watten’s Progress and Joan Retallack’s How to Do Things with Words. The former is a long poem that utilizes the performative as a discursive arena in which autobiography meets forms of social protest. The latter is a spirited response to a number of language philosophers, including J. L. Austin, whose theory of the performative is subjected to a feminist critique. In my final chapter I return to the work of George Oppen and his work’s implications in the wake of 9/11. In “Vertigo” I speculate on the mood of uncertainty and trauma that followed the attack on the World Trade Center, a vertiginous state that Oppen rendered much earlier in his poems that deal with urban matters. The essay was written as part of a panel on “Thinking Toward Action” in postmodernist poetry, but the theme took on new meaning once 9/11 occurred. As I say in the chapter, the “concept of thought as action, grounded as it is in a critique of rationalism, now may cause a certain queasiness in the light of acts that could be seen as the purest embodiment of unreflective thought.” I trace the origins of thought-as-act to Oppen’s modernist predecessors, Ezra Pound and Martin Heidegger, whose critique of Cartesian rationalism and humanism is qualified by their support for Fascism and National Socialism. How, I ask, could Oppen as a Marxist, who gave up twenty years of his writing life to work as a labor organizer and activist, have developed his poetics and philosophical views on metaphysics out of writers whose proximity to Fascism was the very antithesis of his own political views? Oppen’s ambivalent relationship to col-

Introductionâ•… 19

lectivist solutions to social problems is the theme of many of his most important poems yet, as I have pointed out, the “shipwreck of the singular” was a no less problematic concept. “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte.” Derrida’s formulation—that there is no outside to the text—also implies that there is no position from which the text can be constituted without, at the same time, being transformed by it. Writing on the outskirts of form offers no clear vantage on what form means, yet it is only when poetry refuses to con-form to expectations that its function is revealed as provisional and contingent. Robert Creeley liked to repeat an anecdote about Franz Kline who, when asked why he paints abstractly, responded, “Well look, if I paint what you know, it will bore you .€.€. if I paint what I know, it will be boring to myself. Therefore I paint what I don’t know” (Contexts 73). This has been the excitement and challenge of writing about poetry in the wake of the New American Poetry, a writing that is often about that which we don’t know, what we can’t anticipate. If that tradition has now entered the classroom and teaching anthology, it has also generated new participatory forms and genres whose outlines are yet to be described. Those outlines, as I have tried to emphasize here, are not limited to the poem and its language but register the fissures and tectonic movements of a geopolitical world in formation and without direction, the outskirts of a city still under construction.

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I b

A Public Language

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On the Outskirts of Form Cosmopoetics in the Shadow of nafta If geography has been imagined and made as part of capitalism’s historical geography then it can be reimagined and remade in an image other than that of capital in the future. —David Harvey We walked through the soft arcade. We became an architect. —Lisa Robertson

The New Cosmo

I

n Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2006 film, Babel, the historical geography of globalization is presented through a series of interlinked stories about a crisis of communication among widely dispersed individuals. A Japanese businessman gives a rifle to a Moroccan herdsman who has served as the former’s guide on a hunting expedition in northern Africa. The herdsman gives the gun to his two sons so that they can ward off jackals that are preying on their herd of goats. While engaging in target practice, one of the boys shoots at a bus carrying tourists, striking an American woman, Susan (Cate Blanchett), and causing her husband, Richard (Brad Pitt), to staunch the bleeding while frantically attempting to contact the American embassy for medical aid in a remote village. Once Susan is helicoptered to a hospital, Richard phones his undocumented Mexican nanny back home in San Diego and asks her to take care of their children for a few more days. The nanny, Amelia (Adriana Barraza), had planned on returning to Tijuana to witness her son’s wedding. Lacking any alternative childcare, she takes the two American children with her across the border. After the wedding, she returns late at night with her nephew, and when the border guards become inquisitive about the presence of two American children in the back seat, the inebriated nephew guns the car across the border, leaving Amelia and the children in the California desert. The film then

24â•… a p ub l i c l an gu a g e

cuts back to Japan where the deaf daughter of the businessman, Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi), is cruising the neon-lit streets of Tokyo with a group of deaf friends. Her alienation within the hearing world is marked by a series of sexually explicit exhibitionary acts that culminate at the end of the movie with her standing naked on the balcony of her high-rise apartment with her father, staring at the brightly lit global city. Whatever promises globalization proffers for increased communication and intersection are, as the title implies, lost in a confusion of tongues and temporalities. What disturbed many critics about the film are the sudden cuts and shifts of locale from Morocco to San Diego to Tijuana to Tokyo that keep the viewer constantly off balance. David Denby, writing in The New Yorker, called Babel “an infuriatingly well-made disaster” in which the overlapping stories “are so idioÂ� syncratic that they don’t comment on one another; they just lie side by side in the same film” (103). Denby feels that moviegoers are right to expect “some sense of order sterner than trivial contingency,” but this desire for continuity misses Iñárritu’s salient point about the impossibility of rendering new global realities according to more traditional narrative devices. The film allegorizes the limits of national narratives to contain citizen-subjects widely separated by linguistic, cultural, and economic barriers at the same time that it illustrates its own diegetic limits in telling a story in traditional narrative terms. And if narrative coherence suffers, so do ethical determinants. “No one is evil,” Denby complains, and thus no one is accountable for the “terrible events” that befall its deterritorialized characters. While it is true that Iñárritu does not point the finger at a particular source for these events, their indeterminate provenance marks Babel’s comment on the agentless nature of global power. Seen from the standpoint of the stateless Amelia, isolated in the desert and tied to her two Anglo charges, or from the standpoint of a deaf Japanese girl in a sounddrenched metropole, the experience of fragmentation Denby bemoans may very well be the structure of feeling that we call globalization. I described Babel as an allegory, but it is more properly a fable about a new form of cosmopolitanism in a world where millions of people have fled homelands to escape political repression, ethnic cleansing, and poverty within an increasingly globalized economy. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the film displays the breakdown of “homeland” as a stable figure for origins in a period of what Aiwa Ong has called “flexible citizenships” created around labor flows, trade agreements, and outsourcing opportunities.1 As a fable about cosmopolitanism, the film invites comparison with an earlier ver-

â•…

On the Outskirts of Form 25

sion that we associate with modernity and whose global modality is colonization.2 For the modernist generation, cosmopolitanism implied being a citizen of the world, unmoored from a single place (provincialism) or national identity (nativism). Poe’s man of the crowd or Baudelaire’s flaneur could negotiate threatening urban spaces because they were not perceived to be of those spaces. Characters in Henry James’s novels are on a perpetual grand tour, moving from England to Italy to France to the Orient, exorcizing psychic and cultural limits of their national origins while engaging in touristic voyeurism. Their progeny in the personae of modernist poets—Eliot’s Prufrock, Pound’s Mauberly, Stevens’s Crispin—become the models of poetic cosmopolitanism: witty, world weary, mobile—fuguers lost in Imperium. Unlike the philosophical-political cosmopolitanism envisioned by Kant in “Perpetual Peace” (1795), with its utopian belief in world-citizenship through hospitality and shared rights, the cosmopolitanism produced through globalization yokes together the elite and the abject, the globe-trotting businessman or wealthy tourist, as well as the migrant laborer, sex worker, and political exile. The former, like their Victorian counterparts, are marked by access to education, languages and cultural capital—what Craig Calhoun calls the “class consciousness of frequent travelers.” The latter are defined by postcolonial histories of displacement and structural violence that complicate both the idea of a national homeland and the forging of a new, assimilated identity in the host country.3 Such disparities argue against speaking of a single cosmopolitan tendency but rather of what James Clifford calls “discrepant cosmopolitanisms” that differentiate the “different degrees of entanglement in national/transnational orders” (365). In order to study the poetics of such displacements I will focus on discrepant cosmopolitanisms created within the North American context, specifically those created in the long shadow of nafta.4 My examples include the Mexican poet and novelist Cristina Rivera-Garza’s poem, “Tercer Mundo,” the American poet and activist, Mark Nowak’s Shut Up Shut Down, and Canadian poet Lisa Robertson’s Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. By focusing on poetries forged around a hemispheric trading bloc rather than a school or shared aesthetic, I hope to discover critical affinities grounded in political and material realities of globalization. In this respect, I am taking a cue from Amitava Kumar’s anthology, World Bank Literature, which seeks to understand the role of literary culture in an age of international finance and structural adjustment policies. As Kumar points out, thinking

26â•… a p ub l i c l an gu a g e

through global ventures like the World Bank or nafta necessitates an understanding of the inextricable bonds between economic, political, and cultural life such that changes in one are felt in the others. As Kumar observes, in the wake of worldwide anti-globalist struggles, the “analytic shift from the liberal-diversity model of ‘World Literature’ to the radical paradigm of ‘World Bank Literature’ signals a resolve not only to recognize and contest the dominance of Bretton Woods institutions but also to rigorously oppose those regimes of knowledge that would keep literature and culture sealed from the issues of economics and activism” (xix). By stressing a hemispheric frame for reading poetry I also hope to define a shift in geographical focus away from a kind of spiritual localism—the “spirit of place”—among poets of the 1950s and 1960s toward spaces currently under construction. By stressing literary community formed through shared economic interdependencies I want to complicate the idea of “imagined communities” produced within the nationstate—including literary movements or schools—and situate them across national borders and cultural agendas.5 This latter aspect of my project requires a reconsideration of avant-garde linguistic practices as they are used to imagine new urban, geopolitical realities. It is here that the trans-generic, fragmented poetries of the recent generation join the discontinuous cinematography of Iñárritu and the street theater of anti-globalist activism.6 As I will point out, Cristina Rivera-Garza creates a surrealist narrative to imagine a fabulist third world, a “self-generated out-ofplace”;7 Mark Nowak uses documentary materials and photographs to chronicle the decay of industrial cities due to downsizing and outsourcing practices; Lisa Robertson’s “soft architecture” project continues a tradition of the modernist manifesto focused around urbanism and capitalist space. It is tempting to read their formal practices as a continuation of the historic avant-garde’s defamiliarizing of urban spaces by incorporating the commercial detritus of everyday life. Cendrars’s and Delauney’s La Prose du Transibérien€.€.€., Marinetti’s manifesto “Against Past-Loving Venice,” Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York, situationist dérives, all anticipate the work of contemporary cosmopolitan poets in their defamiliarization of the rationalized metropole. Yet works of the historical avant-garde in both utopic and dystopic forms still imagine that there is a building to build, a neighborhood to restore, a national border to traverse. In an era of flexible accumulation, transnational capital, and nomadic labor, such sites and spaces can no longer easily be cognitively mapped.

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On the Outskirts of Form 27

Emergent discourses of cosmopolitanism differ substantially from previous models based on the authority of the nation-state and its organizing dyads: local/global, metropole/province, self/other. My three examples offer an admittedly limited perspective on how cultural production has been transformed by nafta, but I might offer some tentative suggestions about how the specific properties of the agreement relate to questions of cultural production. The shadow that nafta casts is precisely that, a form of unheimlich reality through which subjects are produced and economic displacement is lived. When it was passed in 1994, nafta was seen as an agreement between equal trading partners that promised the removal of tariffs and restrictions on both material and intellectual property among the three countries. As Maria Josefina Saldana-Portillo observes, nafta “‘opened up’ the borders among the three nations by changing the formal legal controls on the entry and exit of goods and capital, although notably not of people” (753). Critics agree that the promise of more jobs, greater mobility, increased environmental oversight, faster growth and a leveling of economic disparities among the three countries has been a phantasm, especially for those at the lowest end of the economic scale. According to the authors of Dying for Growth, globalization—far from improving access to healthcare, medicines, and sanitation—has increased physical impairments and disease by privatizing healthcare, exposing workers to industrial waste, and denying access to cheap, generic drugs. The loss— the “great sucking sound”—of more than one million jobs to the developing world has produced a growing trade deficit with Mexico while the anticipated increase in jobs for Mexican laborers has resulted in a permanent maquiladora underclass and an increase in illegal border crossing and surveillance since the act’s passage. The good news about U.S. exports to Mexico and Canada having increased by $104 billion between 1993 and 2004 is matched by the bad news that imports during the same period have increased $211.3 billion, leaving a trade deficit of $107.3 billion.8 Instead of an increase in environmental protections throughout the three countries, there has been a precipitous reduction of unified standards leading to increased pollution, toxic spills, and deregulation. Agriculture has been especially affected. Michael Pollan points out that corn, Mexico’s most stable agricultural product, has been eviscerated by the importation of federally subsidized U.S. corn. Mexican farmers who can survive must do so by adopting industrial farming practices and chemically intensive methods of growing to compete with U.S. practices. As many critics have agreed, nafta is less an act that promotes free trade than an investment

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agreement that shores up the wealthiest sectors of the economy in each of the signatory countries. What do these factors have to do with poetics? How does the removal of tariffs and subsidies to achieve more porous borders impact the borders of language arts? At the most basic level, nafta has inspired a lively arts discourse around globalization that would include work by the binational Border Arts Workshop (baw), the feminist writing collective, La Liñea, the performance work of Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Michael Schnorr, and Heriberto Yépez, the theater of Cherrie Moraga and mixed-media art of the Chicano asco group, the poetry of Rodrigo Toscano, Alfred Arteaga, Bruce Andrews, Claudia Rankine, Jeff Derksen, M. Nourbese Phillips, Dione Brand, Rita Wong, Wade Compton, and others. What joins all of these artists as well as my three specific examples is a recognition of the phantasmal quality of post-nafta reality—a world in which the illusion of mobility and expanded communication masks the re-consolidation of wealth and the containment of resistance within a totalized surveillance regime. If modernism was marked by the “unreal city” of the Baudelairean crowd, the new cosmopolitan phantasmagoria is a reality effect of sign systems and grids of exchange, a Times Square of the imagination. A recent Los Angeles County Museum exhibition of Chicano art was titled “Phantom Sightings,” a phrase that captures something of the fugitive nature of artwork specific to Latino culture in Southern California but applicable to the work of art in an age of globalization as well. “Phantom Sightings” hints at work that no longer relies on the permanent object in the gallery space but that may appear on walls or underpasses, public signage (as in Heriberto Yépez’s Frontera installation) or food carts (as in La Linea’s “poemales”—poems written on the spot and wrapped in cornhusks) as well as flatbed trucks, community centers, and computer screens. The phrase also speaks to the uncanny quality of the Chicano demographic, one that is pervasive as a population yet which remains invisible within zones of power and representation. And this phantasmal quality extends into the urbanist focus of my three examples. For Teresa Rivera-Garza, the “third world” is no longer lodged in a specific geopolitical reality but in carceral and social spaces, “un hospital, una fiesta, un orfanatorio, una villa de reposo secuestrada de la realidad” (a hospital, a party, an orphanage, a rest home abducted from reality; 32–33).9 The architecture of the new global city, as Lisa Robertson points out, is “soft,” its glamorous surface permeated by investment capital from East Asia and elsewhere. The speaker of her urbanist manifestos is less an individual than an “office,” an

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On the Outskirts of Form 29

╯

institutional site visited by multiple subjects. For Mark Nowak, the cosmopolitan movement of global labor has turned small towns in the rust belt into ghost towns, their local infrastructure impacted by events in far-flung zones of outsourced labor and trade. And as in Babel, generic categories no longer hold but blur into prose, photography, documents, fable, and manifesto. Formal innovation seems based less around interrogating the status of the sign or, alternately, the integrity of the Subject than around the problem of citizenship and public agency. Unlike the privileged status given to personal alienation in cold-war poetry, the new cosmopoetics embodies alienation within a specific economic reality—neoliberalism—a telos-evacuated form of personal emancipation owned and operated by the global market. “Vamos al Terzo”: Cristina Rivera-Garza The three following examples are taken from the principle signatory countries of the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994), and while these works do not explicitly address the economic conditions of maquiladora workers, trade barriers, or agricultural subsidies, they imagine alternative ideas of nationhood and cultural identity to those organized around economic globalization. There is no direct aesthetic affinity or lineage among the three writers, and so they present an opportunity to see how national subjects speak to each other without the benefit of cohering manifestos or coterie identifications. It may seem that by treating poems that do not directly address nafta I am extending its shadow a bit far, but I want to show how cultural forms articulate social processes that pre-exist their formal recognition. As such, these examples offer an opportunity to investigate the ways that cultural forms mediate patterns of movement and location, giving voice to constituencies seldom freed by free trade. One obvious way that nafta informs my three texts concerns the matter of space. As the most visible example of the hemispheric application of neoliberal economic policies, nafta has dramatically transformed our understanding of region as a discrete, mappable entity. Where a previous generation of poets placed a high value on the genius loci (William Carlos Williams’s Paterson or Robert Duncan’s “place of first permission”) the poets I will discuss regard space as a highly mediated concept, a product of sign systems, land-use policies, and zoning laws. Their efforts reflect the “spatial turn” in cultural theory that has contested the historicism of classical Marxism by

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studying the ways that space, rather than an empty category within which social relations are produced, is part of the production process itself. Following the work of Henri Lefebvre, cultural geographers have focused on the degree to which certain kinds of spaces (cities, factories, hospitals, markets, information centers) organize labor and capital, fix social identities, and encourage consumption through managing individuals in public venues. Although each of the works I discuss deals with issues of space in different ways, all three works are cognizant of how space is dominated by the effects of neoliberal policies on specific economies. As I have said above, for Teresa Rivera Garza or Mark Nowak, space is now a fluid concept, mediated by labor flows and outsourcing, crossing borders that challenge world-systems models of developed or third-world countries. And in Lisa Robertson, the global city of Vancouver becomes a vast real estate bazaar in which buildings, parks, and houses are so many Monopoly pieces in a fluid or “soft” architecture. It is not that nafta has “caused” forms of cultural production so much as the fact that it has contributed to a cultural imaginary of social relations beyond the nation-state. I have taken my title from the work of Cristina Rivera-Garza, a Mexican poet, historian, and novelist who lives both in the United States and Mexico and whose research has been focused on mental health institutions. Her long poem, “Tercer Mundo,” addresses a key issue in globalization: the problem of representing systems of integration and amalgamation that, by definition, cannot be defined by mimetic criteria. As David Harvey asks in the epigraph to this chapter, how is it possible to imagine geography “in an image other than that of capital in the future” (557). Rivera-Garza similarly asks what would it be like to see the third world both from a perspective before its invention in world-systems theory and outside of its ancillary relationship to a putatively developed world—when, to adopt a Heideggerian terminology, the world no longer “works.” Her answer is to posit a kind of innocence—even sentimentality—that stands in stark contrast to the neoliberal world order. It is a world that, like religious belief, depends not on proof but on faith: Estaba en una orilla de la orilla

a punto de existir y a punto de no existir como la fe

un tendajo rodeado de isletas miserables de maíz y guajolotes hambrientos. El Tercer Mundo era una casa sin techos. El Terzo.

On the Outskirts of Formâ•… 31 It was at the far edge of the far edge

about to exist and about not to exist like faith

a shack surrounded by miserable islets of corn and half-starved turkeys. The Third World was a roofless house. The Terzo. (24)

Here, the “orilla” (far edge) is not so much the border—a geopolitical entity—but a liminal state that contains both the possibility of resistance and the danger of dependence. In order to render the experience of living outside of first-world imaginations of underdevelopment, Rivera-Garza replaces the Spanish tercer with the Italian terzo, thus embodying her own linguistic alienation within a first-world discourse. Travelers to Terzo emerge from a Dantean underworld—of poverty, crime, and pollution; they flee dirty wars, disappearances, and ethnic cleansing that the first world helps to create but refuses to see.10 They arrive “prostrate and thirsty€/ voracious black heralds with voices of pandemic and killing hands” (“postrados y sedientos€ / avorazados heraldos negros con voz de pandemia y manos de matar”; 24). Like the best minds of Allen Ginsberg’s generation, “these good-for-nothings” (los pránganas) are both abject victims of exploitation as well as voices of resistance who, although “mute [speak] with the fervor of the converted” (“los mudos para siempre hablaban con el fervor de los conversos”; 24). With broken speech, these “far-out, far-gone lunatics broke down the mechanism of language among the meditative€/ vapors of alcohol and matches” (“los locos de remate descomponían el mecanismo del lenguaje entre el vaho€ / meditabundo del alcohol y los cerillos”; 24). Rivera-Â�Garza’s use of the past tense situates these denizens in a perpetual backwardness and underdevelopment: They “choked on smoke and they died again inside the box of their bodies” (“se atragantaban de humo y morían otra vez dentro de la caja de sus cuerpos”; 26). They are scavengers and petty thieves who “spread their plunder across their laps—pocket watches, car parts and wilted flowers” (“desparramaban sobre los regazos su€ / botín de relojes de bolsillo”; 26). As criminals, street vendors, and prostitutes, they seek respite from “the cruel monotony of the summer deluge” and cry out, “Let’s go to the Terzo€.€.€. Down towards the eternal primeval towards€/ and never get there” (“Vamos al Terzo .€.€. Abajo hacia el eterno hacia primigenio€/ sin llegar”; 26). The Â�poet’s

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Â� simultaneous description of these denizens as “good-for-nothings” and “highly useful beings” ventriloquizes civic leaders who must condemn migrants while depending on their labor. This attempt to go “towards” the Terzo is a historical fact—the great migration from rural outposts to the metropole—but the refrain, “Let’s go to the Terzo” indicates that the world the inhabitants desire is less a place than a teleological fantasy, a “primeval towards” that offers an illusory utopia. Beyond the far edge, at the end of the journey, exists “the biggest city in the world,” the mythic norte of employment and economic security, but also the border city of new labor possibilities and multinational consolidation. It is a place where one loses one’s history, where gender, familial, and social divisions break down. The poet is careful not to define this regime in the allegorical terms I have just used but retains the aura of estrangement from known terms and landscapes that accompanies such processes: De camino al Terzo se arrancaban las camisas de fuerza de los nombres viejos y emergían de sus pasados en cueros finísimos y huesos sin historia. Eran La Diabla, el Perrote, la Rana, la Pequeña Lulú, el Lalo Gallo, la Bestia. Los destinados a ser hombres albergaban a ratos el chillar absurdo de la mujeres

solas en los dientes.

Las destinadas a dar a luz se escondían bajo la oscuridad viril de los enhiestos. Todos cambiaban de lugar en los días bíblicos del Terzo:

los últimos eran siempre los primeros y los que reían al final siempre reían



mejor

Bifidos en el sexo e irresueltos en todo lo demás

fumaban cigarillos categóricamente.

Las hebras de sus cuerpos de deslizaban sin dificultad por el pequeñísmo ojo de la

aguja que era la puerta de la eternidad.

.â•… .â•… .â•… .â•… .â•… .â•… .â•… .â•… .â•… .â•… .â•… .â•… .â•… . Y cuando partían mareados hacia La Ciudad, se llevaban al Terzo colgando de los

hombros

orgullosos de su informidad.

(29) On the way to the Terzo they tore off the straitjackets of old names and emerged from their pasts with fine, fine hides and bones with no history.

On the Outskirts of Formâ•… 33 They were The She-Devil, The Giga-Dog, The Frog, Little Lulu, Red Rooster Ed,

The Queen Beast.

Those destined to be men harbored from time to time, the absurd shrieking of

lonely women in their teeth,

Those destined to give birth hid beneath the virile darkness of the upright. Everyone changed places in the biblical days of the Terzo:

the last were always first and those who laughed last always laughed best.

Bifids sexually and in everything else unresolved

they smoked cigarettes categorically.

The strands of their bodies slid without difficulty through the needle’s tiny eye

which was the gateway to eternity.

.╅ .╅ .╅ .╅ .╅ .╅ .╅ .╅ .╅ .╅ .╅ .╅ . And when they headed out, dizzy for The City, they took the Terzo with them, �hanging from their shoulders

Proud of their shapelessness.

(28)

In this deracinated cityscape, names are lost, genders reversed. Like characters in Burroughs or Le Guin, individuals become sexual bifids, capable of selfreplication. The only constant from third world to Terzo is the “categorical” smoking of cigarettes. The third world is less a place left behind than a condition one carries like a suitcase into perpetual exile. The roofless house of rural underdevelopment is replaced by the urban matrix itself: “The city was also their house€/ they had a living room of brackish buildings downtown€/ a dark bedroom in Tlanesburgo€/ an enviable view in Belvedere€/ and underground passageways that everyone called the Metro” (“La ciudad también era su casa€/ tenían una sala de edificios salobres en el centro€ / una recámara oscura en Tlanesburgo€/ un mirador de envidia en Belvedere€/ y pasillos subterráneos que todos denominaban el Metro”; 30).11 The presence of a migrant population in the “biggest city in the world” signifies difference, marking non-citizens, green-card holders, and visitors who stand out in public spaces: “they were the ones who sang anthems out of tune and walked upstream in parades€/ the contingent of dark individuals€// They could be recognized by their way of being absolutely, roundly, cinematically wrong” (“Ellos eran los que desentonaban himnos y caminaban a contracorriente en los desfiles€/ el contingente de los oscuros indivuos.€// Se les reconcía por esa manera de equivocarse absoluta,

34â•… a p ub l i c l an gu a g e

redonda, cinéfila”; 30). This last phrase, “being .€.€. cinematically wrong,” testifies to the way in which migrants and guest workers function as the visible Others of the nation, objects of a specular gaze that constitute the invisible normalcy of the citizen subject. As Others in the “biggest city in the world,” the denizens of Terzo lack the self-presence guaranteed by national citizenship and thus can only see themselves through the reflected, third-person pronoun. But at a crucial moment in the poem, Rivera-Garza finds a way to rearticulate this grammatical subject position through Rimbaud’s “je est un autre,” which she renders Yo eras otro, Rimbaud dixit

pero era más

¿Cómo cantar esta agujerada sentimentalidad de baratija

este borde diamantinamente geológico sobre la piel



la ceguera de la oración y la magnanimidad de la dádiva?

Yo era tú desmesurado perro de ojos amarillos tú muchacha proclive tú pedacería de resolanas y recodo verde de ciudad. I were an other, Rimbaud dixit

but I was more.

How to sing this holey trinket sentimentality

this diamantinically geological layer upon my skin



the blindness of prayer and the magnanimity of the gift?

I was you excessive dog with yellow eyes you proclivious girl you glaringly sunny patchwork and green city bend. (34)

Rimbaud’s ungrammatical sentence represents a canonical statement of modernist linguistic subjectivity, its quasi-theological status reinforced by the Latin verb; “Rimbaud dixit.” Rivera-Garza gives it a political and historical twist from one suggesting the division of self and artist to one announcing a unity of self and community of readers. The first-person pronoun is combined with eras, the second person of the singular, suggesting an identification of

On the Outskirts of Formâ•… 35

diasporic subject with her addressee. Hence she is no longer singular or isolated but “more” than herself: “pero era mas.” This wordplay responds to the major question of the poem: “How to sing this holey trinket sentimentality” (“¿Cómo cantar esta agujerada sentimentalidad de baratija”), how to create the poem—the “holey trinket”—if not by identifying with those residents of a mythic Terzo. The translator, Jen Hofer, has rendered the adverb, agujerada, as “holey” in order to tease out the idea of the poem as something full of holes— inadequate to the Real—but also the poem as holy or sacramental, an association reinforced by the use of oracion (prayer) in subsequent lines. With the example of Rimbaud’s linguistic dérèglement, Rivera-Garza is able to switch from third to first person in the latter stanzas of the poem, suggesting a transition from object to subject status: “I were an other .€.€. but I was more.” She defines herself as being like the poem, “a neighborhood accumulated on the outskirts of form€/ about to exist and about not to exist like faith” (“Yo era un barrio accumulado en las afueras de la forma€/ a punto de existir y a punto de no existir como la fe”; 36). As a world forever on the “outskirts” of form—of identity, of language, of power—the Terzo occupies the same realm as religion, something that in order to be imagined must be accepted “like faith” in a world based on empirical evidence. The poem traces through its deixis a movement from a “there” where third-world people are synonymous with underdevelopment and lack to a first-person singular and, in the last Â�strophes, to a first-person plural: Éramos un assomamiento vertiginsoso tras las venas una laboriosidad aérea de piernas y uñas y cartilagos. Éramos saliva. We were a vertiginous peeking out from behind the veins an aerial industriousness of legs and fingernails and cartilage. We were saliva. (37)

In these last lines, the poet imagines a form of embodiment in which one not only uses language but becomes the literal tissue and secretions of the body from which language emanates. Instead of being the abject body—the Mexican nanny or the Moroccan goat herder in Babel—they reinhabit bodies that can speak back.

36â•… a p ub l i c l an gu a g e

“The ╯ Basic Form Is the Frame”: Mark Nowak Walter Benjamin’s view of the modern city as ruin is elaborated in all three of my examples. “Tercer Mundo” imagines a city portable enough to be carried on one’s back; Lisa Robertson’s Vancouver is soft and pliable; Mark Nowak sees the rustbelt city as a ghost town, destroyed by downsizing and anti-union policies. Unlike William Carlos Williams’s Paterson—the city as a sleeping giant—or Ezra Pound’s mythic Ecbatan or Charles Olson’s Gloucester, the cities in these poems are products of finance capital, story poles marking future suburbs. Alternative communities provide a hedge against alienation, but they do so through identities mediated by uncertainties of labor and capital.12 This is particularly the case in Mark Nowak’s Shut Up Shut Down, which depicts an industrial archipelago of decaying factory towns from Lackawanna and Detroit to Gary, Youngstown, and the Iron Range of Minnesota. These formerly robust industrial centers have seen their populations decimated by plant closings, union-busting legislation, and labor outsourcing during the Reagan and Bush administrations. Nowak draws on the testimony of displaced laborers through interviews and family reminiscences, chronicling the decline of American organized labor and the evisceration of civic life by big-box outlets and national franchises. Although Nowak does not turn his sights specifically on free-trade agreements, he anticipates their impact by focusing on the damage to society when the pursuit of cheap, non-union labor becomes the bottom line. “Read the writing on the Wal-Mart,” as one section warns. Shut Up Shut Down is a documentary poem in the tradition of Muriel Rukeyser’s “Book of the Dead” or Charles Reznikoff ’s Testimony, much of it based on interviews with workers. In each of the five poems that comprise the book, Nowak depicts their voices through a combination of bold and regular font, parentheses and brackets, that mark distinctions between various workers and his own family memories of growing up in a working-class household: Built sheds and piss houses. We took care of shit. Nation (“Under Construction”) needs the State (in decay)—a flag out of focus where working-class (white) masculinity also factors into how factories get framed. You made steel together and you won your dignity together. Inside my third-grade (Union Road) classroom, the distant bay of trains (braking) out behind Buffalo Salvage & Tow. All those present (in prefigured relations) are constituted for a State that will remain (for us) always

On the Outskirts of Formâ•… 37 Â�German-shepherd guarded. You couldn’t make steel alone and you couldn’t win respect alone. Further up the road was the Local.€(12)

In this section, “$00 / Line / Steel / Train,” prose passages are juxtaposed to short lyrics that condense and focus the longer units: Bricks, the frame [work] of an eye, accents of bricklayer and optometrist, tongues extant (12)

The objectivist surface of this poem, with its interruptions, enjambments, and grammatical condensations, links all parts of the factory town. The materials (brick) and laborer (bricklayer) are seen as inseparable from other members of the community (optometrist) in an interdependent structure of individuals, labor, and communication (“tongues€/ extant”). The form here, and in two other sections in the book, is based on the classical Japanese poetic form, haibun, in which a prose passage is followed by a short haiku or lyric. As used by its greatest practitioner, Basho, a narrative description of a landscape or temple is followed by a haiku that reduces the description into a few words. Nowak rearticulates this classical poetic form, based on the metaphysics of the discrete topos, onto a new late-capitalist landscape. In the poem’s final section, “Hoyt Lakes€/ Shut Down,” the haibun structure undergoes a further modification as the human costs of factory closures are registered at the bottom of the page by reference to the number of workers laid off by plant closings. In Marxist terms, the relationship of prose to poetry replicates the classic division between superstructure and base, between narrative representations of “real conditions” and the economic realities sustained by (or interpreted through) those representations. We can see this relationship vividly in the opening poem of the sequence which records the shutdown of the ltv steel factory in Iron, Minnesota (figure 1.1): The factory of my father [reduced to rubble]. Factory [after factory (shut down)]. Seventeen stories. The blast furnace of my grandfather. The slaughterhouse across from the railroad [terminal] where my father’s aunt used to work. Seventeen stories, and every single window shattered [shut up].€(133)

38â•… a p ub l i c l an gu a g e

Fig. 1.1╇ Pages 132–33 from Mark Nowak, Shut Up, Shut Down. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2004. ©Â€Mark Nowak and Coffee House Press

Below this testimony by one of the laid-off workers is the schematic summary: “workers€/ words€/ worth€/ [repeating]” which condenses the links between labor, language, and value in an alliterative sequence. Below this, outlined in black, is the word “Iron” followed by the number “21” indicating that, in the small town of Iron, twenty-one workers lost their jobs. A photograph on the facing page shows the road to the main gate of the closed ltv steel plant. Each level of the poem deepens the “base” by framing it in specific voices and€images. It is not only the closing of factories that these poems memorialize; the impact of closings on families and town economies is equally important. In one poem from the series, Nowak quotes from a speech by the Wal-Mart founder, Sam Walton (figure 1.2): “We’re all working together; that’s the secret. And we’ll lower the cost of living for everyone” (151). Buttressing Walton’s boosterist testimony are two newspaper ads welcoming Wal-Mart to Hibbing, Minnesota, one from Kentucky Fried Chicken and another from Hardee’s. Offering a contrasting view of such commercial synergy is a quotation from a local paper,

â•…

On the Outskirts of Form 39

€

╇

Fig. 1.2 Pages 150–51 from Mark Nowak, Shut Up, Shut Down. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2004. © Mark Nowak and Coffee House Press

describing members of United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local No. 1116 who picketed the entrances to the store. Below this is the familiar sign-off signature of the Windows operating system: “Windows is shutting down” and at the very bottom of the page is the stark statistic, “Babbitt: 55,” memorializing the fifty-five workers laid off in the (felicitously named) town of Babbitt. On the facing page is a photograph of Rudy’s Bar with a real-estate sign in the window, suggesting that the entry of Wal-Mart into Babbitt’s local economy signals the end of downtown merchants and services. This collage of quotations, images, and documents offers, in itself, a condensed labor-history haiku, not unlike Pound’s presentational method in the Malatesta Cantos: Walton’s boosterist rhetoric is reinforced by newspaper ads that show alliances among franchises. The news report on union picketing displays resentment felt by threatened rank and file, while the literal “bottom line” is reserved for the number of workers displaced by the closure of ltv Steel. The photograph of Rudy’s Bar, with its “for sale” sign in the window, offers an ironic variation on the Microsoft sign-off, suggesting that the windows

40â•… a p ub l i c l an gu a g e

of the town are literally “shutting down” and being replaced by fast-food franchises and big-box distributors. A related effect of plant closings is the revival of late-nineteenth-century nativist fears of “foreign labor.” Nowak figures this tension through a poem dealing with the murder of Vincent Chin by recently laid-off autoworkers in Detroit on June 19, 1982 (the date serves as the title of the poem). Chin had been attending his bachelor party at a local strip club when he got into an altercation with two men who mistook Chin—who was Chinese-American— for Japanese: “It’s because of you little motherfuckers that we’re out of work,” witnesses remember them saying (“Remembering”). Chin and his friends left the club, but he was later accosted in front of a fast-food restaurant, where the two men beat him with a baseball bat. He died of his wounds four days later. The killing of an Asian-American man over the presumed loss of U.S. jobs to Japanese companies renewed fears of a nativist backlash and spread anxiety throughout the Asian-American community, prompting at least one bumper sticker that read, “Remember Pearl Harbor; Buy American.” In Nowak’s framing of the story, the site of the altercation at a topless bar is a significant component in the racialization of labor tensions. Chin’s presence as an Asian-American in a bar where out-of-work laborers come to forget their troubles links insecurities about masculinity to anxieties about racial others (figure 1.3): All Sexy Come Nude Show See service industries basement laundries “.╯ . . service them either by giving them a lap dance or a hand job . . .” unemployment: 17% laid pink slips off hunger emergency human commodities

â•…

On the Outskirts of Form 41

€

╇

Fig. 1.3 Pages 76–77 from Mark Nowak, Shut Up, Shut Down. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2004. © Mark Nowak and Coffee House Press

the dead bolts the Master locks discounted rocks the windows (77)

Reference to an unemployment rate of 17 percent stands at the center of the poem, flanked by allusions to pink slips, strip-club signage, factory lockouts, and sex work as part of a service economy that produces “human commodities.” Above the poem appears a quotation from another unemployed laborer: I’m having difficulty in starting to do things. I seem to have given up. I’ve stopped trying because all that I do seems to end in failure. I feel as though I am paralyzed. €

It is as though I feel numb all over. (77)

42â•… a p ub l i c l an gu a g e

As Nowak suggests in another poem, to be “unemployed structurally [is to be] Capitalized racially” which is to say that in an economy where unemployment is a constant threat—a structural component of being hired—everyone is racialized as other (85). Unemployment ceases to be a story of personal loss (or lack of initiative) and more of a social process that affects everyone. The theme of Shut Up Shut Down is one of framing: how to see the photographs of closed factories in their largest social meaning and, at the same time, how to represent capital that is no longer reinvested in the environment in which it is produced. Nowak provides a number of “frames” by which to understand those deserted factories—interviews, empirical data, news reports, bibliographies, photographs, lyric poems, personal memoirs—to embody the voices and sites of a weakened labor movement. He has expanded this frame beyond the poem by staging performances of Shut Up Shut Down in union halls, theaters, community centers, and other public sites far from the usual academic venues, often using members of the audience and fellow workers. Nowak’s own political activism and organizing, his involvement in the Union of Radical Workers and Writers, his editing of Cross Cultural Poetics (XcP), his recent collaborations with workers in South Africa, and his journalistic, blog, and political writings suggest the presence of a revived public poetry that fuses the “outskirts of poetic form” with the displaced margins of American social life. Walking Through Soft Architecture: Lisa Robertson Yet our city is persistently soft. We see it like a raw encampment at the edge of the rocks —Lisa Robertson (15)

In a famous passage from the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin speaks of “wish images” by which new modes of production are combined with previous decorative surfaces as a way of normalizing novelty. “In the dream in which every epoch sees in images the epoch that follows, the latter appears wedded to elements of ur-history, that is, of a classless society” (“Paris” 148). In his work on the Paris arcades, Benjamin explores these wish-fulfilling images in the surfaces of modernity, finding in the intractable steel and glass of modern buildings, metro entrances, and railroad stations the expression of the collective wish to transcend the social order of production. In order to see the wish behind the fulfillment, the utopia within reified products of capitalism, it becomes necessary to read modernity allegorically, as though each hard

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On the Outskirts of Form 43

surface belies a soft interior, as though the novelty promised by commodities is negated by the dust that forms on them in the shop window. A number of recent poets and artists have re-imagined Benjamin’s Arcades Project in a post-Fordist global society. Such is the case of Lisa Robertson and her Office for Soft Architecture. As my example from the third signatory nation of nafta, the Canadian poet’s work parallels Rivera-Garza’s urbanist concerns by regarding her home city of Vancouver as a phantasmagoric site for neo-situationist projects. Some of these projects derive from various commissions by art galleries, as well as journalistic assignments to chronicle changes in her native city, the fruits of which can be seen in her recent book, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. The book is less an anthology of separate essays and more of a guidebook (its compact size and page-marking tassel imitate the shape of the nineteenth-century Baedeker) whose peripatetic narrator is the collective entity, “The Office for Soft Architecture” (osa). But unlike the guidebook, osa is structured in relation to specific goals, tasks and readers. Each essay is treated as an architectural commission: It was efficient to become an architect, since the city’s economic and aesthetic discourses were increasingly framed in architectural vocabularies. In writing I wanted to make alternative spaces and contexts for the visual culture of this city, sites that could also provide a vigorously idiosyncratic history of surfaces as they €

fluctuate. (n.p.)

She calls the last seven sections of the book “walks,” and it is here that she most resembles her situationist forebears by observing “alternate spaces” to those in the touristic guide or chamber of commerce brochure. Rather her desultory urban strolls—like those of Rousseau, Henry Adams, and Henry James before her—offer an occasion for observing the city differently. The city that osa sees is not the glass-and-steel corporate landscape of Vancouver so much as a state of transience: Yet our city is persistently soft. We see it like a raw encampment at the edge of the rocks, a camp for a navy vying to return to a place that has disappeared. So the camp is a permanent transience, the buildings or shelters like tents—tents of steel, chipboard, stucco, glass, cement, paper and various claddings—tents rising and falling in the glittering rhythm which is null rhythm, which is the flux of mod€

ern careers. (15)

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Like Rivera-Garza’s Terzo, Robertson’s Vancouver is a work in progress, an encampment or settlement made of ephemeral and contingent structures. osa is both an inhabitant of the city yet an outsider to its instrumental functions of producing new citizen subjects, organizing capital flows, containing and mediating information. In a comment on the book’s cover, Robertson characterizes her work as providing a natural history of “civic surface,” and in this respect, she resembles Benjamin in seeing natural science and vernacular architecture as a filter through which to view the crasser intentions of modernity. Her focal points in each section—gardens, parks, alleyways, fountains, weeds, wild plants, shacks, scaffolding, curtains—are phenomena that blur fixed boundaries, much as Benjamin focuses on art nouveau’s use of organic shapes to naturalize modern metro stops and train stations. She is less a detached flaneur than a docent guide, pointing out the sites and the systems that organize them. Why “soft” architecture? Robertson explains that The Office for Soft Architecture came into being as she “watched the city of Vancouver dissolve in the fluid called money. Buildings disappeared into newness” (1). Architecture is soft in its ephemerality but also soft in offering a malleable surface to corporate modernism’s seeming permanence. At one point, Robertson includes photographs by Keith Higgins of suburban houses, contact sheets of virtually identical homes, each with minor ornamental variations that extend the modernist abstract grid into an urban context (figure 1.4). Higgins’s photographs illustrate the replaceability and modularity of these homes, rendering hard capital into “soft” transience. Other photographs, sculptures, and images throughout the book occupy the same interstitial relationship between architecture as realized form and projection—the tract home as social amelioration and as commodity form. I have spoken of Robertson’s project as a guidebook, but I could as easily have described it as an urbanist manifesto, à la Marinetti, or work of visionary architecture, à la Corbusier or Koolhaas. Each section of the work was commissioned as part of a site-specific project, and each involved a variety of practices—walking, archival research, teaching (she taught a series of classes on “walking”), curatorial work (she arranged a series of lectures on urbanism), cooking, shopping, reading. And by adopting the pseudonym “The Office” she alludes to the collective character of commissioned work. In this sense, her work is part of a larger impulse among contemporary poets to think less in terms of individual poems than in large projects, often of a collective and investigative nature.13

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On the Outskirts of Form 45

€

╇

Fig. 1.4 Vancouver houses (photos by Keith Higgins, layout by Robin Mitchell); pages 20–21 from Lisa Robertson, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2006. © Keith Higgins

As I have indicated, Robertson’s poetic model is the “walk,” indebted to Baudelaire’s flaneur and Benjamin’s own botanizing on the asphalts of Paris or Moscow. The poem-as-walk jettisons the poetic line as primary metrical unit and substitutes a desultory sentence, not unlike those nineteenth-century versions in Flaubert and James that measure the outer world by registering minute shifts of subjective attention: Belief is difficult. It suits us to write in this raw city. Maybe it’s the spanner-framed and buttered light slabbed or trickling into soot, soft clicking of louvred Chanel billboards, puce sky swathing the night-time overpass where on every radio of every taxicab Rousseau croons “we are born innocent” over and over in whining vibrato. The superstores and their parking lots scroll past. Against the distant tile wall of the Advanced Light Rapid Transit facility the city composes itself in the €

skirts of some teens. (25)

The sensuous surface of Robertson’s language creates an alternative surface to the constantly changing commercial landscape. Seen through the eyes of osa,

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“Belief is difficult” when those indices of Enlightened truth (light, illumination, innocence) have become so many products. Rousseau’s noble savage has become a teenage rock star crooning “innocence” in a “whining vibrato” while a kind of fugitive beauty is discerned in the “soft clicking of louvred Chanel billboards” and the “puce sky swathing the night-time overpass.” The mannered opulence of her prose seems a distinct response to the “raw” city, finding in synthetic surfaces and pre-packaged information a new kind of lyric voice. The rich flat vowels and alliterations of s’s and t’s (“Light Rapid Transit facility the city composes itself in the skirts of some teens”) turns urban into verbal display. If Robertson searches out lyric possibilities amidst commercial signage, she also observes a more sinister mobility of lives that support commerce. In her first “walk,” she and her guide find themselves at the shipyard with its jaunty assemblage of stacked containers. We talked of the bare co-mixture of stuff and life in the stacked hulls of freighters, strangers shipped anonymously in containers among their dying and dead. We had read of this also in the papers, how in the city’s ports the wracked individuals had been prised or extruded as mute cargo, living or dead. They had attempted to migrate into experiment. The rhetorics of judgment and hope are incommensurate. We spoke of these rhetorics because morning is overwhelmingly the experiment of belief. We rise into the failed library of civitas.€(226)

Once again the language of “belief ” is negated by the news of global migration, of migrating bodies shipped in containers. The failed social contract in which such diasporic individuals are reduced to bare life (“the failed library of civitas”) is bluntly rendered by the image of stacked containers that vividly represent the dependence of the soft city on global trade. In an environment where human lives are so many containers, the natural world might seem a contrastive value, but because nature has become a raw material within production, there seems little separation between migrant labor and invasive plant life. Take, for example, her reflections on the Rubus armeniacus, the Himalayan blackberry, that grows throughout British Columbia. Robertson begins with a homely description that replicates the rhetoric of agronomists and batologists who study invasive plants: Our own relation to Rubus has been as jam makers rather than batologists. The sweet, plump drupelets of the Rubus armeniacus, or Himalayan blackberry, grow

â•…

On the Outskirts of Form 47 free and copious in lesser-groomed residential alleyways, vacant lots, chain-linked sites of abandoned factories, and similarly disturbed landscapes of our city. Environment Canada classifies this non-native introduced taxon as a “minor invasive €

alien.” It makes tasty, if somewhat seedy, pie. (126)

Although she maintains a posture of scientific detachment, her prose betrays a certain nativist prejudice. The vine is “illegitimate, superfluous,” “non-native” or “alien.” It is a product of “entrepreneurial” horticulture, and thus violates natural evolution; it exhibits “exuberant productivity” whose growth makes it seem capable of “swallowing barns” (figure 1.5). It inhabits marginal spaces, prospering in “alleys, vacant lots, and chain-linked sites.” And although the author sees the plant—like Whitman’s grass—as being “democratic,” its proliferation and adaptation require rhetorical normalization: Rubus’s habits are also democratic. In Fordist fashion it maximized distribution through the temperate mesophytic forest region, that is, from California, in the Northwest coast as far as southwestern British Columbia, and inland to Montana. But what we have come to appreciate most about this Rubus, apart from the steady supply of jam, is the bracingly peri-modern tendency to garnish and swag and garland any built surface it encounters. In fact, the Himalayan blackberry insistently makes new hybrid architectures, weighing the ridgepoles of previously sturdy home garages and sheds into sway-backed grottoes, transforming chain link and barbed wire to undulant green fruiting walls, and sculpting from abandoned cement pilings Wordsworthian abbeys. We too are fascinated by its morphological lust. (127)

The plant mimics industrial production, extending its influence through Fordist “distribution.” Although the plant was introduced to Canada by the American botanist, Luther Burbank, and is of European origin, it is associated with things Chinese that “enriched the picturesque aspect of shrubberies, pergolas, and pleasure grounds” and thus served as a “faddish adjunct to horticultural orientalism” (126). The spread of the plant to California or Montana replicates the historic immigration of Chinese in the West and the influence of orientalism on architecture foods, and fashions. The vine contributes to “soft” architecture by attaching itself to surfaces, making “new hybrid architectures” and transforming “chain link and barbed wire to undulant green.” Thus what begins as a tribute to a hardy native plant is simultaneously a comment on native orientalist anxiety.

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Fig. 1.5╇ Rich Jensen, “rubus2”; pages 122–23 from Lisa Robertson, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2006. Courtesy Rich Jensen and ©Â€Lloyd Center€/ Clearcut Press

I am by no means saying that osa is using racist stereotypes but that the agronomist rhetoric she adopts to describe the Rubus carries a historical burden applied to other “non-native” aliens to the region. osa reinforces this paradox by calling the plant the “dystopian epitome of the romance of botanical pattern as applied architectural decoration” (127). Here the poet’s debts to Benjamin are made explicit; decorative surface reveals the base and superstructure of a capitalist edifice. But in the plant’s hardihood, osa sees a new frontier: “If architecture is entombed structure or thanatos, ornament is the frontier of the surface” (127). She then quotes various naturalists and biologists on the importance of genetic mutation and variation: The Office for Soft Architecture finds the chaos of variation beautiful. We believe that structure or fundament itself, in its inert eternity, has already been adequately documented—the same skeleton repeating itself continuously. We are grateful for these memorial documents. But the chaos of surfaces compels us towards new states of happiness.€(128)

The “chaos of variation” that Robertson explores in her walks contests the latter-day Haussmanization of the Pacific Rim city. The residues of the arts and

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On the Outskirts of Form 49

€

crafts movement in Vancouver offer, as Robertson observes, a sign of an alternative civic vision, a bourgeois alternative to modernity that bore within its cult of nature and medievalism vestiges of William Morris’s socialist project, one in which “Lifestyle became an ethical category” (98). But as her reading of Arts and Crafts architecture reveals, this lifestyle is restricted to the wealthy who wish to replicate a kinder, gentler British past. By juxtaposing the promise of happiness represented by rural and regional traditions against the glass-andsteel spires of the global city, Robertson exposes the nostalgia that underwrites progress: “Under the pavement, pavement” (15). Conclusion: The Outskirts of Feeling We want to use the word “cosmos.” —Lisa Robertson

�

La promesse de bonheur, new states of happiness, a third space, cosmos, El Terzo —these are phrases that suggest links between a modernist emancipatory project and contemporary cosmopolitanism, a “chaos of variation.” Yet the characteristic image of the modernist cosmopolitan—his mobility among classes and foreign sites—is transformed in global postmodernity through the existence of the undocumented domestic worker of Babel, and the displaced factory workers of Shut Up Shut Down, and the migrant bodies locked in stacked containers in Robertson’s Soft Architecture writings. In choosing Rivera-Garza, Nowak, and Robertson to illustrate the nations of nafta, I have stressed the geopolitical over gender, not to absorb the latter in the former as so often happens in discussions of globalization, but to suggest changes in the role of identity politics when the national is no longer the optic through which gender is seen. Clearly nafta has caused violent disruptions among women—the documented rise in depression among female maquiladora workers, cancers among children affected by industrial wastes, families displaced by the loss of jobs—but its disruptions cut across more lines than gender. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha makes the gender of diasporic citizenship a key issue of her protocosmopolitan poem, Dictee, Nowak exposes the close links between unemployment and beset masculinity and, in Rivera-Garza, gender is being renegotiated among new populations. “Let’s go to the Terzo,” her cosmo-citizens cry, yet the world encountered there is “not yet of men, not yet of women,” where “those with winged sexes cut their hair military style and forgot the homes they came from” (26). Finally, Robertson, on one of her walks, sees “girls with

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briefcases enter the architecture, the ones we had seen juggling fire in the alleys at night. Morning is always strategic” (228). Clearly, Stendhal’s promise of happiness requires ever-revised performances of identity. The relationship between flexible production and flexible identity has its corollary in the border between the outskirts of capitalist production and the margins of literary form. Outskirts may define a space within the metropole, but the mixed nature of these poems may define literary genre as well, one that links three distinct sites of what Ed Dorn, in another context, calls the “North Atlantic turbine.” 14 If, as I have said, globalization is impossible to represent as a totality, it may be experienced affectively. In this, I am adapting Raymond Williams’s concept of a “structure of feeling” to describe emergent social realms that have yet to assume recognizable form.15 Williams is speaking of a British national context, but I would like to adapt his usage to my examples in the way that their multigeneric, open-ended, and collaborative character annex the fluid and deterritorialized qualities of global postmodernity. Rivera-Garza’s deictic interplay among pronouns and her baroque fabulism, Nowak’s deployment of documentary and photographic materials, Robertson’s emphasis on projects and open-ended assignments imagine the present as a kind of displacement or temporary respite on the way to somewhere else. They imagine a different form of hemispheric unity than that imagined by the World Bank and the imf. As such, the free-market dreams of nafta become the waking nightmares of those living in its shadow. Perhaps poetry, in its proximity to affective states, is the dreamwork of globalization.

b 2

The Dream of a Public Language Modernity, Textuality, and the Citizen Subject But the city that we create in our bartalk or in our fuss and fury about each other is in an utterly mixed and mirrored way an image of the city. A return from exile. —Jack Spicer, Heads of the Town Up to the Aether

The Subject in the “Linguistic Turn”

T

he role of authorship in the wake of the so-called “linguistic turn” could be seen as a subset of a larger concern within modernity involving the Subject as a function of discourse. Whether framed in terms of psychoanalysis, analytic philosophy, post-Structuralism, or postcolonial theory, the linguistic turn is usually treated as a question of whether the Subject speaks or is spoken. Is the Subject the author of its own speech or a ventriloquist of institutional speech acts and ideological state apparatuses? The latter formulation, which has dominated theoretical discussion over the past ten years, leads to a conundrum: if the Subject is constituted by and within language, how can there be a historical turn towards the latter that is not underwritten by the former? Doesn’t the proposition that there is a Subject to be constituted discursively already presuppose such an agent? This question has particular relevance for poetry in an age of globalization when the citizen subject (if not history itself ) is increasingly being defined within a cosmopolitan public sphere of multinational corporations, labor outsourcing, free trade agreements, and digital communications. Now the question is not “does the subject exist outside of discourse” but “does discourse exist outside of global systems that produce citizen subjects?” What forms of public language exist that are neither owned by a residual humanism nor the global mediascape? What would a cosmopolitan poetics look like?

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Someone might dismiss such questions by observing that the problem I am addressing is that of authorship, not the Subject. The latter has been a perennial problem in philosophy, at least since the Enlightenment, but the problem of Authorship—its invention as well as its death—seems to have a date. Â�Michel Foucault, to take the obvious example, considers the invention of the “author function” as coinciding with the work, regarded as a commodity placed into a circuit of exchange and interpretation. The author is less a person than a function of institutions that determine the scope and meaning of what can be articulated. Certain authors—Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, are “transdiscursive” in that they generate an entire circuit of discourses beyond their actual works. The death of the author occurs when the integrity of those discourses breaks down, when the “work” gives way to an intransitive writing whose reference to a historical person (via deixis, narrative, persona, verb tense) can no longer be discerned. While I would acknowledge the significant difference between authorial and humanist Subject, I see both coinciding in the rise of modern citizenship at a moment when individuals authorize themselves through property and communication rather than through the state. The Lockean definition of the individual as that which “has a Property in his own Person” can be extended to Habermas’s idea that participation in a public sphere is guaranteed to property-owning males. The relationship between an individual’s ability to authorize himself in language and his ownership of the fruits of his labor—including his writings—is a cornerstone of both democratic polity and copyright law. Hence instead of assuming that the Subject/Author is constituted in the structure of language—the ghost in the machine—we might think of the linguistic turn as a series of stages in the production of a citizen Subject who authors identity through writing and who publishes his opinions in public forums. This might allow us to shift the focus from a subjectivist and psychoanalytical model of the Subject, capital S, to situated subjects in discursive contexts that change focus at different stages of modernity. In this model, language would be seen not as a system of neutral signifiers but a component of social intercourse. By invoking Habermas’s theory of rational critical debate (or what he later termed “communicative action”) I am imagining another “turn towards language” with implications for the creation of historical subjects who are also authors. Habermas defines the public sphere as a realm of private individuals who

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The Dream of a Public Language

53

come together . . . [and claim] the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of com-

�

€

modity exchange and social labor. (27)

In Habermas’s view, access to this sphere was (and for him it is definitely a phenomenon that has passed) theoretically open to all citizens whose ability to participate in debate is based not on status but on the ability to reason. The primary function of a public sphere outside of the state was to enable merchants and small-business owners to discuss matters of trade, but it also facilitated the exchange of cultural capital, through debates about theater, novels, politics, and art. Thus a linkage was formed between the expansion of capitalism and the formation of aesthetics that became the basis of Marx’s and Hegel’s critique of bourgeois ideology. As many critics have pointed out, Habermas’s formulation of the public sphere is far too narrow to accommodate constituencies who have historically been denied access to those venues where rational debate is authorized. Nancy Fraser, Michael Warner, Mary Ryan, Geoff Eley and others propose competing or “counter publics” whose claims to participation are no less important and which complicate a too-easy separation of spheres. While recognizing the limits of Habermas’s formulation, these critics acknowledge his important vision of social forms based on talk and publication that could, in Nancy Fraser’s terms, be “a site for the production and circulation of discourses that can in principle be critical of the state” (2). What remains salient for our concern with authorship is Habermas’s belief that publics are formed in talk, debate, and conversation in specific sites (bars, coffee houses, art spaces, journals, community centers) and that the public sphere publishes its opinions, thereby extending the marketplace of ideas to larger constituencies. We could identify several moments in which new forms of social agency mark a “turn toward language”—not language as such but as used by constituencies. I will look at three such turns that have produced new citizen subjects at different stages of modernity. My first example is drawn from the period that Habermas sees as the high point of the bourgeois public, the mid eighteenth century, and from a poem included in The Annual Register for the year 1776. The Annual Register epitomizes Habermas’s view of a public sphere produced through the medium of print, a form of print culture where political and literary debate are conjoined. The 1776 edition of the journal is particularly

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Â� important since it contains, among other things, the first British publication of the U.S. Declaration of Independence and thus offers a moment when a new republican citizen subject was declaring itself in print. I then turn to a figure who was not included in the Declaration’s purview, the African, Olaudah Equiano, who was experiencing the grim limits of this new republicanism even as he used the medium of his slave narrative to negotiate his participation in the public sphere of the eighteenth century. My second example concerns the emergence of a new feminist subject at the beginning of the twentieth century within the historical context of the “new woman.” Mina Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” of 1914 is a riposte to the masculinist postures of the Futurists and Dadaists, and utilizes the same performative rhetoric that we identify with her colleague and lover, F.€T. Marinetti. Loy’s manifesto implicitly challenges Marinetti’s appeal to a post-human, mechanized subject by focusing on the female body and its function in commodity society, a theme that she develops in many of her poems. Hence her “turn toward language” occurs within the avant garde’s rejection of realist aesthetics but also within universalist claims for gendered subjects. My third example is that of the Mexican poet and novelist, Heriberto Yépez, whose 1998 Festival de la Frontera installation defines the possibilities and limits of citizenship in globalization. His installation of a series of signs at the U.S./Mexico border directs attention to the production of citizenship in the post-nafta era by asking viewers to define themselves in relationship to the border by appropriating the sign in an act of vernacular criticism. If the public sphere of the eighteenth century was produced in the atmosphere of republican citizenship, the counter-public sphere of women in the early twentieth century was formed in the atmosphere of gender difference and medical science. And although the outlines of a new globalized citizen subject are still being formed, the work of border artists in the shadow of nafta questions whether language can imagine a truly cosmopolitan existence. All three of my examples begin with a consideration of the manifesto as a genre specifically identified with modernism and with the possibilities of republican citizenship. The manifesto claims a kind of collective subject whose juridical and political identity does not yet exist but which must be imagined into reality. The rhetoric of the manifesto operates performatively to challenge the recalcitrant reader into action and provoke the hegemonic holder of power into re-action. It is not designed for rational discourse but claims authority by sheer invective and presumption. Its material form—varying typefaces and

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The Dream of a Public Language

55

fonts, exclamation marks and spacing, hectoring address—extends the typographic revolution begun by Mallarmé’s “Un coup de des” into performance art. The Declaration of Independence, Mina Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto,” and Heriberto Yépez’s border arts project offer three radically different types of manifestos that are themselves surrounded by other textual materials—poems, signs, performances, chronicles—that blur the boundary between the manifesto and the imagined community it hopes to create. Thus, far from being a discrete object to be studied along with other modernist genres, the manifesto comes close to that contentious “bartalk” that Jack Spicer (in the epigraph to this chapter) imagines as creating a new city. Written By Himself In 1758 Edmund Burke began publishing The Annual Register, a yearly compilation of historical events, public documents, antiquarian surveys, book reviews, and poetry. Unlike The Tatler and The Spectator, which caricatured manners and social morés, The Annual Register provided a digest of cultural information for the new middle-class reading public. In his preface to the first volume Burke notes that the book will “relieve the minds of men of business” and “preserve the strenuous idleness of many from a worse employment.” 1 To aid in this endeavor, each volume included political polemics, antiquarian lore, book reviews, and historical documents. Each issue featured a chronicle of events for the year that embodied those areas of common concern that Habermas envisioned as constituting the public sphere. For the chronicle for January 10th and 11th of 1776, for example, the journal describes a woman in Paris who started a fire that consumed her and burned a portion of her neighborhood around the Palais and courts of justice; a review of troops, about to leave for battle in the new colonies, by the King on Clapham Common; inclement weather on the Thames; the birth of a child to the Duchess of Gloucester; an Italian bookseller who was banished from London for omitting the title of “Royal” in his dedication of dramatic pieces to the Duke of Saxe-Gotha; the sentencing to death of five prisoners at the Old Bailey; an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Naples; a handbill delivered to both houses of Parliament appealing to every member to put a “speedy stop to the further effusion of the blood of our American brethren” (116–17). This conflagration of local, official, national, and international subjects in print gives a vivid sense of what public discourse resembled on the eve of America’s decision to separate from Britain.

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That decision is announced fully in a section devoted to “State Papers”— legal documents, proclamations, and decrees. “A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress assembled” is the concluding item in this section, and it marks the first appearance of the document in England as well as its first appearance outside of the thirteen colonies. The Declaration’s stirring language, its call to “dissolve the political bands” which connected the colonies with Britain, its claim that “all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” became the terms of republican citizenship, imitated in subsequent documents and proclamations throughout the long nineteenth century. As a manifesto, the Declaration must name a constituency, a “We,” who has suffered long enough, against a “He,” King George III, whose “repeated injuries and usurpation all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states” (262). The fact that such an anti-royalist document could appear in a journal for public consumption is, of course, testimony to the success of the public sphere in separating itself from juridical and state apparatus. Janet Lyon points out that manifestos like the Declaration of Independence occupy an unusual space between “iconoclasm and iconography.” In order to found a new republic the document must imagine a constituency as a harmed minority [iconoclasm] that “probably already occupies the hegemonic position the text proposes to secure” and thus furthers the iconography of independence (27). The question arises whether the document’s performativity “states or produces independence,” whether the Declaration, like all manifestoes, “[aims] to invoke even as [it addresses] charged audiences” (28). It does so, I would add, within a matrix of other documents, seemingly unrelated to national policy, that confirm and complicate the nature of citizenship. Manifestoes, although they often inaugurate programs and movements, do not exist on their own, but are supported by subsequent texts—newspapers, essays, poems, images—through which ideas of national citizenship are formed. In the section devoted to “Poetry,” to take one example, the editors publish a poem entitled “The Death of Alico,” by Bryant Edwards, a merchant and member of the colonial assembly who wrote the first history of the British colonies in the Caribbean.2 Edwards’s poem is a sentimentalized monologue spoken by an African slave who has been condemned for leading a rebellion in Jamaica in 1762. He addresses his beloved wife from his place of execution, telling her to calm her fears, that “Firm and unmov’d am I:—/ In Freedom’s cause I bar’d my breast—/ In Freedom’s cause I die” (209). He imagines that soon he shall rise

The Dream of a Public Languageâ•… 57

to heaven “Where joy shall lead the circling hours€/ Unless too long thy stay.” The rhetoric of heavenly escape is modulated through that of slavery: On those blest shores—a Slave no more!

In peaceful ease I’ll stray;

Or rouse to chase the mountain boar,

As unconfin’d as day!

No Christian Tyrant there is known

to mark his steps with blood,

Nor fable Mis’ry’s piercing moan

Resounds thro’ ev’ry wood!

(210)

Although Alico is being punished for leading a slave rebellion, the “Tyrant” he addresses is clearly marked as the Christian colonist whose religious fervor and defense of freedom were being articulated that year by the American colonists. The romantic convention of the imprisoned lover is translated into the condemned slave: O Death, how welcome to th’opprest!

Thy kind embrace I crave;

Thou bring’st to Mis’ry’s bosom Reft,

And Freedom to the Slave!

The author, Bryant Edwards, Esq., was a defender of Creole planters against abolitionists; he published a polemical tract on the “Conduct of the Government and Colonial Assembly of Jamaica in regard to Fugitive Slaves” in 1796. Despite his alliance with the planter class, he was nevertheless able to utilize a rhetoric of pathos for the subaltern’s voice. He was joined throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century by many other poets, including Blake, Wordsworth, Burns, Eliza Cook, and Mary Robinson, who invented romantic subjectivity by appropriating the voices of an emerging counter-public. Around the same time that Edwards’s sentimentalized version of the heroic slave was being penned, an actual American slave, Olaudah Equiano, was traversing the black Atlantic in a series of ships that brought Africans like Alico to Jamaica. Recently, there has been controversy over the integrity of Equiano’s narrative of these travels and the veracity of his description of his early life in Africa. Vincent Carretta has produced documentary evidence suggesting that

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Equiano drew upon travelogues, novels, and accounts of slavery in fashioning his autobiography. Carretta claims that Equiano may not have been forced into slavery in Africa as he says, but born in South Carolina. The fact that Equiano may have fabricated elements of his narrative, far from discounting its integrity, reinforces my argument about the role of self-fashioning in producing a new citizen Subject. Given that one of the texts that appears to have been influential in his thinking was Robinson Crusoe, it is worth thinking of how the slave narrative might have been fashioned both out of the titular hero’s Protestant economy and Friday’s subaltern resistance. Despite the question of its authenticity, Equiano’s 1789 document became the prototype for subsequent slave narratives that negotiated what Henry Louis Gates has identified as a rhetorical double-voicing. In Gates’s formulation, the naive wonder of the unlettered African in slave narratives is measured against the mature author who has mastered the ability to write (131–33). The demonstration of literacy becomes a major feature of Equiano’s narrative, announced as such in the subtitle to his book: “Written by Himself.” His need to authenticate his narrative is based presumably on the fact that, as a piece of property, denied the power of reason and literacy, he must validate his role as author. Perhaps the most sophisticated rhetorical device of all, however, one found in almost every other slave narrative, is the reproduction of the author’s paper of manumission, signaling that this slave has been freed by legal decree: “As the form of my manumission has something peculiar in it, and expresses the absolute power and dominion one man claims over his fellow, I shall beg leave to present it before my readers at full length” (101). By including this legal document into his narrative, Equiano establishes his status as both property and freeman. He is produced as a citizen subject (but without franchise) within an institution of exploitation for profit, but his ability to use the paper that frees him in creating his own story signifies his knowledge of the text’s power. Equiano’s ability to present himself as both subject and object, freeman and commodity, author of narrative and narrative of contract, is a vivid example of that double consciousness that W.E.B. Du Bois saw as the special province of African Americans. To the extent that Equiano is self-reflexive about the role of language and literacy in this act can be seen in a passage where he narrates his initial response to reading: I had often seen my master and Dick employed in reading; and I had a great curiosity to talk to the books, as I thought they did; and so to learn how all things had

â•…

The Dream of a Public Language

59

a beginning. For that purpose I have often taken up a book, and talked to it, and then put my ears to it, when alone, in hopes it would answer me; and I have been

€

very much concerned when I found it remaining silent. (43)

Gates observes that, through the image of a “talking book,” Equiano represents “the difference in subjectivity that separates his, now lost, African world from the New World” into which he has been thrust (155). By signifying on reading and talking, Equiano demonstrates his ability to participate in a public sphere that his master and Dick take for granted and claims a role as subject that his abject position as property denies him. He talks back to the talking book by reading subversively, turning not toward language, per se, but toward its function in accumulating power and controlling the bodies and minds of others. By linking Equiano’s narrative with the 1776 edition of The Annual Register, I want to show two examples of new public identities forged through republican imaginations of authorship. In the case of the Declaration of Independence, a collective authorship interpellates a national citizenry that is already involved in insurrectionary activities; in the case of “The Death of Alico,” a white colonial author gains his public voice by writing through the voice of a black slave. By romanticizing the “human” affective qualities of a black Jacobin, the poet humanizes the slave and provides a vantage by which to understand slave rebellions such as that of Nat Turner or Denmarck Vesey. The linguistic turn implied in both documents must be located in the publication of The Annual Register itself and its recording of emergent as well as residual forms of cultural meaning. A Mongrel Poetics Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” of 1909 is staged as a modernist birth allegory. After a night of furious writing and drinking, the poet and his young colleagues, lured by the sound of trams outside, roar off into the night in cars. Attempting to avoid two bicyclists, Marinetti’s car tips over, and he is thrown into a ditch. There, in the industrial waste, he is reborn as a Futurist: Oh! Maternal ditch, almost full of muddy water! Fair factory drain! I gulped down your nourishing sludge; and I remembered the blessed black breast of my

60â•… a p ub l i c l an gu a g e Â�Sudanese nurse. .€.€. When I came up—torn, filthy, and stinking—from under the capsized car, I felt the white-hot iron of joy deliciously pass through my heart!€(186)

Marinetti’s industrial birth and baptism, facilitated by memories of his black Sudanese nurse, embodies an odd merging of modern industry and colonial ethnocentrism. To become a Futurist, he must rise from the maternal ditch of “old,” Catholic Italy, right his car, and drive off into a metalized future: We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women. (186)

The name of this hygienic future was “The Great War,” and the misogyny it inspired can be read in any number of poems during the period (Ezra Pound in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly” sees World War I as being fought “For an old bitch gone in the teeth” [191]). Marinetti’s famous lines about “scorn for women” angered a number of feminists who had linked their project to Futurist Â�ideals and who eventually criticized the movement’s leader, causing him to omit the lines in subsequent printings. Valentine de St. Point, for example, wrote two works, “Manifesto of the Futurist Woman” (1912) and “Manifesto of Lust” (1913) which take issue with Marinetti’s linkage of woman with the past, tradition, and domesticity. St. Point seeks a new “virility” in both men and women, invoking as exemplars the Furies, Amazons, Joan of Arc, Charlotte Corday and other heroines of republican femininity (Caws 214). St. Point substitutes for the domestic feminine a masculine female who replicates Marinetti’s macho€ideal. Mina Loy also responded to Marinetti’s Futurism through a series of manifestos, plays, poems, and paintings, and like the father of Futurism she imagined a new world through a kind of parturition. As Roger Conover says, in his introduction to The Lost Lunar Baedeker, her response “constitutes the most substantial literary response to Futurism ever made by a woman under the direct influence of the movement” (xxxiv). She quickly became disillusioned with the movement’s misogyny and nationalist ethos and, like St. Point, subjected the tenets of Futurism to a withering critique. Her “Feminist Manifesto” (1914) avoids St. Point’s female version of the Futurist hero and instead projects what we would today call a politics of difference. She dismisses the reform feminism of her day (“The feminist movement as at present instituted is Inadequate”) and

â•…

The Dream of a Public Language

61

€

its call for equality of gender (“that pathetic clap-trap war cry Woman is the equal of man—/ for / She is NOT!” [155]). Instead she attacks a paternalism that by presuming protectorship of women emasculates itself: “The man who lives a life in which his activities conform to a social code which is a protectorate of the feminine element—is no longer masculine” (155). The current alternatives for women—“Parasitism, & Prostitution—or Negation”—are inadequate because they are based on dependency; “Men & women are enemies, with the enmity of the exploited for the parasite, the parasite for the exploited” (156). Loy’s use of bold font, variable typefaces, and underlining creates a buoyant counter rhythm to the prose, forcing it off the page and demanding the reader’s affective response. The physical qualities of the page also register a degree of anger and impatience that cannot be contained in discursive prose. The most radical—and disturbing—dimension to Loy’s manifesto is her recognition of the economic basis of the female body. Loy urges the “unconditional surgical destruction of virginity” at puberty, thereby eliminating the “principal instrument of her subjection” as commodity (156). Her call for sexual liberation echoes those being expressed by Margaret Sanger, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, and other “new women” of the Progressive Era who, although calling for sexual liberation, nevertheless defended child-bearing as a woman’s right, within or without marriage. But Loy’s version of this right contains a troubling eugenicist subtext: “Every woman of superior intelligence should realize her race-responsibility, in producing children in adequate proportion to the unfit or degenerate members of her sex” (157). Later she says that “for the harmony of the race, each individual should be the expression of an easy & ample interpenetration of the male & female temperments—free of stress” (157). The theme being advanced here—that superior woman must “realize her race-responsibility” by producing children to offset those of the “degenerate members of her sex”—suggests an affinity with other modernists—including Perkins Gilman, D. H. Lawrence, Stein, as well as Sanger and Marinetti, who drew upon the writings of Francis Galton or Otto Weininger and shared a common interest in eugenicist ideas of race superiority.3 Elizabeth Frost feels that Loy was being somewhat ironic in her use of eugenics rhetoric in her later work: As seen in “Anglo-Mongrels” and other of Loy’s satires, Loy’s strategy is not revolution or violent confrontation, but a parody of cultural symbols and a satiric voice that exploits the very traditions she critiques. The result is a poetry of effect rather

62╅ a p ub l i c l an gu a g e than affect, a double consciousness that inhabits and maintains an ironic distance from poetic language and the heritage it represents.€(150)

In Frost’s view, Loy adopts a poetics that rearticulates eugenicist mongrelization (racial miscegenation) into a critical or queer version of her own mixedrace heritage as well as her poetics. I would agree that Loy does satirize eugenicist rhetoric in her later work, but in her early poetry her materialist feminism often seems fatally implicated in hereditarian ideas of racial perfection and species improvement.4 While such racialist ideas were common during Loy’s day, her use of them illustrates the difficulty of mounting a campaign for a new feminist ideal without positing a utopian body. Whatever anti-semitism and misogyny Otto Weininger may have expressed in his Sex and Character (1903) was somewhat ameliorated for Gertrude Stein by his belief that if one had to be a woman, on a scale that placed feminine women at the low end of the bell curve, it was best to be a masculine one. The mannish lesbian at the turn of the century could gain some modicum of satisfaction from such a doctrine. Marinetti had imagined his own form of post-human ideal through a mechanized incarnation in the industrial society of northern Italy, and Loy’s riposte seems to have taken her lead from this. But for Loy, who distrusted both the maternal ideal of domesticity as well as the republican attitudes of modern feminism, the challenge was to recreate the new woman through her material status as property. Like Charlotte Perkins Gilman in Women and Economics, Loy saw that institutions of marriage and compulsory reproduction had become agents of commodification masquerading as natural gender roles. Instead of gaining identity through childbirth, woman becomes absorbed into her biology. As she says in “Parturition,” I am the false quantity in the harmony of physiological potentiality To which Gaining self-control I should be consonant In time (4)

Instead of being “consonant€/ In time” through her ability to reproduce and thus extend life, she becomes identical to her “physiological potentiality.” Her

The Dream of a Public Languageâ•… 63

temporal horizons and possible subject positions are dominated by maternity, a fact that she embodies in ambiguous deixis and address: Mother I am Identical With infinite Maternity

Indivisible



Acutely



I am absorbed



Into

The was—is—ever—shall—be Of cosmic reproductivity (7)

Marinetti’s ability to fashion his birth into modernity through parthenogenesis is countered in Loy’s work by acknowledging her negative status (“the false quantity”) as biological other to masculine agency. At the same time, her remarks about the economic meaning of female sexuality in her manifesto anticipate remarks made in a number of subsequent poems, including her 1915 poem, “Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots”: Houses hold virgins The door’s on the chain ‘Plumb ╯ streets with hearts’ ‘Bore ╯ curtains with eyes’ Virgins

without dots

Stare

beyond probability

See the men pass Their hats are not ours We

take a walk

They are going somewhere And they

may look everywhere

Men’s eyes look in-to things Our eyes (21)

look out

64â•… a p ub l i c l an gu a g e

Loy, who was living in Florence at the time, imagines young Italian women gazing into the street at men who move unencumbered in the city. The girls protect their purity for marriage because, as poor women, they lack dowries (dots in French) and thus must rely on the power of their virginity as capital. They are held in their houses, sequestered behind chained doors and curtains while the men “are going somewhere.” The eyes of the virgins “look out” while those of the men look “in-to things.” In a world where true subjectivity is restricted to those who have the ability to look “in,” those who may only look out are doomed to become the material world they see. Love becomes a contractual matter for which doors, curtains, and locks protect valuable merchandise: We have been taught Love is a god White

with soft wings



Nobody shouts



Virgins for sale

Yet where are our coins For buying a purchaser Love is a god

Marriage expensive

A secret well kept Makes the noise of the world (22)

The young women have been sold an image of romantic love—a god with “White .€.€. soft wings,” and although “Nobody shouts€/ Virgins for sale” there is a fiscal implication attached to purity. This image of virgins as commodities can be found in other poems of this period in which women are compared to mannequins or dolls.5 As a sometime designer of women’s hats and fashion illustrator, Loy well knew the close relationship between the pristine female body and its commercialized form.6 The emergence of a feminist public sphere in the early twentieth century is embodied in a manifesto that, in asserting the sexual freedom of the new woman, attacks her commodification within marriage and marketplace. Loy’s manifesto rejects reasoned, logical argument in favor of broad generalizations and utopian projects. It responds to a mercantile age where gender roles are framed through capitalist relations as well as eugenicist ideas of racial and

The Dream of a Public Languageâ•… 65

bodily improvement. If her manifesto skates perilously close to racialist ideas of better breeding, its performative rhetoric rejects half measures and gradualist solutions by positing a new woman outside of legal contract and sexual economy. As a public document, the manifesto challenges the feminist movement to look beyond a rights rhetoric predicated on the heterosexual male as default. Although Loy often figures women as inert dolls, mannequins, and virgins in her poetry, in the manifesto she provides a public voice, forged in the smithy of Futurist invective but versed in an era of progressive reform. Signs of a Global Public Sphere My third example of a new public language illustrates the production of a Subject within globalization where the nation-state is no longer able to contain and control the production of citizenship. This new subject position is defined within the terms of neoliberal trade policies, transnational capital flows, and digital information for which the Futurist machine ethos seems a quaint relic. Globalization’s fantasy of fast capital, cheap labor, and unrestricted markets is being resisted on a number of fronts—from indigenous peoples’ movements to anti-globalist struggles. Not surprisingly, this revived activism is being continued by a broad coalition of artists around the world for whom neoliberalism has become just another word for the Washington consensus. In a world where language seems inseparable from capital, how might a turn toward language be possible that does not further the cause of global consolidation? I have already developed the possibility of a post-nafta poetics in chapter€1. Here, I want to focus on the ways in which a kind of neoliberal legerdemain has created the border as theoretically more porous at the same time that it has become more rigid. Artists and writers who have made the border the site and subject of their work have often seen it as a metonym for the larger field of globalization and flexible citizenship. Among those emergent spaces, artists and poets have found a surprisingly rich field of exploration that both builds on the specificity of the border region and its formation of national identities. I have already discussed the representation of this mobile citizenship in Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu’s film, Babel, but here I want to focus on a section of the movie that takes place in northern Mexico when Amelia, the Mexican housekeeper (Adriana Barraza), crosses the border with her two Anglo charges on her way to her brother’s wedding outside of Tijuana. For a brief moment her car traverses the border fence, and in the background we can glimpse a

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group of crosses nailed to the fence at regular intervals. These crosses are part of a border arts project that appropriates the vernacular creches and roadside altars one sees along Southern and Baja California roadways, marking where a pedestrian has been killed.7 By nailing crosses to the border fence, the artist treats the border itself as a Calvary, each memorializing someone who has died while trying to enter the United States. Although this is a site-specific artwork, it does have implications for a global poetics. If metaphor means bearing a cross between tenor and vehicle, the geopolitical application of this metaphor transforms the incarnation, as the Word made flesh, into the flesh made sign. Now the passion of suffering humanity, as Iñárritu’s Amelia finds out in the film, is acted out in the southwest desert sun. If the very nature of globalization is its invisibility and dislocation, a poetics of the borderlands creates metaphors by which it can be known. The Mexican poet and novelist, Heriberto Yépez, has responded Â�similarly to the darker realities of global citizenship by creating an installation that engages the public in a critical hermeneutics. In his 1998 installation for the Festival de la Frontera (Border Arts Festival), he placed a series of signs constructed out of red-tinted acrylic on traffic medians, light poles, and stop signs. These signs feature short poems and epigrams in Spanish and EnÂ�glish that refer obliquely to the border-crossing experience and the questions it raises about national citizenship. Although I will focus on his 1998 installation I would call attention to more recent versions of this project in which the signs refer to the post-9/11 paranoia generated by the Patriot Act. In the 1998 version, the transparency of the signs seems to refer to the transparent borders promised by nafta, at the same time that the words printed on their surfaces complicate that access: “They told us we were crossing the border€/ to prevent us from really doing it.” 8 Here the “turn toward language” is literal. Pedestrians crossing the border decipher cryptic signs that refer, in some obscure way, to themselves as national subjects. A few days after the signs were installed, the author, posing as an innocent bystander, interviewed people on the street, asking what they thought the signs meant, and their responses became part of the project. Yépez reports that observers assumed that the signs indicated a new civic ordinance or some sort of political propaganda (figures 2.1 and 2.2). Others thought they were a new touristic device or advertising gimmick. At first Yépez was frustrated that pedestrians did not recognize the signs as poetry until he realized that like poetry, “publicity and propaganda also use word play, the power of sound, humor, sex, ideology, minimalism, typography, multi-leveled meanings so how could

Fig. 2.1╇ Heriberto Yépez, photo of installation from Festival de la Frontera (1998). Courtesy Heriberto Yépez

Fig. 2.2╇ Heriberto Yépez, photo of installation from Festival de la Frontera (1998). Courtesy Heriberto Yépez

The Dream of a Public Languageâ•… 69

ordinary people, often non-literate, distinguished one of my signs from the other forms of texts which use the same language techniques” (n.p.). In terms of issues already raised, we could see how Yépez’s installation problematizes authorship by engaging public acts of interpretation. As public objects, signs are subject to reinterpretation, decay, graffiti, and theft, thus moving from aesthetic objects to vernacular elements of the built environment. Moreover, as signs they merge with the vast signage at the border, a region plastered with advertisements, public service announcements, political messages and directions. The ambiguity of deixis in Yépez’s signs points to the uneven possibilities for movement across the border, depending on whether one is a Mexican or U.S. national:

they told us we were crossing the border



to prevent us from really doing it



streets are stalkers that follow passers by around



el movimiento urbano inventa gente



que imagina espacios que luego habita



(The urban movement invents the people who imagine the spaces they then



inhabit)

In this chapter I have been studying the rhetoric of the manifesto in producing new publics that are then re-imagined in poetry. With Yépez, the installation itself is a kind of manifesto, utilizing the same performative language one associates with the historic avant garde. Instead of appearing in a journal or newspaper, the text is placed on the city. Instead of the collective first person (“We the people”) of previous manifestos, Yépez insists on a fluid, unstable reference: “They told us we were crossing the border€/ to prevent us from really doing it.” Another reads, “La ciudad se sujeta de miradas que la inventan” (the city is subject to views that invent it). In the latter sign, placed on a bridge over the Tijuana River, the word “miradas” (views or sites) is crossed out, suggesting that the vantage in question is flexible, that the city is the product of multiple vantages for which the touristic postcard is inadequate. In a photograph reproduced in Tripwire magazine, one can discern two children standing behind the sign, their bodies partly revealed through the transparent plastic as if to suggest the ways that signs hide individuals who are both the viewed as well as viewers of the city (figure 2.3).

70â•… a p ub l i c l an gu a g e

Fig. 2.3╇ Heriberto Yépez, photo of installation from Festival de la Frontera (1998). Courtesy Heriberto Yépez

In his commentary on the installation, Yépez develops what he calls a “contextual poetics” that defines work written explicitly for its placement on the “street as page.” He regards his installation as continuing an ancient tradition of public inscription on monuments, gravestones, and sculpture, but he is also aware of its extension of a modernist urbanist impulse from Baudelaire to Eliot and Benjamin in which the city itself becomes an allegory of social forces beyond its glittering surfaces and shop windows. Yépez describes his work as not poetry “about” the city but poetry “on the city”; he creates poems that not only chronicle the breakdown of urban space but suffer its disregard. As he says, his work moves from “Make it New” to “Make it News.” Yépez’s Frontera project takes seriously the production of Subjects within the “archipelago of factories of society” that Hardt and Negri call Empire (196). For Yépez, this archipelago includes the literal maquiladora zone that defines the U.S./Mexico border in which commercial signage and immigration signage occupy the same space. By making the bystander a critic, the pedestrian a reader, the text dissolves into social space, the distance between poet and critic collapses into the street. As Yépez notes, the signs eventually became covered with graffiti or were stolen, and ignored, thus merging with the detri-

â•…

The Dream of a Public Language

71

╇

Fig. 2.4 Heriberto Yépez, photo of installation from Festival de la Frontera (1998). Courtesy Heriberto Yépez

tus and movement of border spaces. The author ceases to be the creator of discrete texts but the facilitator of a discourse about public spaces, and because the author is also a border crosser himself, he locates the question of authorship within the domain of citizenship. The implications of border arts projects for authorship are profound. If a poem resembles a traffic sign or commercial ad, does it cease to be a poem? Is there a significant difference between the poem as sign and the sign as poem? Is the manifesto the document written after the installation or the installation itself ? Where does the public nature of signage end and become the poetic? At the U.S./Mexico border, such questions have real implications for subjectivity, since individuals at the site cease to be private subjects and become objects of the immigration gaze. Conclusion: A Public Language My title invokes Adrienne Rich’s 1978 book, The Dream of a Common Language. The common language of which she dreams is that of a feminist community. As a document of cultural feminism, Rich’s book understands that a public

72â•… a p ub l i c l an gu a g e

language is owned and operated by patriarchy, yet the alternative to a maledominated voice can no longer be the personal and confessional domain to which women’s work has been consigned: If in this sleep I speak it’s with a voice no longer personal (I want to say with voices) (Fact 226)

At the same moment that Rich was imagining a speech “with voices” in solidarity, speech itself was undergoing that severe rupture with identity that we know as the “linguistic turn.” The culture wars over identity politics and varieties of post-Structural linguistic theory were occurring in the poetry community as a debate over whether language is expressive speech or social, signifying system. Current arguments over the politics of flarf, standup, conceptual, spoken word, and concrete poetries suggest that the debate is not over. To some extent Rich’s lines invoke Yeats’s belief that in dreams begin social responsibility (“If in this sleep I speak€/ it’s with a voice no longer personal”) as well as a politics of separatist community. What Rich thematized as a problem of identity and agency, the emergent language poetries saw in structural terms as a matter of state power and information manipulation. These discrepant propositions of the social can no longer be formulated as a question of a linguistic turn that locates identity either within a common language or within the matrix of relatively inert signifying systems. Signification, as Yépez’s installation illustrates, is itself a structure of power upon which authors since Equiano have signified. In Habermas’s formulation of the public sphere, none of my authors—Equiano, Loy, Yépez—has a voice, despite the fact that modernity is lined with the effects of their labor. The spaces of global amalgamation and production offer the possibility of a public language that speaks not only across borders but on the border, not through the Author but through authors produced in acts of reading and interpretation. Heriberto Â�Yépez’s installation offers a tentative intervention into the power grid by placing the simplest of icons at a traffic median, making individuals in the process of becoming citizens turn toward language and read their fate there.

II b

Objectivist Frames

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b 3

Life by Water Lorine Niedecker and Critical Regionalism

Critical Regionalism

I

n an oft-quoted letter to Cid Corman, Lorine Niedecker complained that pa pers of hers deposited at the University of Wisconsin had been filed among the “regional materials.” She asks “[what] region—London, Wisconsin, New York?” (“Between Your House” 208). Her impatience at being called a “regional poet” is understandable, given the term’s association with minor genres and (often gendered) provinciality. Niedecker counters the association by recognizing that she has been equally concerned with the metropole, her poetics framed as much by debates in London and New York as in Black Hawk Island. Like Thoreau’s pond, Niedecker’s Rock River landscape often provides an allegory of events in a more public world. Measuring the sound of canvasbacks, “their blast-off rise€/ from the water,” recording the speech of local townsfolk, or seeing the world through her electric pump give the poet a lens through which she can see the limits to modernity, its instrumental forms and agendas. Such localized perceptions—given further specificity by idiosyncratic lineation, enjambment, and syntactic disjunction—speak not of a lost agrarian past but of a vital, sensate world in which time itself can be rediscovered. Recent criticism has taken Niedecker’s cautions about region to heart, recognizing that she has been unfairly categorized as a local colorist whose short, naturalist poems are her major claim to fame. For her first readers, as Gil Sorrentino observes, Niedecker “was that astonishing creature, the true pastoral poet, naive amid the glades and rills and humming bees” (Penberthy 288). She was consigned to a sort of “pastoral limbo” from which she was unable to escape her role as “bumpkin-savant” (289). Peter Nicholls notes that “the beguiling image of the nature-lover recedes in favour of the rigorous stylist testing the limits of language” (Penberthy 194). And Richard Caddel feels that her treatment of nature “offer[s] few concessions to anthropocentrism” and

76â•… o b j e c t i v i st fr a m e s

that while other naturalist poets write from within a mystical or transcendental aesthetic, Niedecker is able to “root hers in ‘particulars’—an immediate, local reality, a fusion of past and personal” (Penberthy 281, 282). While these correctives to the picture of Niedecker as local-color poet are necessary, I worry that dismissing this aspect of her work might perform for her what it did for women writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—Sarah Orne Jewett, Sarah Wilkins Freeman, Willa Cather, Kate Chopin—in removing their critical relation to place. Like these earlier writers, Niedecker’s use of folk idioms, ballad forms, naturalist lore, nursery rhymes, haiku, and other “minor” genres represents a use of region and vernacular to comment on marginal subject positions in U.S. culture generally.1 Niedecker lived (as she admitted) on the periphery of the literary world and used that vantage to observe what others took to be the “center.” I would like to reinsert NieÂ�decker’s claim to localism but do so within a critical regionalist framework that links her with her more metropolitan objectivist colleagues. By treating Niedecker through place and locale, we may complicate the cosmopolitanism of objectivism in specific and modernism in general.2 By speaking of Niedecker’s “critical regionalism,” I am adapting a term from architecture that has been used to describe the role of local, vernacular traditions against more universalized (e.g., neoclassical, corporate modern) alternatives. Regionalism may reinforce populist, even xenophobic cultural agendas, but used as a critical vehicle it can, by its exploitation of the vernacular and local, create an alternative to what Kenneth Frampton calls “world culture”: In this regard the practice of Critical Regionalism is contingent upon a process of double mediation. In the first place, it has to “deconstruct” the overall spectrum of world culture which it inevitably inherits; in the second place, it has to achieve, through synthetic contradiction, a manifest critique of universal civilization. (21)

At a moment when regional problems (aids, environmental pollution, unemployment) are being addressed via global solutions, such deconstruction becomes increasingly difficult to imagine. Part of the problem is the entrenched nature of the term “regional” itself, defined as that which exists outside of production, peripheral to the urban economic core. In order to think outside of both a modernist and a globalist frame, it becomes necessary to imagine alternative forms of productivity (material and epistemological) from within the regional, not extrinsic to it. As Cheryl Herr points out, outsiderness must be

Life by Waterâ•… 77

construed, “not so much as ignorance or uncertainty but rather as a specific, productive social negativity” able to access “previously unseen or inaccessible platforms, of the conjunction of marginality and the accidental, of mutually constructed, chorally articulated interspaces” (2). We can see a critical perspective brought to bear on regionalism in Muriel Rukeyser’s poem, “The Book of the Dead,” first published in her 1938 book, U.S.€ 1. Its account of an outbreak of silicosis in Gauley Junction, West Virginia, and its effect on miners working for the Union Carbide Company led to a class-action suit and congressional investigation. Rukeyser went to Gauley Junction with photographer Nancy Naumberg to create a documentary on the industrial disaster.3 Although the documentary project was never completed, “The Book of the Dead” draws on documentary materials (stock quotations, congressional testimony, interviews with miners and social workers) to create a collage poem on the model of The Cantos or “The Waste Land.” Although it is usually read in terms of modernist epic or through the documentary culture of the Popular Front, “The Book of the Dead” should also be read as a regionalist work that unites a detailed account of rural miners and their families with a critique of capitalist exploitation. One of the poem’s major themes is the interÂ�connectedness of isolated spaces, where labor and raw materials are produced, and the centers of power (Wall Street, Madison Avenue, Washington, D.C.) sustained by that labor. Rukeyser focuses on the ways that the country roads she and Naumberg take to West Virginia begin in the city: These roads will take you into your own country. Select the mountains, follow rivers back, travel the passes. Touch West Virginia where the Midland Trail leaves the Virginia furnace, iron Clifton Forge, Covington iron, goes down into the wealthy valley, resorts, the chalk hotel. (656)

As Rukeyser is at pains to point out, the towns where the miners live and die from silicosis are not touristic destinations: The road flows over the bridge, Gamoca pointer at the underpass, opposite, Alloy, after a block of town.

78â•… o b j e c t i v i st fr a m e s What do you want—a cliff over a city? A foreland, sloped to sea and overgrown with roses? These people live here. (661)

Against the postcard view of rural beauty, with its “cliff over a city” and “foreland, sloped to the sea and overgrown with roses,” Rukeyser poses a place where people live. Although she occasionally allegorizes the landscape as a source of natural power against the man-made harnessing of energy through dams, tunnels, and roads, Rukeyser’s constant interruption of scenic details with congressional testimony and medical transcripts prevents the poem from becoming a metaphor. Gauley Junction is thus fatally tied to systems that profit from keeping regions “regional” and obscured from view. Rukeyser’s poem is more overtly critical, in the spirit of other Popular Front works of the era, but like Niedecker she builds on the “chorally articulated interÂ�spaces” that Herr sees as characterizing a critical regionalist project. By applying “critical regionalism” to Niedecker, I am not suggesting that her use of hardy plants or tenacious waterfowl represents enduring qualities of life in (or against) modernity—although she is capable of this as well—but rather that her clear-eyed focus on a specific locale permits her a class- and genderinflected survey of that region she called “North Central,” home to the Fordist assembly line and Joseph McCarthy.4 The poet’s repeated references to her working-class background, her father’s marginal life as a fisherman, her own work as a cleaning woman and library worker, her no-nonsense view of women’s condition (“Hatch, patch and scratch,€ / that’s all a woman’s for€/ but I didn’t sink, I sewed and saved€/ and now I’m on the second floor”) and marriage (“I married€// in the world’s black night€/ for warmth”) are all configured around the watery landscape of northern Wisconsin where she spent most of her life (167, 228). Her most common metaphor for the linkage of place and person is “floating,” a term that describes the unstable character of material conditions as well as of reflective positions taken toward those conditions: O my floating life Do not save love

for things



Throw things

to the flood

Life by Waterâ•… 79 ruined by the flood

Leave the new unbought—



all one in the end—

water (268)5

This “floating life” tests the limits of novelty in commodity society (“Leave the new unbought”) against the “flood” of nontemporal processes, embodied in nature. But the “flood” is never far removed from a life formed around it. In “Paean to Place,” she makes it clear that her ability to “throw things€/ to the flood” is a product of a specific social background whose class stratification takes on geological features: My life in the leaves and on water My mother and I born in swale and swamp and sworn to water My father .â•… .â•… .â•… . . . . seined for carp to be sold that their daughter might go high on land

to learn

(261)

One way to understand this fusion of class, gender, and region is to see it as marking Niedecker’s participation in the Popular Front of the 1930s. Michael Denning has recently called for an expanded concept of the Popular Front to include not only urban intellectuals and partisan novelists, but regional writers like John Steinbeck, Carey McWilliams, Tillie Olsen, and Carlos Bulosan whose emphasis on the rural proletariat, migrant populations, and agricultural labor extends 1930s social formations beyond the industrial Â�working

80â•… o b j e c t i v i st fr a m e s

class. What Denning calls “proletarian regionalism” opposed more reactionary versions (Southern Agrarianism and Nativist populism) and provided an alternative narrative to the cultural Left written by New York intellectuals. Within this narrative, as Sanora Babb notes, regionalism “was the stinging word used by certain influential New York groups to try to keep writers outside ny in their places” (qtd. in Denning 133). Denning also notes that in addition to proletarian regionalism, the Popular Front brought new genres and technologies to the fore, including mass cultural forms such as film, jazz, radio, and photography. Thanks to Jenny Penberthy’s new edition of Niedecker’s Collected Works we can better understand Niedecker’s place in such developments and assess her contribution to the cultural front. In addition to the short, objectivist lyrics by which she is best known, she wrote radio plays, surrealist narratives, folk ballads, longer serial poems, short stories, travel guides, and reviews, thus emerging as a far more eclectic writer than previously thought. Her letters to Cid Corman and Louis Zukofsky show a lifelong concern with Left politics and social movements, and although she never identified as a feminist, she wrote numerous poems about women’s condition. Moreover, she self-consciously used the upper Midwest region as a chronotope through which to understand national and global politics from the end of the Progressive era to the cold€war. “Right ╯ Down Among Em” Niedecker’s critical regionalist relationship to the Popular Front can best be seen in poems written between 1935 and 1944 which self-consciously deploy folk idioms and ballad meters.6 Many of these poems appeared in her first book, New Goose, whose title, with its playful invocation of Mother Goose, suggests its debts to childhood rhymes and stories. Louis Zukofsky included one of these poems, “There’s a better shine,” in his 1948, Test of Poetry, noting that folk poetry “does not arise and exist in a vacuum,” but “reflects economic and social status of peoples; their language habits arising out of everyday matter of fact” (99). The New Goose poems were written concurrently with work for the Federal Writer’s Project in its “American Guide Series” for which she wrote Wisconsin: A Guide to the Badger State. This project reinforced her interest in€ American history, particularly stories of Great Lakes exploration and white/Native contact and links her to better-known writers of the period— Ralph Â�Ellison, Nelson Algren, John Cheever, Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret

Life by Waterâ•… 81

Walker, and Kenneth Rexroth—all of whom contributed to the series which John Steinbeck called “the most comprehensive account of the United States ever got together” (Brinkley 18). As Niedecker’s colleague, Vivian Hone, remembers, work on the Wisconsin book concerned more than local history, and was conducted in an atmosphere of Left activism. Talk around the fwp offices often turned to radical politics. “Like many young Americans who saw their own nation foundering, thus looked to Russia as a savior, Lorine was caught up in the web” (Penberthy 103). While we know a good deal about the objectivists’ relationship to the “web” of Left politics of the 1930s—Oppen’s rent-relief work, Zukofsky’s translations of Marx in “Aâ•‚9” or Rakosi’s labor organizing—we know less about Niedecker’s relationship to such contexts. One way to investigate Niedecker’s participation in a Left critical project would be to study her condensation of region and class in her story, “Uncle,” published in New Directions 2 in 1937. The story’s free indirect narrative and its study of Progressive-era politics is reminiscent of John Dos Passos or Sinclair Lewis. “Uncle” is a thinly veiled study of her maternal grandparents, who ran a small resort on Black Hawk Island, and of her father who, in this story, becomes the main characters’ son, John. The owners, Great Uncle Gotlieb and Great Aunt Riecky Beefelbein establish their shabby genteel proprieties within a climate of Tammany Hall politics: Sometimes on spring election days, her money spent for taxes, she would serve Uncle Gotlieb with the blitz kuchen and soup and water-cress and handcheese he loved .€.€. and she would ride with him to town over the muddy road after the long winter—he had to attend to voting, didn’t he?—an important day for men and they were treated to cigars by those who were running. John [their son] had a poem in his schoolbook about voters by a man named Whittier—She would make it known to Gotlieb that she wanted him to buy her a blouse and a hat, thus making herself dear to him.€(309)

Niedecker’s witty pun on “dear” conflates the expense of blouse and hat with the affection their purchase signifies. But there is a darker side to the pun, as we shall see. Against this backdrop of taxes, German food, election-day cigars, and genteel poetry by Whittier, Niedecker frames a textured view of Midwest immigrant culture during a period of Populist racism and economic uncertainty. Much of the story revolves around John’s attempt to organize a farmer’s cooperative that would liberate the dairy industry from its fealty to the banks

82â•… o b j e c t i v i st fr a m e s

and high taxes. The cheese Uncle Gotlieb loves is also the commodity that provokes his son, John, to pursue a political career based on agricultural reform. Niedecker focuses these issues through a description of wealthy cheese makers who visit the Gotlieb resort in the summer and who implicate Uncle Gotlieb in an insidious social ritual of deference and dependency: And it wasn’t long before they had him making merry with them, blowing the foam off their beer mugs splotch on the walls. And they pressed cheese upon him. Perhaps they liked people to whom they could be in debt and surely they liked to have people in debt to them. They took enjoyment in those who owed them something. We love you to stay this way, poor, working for us, they said, we want to be your Patrons. Postponement of the pay might even extend over into next year but then a silk dress would accompany the big check and a silver dollar for Matty and John each. It was just their leisurely, aristocratic social-democracy, perhaps even a kind of aesthetic. They were cultured and didn’t have to think of money. And my Great Uncle was cultured too and couldn’t demand. Really everyone accepted it as policy. The cheese people still held the mortgage on Uncle’s place and although it put Gotlieb in embarrassment to have to be a little late with the interest, that’s the way it was in the country.€(310)

The “aristocratic social-democracy” of these (literally) big cheeses is finessed by an “aesthetic” that implicates Aunt and Uncle into a kind of social dependency that permits deferred payment of the bill. Compensation for a summer’s enjoyment is justified by a form of “culture,” but to recognize it as such would be vulgar. Gotlieb becomes dear to his patrons, but the cost is dear to his income. The use of free indirect style implicates the narrator’s own childhood perspective in this aesthetic, showing the moment when issues of “policy” and “culture” are normalized within the “adult” world of Aunt and Uncle. Unwilling to settle for such an aesthetic, John pursues his political bid based on a reform ticket and oratorical style reminiscent of Progressive Wisconsin senator, “Fighting Bob” La Follette. But the Depression puts an end to his finances—and his political aspirations. On the day that he loses the election, he goes to the river on his family’s property, heard bullfrogs—he’d had them imported a few years before, saw the yellowheads in the rushes, the little river and the lake, all in a land of slavery, blue heron stands, finish, form, if city folks could see, advanced into summer, took his new stand against the Bankers€.€.€. (329)

Life by Waterâ•… 83

In this passage we hear John’s internalized political rhetoric combined with Niedecker’s objectivist lyricism (“yellow-heads in the rushes, the little river and the lake”), suggesting the inextricable connection between political and natural landscape, between the idealism of Progressive rhetoric and minimalist lyricism of objectivism. By blending John’s political speeches with the female narrator’s reflections, we may see this story as an affectionate, if bitterÂ� sweet, portrait of Niedecker’s relationship to her own father and the extent to which her voice is formed through his. By framing a historic struggle of big-city entrepreneurs and local farmers in Wisconsin through a single family, Niedecker is able to provide an intimate look at Midwest progressivism, the epic of which is Dos Passos’s USA trilogy. When Niedecker came to reflect on the period in which this story was written, it was through a kind of cold-war optic that permitted some distance from her folk interests. We can see how she figured her relation to the proletariat in a poem in the “For Paul” sequence: In the great snowfall before the bomb colored yule tree lights windows, the only contemplation along this road I worked the print shop right down among em the folk from whom all poetry flows and dreadfully much else I was Blondie I carried my bundles of hog feeder price lists down by Larry the Lug, because I’d never had suction, pull, you know, favor, drag, well-oiled protection I heard their rehashed radio barbs— more barbarous among hirelings as higher-ups grow more corrupt. But what vitality! The women hold jobs— clean house, cook, raise children, bowl and go to church.

84â•… o b j e c t i v i st fr a m e s What would they say if they knew I sit for two months on six lines of poetry? (143)

This deceptively simple poem reflects on two forms of labor, manual and aesthetic, that exist in uneasy tension. The poet remembers her nine-to-five job in a print shop during the mid-1940s, “right down among em€/ the folk from whom all poetry flows,” but frames her memory through a history written by the bomb.7 Although Niedecker admires the “vitality” of her co-workers, she marks her distance from them, wondering how women who “hold jobs—/ clean house, cook, raise children” would feel about the fact that she sits “two months on six lines€/ of poetry.” This aesthetic distance from fellow workers is reinforced by her use of their vernacular—“Larry the Lug,” “higher-ups,” “suction,€/ pull, you know, favor, drag”—phrases that suggest a level of workplace competitiveness reinforced by crass mass-cultural interests.8 She is cynical about the printers’ “rehashed radio barbs” that seem more corrupt in the stratified environment of the workplace—where “higher-ups grow more corrupt.” Whatever romance of the “folk” Niedecker may have maintained during the 1930s has been qualified by seeing their limits in what sociologists of the 1950s called “mass society.” There are two historical frames for this poem: the pre- or inner-war era (“the great snowfall before the bomb”) and the period of postwar nuclear paranoia. Her retrospective position suggests that the more bucolic moment can no longer be experienced outside the context of global annihilation; there is no more “well-oiled protection” of one sphere from another. The opening lines show Niedecker working in the print shop, speaking the lingo; the last lines represent her labor as a poet whose work is ultimately printed by the same process. The poem moves between two modes of poetic production: the workaday world of the print shop and the aesthetic labor of creating the poem.9 (On the gendered implications of “In the great snowfall” see DuPlessis and Augustine in Penberthy.) The gap between these two embodies a form of aesthetic alienation that comes from trying to inhabit two forms of materiality, social and aesthetic. In this context, one is reminded of William Carlos Williams’s uncomfortable relationship to his “half-cracked” servant, Elsie, who as a “pure [product] of America” represents the loss of a “peasant tradition” to commercial desires. In representing class stratification in U.S. society, Niedecker and

Life by Waterâ•… 85

Williams must invoke an image of themselves as out-of-place, ventriloquizing the Other’s voice.10 This is a very different position from partisan writers of the thirties, who represented the heroic proletariat without necessarily implicating themselves, or from high modernists like Pound and Eliot for whom class differentiation is achieved by quoting from the classics.11 Niedecker’s poem acknowledges its implication in a printing process in which alienated labor speaks in several voices. “Where ╯ the Arrows . . . Lead Us” For Niedecker, as I have indicated, human and natural history form a continuum in which to comment on one is to invoke the other. In her notes preparatory to writing her long poem, “Lake Superior,” she observes that “the North is one massive, glorious corruption of rock and language. People of all nationalities and color have changed the language, like weather and pressure have changed the rocks” (Penberthy 313–14). In her early, surrealist poems, this “glorious corruption of rock and language” is manifest in what she called “synamism,” the formation of new words out of morphemic elements drawn from several sources: “Unrefractory petalbent€/ prognosticate€/ halfvent purloined€/ adark€/ vicissitudes of one-tenth€/ steel-tin€/ bluent” (33).12 Although this was not an idiom that she pursued, synamism embodies Niedecker’s interest in finding a kind of vulcanized language, resistant to unitary semantics yet embodying the almost tectonic pressures of its formation. As with the work of some aspects of later language writing, morphemic and syntactic elements are decontextualized, forming new compounds (“petalbent,” “halfvent”) or parts of words (“adark,” “bluent”). In later, longer works like “Lake Superior” or “Wintergreen Ridge,” this fusion of language and landscape manifests itself in the adoption of a triadic stepped line and increasingly broken syntax and heavy enjambment, as though lineation itself could embody something of the geology of the region. In these tendencies, the materialization of language represents an attempt to bring the poem as close to landscape as possible, part of the place itself and not about it. We can see this fusion of language and landscape in the way that Niedecker often evacuates syntax of elements, a tendency she shares with Emily Dickinson: In every part of every living thing is stuff that once was rock

86â•… o b j e c t i v i st fr a m e s In blood the minerals of the rock (232)

The opening couplet forms a complete sentence, balanced on the copula of the second line. The second couplet parallels the syntax of stanza 1 but eliminates the verb phrase: “In blood [can be found] the minerals [formed from the same stuff ] of the rock.” To some extent, the removal of syntactic elements replicates the chemical reduction that the poem describes; just as living things are composed of chemicals found in that most inert element—rock—so those same elements are hidden—like absent verbs—in blood. The Darwinism implied in the opening couplet (from rock to living things) is reversed in the second (from living things back to rock), a pattern reinforced by the shift from complete clause to sentence fragment.13 Language is not only “about” stone; it imitates the same forms of organic exchange as elements of nature. This formulation—language as stone—may participate too much in an idealization of language as such. Niedecker recognized that the upper Midwest region is a place of great natural beauty that is, nevertheless, marked by human interests and intentions—including her own.14 If she “incorporated” the landscape, she also understood the dangers of too much identification with it. The subject of one of her most important late poems is a geographical region, Wintergreen Ridge, that exists “Where the arrows€/ of the road signs€/ lead us.” Those arrows—literal signs marking a trail—suggest the human imprint on the natural landscape, a postlapsarian consciousness of vulnerability in a rapidly industrializing landscape. It turns out that those arrows also point to a historical site of social protest where women “of good wild stock€// stood stolid€/ before machines€/ They stopped bulldozers€/ cold” (249–50).15 The historical women who, in 1936, stopped the development of Wintergreen Ridge into a park and campground are like the plants that grow there, “of good wild stock” and as such are among “Evolution’s wild ones.” The “pretty thing” the women save includes the “insect-eating€/ pitcher plant” that traps flies and the lady slipper whose “electric threads” force the bee to “go out at the rear€/ the load on him€/ for the next€/ flower” (251–52). Such lines deflect traditional associations of femininity with nature and show a more aggressive force that, as Jeffrey Peterson says, “exploits the ambiguous boundary .€.€. between natural and technological (re)production” (253). Peterson makes the point that, rather than oppose the “technological with the women who

Life by Waterâ•… 87

‘stood stolid,’ Niedecker is claiming its insinuation within our imagination of the natural” (254). To enter nature is not to leave the technological but, rather, to find the machine already in the garden. If poems like “Wintergreen Ridge” celebrate a specific region, they do so by linking two forms of resilience, social and natural, embodied in the poet’s economical language and lineation. Earlier, I described critical regionalism as a use of locale to comment on global forces, placing indigenous peoples, local economies, and non-metropolitan spaces within the orbit of capitalist production worldwide. Cultural geographers have used critical regionalism to describe the self-conscious use of vernacular features to critique modernist universalism and as such have focused on urban spaces and commodity culture. A good deal of this enterprise has studied marginal urban spaces—what Michel Foucault calls “heterotopias”—as offering resistant sites to capitalist production. A poem like “Wintergreen Ridge” offers an alternative view of universalism by focusing on “The Natural” as a category produced within cultural meanings and human projects yet whose complexity and integrity provide a model of noninstrumental growth. The violence of evolution, embodied in the lady slipper or pitcher plant, is extended to nuclear annihilation; the “wildness” of landscape is extended to “wild women” who protest development or to protesting hippies during the anti-war era. Although “Wintergreen Ridge” celebrates a natural space, Niedecker refuses the usual consolations offered by nature. In natural life there is “Nothing supra-rock€/ about it€/ simply€/ butterflies€/ are quicker€/ than rock (247). So much for the “spirit of place.” Part of the poem’s resistence can be found in its form. Unlike most of her previous poetry, Niedecker turned, in the mid-1960s, to longer, more openended sequences that permitted her a wider range of speculation on matters of human and natural history. In a letter to Gail Roub she referred to this turn to longer forms as “reflective,” but it becomes clear that by extending her poems over several pages Niedecker was also able to become more critical as well. “Wintergreen Ridge” is arranged in ninety-four tercets, lines staggered in the manner of Williams’s late poems. The absence of punctuation and the extensive use of enjambment create an unstable, constantly shifting semantic field. Speaking of her mother, Niedecker remembers how she loved

closed gentians



she herself

88â•… o b j e c t i v i st fr a m e s so closed and in this to us peace the stabbing pen friend did it close to the heart pierced the woods red (autumn?) (252–53)

Here, reference to her mother’s detachment, partially due to late-deafness, is connected to a verbal attack by someone else.16 The convoluted syntax of “and in this to us peace€/ the stabbing€/ pen€/ friend did it,” joins several regions— the peace of the “closed” woods versus the violation of that peace by a letter, the redness of blood and that of autumn colors, mother’s distance and friend’s alienation. The lines, like the woods, are piercing, the “stabbing” pen linked to the psychic pain it caused, absent mother to absent friend, closed gentians to dying nature. Phrases become modular, joining with and separating from each other in a constantly circulating mobile. The instability created by enjambment and open punctuation, the confusions of pronouns and antecedents, shifts of tense and voice all contribute to a larger thematics of cold-war disruptions. Although Wintergreen Ridge has been protected from development, it remains vulnerable to a world bent on annihilation: thin to nothing lichens grind with their acid granite to sand These may survive the grand blow-up the bomb (253–54)

The omnipresence of nuclear catastrophe is embodied by a series of negatives that organize the central part of the poem. Niedecker observes

â•…

Life by Water

89



no pelting of police

no uprooted gaywings bishop’s cup





with flowers

(254)

Looking at a water lily she reflects on what is not present:

launched here no mind-changing





I see no space-rocket

one sort manufactured as easily as gin





acids eaten

in a bathtub (255)

I would agree with Lisa Faranda that the speaker’s journey into the interior of the isolated park appears to distance her from “the current of human life” embodied in space-rockets or social protest, but I also see these repeated negatives as signaling the endurance of social forms that, like the arrows on a sign, cannot be dissevered from the natural world.17 Reminders of what is absent from Wintergreen Ridge are, of course, reminders of their presence. The detailed botanical descriptions of plants and flowers often resemble Marianne Moore’s naturalist catalogues—fits of taxonomic exuberance that satirize the will to evidence. The “pelting of police with flowers” that in 1967 would remind readers of anti-war protests provide a continuity with the women who protested bulldozers in 1936; the absence of space rockets or lsd reminds readers of space- and mind-altering forces that were increasingly changing both rural and urban America. And where religious buildings had once aspired to the sky, they are now imitating plants and animals:





as we drive towards cities the change

90â•… o b j e c t i v i st fr a m e s in church architecture— now it’s either a hood for a roof pulled down to the ground and below or a factory-long body crawled out from a rise of black dinosaur-necked blower-beaked smokestack steeple Murder in the Cathedral’s proportions (255–56)

Factories replace churches, churches resemble animals and organic forms. Eliot’s play about the life and death of Thomas à Becket and the temptation to do “the right deed for the wrong reason” now applies to industrial pollution and waste.18 And as for the physical sanctuary where Becket was assassinated, it now becomes a site of criminal carnage, where “human parts [are] found€/ wrapped in newspaper€/ left at the church” (256). We may have left a preserved natural habitat “as we drive€/ towards cities,” but we see everywhere the built environment imitating the organic, seeking, as Walter Benjamin said, a dialectical image of some pre-industrial space, the incarnation in a handful of€sand. It might seem that Niedecker is using longer poems like “Wintergreen Ridge” to engage with the social activism of the 1960s—and perhaps to engage with younger poets in whose magazines she was beginning to publish (“Wintergreen Ridge” was published in Clayton Eshleman’s Caterpillar). But such poems represent a continuity with the Long Popular Front described by Michael Denning, one that did not die with World War II but which continued well into the 1960s. It is this latter possibility that challenges the totalizing character of literary historical terms like objectivism and forces us to seek alternative histories of postwar poetry written not around manifestos or schools but around marginal spaces—Charles Olson’s Gloucester, Gwendo-

â•…

Life by Water 91

lyn Brooks’s Brownesville, James Wright’s Dakotas, Gary Snyder’s northwest, Cherrie Moraga’s Central Valley. Such alternate histories seem especially important in a globalizing moment when region and locale are threatened with extinction through the integration of systems—political, communicational, and economic. Niedecker’s microscopic look at the resilient flora and fauna of the upper Midwest, the fishermen and women of Blackhawk Island, offer not an isolationist’s remove from national events but a lens to see the impact of those events on a single area.19

b 4

“Closed ╯ in Glass” Oppen’s Class Spectacles in memory of burton hatlen I might at the top of my ability stand at a window and say, look out; out there is the world. —George Oppen

I still feel that “proletarian”—

The pure maker?â•… the banger, the pounder?╅╇ one of the men?—struggling around in my innards —George Oppen

“Here ╯ the Manuscript Breaks Off ”

A

lthough we associate the theory of classes with Marx, his only systematic attempt to develop the theme was truncated after only two paragraphs at the beginning of the third volume of Capital. Engels’s comment—“Here the manuscript breaks off ”—leaves us wondering what Marx might have said in a synthetic way about the structure of class. Of course class stratification is a cornerstone of his work, and the roles of “freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman,” to quote the best-known litany, are Marx’s best known historical actors (473–74). It was for a later generation of Marxists to develop a theory of class that explored not only the economic basis for each layer of society but the ideological means that keep such layers in place. One such subsequent Marxist was George Oppen, who filled in some of the blanks in book three, but used class spectacles forged in his own upper middle-class family background. Since he was a poet who appreciated the value of the textual fragment, it is tempting to think of what Oppen might have written in the incomplete section of Marx’s magnum opus.

â•…

“Closed in Glass”

93

The poem from which the title to this chapter derives establishes a connection between two central concerns in George Oppen’s work: class and vision. The felicitous proximity of two phonemes that divide “class” from “glass” turns out to join the poet’s materialist poetics and his philosophical ethics such that reference to one invariably produces a reflection on the other: Closed car—closed in glass— At the curb, Unapplied and empty: A thing among others Over which clouds pass and the

alteration of lighting, An overstatement Hardly an exterior. Moving in traffic This thing is less strange— Tho the face, still within it, Between glasses—place, over which



time passes—a false light (ncp 13)1

€

For this “man of the thirties” the image of a “closed car—closed in glass” is a sign of capitalism’s deceptive allure, promising a vantage that is also a kind of protection, a mobility that is also stasis.2 Glass offers the illusion of unmediated perception into the car’s inhabitant at the same time that it inoculates the face from visibility. In the Marxian terms with which Oppen was intimately familiar, the car is both a “thing among others” yet a phantom object that displaces social relations onto a gleaming surface. Hence, as he says, the car is an “overstatement.” The poem’s attempt to describe the car’s substance is thwarted by its extended use of modifying phrases that, far from creating a coherent image, results in a static list. The occupant of the car is reduced to a “face, still within it,” suggesting that the human inhabitant, like the car itself, is dead, a “still life,” framed by glass that distorts and clarifies at the same time. This brief poem from Discrete Series marks a consistent pattern, throughout all of Oppen’s work, of seeing the object through the optic of class. Objectivism is often understood as a movement based around the clear, carefully seen

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object, freed of “predatory intent,” but it is seldom observed that the object so rendered is also a commodity—a wheelbarrow—whose importance rests in how it is seen (“glazed with rain€/ water€// beside the white€/ chickens”) such that its value may be asserted (“so much depends upon”). As a builder of furniture, boats and houses, Oppen was keenly aware of the close proximity of “making” and “seeing,” and he instantiated it in his poems by the kind of verbal intransigence I have just described. By removing predication, truncating syntactic elements, and employing enjambment, he exposes meaning-making as a form of labor that he shares with the reader. Far from revealing the product of that labor as a discrete object, he makes it hard to consume. Oppen’s relationship to the working class is a form of what Sean Wilentz calls “Republican artisanship,” an idealization of the skilled worker or journeyman that looks back to the Chartists, Blake, and the arts and crafts movement, and forward to the Popular Front.3 He expresses his “Debt” (as he titles an early poem) to this tradition as honoring, That ‘part Of consciousness That works’: A virtue, then, a skill of benches and the shock Of the press . . . (ncp 60)

Oppen preferred the term “populist” to describe his class affiliations, but his consistent ethical viewpoint is structured around values he associates with those who know “how a hammer should be handled.” 4 Oppen often used his labor theory of poetic value as a cudgel against claims of authenticity not grounded in experience: and if Pound had walked into a factory a few times the absurdity of Douglas’s theory of value, which Pound truculently repeats in the Cantos, would have dawned on him—it sometimes pays to have a look. .€.€. And keep still till one has seen.€.€.€. [T]he weakness of Imagism—a man writes of the moon rising over a pier who knows nothing about piers and is disregarding all that he knows about the moon.€.€.€. Eliot’s Prufrock is aware that his life is not the only possible life, whereas [Eliz-

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abeth] Bishop’s mechanical toy knows of no other world that the small bourgeois is bound to respect [in pencil: “one is moved by what the poet doesn’t know”]. €

€

(ucsd 16, 19, 4)

€

€

This artisanal emphasis was complicated by his ambivalent relationship to his own family origins. He grew up in an upper-middle class Jewish family that, as Mary Oppen records “had never . . . done anything with their hands” (Young 20). Oppen’s father, né George August Oppenheimer, was a successful businessman in New Rochelle, New York, who later ran a succession of movie theaters in San Francisco. His father’s entrepreneurial involvement in film may have contributed to Oppen’s general hostility to aspects of the culture industry, including middlebrow literary publishing like The New Yorker and Esquire. According to Mary Oppen, George’s stepmother, Seville Shainwal, was a paragon of conspicuous consumption, taking her breakfast in bed, shopping in San Francisco’s elegant shops and eating in expensive restaurants.5 The family lived on San Francisco’s fashionable Nob Hill where George attended private schools. These bourgeois trappings stifled the young poet and, despite several attempts to live within his father’s fold, he and Mary left in 1928 on an extended remove from his family, recognizing that, as Mary said, they “were not required to remain in the class into which we were born” (Meaning 76).6 Although he received an inheritance that left him financially secure, he continued to live in a proletarian imaginary.7 By “imaginary,” I do not mean that his actual manual labor was a fiction, but that his representation of it carried additional ideological weight, derived from his oedipalized relationship to his bourgeois upbringing.8 Thanks to work by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Peter Nicholls, Eric Hoffman, and Eric Homberger, we know a good deal about George Oppen’s political activities during the 1930s and 1940s, his participation in the cpusa, his labor and rent-relief organizing, his work as a tool-and-die maker and his various furniture-making and house-building jobs after the war. His famous “silence” during the period of his greatest political activity has been variously interpreted as a long caesura between poems (Hugh Kenner) or a principled refusal of instrumentalized or “partisan” poetry.9 Recently, as I will point out later, this silence has been extended to his philosophical skepticism in general. His return to poetry in 1958, following his sojourn in Mexico, is marked by a thematic insistence on the “materials,” as he titles his first book, and a renewed awareness of the inextricable closeness of man and machine, consciousness and

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Â� materiality. Although his political affiliations were forged in the labor movement and class struggle of the Depression era, Oppen began to renegotiate his attitudes toward class in the 1960s through a different lens, one strongly influenced by new social activism around the anti-war movement, racial equality, feminism and, for want of a better term, “life style.” His and Mary’s attendance of the Altamont concert in 1969 was a defining—if unsettling—moment in this shift, one that brought together the generational (and ideological) differences from Old to New Left to identity politics. At the same time, he revisited his relationship to Jewishness through a trip to Israel in 1975 that, far from linking him to his Jewish heritage, led to a feeling of estrangement, a sense of himself as a stranger, “neither Roman€// nor barbarian (ncp 257).” In short, class, for Oppen, was not a strictly economistic category, as it was for Marx or Lenin, but a “structure of feeling” or vantage through which emergent social forms could be experienced and represented.10 What I defined above as Oppen’s “verbal intransigence” is precisely his register of the incommensurable void between lived conditions and representability. As we shall see, Oppen seized on a mood (such as boredom in his first poem from Discrete Series) as an affective category through which to see the “world weather swept.” Because he saw class both as a cultural as well as an economic category, he exhibits some features of western Marxism from Lukács, Gramsci, and the Frankfurt School, for whom social categories implicate forms of consciousness that naturalize material relations for the bourgeoisie while permitting a critical perspective on social inequality for the proletariat. The shift from a materialist critique of the wage-labor system to a philosophical theory of how subjects are produced within that system is the cornerstone of this tendency, and although there is no indication that Oppen read the major figures of western Marxism—except for Sartre—his interest in social consciousness and epistemology connects him to this tradition. And like various members of the Frankfurt School, Oppen’s links to the modernist avant garde provided a critical lens on modernity’s instrumental reason. In this respect he differed from more recognizable members of the Popular Front like Mike Gold, Max Eastman, or Ruth Lechtlitner, for whom art was a weapon in the class struggle and who scorned more experimental tendencies in art. He was closer to writers like James Agee, John Dos Passos, William Carlos Williams, or Muriel Rukeyser, products of middle- and upper-middle-class families who attempted to forge a bridge between modernist formal innovation and the workers, miners, and sharecroppers that became their subjects.

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“To ╯ See€/ What Was Really Going On” Oppen’s class spectacles are evident in many poems from Discrete Series, written at the start of the Depression when he was in his early twenties. The inaugural poem of his entry into poetry announces the theme in a rhetoric very different from what would become his usual idiom: The knowledge not of sorrow, you were saying, but of boredom Is—aside from reading speaking smoking— Of what, Maude Blessingbourne it was, wished to know when, having risen, “approached the window as if to see what really was going on”; And saw rain falling, in the distance more slowly, The road clear from her past the window glass— Of the world, weather-swept, with which one shares the century. (ncp 5)

This poem has been extensively analyzed as anticipating Heidegger’s contemporaneous account of boredom in “What is Metaphysics,” a lecture delivered at the University of Freiburg in 1929. Commentators are quick to point out that Oppen could not have known of Heidegger’s essay at that time (it did not appear in English translation until 1949), but that he provided a parallel account to the philosopher’s sense that “Real boredom comes when ‘one is bored.’ This profound boredom, drifting hither and thither in the abysses of existence like mute fog, draws all things, all men and oneself along with them, together in a queer kind of indifference. This boredom reveals what-is in totality” (364).11 Boredom here is not transitive—a mood or state of mind in which one is “reading speaking€/ smoking.” Rather it is an existential condition—a “queer indifference”—in which one is cleared of all instrumental purposes and thus poised to apprehend “the world, weather-swept, with which€ / one shares the century.” As in “closed car,” Oppen places special emphasis on the

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temporality discovered in such a state, a theme to which Heidegger would return in Being in Time. Maude Blessingbourne’s ability to see “what really was going on” (rain, the road) gives her access to history, not by her rational understanding of time, but through her discovery of herself in time. What is often left out of accounts of the poem is the degree to which Oppen, by his use of Henry James (and the lengthy Jamesian sentence), marks a specifically class-based perspective on history. Readers of James’s fiction will recognize Maude Blessingbourne’s position at the window as that of the novelist in the house of fiction “piercing” one of its multiple windows to give an account of the “world weather swept.” 12 But Blessingbourne, perhaps like James and Oppen, is fatally contained by her upper middle-class perspective and gender. She gains insight into the world beyond by occupying a perspective from within a large, comfortable house. What grants authority to the male Â�realist becomes a class limit for the female observer. Her boredom provides that emotional register in which she may discover her relationship to what lies beyond the protective glass. Oppen’s appropriation of Maude Blessingbourne to speak for his own position at the objectivist window reminds me of Whitman’s similar position in section 11 of “Song of Myself ” where, in order to view twentyeight naked men bathing, the poet adopts the position of a wealthy woman, hiding “aft the blinds of the window.” Such triangulated perspective through the optic of class and gender permits the good gay poet to inhabit a subject position he could not otherwise entertain in Victorian America. Oppen crossdresses in the prose of Henry James to test his own bourgeois perspective against “what really was going on” at the start of the Depression. As much as Oppen distanced himself from the Jamesian sentence and perspective, he returned to them—and to this first poem—throughout his work.13 In “Of Being Numerous,” for example, James’s line recurs: ‘.╯ . . approached the window as if to see . . .’ The boredom which disclosed Everything— I should have written, not the rain Of a nineteenth century day, but the motes In the air, the dust Here still. (ncp 186)

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Oren Izenberg interprets this reprise as a sign of Oppen’s failure to historicize—that his commitment to change and the quotidian represented in Discrete Series is undermined by his view that the “rain” of the 1920s (or that of the late nineteenth century, when James’s story was penned) has simply been replaced by the “motes” of the late 1960s. Whatever knowledge we may gain from the specific object seen from the realist window is vitiated by comparing it, however slightly, with the dust on a later window. Izenberg attempts to show that Oppen’s view of poetic knowledge is lodged “not in a practice of changeable form but in a practice of unchangeable silence—a silence that penetrates his poems as well as bracketing them—that we may find, not new knowledge exactly, but a new account of what we mean by knowledge” (45). For Izenberg, Oppen was not so invested in the material history that produces a subject but in an ahistorical, cognitive concern with conditions by which a truth claim is€made. Izenberg offers a subtle critique of materialist readings of Oppen’s poetics (my own included) but, in shifting the focus from a discourse of class to a discourse of mind, he misses an opportunity to see the close proximity of the two.14 For Izenberg, the kind of pleasure available in Oppen’s poems has little to do with their status as poems, but rather with a “form of intentionality toward persons” (47).15 His test case is Oppen’s treatment in “Of Being Numerous” of Robinson Crusoe, who is less important as a character than as a trope for evaluating sociality. It matters little whether or not Crusoe’s “rescue” from his island is a good or a bad thing, but that we have opinions about what that rescue means: “Crusoe€// We say was€/ ‘Rescued.’ So we have chosen .€.€.€// the meaning€/ Of being numerous” (ncp 150–1). Oppen’s use of quotation marks around “rescued” proves Izenberg’s point; it implies that the stance towards Crusoe’s freedom is one that must be cited by others. This is very different from Marx’s version of Crusoe in Capital. For Marx, Crusoe, as a good bourgeois, “carries his whole class with him wherever he goes” (50). His organizing of his island, his building of a home, his management of nature—a seemingly “natural” form of arrangement—exposes the degree to which Protestant thrift and acquisition are tacitly assumed values for the reader. “We” (in quotes) assent to the idea that Crusoe must be “rescued” because as good bourgeois ourselves, we seek to read his natural acquisitiveness into our own, treating the virtues of hard work and thrift as proxies for the social contract. “Pressed on each other” we naturally choose the meaning of being numerous to naturalize Crusoe’s condition as ours.

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Against this ideological reading, Izenberg posits Wittgenstein’s theory of private language, as developed in The Tractatus and as explicated by Saul Kripke. In this view the quotation marks around “rescued” suggest that Crusoe is being used not as a sign of the Protestant ethic but as a necessary term in human judgment, marking our innately human desire to say something about someone. Words may fail, but the speech-act situation promises a dialogue beyond the poem. Crusoe, in this reading, is a structural necessity that resembles those planks that Wittgenstein uses to illustrate commands. Inert and blank in themselves, they are simply occasions for marking the rules by which directions are made and statements are evaluated. How we look at something, then, trumps the meaning of what we look at. We have chosen the meaning of being numerous by talking about Crusoe, not by deciding, in advance, what being numerous means. Where materialist critics value Oppen’s words as planks, and planks as part of social materiality, analytical critics like Izenberg value words as tools by which we frame propositions about Crusoe. The position from which we speak is irrelevant; what is important is that a poem like “Of Being Numerous” “resolves on an attitude toward looking”€(57). I would agree that a poem like “Of Being Numerous” is very much about looking, but I would not conclude from this that there is nothing to look at. In “Of Being Numerous,” Crusoe is being invoked in a highly specific, historical situation—the Vietnam War, U.S. imperialism, and Oppen’s participation in World War II. Acts of looking and seeing in the poem often implicate social vantages: “A city of the corporations€// Glassed€/ In dreams” (164); “‘.€.€.€he who will not work shall not eat,€ / and only he who was troubled shall find rest,’” (172); “The fly in the bottle€// Insane, the insane fly€// Which, over the city€/ Is the bright light of shipwreck” (173). Izenberg’s view that Oppen’s requotation of lines from his earliest poem undermines his claim to see historically ignores the many references to Oppen’s own social history—the impact of immigrant migrations (“The black€/ Rectangular buildings€/ Of the immigrants”), working class culture (“Among those riders€/ Of the subway”), and “those men€// With whom [he] stood in emplacements” during World War€II. It denies the “covenant” under which American exceptionalism is formed, and of which the war in Southeast Asia is the latest example (“The covenant is€/ There shall be peoples”), as well as the death of his own father (“You are the last€ / Who will know him€ / Nurse”)—all of which help to frame the poet’s need to re-site his early lines from Discrete Series in a new context. Maude BlesÂ� singbourne’s self-knowledge through boredom provides a window not only

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on the reality of the nineteenth century but on what a poem’s optic on that history might offer for the twentieth. The Ghost in the Machine The title of Oppen’s first book following his twenty-five-year silence, The Materials, alludes to those basic elements of daily life—work, family, community —as well as the “little words” he loved so much. The title also may allude to the fact that he had sustained his self-imposed exile in Mexico by working as a carpenter and furniture maker. The book’s epigraph from Maritain, “we awake in the same moment to ourselves and to things,” reinforces the idea that, for Oppen, the materials are necessary adjuncts to self-knowledge. Because for Oppen the materials are embedded in social relations and conditions of use and exchange, such self-knowledge is already social. Read in terms of Lukács’s theory of reification, the remark takes on a distinctly different coloring. In History and Class Consciousness Lukács notes how the bourgeois regards his relationship to material objects as inert and separate from himself. Things take on a “phantom objectivity” or autonomy that renders them susceptible to exchange. Social relations assume, in Marx’s terms, the “fantastic form of a relation between things” (86). Where the bourgeosie separate themselves from the objects of their conjecture, the proletariat occupies a privileged position vis à vis the object by contributing to its production. By their proximity to the means of production, workers understand the function of the commodity in the labor process and, most important, their own object-status in that process. A proletarian epistemology cannot apprehend the world in the same contemplative manner that the bourgeois can since the worker is part of the labor process. We can see Oppen exploring the “voice” of this epistemology in “Image of the Engine.” Likely as not a ruined head gasket Spitting at every power stroke, if not a crank shaft Bearing knocking at the roots of the thing like a pile-driver: A machine involved with itself, a concentrated Hot lump of a machine Geared in the loose mechanics of the world with the valves jumping And the heavy frenzy of the pistons. When the thing stops, Is stopped, with the last slow cough

102â•… o b j e c t i v i st fr a m es In the manifold, the flywheel blundering Against compression, stopping, finally Stopped, compression leaking From the idle cylinders will one imagine Then because he can imagine That squeezed from the cooling steel There hovers in that moment, wraith-like and like a plume of steam, an aftermath, A still and quiet angel of knowledge and of comprehension. (ncp 40)

This is a poem that rejects what Heidegger calls the “in order-to” aspect of the tool (Verweisung), the purposes for which the engine is designed, in favor of its “ready to hand” (Zuhandenheit), its ontology as an object devoid of functionality.16 But as Oppen shows, this does not mean the tool is a windowless monad, separate from the reflective subject. Through his opening adverbial phrase (“Likely as not”) Oppen signals his proprietary knowledge of the engine’s structure, a knowledge that permits him to translate the “hot lump of a machine” into an image. As we discover from subsequent sections, the poem treats the engine as a complex metaphor for mortality, “The image of the engine€// That stops” (40). In an interview with L.€S. Dembo, Oppen says that the poem presents “the image of man as a machine, with a ghost, the ghost in the machine .€.€. and it asks the question, Does one believe, then, just because one can believe?” (206). In other words, are we simply a machine “that stops” or is there some “still and quiet angel of knowledge and comprehension” that exists beyond the body? 17 Subsequent sections show that neither of these positions—the mechanistic nor the metaphysical—is tenable: We cannot live on that. I know that no one would live out Thirty years, fifty years if the world were ending With his life. The machine stares out, Stares out With all its eyes Thru the glass With the ripple in it, past the sill

“Closed in Glass”â•… 103 Which is dusty—If there is someone In the garden! Outside, and so beautiful. (ncp 41)18

“We ╯ cannot live on that”—on what? The continually shifting perspective of this passage illustrates the impossibility of positing a thing without a situated viewpoint, that of a worker whose knowledge of the materiality of life permits knowledge of intersubjectivity. As Burton Hatlen says of these lines, The machine, and the individual human being as well, find their meaning, indeed their very existence, only in and through the ‘other.’ .€.€. [As] we and our tools enter into relationship with the ‘other’ and implicitly with a world that extends beyond our lives, the terms of our existence begin to undergo a profound change, giving birth to a sudden beauty. (Hatlen€347)

I would only add to this the observation that this relationship between man and machine produces a vantage—a “glass€/ with a ripple in it”—through which others may be seen. I take this to mean that social reproduction is made possible by being able to represent the means of production to oneself and in so doing establish connections with others. Through such apertures, the ghostly objectivity of the commodity form—“the lost€/ Glitter of the stores”—is broken and we begin to seek companionship in the “Rubble: concrete, conduit, pipe, a crumbling€/ Rubble of our roots” (42). Engendering Class The weakness of Imagism has been this affectation and feminine self-love, the strength of Imagism its demand that one actually look. —George Oppen

A textual version of Oppen’s “rubble” is evident on the manuscript page itself, a mark of poetic labor whose condensed trace can be found in the published poem. For Oppen, poetry consists of “piling up pieces of paper to find the words,” as if in the sheer midden of his daily writing can be found the poem’s generative nucleus (Hatlen 44). In my introduction to Oppen’s New Collected Poems, I describe the significance of his palimpsestic method of writing—his habit of gluing slips of paper one on top of the other in the revision process—but here I want to understand how the manuscript page both

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presents and withholds narratives of class that are often articulated through gender. My epigraph to this section, taken from one such page, suggests that poetic labor was often figured through gendered alternatives, the feminine “weakness” of Imagism being its isolation of the object from limits of time and space, its masculine “strength” being its visualist imperative. This binarist logic is often articulated through modalities of class and social position. Consider the following, culled from among Oppen’s scattered papers at the University of California, San Diego. At the top of the page is a tercet that allegorizes his class anxiety in Dantean terms (figure 4.1): The noise of wealth, the clamor of wealth in the hotel lobby, sound Like a voice of Hell (ucsd 16, 19, 1; sp 56)

The lines look back to his upbringing in San Francisco (his parents’ house was across from the Mark Hopkins Hotel on Nob Hill). Taken in the context of the rest of the page we can see the way that these lines are geared in the loose mechanics of Oppen’s thinking about class and materiality. The tercet reflects Oppen’s lifelong animosity towards extravagance, the “clamor of wealth” heard in a hotel lobby. As if in response to this infernal chorus, he quotes a variation on Aquinas’s Veritas sequitur (truth follows from the being of things) that he quotes in “Psalm” and which he discovered in Jacques Maritain: “Nevertheless Truth follows the existence of something.” The proximity of these lines to the preceding tercet raises the question of whether that “something” is an ethical end in itself or a delusion that capitalism proffers. He then quotes, in brackets, the mystical theologan, Eliphas Levi, “an eternity of isolation will be eternal death,” as if to qualify Aquinas’s doctrinal view of the incarnation with a darker worry over existential isolation. In a scribbled list at bottom of the page, Oppen catalogues possible literary sources for that “something” (Balzac’s “Seraphita” and “Louis Lambert,” Simone Weil, Leviathan, a remark by Henry Miller [“a nightmare of bric-à-brac”]), some mathematical calculations, and concludes with what seems a return to the original poem: “If not this [deluge of ] bric a brac, Nothing.” In “Guest Room,” the poem into which the tercet finally appears, the figure of the hotel lobby is dropped, replaced by another figure of impersonal habitation:

Fig. 4.1╇ “The noise of wealth.” From the daybooks of George Oppen. ©Â€Linda Oppen. Courtesy of the Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego

106â•… o b j e c t i v i st fr a m es There is in age The risk that the mind Reach Into homelessness, ‘nowhere to return.’ .€.€. (ncp 107)

Now the image of empty wealth and cosmopolitan identity is given a more philosophical cast. The Eliphas Levi quote about a Hell of isolation is folded into a Beckett-like homelessness. What begins as a figure of anonymous wealth and prestige, figured in a hotel, is transformed into the “great house” and guest rooms of Oppen’s upbringing. An older Oppen seems to be asking, if Hell is wealth, does its clamor drown out the “something” from which truth follows? “Guest Room,” ruminates on how, in old age, “The maxims€// Expose themselves, the happy endings€/ That justify a moral.” The page on which the tercet is written explores the something upon which truth is based and the ephemeral nothing that promises happy endings. Another draft of “Guest Room,” titled “Ninth Floor,” extends the class critique through themes of gendered inheritance (figure 4.2): Overlooking The park, She clings By bibelots To a line Of descent. She trembles In a way That would have amazed Those merchant New Yorkers From whom she inherits. (ucsd 16, 21, 12)

Oppen is presumably speaking of his stepmother, Seville Shainwal, with whom he had an abusive and conflicted relationship. He imagines her “Overlooking€/ The park,” once again occupying that vantage inhabited by Maude Blessingbourne, but now heightened, as it were, by the vantage purchased by

Fig. 4.2╇ Draft of George Oppen’s “Guest Room.” ©Â€Linda Oppen. Courtesy of the Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego

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wealth. This vertical perspective of the wealthy woman overlooking the park is transformed by reference to lines of “descent” that enables her perspective.19 The final, incomplete line “from whom she inherits” suggests that her class vantage on the “Ninth Floor” undermines genealogical descent and replaces it with material inheritance. In these examples the “clamor of wealth” Â�associated with hotel lobbies and penthouse apartments is ultimately figured as a perspective dominated by women who consume but do not produce. Although Oppen surrounded himself with strong women like his wife Mary, his sister June Degnan, and fellow women poets, he often relied on a stereotyped view of the passive feminine to describe the aridity of his own class background. The fact that Shainwall was not his biological mother permits Oppen to conflate the “noise of wealth” with the “homelessness” it produces for the stepson. Another poem that more directly relates gendered power to class privilege is “Boy’s Room” from This in Which: A friend saw the rooms Of Keats and Shelley At the lake, and saw ‘they were just Boys’ rooms’ and was moved By that. And indeed a poet’s room Is a boy’s room And I suppose that women know it. Perhaps the unbeautiful banker Is exciting to a woman, a man Not a boy gasping For breath over a girl’s body. (ncp 122)

Here, poets are seen as perpetual boys, their aesthetic power meaningless next to the monetary power of the “unbeautiful banker.” Money and prestige confer a kind of sexual authority to which the aesthetic can never aspire. Keats and Shelley become mere boys, “gasping€/ For breath over a girl’s body” while the “unbeautiful banker” is attractive to the woman. Oppen elaborates on this poem in a daybook passage where he observes that “the artists [sic] room is indeed a boys room. Incapable of being deceived by riding a rolls royce. Or once deceived, ceases to be an artist .€.€. Which is all any of us can be. With a special color, atmosphere, a person, a new person,

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herself ” (sp 93). There is an odd transformation of pronouns here in which the male poet who becomes deceived by riding in a Rolls Royce becomes a “new person, herself.” Oppen seems to be saying that the male poet is capable of resisting the lure of commodities, but that the girl is seduced by them? If this seems a problematic, even sexist distinction, it is qualified by a poem on the same page that seems to understand class divisions as a biopolitical fact (figure 4.3): Eugenics—The Strong Man It is lower class And moreover girls don’t much want him. His young wife is far too womanly, They will get nowhere. He is probably a truck driver Or a crane operator. (sp 93; ucsd 16, 19, 4)

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Here the wealthy banker’s monetary power contrasts with the working-class male’s lack of power; the former’s sexual advantage trumping the latter’s eugenic perfection. Although the “truck driver / Or . . . crane operator” may represent masculine physical perfection, his class position and that of his “womanly” wife lead “nowhere.” Against eugenic models of physiological superiority that promise successful bio-futurity, Oppen poses economic social status that ultimately determines the form that futurity takes. While “Guest Room” and “Boy’s Room” are understandable as discrete poems, when they are subjected to the manuscript and daybook pages in which they begin, they reveal the extent to which “rooms” for Oppen are privileged sites of class identity that are often figured through gender distinctions.20 At times he adopts what seem today to be rather patronizing attitudes towards women (“Women see no purpose, in art or in life, except to make things which are nice” he says on one page; ucsd 16, 19, 2), and while we may find these attitudes problematic, their appearance in the scattered pages and daybooks of his archive show the degree to which he was arguing with his personal “line of descent.” Rather than read Oppen as sexist or masculinist, I see him confronting the limited agency accorded women during this period, and debating within himself the limits of his own masculine roles when they are configured around strict class divisions.

Fig. 4.3╇ “The Strong Man.” From the daybooks of George Oppen. ©Â€Linda Oppen. Courtesy of the Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego

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Altamont Whether, as the intensity of seeing increases, one’s distance from Them, the People, does not also increase —George Oppen

The gendering of class that I have been discussing undergoes a change in Oppen’s later work as debates with various women poets (Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Diane Wakoski, Denise Levertov) challenge his class-based social ethos. The distinctions such as those we have just seen in “Guest Room” and “Boy’s Room” become increasingly problematic as he negotiates the claims of feminism and identity politics. The lines above from a letter to Oppen from Rachel Blau DuPlessis during the period of the Columbia University strikes of 1968 are included in “Of Being Numerous” as an important acknowledgment of his attention to late sixties youth activism around the Vietnam War (ncp 167). Once again, the issue of the social is framed as a problem of sight and perspective. DuPlessis’s remark echoes the older poet’s skepticism about the limits of the social as an abstract entity, against which, in the same poem, he posits “The unearthly bonds€/ of the singular” (167). Reflecting on these remarks elsewhere, Oppen acknowledges that “the concept of humanity [is] a concept without which we can’t live” and yet the more we probe it as a proposition the more it removes one from actual people (cl 173). Oppen scrutinized the New Left against the backdrop of his own activism in the 1930s and in tandem with his return to San Francisco in 1966. This shift of location from New York to the West Coast placed him back in the city of his origins, but also in a city that was at the center of a profound national rift, both culturally and politically. The new youth culture and its implicit rejection of Old Left class consciousness challenged his own Depression era formations as did the many poetry readings, demonstrations, and marches that the Oppens attended.21 The killing of three civil-rights workers in 1967, including Mickey Schwerner, cousin of poet Armand Schwerner, moved Oppen a great deal and inspired a number of poems about the ongoing civil-rights struggle. And in returning to the Bay Area, Oppen was faced of course with the oedipal anxieties from which he had separated so many years ago. His later poems are filled with references not only to his father but to his own status as a father whose daughter is now grown and married. Oppen’s notes from this period still interrogate the status of class in America, but they also recognize that class, as a self-evident descriptor, has become too limited in the face of a multicultural

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world. Speaking of the poems “Debt” (ncp 60) and “Rationality” (ncp 136), which deal with work and labor, Oppen muses, They are the same poem, yes. That’s why I call it “Debt.” It was the poem I couldn’t write. It was about working. The carpenter working in factories—which meant a great deal to me. And suddenly that meaning disappeared. I was writing it too late. (Englebert and West€12)

He is increasingly aware of the rise of a black bourgeoisie against which the Black Power movement poses an alarming challenge: Of course the non-violent leaders represent a tiny-minority, a minority of the bourgeoisie [sic] minority. And of course such people as Malcolm X are essentially more popular leaders. And when the basic masses of the Negro people begin to move we will discover how fascist-minded a population—both Negro and white—this country contains. (sp€101)

And this reflection on class divisions within black culture leads to an acknowledgment of cultural forms across class lines: There has been created a culture, a culture centering around Jazz, and perhaps largely the creation of the Negro, which is not a bourgeois possession, and young people are drawn into contact with classes not their own. (sp€188)

This confrontation with new social movements through popular media, music, and the arts motivated the Oppens to attend the 1969 Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Pass, east of San Francisco. It marks a turning point in Oppen’s attitude toward more traditional social stratification, but it was by no means an unreflective endorsement of youth culture. Quite the contrary; he was distressed by what he characterized as a “masturbatory,” inward-turning phenomenon “as the tremendous volume of the music takes€/ over obscured by their long hair they seem€/ to be mourning” (ncp 221). Against the “Love” ethos he imagines being hammered out on the “spike” of Keith Richards’s guitar (“Tho all say€/ Huddled among each other€// ‘Love’”) Oppen turns to a biblical vision of Exodus, the children of Israel following a pillar of fire: Miracle of the childrenâ•…â•…â•… the brilliant Childrenâ•…â•… the word Liquid as woodlandsâ•…â•…â•… Children? When she was a child I read Exodus To my daughter╅╅╇ ‘The children of Israel . . . ‘

“Closed in Glass”â•… 113 Pillar of fire Pillar of cloud We stared at the end Into each other’s eyesâ•…â•…â•…â•…â•… Where She said hushed Were the adultsâ•…â•… We dreamed to each other Miracle of the children The brilliant childrenâ•…â•…â•… Miracle Of their brillianceâ•…â•…â•… Miracle of (ncp 234)

It would be reductive to say that Oppen had turned back to his Jewish inheritance in reaction to the inward-looking youth at Altamont, but it is clear that he is rearticulating the meaning of those biblical children in his contemporary terms. He reads the Old Testament account of the Jews fleeing Egypt to his daughter, and she asks “Where .€.€. Were the adults.” For all of Oppen’s worries about the future of the children of America represented at Altamont, clearly those youth—his own daughter among them—have become a “miracle” through which the future could be imagined. Oppen’s metaphysical concerns in these late poems—bolstered by quotations from Hegel, Heidegger, Edmond Jabès, and Simone Weil—contrast with his earlier emphasis on perception and vision. The collective solidarity which animated his earlier poetry is replaced by the metaphor of the stranger and alien, “neither Roman nor barbarian.” Peter Nicholls notes that in these late poems Oppen returns to the figure of the survivor from “Of Being Numerous,” only now, instead of being locked in a dialectic with numerousness, he is in dialogue with himself about the threat of losing Mary, the question of literary fame, and ultimately the fear of physical and mental decay. The stance of the stranger appears in late poems such as “Disasters,” which addresses many of the themes to which I have just alluded: of wars o western wind and storm of politics I am sick with a poet’s vanityâ•…â•— legislators

114â•… o b j e c t i v i st fra m e s of the unacknowledged world it isâ•…â•— dreary to descend and be a stranger . . . (ncp 267)

The opening lines invoke the epic tradition (“I sing of arms and the man”) but quickly turn to the fifteenth-century love lyric, “Western Wynd,” as response to the wars that mark his epoch.22 Oppen claims to be “sick with a poet’s vanity” of wars and politics, revising Shelley’s description of poets as the “unacknowledged legislators of the world” to become “legislators€ // of the unacknowledged world.” But this role of the poet—Pound’s “antenna of the race”—no longer holds, hence his inversion of the lines to emphasize the poet’s ability to make the world visible rather than serve as its prophetic Jeremiah. He then quotes Nathaniel Hawthorne, “it is dreary€/ to descend€/ and be a stranger,” a remark that refers to Clifford Pyncheon who, in The House of the Seven Gables, is falsely accused of murder then released after thirty years in prison, to return to his ancestral home.23 He is a sad, senile shadow of his former self but enriched by his proximity to his niece, Phoebe. The affection between the old man and young girl is compared to that between poets and their mates: “Because probably at his highest elevation, the poet needs no human intercourse; but he finds it dreary to descend, and be a stranger” (141). As it turns out, Pyncheon’s feelings of alienation—from history and family—parallel Oppen’s in several ways, a fact that is revealed in a manuscript draft of the poem. In this page, the poem is not called “Disasters,” which links it to the ongoing Vietnam War, but “Senility,” which marks it as a sign of the dementia that ultimately claimed his life. In its earlier form, the opening lines read as follows (figure 4.4): Senility: A Political Poem Of the western dream [fellowship] of politics for it is dreary to descend like a gift in the disorder

Fig. 4.4╇ Draft of George Oppen, “Disasters.” ©Â€Linda Oppen. Courtesy of the Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego

116â•… o b j e c t i v i st fra m e s rises I am sick with a poet’s vanity (ucsd 16, 26, 5)

Here Oppen seems to merge Pyncheon’s senility with his own incipient AlzÂ� heimer’s disease. The early draft indicates that he thought of approaching old age and senility not as cognitive but political issues, related to a larger context of “wars” and “politics.” And the word “fellowship” in brackets, although not modifying any particular word, nevertheless suggests the absence of a significant collective or community. Given his use of the term “stranger” elsewhere in the late poems to refer to himself as a Jew, “neither roman nor Barbarian,” the lines coalesce a series of personal, political, and racial forces. Later in the poem, Oppen quotes Sherwood Anderson (“we wanted to know€// if we were any good€// out there”) and in so doing describes a sense of insecurity about his own literary success—which if anything was at its highest point. Whatever redemptive hope class solidarity may have represented in the past has been replaced by a highly personal wish for contact of the most personal and intimate order. “That ╯ Fanatic Glass” What I have described in this chapter is a continual and consistent privileging of vision and perspective in Oppen’s work as they contribute to his thinking about the social. When in section 21 of “Of Being Numerous” Oppen says, “There can be a brick€/ in a brick wall€/ The eye picks” we may assume that the focus is on the studious eye’s ability to isolate the single detail in an otherwise anonymous wall (ncp 175). This is what we might call the objectivist aesthetic imperative. We could also assume, based on what I have said, that this ability is nurtured by an understanding of what the single brick in a brick wall means for the craftsman—poet and bricklayer—who places it there. This, I would contend, is Oppen’s version of Lukácsian class consciousness. A number of recent books in critical theory have chronicled modernism’s ocularcentrism—from Impressionist pointillism and Pound’s Imagism to Magritte’s optical puns, Duchamp’s satires of retinal art, narrative theories of spatial form and, of course, objectivism. At the same time, social theorists have provided a critique of modernity’s ocularcentrism, pointing out how metaphors of seeing and sight dominate the work of philosophers and theorists

“Closed in Glass”â•… 117

from Marx’s theory of ideology as a camera obscura, Heidegger’s “Age of the World Picture,” and Bergson’s durée to Foucault’s emphasis on the panoptical gaze, to Sartre’s “regard” and Laura Mulvey’s theory of the gaze. Attempts to describe this ocularcentrism by reference to new optical technologies (photography, film) or science (optics, comparative anatomy, eugenics) seem inadequate to the larger epistemological shift produced by a world dominated by the commodity form. Where Louis Zukofsky could rely on an ideal of poetry as a “lens bringing the rays from an object to a focus” (Prepositions 12), Oppen worried that the image is obscured by the lens itself. I have argued that his skepticism about the clarity of what can be seen is a continuing preoccupation with the question of class that he approached from his double consciousness as proletarian and bourgeois subject.24 In “The Book of Job and a Draft of a Poem to Praise the Paths of the Living,” Oppen returns to Maude Blessingbourne at her window, only now she looks out from the California tract homes that he helped build following World War€II: in that fanatic glass from our own homes our own rooms we are fetched outâ•…â•…â•…â•… we the greasers says yesterday’s slang in the path of tornado . . . (ncp 241–42)

This “fanaticism of the desire to see out,” as he elsewhere paraphrases these lines, would seem to be the acquisitive desire to possess the world through sight (Power 201). Yet as a former builder of such homes he occupies a curiously mixed relationship to the vantage they offer. The “we” of these lines also includes “the greasers,” a slang term for people of Hispanic and Latino descent who lived in California long before the developers moved in and built such homes. Oppen’s use of the slang term “greasers,” like other words of opprobrium addressed to racial others, now speaks out of the whirlwind, linking Job’s suffering under God’s censure with the suffering of America’s subaltern subjects. The fact that this poem elegizes Mickey Schwerner, murdered for his civil-rights activism in the South, joins any number of abject figures who endure a Job-like trial.

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This identification with the abjected other includes, once again, the laborer:

. . . carpenter

mechanic╅ o we impoverished we hired hands that turn the wheel╅╅ young theologians of the scantlings╅╅╅ wracked monotheists of the╅ weather-side╇ sometimes I imagine they speak (ncp 242)

The pronominal complexity of such passages—the shift from plural first person to singular first person to third person—suggests that authentic speech (the poem invokes God speaking to Job out of the whirlwind) cannot be located in a single subject. Oppen had been himself a “young€/ theologian of the scantlings” as a boat builder, and it is precisely by identifying with the working class that he imagines “they” as a collective entity. The desire to see through the “fanatic glass” of modern material comforts and protection is an affective response to the illusion of clarity it promises. Oppen comes to his form of identification through a verbal struggle among terms for identity, no one of which can adequately “speak” for himself but, as it were, through a glass darkly.

III b

Approaching the New American Poetry

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b 5

Archaeologist of Morning Charles Olson, Edward Dorn, and Historical Method Methodology keeps forcing itself into my mouth as the word to cover the necessities that the execution of form involves. —Charles Olson, Letters for Origin

Negotiating Space

C

harles Olson’s inaugural remarks on literature accompany his first thoughts on history. Call Me Ishmael, the poet’s 1947 book on Melville, is a sustained meditation on space as the “central fact to man born in America” (Collected Prose 17). Moby Dick chronicles the misuse of this space through mercantilism and industry as viewed through North Atlantic whaling. “We are the last ‘first’ people,” Olson says; “We forget that. We act big, misuse our land, ourselves. We lose our own primary” (19). The democratic ideal, thematized in the disparate backgrounds of the Pequod’s crew, becomes vulnerable to the industry of which the boat is a part. Ahab represents the mania of America’s underlying, acquisitive nature. “Whaling was production,” Olson explains, “as old as the colonies and, in capital and function, forerunner to a later America, with more relation to Socony [Standard Oil Company of New York] than to clippers and the China trade” (23). When Olson brought such terms to bear on his own epic of American space, The Maximus Poems, he turned to a specific town, Gloucester, Massachusetts, which would serve as a microcosm—and test case—for America: o tansy city, root city let them not make you as the nation is (Maximus 15)

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The public address, framed as a letter from the eponymous hero to his townspeople, continues a long tradition in U.S. letters—from Jonathan Edwards to Henry Adams to Ezra Pound—who warn the covenanted few of the incorporated many. What is lost is some version of Edenic localism, the genius loci that created Chartres’s Cathedral or Malatesta’s Tempio. Olson’s Black Mountain student, Edward Dorn, published his first work in 1960, an essay on the importance of The Maximus Poems, and he too chose space as his theme: “But when the Place is brought forward fully in form conceived entirely by the activation of a man who is under its spell it is a resurrection for us” (Views 34). The language here could be that of Thoreau or Emerson, in its emphasis on the redemptive power of geography on the individual, but Dorn’s study of Olson’s major work recognizes the dangers of treating “place” as a sentimental localism. Gloucester is no more important than any other town as long as it is regarded in terms of its material effects: I am certain, without ever having been there, I would be bored to sickness walking through Gloucester. Buildings as such are not important. The wash of the sea is not interesting in itself, that is luxuria, a degrading thing, people as they stand, must be created, it doesn’t matter at all they have reflexes of their own, they are Â�casual€.€.€. (Views€34)

The tone is cranky (inherited from Olson, no doubt) and admonitory. What Dorn sees in The Maximus Poems, as Olson saw in Moby Dick, is a practice of art tied to human concerns, a poem as multifaceted as the town itself. Place is not a spiritual quotient or a set of discrete structures; it must first be connected to human labor—to what is done or made. The poem that takes this fact into account must be equally aware of its own relationship to the means of civic production. When Dorn began his own epic of the West, Gunslinger, he seemed, on the surface, to swerve away from Olson’s example.1 Instead of the collage of dates, facts, historical accounts, maps, and brawny admonitions of The Maximus Poems, a comic masque appears. Gunslinger features a cast of characters out of tv westerns, comics, celebrity biographies, Star Trek, The Wall Street Journal, and dime novels. The poem is made out of the very fabric of commercial life that Olson attacked. The leviathan-like representative man (based on Maximus of Tyre) whom Olson places at the center of his poem is replaced by the Gunslinger, a cool and airy debunker whose relation to robber barons of the late nineteenth century keeps him detached from the local citizen. Gunslinger is

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a poem as different in tone and conception from Olson’s as one can imagine, and yet it builds directly on Olson’s historical poetics. Dorn recognizes the full implications of the older poet’s historical concerns—“a stance toward reality outside a poem”—and how these concerns must be tied to the making of art (Collected Prose 246). In particular, Dorn recognizes that “place” as a strictly geographical term no longer exists, having been so totally mediated by entrepreneurial capital that one locale is the same as any other. In this respect, Dorn anticipates current globalization theory, which regards the McDonaldization of the globe not as the victory of free markets but as the centralization of transnational capital. In order to render place as it occurs in contemporary life, the poet must focus on the various forms of mediation and co-optation that have effected this change—including those pertaining to his own language. Gunslinger records this new dispensation toward place and language and, at the same time, extends the terms of Olson’s “Projective Verse” into an entirely new area, one that Olson, no doubt, would not have recognized. Dorn’s radical interpretation and use of Olson’s method is fundamental to understanding the possibilities for history in postmodern poetry. Contrary to much critical writing on the subject, postmodernism has been actively concerned with the relationship between form and history—a relationship that Olson subsumed under one word: methodology. I want to offer a brief speculation upon how Dorn’s reading of Olson brings these matters to a point so that our reading of new poetry, still heavily reliant on an expressivist aesthetic, may be broadened. But before doing this, it is necessary to look at the dominant interpretation of postwar poetry insofar as it reified methodology as existential temporality and effaced the implications of spatial critique among the New American Poets. An Immanent Aesthetic Most early attempts to synthesize the various strands of postwar poetry tended to focus on a re-presencing of the poem in the expressive subject, a return of the poet from exile among an earlier generation’s ironies, masks, and personae. Critics of the 1960s and 1970s like James Breslin, Charles Altieri, Ihab Hassan, Joseph Riddel, William Spanos, Paul Bové, Roy Harvey Pearce, Charles Molesworth, Albert Gelpi, and J.€Hillis Miller viewed postwar poetry as a strategy of immanent discovery and testimony. Form becomes a grid of avowals, speculations, and desultory meditations, the spontaneous display of which

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becomes its own ethos. Form becomes “information,” a way of knowing the world rather than a vehicle for its representation. Certain critics focused on the spiritual or agonistic aspect of this gesture, finding in Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish” or Gary Snyder’s wilderness poems or Jerome Rothenberg’s ethnopoetics a return to the poem-as-ritual, to the personal voice as shamanistic agency. Similarly, qualities of confessionalism were taken as signs of a new non-institutional spirituality generated out of the intensity of private meditation. Ambivalence, which in Eliot is a sign of cultural malaise, is now viewed in John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, or Frank O’Hara as a sign of authenticity and being-in-the world. The evolution of highly personal notations which score the voice, the tradition of poetry readings, the ubiquitous presence of the tape recorder at performances—such developments are viewed as evidence of how the tightly controlled, rhetorical poem and the New Critics’ impersonal theory of art have given away to an art of the immediate and quotidian. This re-presencing, on the surface, looks like a return to romanticism and to a quest for a kind of natural or spiritual immanence. Robert Duncan’s remarks testify to this point: Central to defining the poetics I am trying to suggest here is the conviction that the order man may contrive or impose upon the things about him or upon his own language is trivial beside the divine order or natural order he may discover in them. (Fictive€81–82)

Such remarks are repeated in various ways by Duncan’s contemporaries, for whom the will to form is secondary to the response that form permits. Charles Olson distinguishes between language as “thought about the instant” in favor of language as “act of the instant” in arguing for a new gestural, phenomenological writing. This poetics of immanence, as Charles Altieri characterizes it, rejects the Symbolist-based aesthetics of modernism and stresses immediacy, enactment, and discovery. The modernist stress on formal strategies of arrangement, reliance on anthropological resources, use of complex ironies, tensions, and metaphors are all seen as the end of a trajectory extending from Kantian theories of creative imagination via Coleridge’s organicism to Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Eliot, and Pound. Postmodern poetry, in Altieri’s view, restores the belief in active ratios between what Wordsworth in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads called the “inherent and indestructible qualities of the human mind” and “the great and permanent objects that act upon it which are equally inherent and indestructible” (qtd. in Altieri 35). The artisanal aspect of poetry,

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reflected in Stevens’s “rage to order words of the sea,” gives way to an art that questions its own procedures as an element of the composition process. This reading of postwar poetry has been useful for summarizing a major aspect of the work of the 1950s and 1960s, but it tends to valorize one form of organicism over another. Where modernism depended upon the poem’s internal coherence—its principle of inner ordering and coherence—postmodernism emphasizes the poem’s temporality, its gradual forward-moving progress. This focus on temporality is reinforced by the application of existential hermeneutics in early issues of the journal boundary€2, in which a number of important essays interpreted Heidegger’s temporalizing of Being and his conception of discourse as dis-closure (aletheia) as an epistemological revolution congruent with postwar poetry.2 In the rarified atmosphere of Heidegger’s attack on Western onto-theological metaphysics is found the basis of projectivism and open-field verse, analogized to similar approaches to action painting and gestural abstraction in the visual arts. In this hermeneutic reading, the open-ended field poetry of Olson or Duncan, the tight, meditational confessions of Creeley, the talking pieces of David Antin, the personism of O’Hara, the aleatory experiments of Jackson MacLow, and the new oral impulse in Jerome Rothenberg or Allen Ginsberg present instances of a discourse that asserts the primacy of temporality. Against Joseph Frank’s concept of “spatial form” (the modernist poem’s aspiration towards the condition of visual art or sculpture), the new poetry emphasizes its author’s self-reflexive coming into awareness. Poetry does not build upon pre-arranged mythic, cyclic, or rhetorical underpinnings, nor does it presume a generalized, humanist thematics threatened by mass culture. The open-ended, processual style of contemporary poetry, in William Spanos’s terms, parallels Heidegger’s “hermeneutics of dis-covery in which a dis-closed temporality is given ontological priority over Being” (Being 422).3 That is, “being” is not grounded on some essence or ideal form; rather, it is discovered in time and, especially for Heidegger, in language as it is used to interrogate being in time. So long as we focus exclusively on the expressive features of recent poetry, such criticism provides a useful overview of at least one way that a personalist poetics could be historicized. The limitation of this approach is that it presents the contemporary poet as a passive recipient of a world, “thrown into being,” as Heidegger says. Because the poet inhabits the entire space of the poem there is no way to gain an ethical or moral perspective on reflective acts, and where the modernist poet could mediate cultural views through literary

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or mythic personae, the postmodern poet appears (often literally) naked and vulnerable. In an attempt to look beyond the detached modernist author, paring his fingernails, criticism has valued the explorative, self-conscious voice whose physical presence and ad hoc observations are scored directly into the poem. Frank O’Hara’s pseudo-manifesto, “Personism,” is the key defense of the latter. Such criticism works effectively with more lyric, meditational verse, but has had little to say about the more political and historical concerns of mid-century poets like Olson or Dorn—or, for that matter, Gary Snyder, Amiri Baraka, Robert Lowell, Galway Kinnell, Adrienne Rich, Sonia Sanchez, Denise Levertov, Muriel Rukeyser, George Oppen, and others for whom poetry is a critical art. Granted, such poets believe their historical concerns must grow out of local particulars (“There are things€/ We live among ‘and to see them€/ Is to know ourselves,’” George Oppen writes), but naming is not an end in itself€(163). Part of the reason for this avoidance of history in contemporary poetry criticism is contained in the cumbersome term “postmodernism” and its implied oedipal struggle with the previous era, a struggle made central in the writing of Harold Bloom. The very periodicity attacked by cold-war intellectuals reemerges in a term hamstrung by its own prefix; the new seems condemned to an infinite repetition of itself. To be “post” modern is to be redundant or at least in thrall to the previous generation. And the “ism” with which the term usually concludes implies a fixed body of critical principles and practices that, if the thesis of “openness” holds, contradicts the spirit of modernity in any era. To be of one’s times, or to “make it new” can hardly be bettered by a pre-€or a suf-fix. The complexity of what has been called “postmodern” is better described by what Paul de Man calls “modernity,” the continuous appeal of which is “the desire to break out of literature toward the reality of the moment” (162). But this disruptive gesture is futile since, as de Man continues, it “engenders the repetition and the continuation of literature. Thus modernity, which is fundamentally a falling away from literature and a rejection of history, also acts as the principle that gives literature duration and historical existence” (162). The term “postmodernism” is caught in a similar paradox: in its desire to be more present, it relies on the previous period for its definition and by this acknowledges its historical contingency. Might there be another optic by which the re-temporalizing of poetry can be seen that includes the historical without subsuming history in language’s infinite self-questioning? This is the task addressed, in different ways, by Olson and Dorn.

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Morning and Methodology: Olson and History When the term “postmodern” is used by Charles Olson, its implications are, paradoxically, archaeological and methodological: Therefore I find it awkward to call myself a poet or a writer. If there are no walls there are no names. This is the morning, after the dispersion, and the work of the morning is methodology: how to use oneself, and on what [emphasis added]. That is my profession, I am an archeologist of morning. And the writing and acts which I find bear on the present job are 1)€from Homer back, not forward; and 2)€from Melville on, particularly himself, Dostoevsky, Rimbaud and Lawrence. These were the modern men who projected what we are and what we are in, who broke the spell. They put men forward into the post-modern, the post-humanist, the post-historical, the going live present, the “Beautiful Thing.” (Collected Prose€206–7)

Olson’s gendered view of progress notwithstanding, the postmodern here is informed as much by pre-Homeric civilization as by modernists like Dostoevsky, Rimbaud, and Lawrence. Olson uses “archaeologist” to replace “poet,” indicating that his concerns are cultural as much as literary, spatial as much as aesthetic. And indeed he took his understanding of the postmodern from historians like Toynbee, who first used the term to describe the rise of mass society after World War I, and the anthropologist Ruth Benedict to whom, in a letter of 1945, he speaks of “reaching back and down in order to make sense out of now and to lead ahead” (Selected Letters 57). This double motion—digging down in order to “lead ahead”—is Olson’s continual theme in his attempt to get beyond an Enlightenment view of history as improvement in favor of a more dialectical model. But Olson cannot step outside of the historical view he attempts to modify. By spatializing history, by valorizing the primitive as a model for the contemporary, by conceiving his field of inquiry archaeologically, he resorts to a historicism more convivial to Eliot and Pound. To be post-historical or postmodern in Olson’s terms is to regard the present as “prologue” rather than the sum of past events. In other writings, Olson makes it clear that the “posthistorical” involves a qualitative change in the idea of history made possible by new developments in science. Quantum mechanics, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and Riemannian mathematics transform an earlier model of the world, based on static spatio-temporal categories, into one of variable and continuous processes. Such a change, congruent in Olson’s mind with that

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performed by Melville, Keats, and Rimbaud, altered the linear and/or discursive model of history to produce an “art of Space” which brings the individual in closer proximity to the material universe. It was up to Dorn, as I will indicate, to complete the movement toward critical reflection and analysis that Olson, in this preliminary remark, began. The central term in the above quotation is “methodology,” a word that Olson often uses to describe how historical understanding (“the work of the morning”) might be brought into alignment with language. It is Olson’s preferred term for poetics because it implies a discussion of ‘how’ as well as ‘what’ poetry might be. In an unpublished essay, he describes methodology in terms analogous to those in “Projective Verse,” which stress muscular, physiological ratios in language: Methodology, by displacing metaphysic, has enabled physicality and action to drive descriptive and narrative modes from the centerspot. So it should surprise none of us that the body—our own—is now base, and that our attentions are constantly corrected in terms of its imperatives—how best to put that in one word, kinetics, say? (qtd. in von Hallberg€214)

It is difficult to know exactly what Olson means by “descriptive and narrative modes” or how they limit “physicality and action.” Presumably this is his attack on various forms of positivism in favor of a more pragmatic or perspectival approach. Like William James in Pragmatism, Olson describes the difficulty of abstracting himself from the condition he encounters; his forms are inextricably linked with the kinetics of physical existence. One cannot step back from the multifarious forces that impinge on us at any given moment; rather, one must encounter reality through (and as) a “force field,” a phrase that Olson derived from contemporary physics and from Simone Weil.” 4 Using Whitehead as his source and quantum mechanics as his model for space, Olson seeks to develop a historical-poetic method that would not simply interpret the facts of history but that would exert an effect upon it. The task, as Robert von Hallberg has noted, is pedagogical: poetry as historical curriculum for compelling change (Charles Olson 1–4). A bibliography in a poem is still a bibliography that can be used. In this respect Olson is continuing Pound’s philological interests, and although the former shared none of the latter’s political or economic views, he agreed that his poem should have a demonstrable effect:

Archaeologist of Morningâ•… 129

. . . I compell

backwards I compell Gloucester to yield, to change

Polis

is this (Maximus 185)

“Polis,” Olson’s word for community, is a direct function of individual projects and agendas, not an idealized collectivity. In order to compel the town of Gloucester to change, it is necessary to turn the idea of community away from the aggregate (society, nation) back to the individual in his or her acts of perception. “Polis€/ is eyes.” The eyes that link citizen to world should also be the gauges for all historical investigation. The poet constantly returns to Herodotus’s use of the word “history” (istorin) to mean “finding out for oneself.” The poet’s series of lectures, “The Special View of History,” despairs over the loss of “that which is most familiar” and suggests that its recovery might be possible if we could adopt Keats’s “negative capability” as a way of escaping an instrumentalized, linear view of history. The immediate world has been abstracted by terms like “universe” or “fate” or “Man” as generalized tropes for the collective. Olson wants a return to the “human universe” whose discovery begins with an act of conjecture: The difficulty of discovery . . . is, that definition is as much a part of the act as is sensation itself, in this sense, that life is preoccupation with itself, that conjecture about it is as much of it as its coming at us, its going on. In other words, we are ourselves both the instrument of discovery and the instrument of definition. (Collected Prose 155)

In The Maximus Poems these mutually inclusive acts of discovery and definition are figured in the explorers, settlers, frontiersmen, and historians who use the evidence of their eyes to map a heretofore unknown territory. Olson inverts Keats’s poem “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” a poem in which the eyes are trained inward on a book and in which reading is compared to an explorer’s first sight of the Pacific Ocean. Olson revises Keats’s poem by writing an ode to America’s first mapmaker, Juan de la Cosa. “On First Looking Out Through Juan de la Cosa’s Eyes” recognizes that for Â�Colombus’s

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� cartographer, the eyes look outward; discovery of the New World defines and re-shapes the old: But before La Cosa, nobody could have a mappemunde (81)

Like the cartographer, seeing and charting an unknown continent from his offshore periplus, Olson maps American history according to a changing, impermanent record. If the record is faulty, the poet records the fact by correcting his poem—as he does in the prose preface to “Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 15”: It goes to show you. It was not the “Eppie Sawyer”. It was the ship “Putnam”. It wasn’t Christmas morning, it was Christmas night, after dark. And the violent northeaster, with snow, which we were all raised to believe did show Bowditch such a navigator, was a gale sprung up from W, hit them outside the Bay, and had blown itself out by the 23rd.€(71)5

In an earlier Maximus poem (“Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 2”), Olson had credited the navigator, Nathaniel Bowditch, with bringing the Eppie Sawyer to port through a difficult storm, but closer investigation revealed these facts to be otherwise, and these changes are recorded in the quotation above, including fragments from the historical record. The specifics are not perhaps of interest to us, but Olson’s gesture in correcting them is. He indicates that the process of reading history is always one of adjustment and refinement. The fact that such verification is recorded in the poem recognizes the historicity of the creative act engaging with the rhetoricity of historical writing. The first book of The Maximus Poems is filled with moments in which the study of history, particularly that connected with the settlement of Cape Ann in coastal Massachusetts, is tied to the activities of poetry. Like the ever-present seabird who makes its nest out of the detritus it finds along the tidal littoral, the poet creates his surroundings out of inconsequential materials that in themselves are inert but which, in the poet’s engagement with them, add up: “these€// make bulk, these, in the end, are€/ the sum” (5). The result is a redemptive moment of clarity and understanding:

This morning of the small snow

I count the blessings, the leak in the faucet

Archaeologist of Morningâ•… 131 which makes of the sink time, the drop of the water on water as sweet as the Seth Thomas in the old kitchen my father stood in his drawers to wind (always he forgot the 30th day, as I don’t want to remember the rent (18)

This “song” of Maximus begins as a celebration of simple things—the measure of life by small difficulties (“the leak in the faucet€/ which makes of the sink time”). But this variable measure, inspired by the dripping of the faucet, reminds the poet of an earlier time when the poet’s father would forget to wind the clock on rent day. The shift from the masculine, third-person pronoun to the reflective first person indicates that a father’s burden has become his son’s. The meditation eventually leads to one of his main themes: the dispossession of place by absentee ownership:

a house these days

so much somebody else’s, especially Congoleum’s (18)

Elsewhere in the book, Olson discusses “that first house,” built by the early settlers of Cape Ann which, under John Endecott, was moved to Salem to serve as the first governor’s mansion. The move is significant for Olson since it begins the long road toward American displacement and resettlement. Like his own “first house,” owned by Congoleum (a linoleum-like floor covering), this great early American dwelling did not become part of the soil on which it was built; instead, it served the needs of public authority. Olson’s animus in such poems is directed outward toward the Boston or New York–based banks, industrial fisheries, corporations, and advertising companies that destroy the primacy of local ownership and individual volition. The leaky faucet, whose drip establishes the counter-measure for this “song” of Maximus, creates time at odds with that of clocks that subordinate temporality to a rigid metric. Any attack on this subordination of process to

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chronometric time can be effective only as it is engaged with materials near to hand—the failure of the plumbing, for instance:

Or the plumbing

that it doesn’t work, this I like, have even used paper clips as well as string to hold the ball up╇ And flush it with my hand

But that the car doesn’t, that no moving thing moves

without that song I’d void my ear of, the musickracket of all ownership . . . (18)

Olson can deal with daily difficulties so long as he can fix them with his own hands, but when the house or car or fishery are owned by someone else, he has been displaced from what is most familiar. His senses have been invaded by the “musickracket€/ of all ownership,” a reference to the bland Muzak that was appearing in commercial venues during this period and which destroys one’s ability to hear the smallest noise—like the drip of the faucet. Olson states his concerns over absentee ownership in terms of poetics as well. “Projective Verse” attempts to bring the poetic line back to some ratio with the physiology and musculature of the poet. When verse is “owned” by a fixed metric or overall form, it too is cut off from its producer and loses its speech force. Attention to vowels as quantities, rather than regularized beats, and an awareness of the line as a register of intensity (tied, Olson feels, to the breath) maintain dynamic tensions equivalent to those which exist among objects. I have discussed the masculinist character of this physiological metaphor elsewhere (the body from which the poem extends is always, in Olson, phallic), but what is often overlooked is the “stance toward reality outside a poem” that comes under discussion in section II (Collected Prose 246).6 Here, the poetics of orality and physicality give way to what the poet calls “objectism,” an attitude toward the materiality of language and a reinforcement of the Â�poem’s relationship to other made things. By treating the poem as object, objectism intervenes in the residual dualism of Cartesian rationalism, a “getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the ‘subject’ and his soul, that peculiar presumption by which western man has interposed himself between what he is as a creature of nature (with certain instructions to carry out) and those other creations of nature which we may, with no dero-

Archaeologist of Morningâ•… 133

gation, call objects” (247). The purgation of the lyrical ego is necessary if the poet is to bring the materiality of the aesthetic and that of society together. Ed Dorn heard this advice loud and clear and made it an important feature of his revision of Olson’s poetics. The Literate Projector: Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger Olson’s pedagogical advice to Dorn on the subject of history was to “dig one thing or place or man until you yourself know more abt that than is possible to any other man. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Barbed Wire or Pemmican or Paterson or Iowa. But exhaust it. Saturate it. Beat it” (Collected Prose 306–7). Dorn took Olson’s advice to heart and began a lifelong study of the American West, from its discovery, settling, and expansion to its broader implications as a cultural, philosophical trope. Olson in his “Bibliography on America” had warned against the strict treatment of history as a series of events. The results of historical study are not “how much one knows but in what field of context it is retained and used” (Collected Prose 298). For the younger poet this meant studying the West in terms of its settlement and exploitation. Landscape, he learned from the cultural geographer Carl Sauer, is contingent upon human uses; the ultimate meaning of barbed wire lies in attitudes of containment and proprietorship that are as much a part of the West as was the eradication of native peoples. Dorn’s early poems meditate on these relationships between man and landscape in a relaxed, anecdotal style: the sky

is not

bigger in Montana. When for instance you come from Williston there seems at the border a change but it is only because man has built a tavern there. (Collected Poems 115)

The tavern delimits not only the demographic border; it alters the nature of space in general. Long poems like “The Land Below,” “Idaho Out,” “The Problem of the Poem for My Daughter Left Unsolved,” and “The North Atlantic

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Turbine,”’ all investigate this mediation of landscape by commercial interests. To this extent, Dorn echoes the work of cultural geographers like Edward Soja and David Harvey who, building on the work of Henri Lefebvre, revise Marxist historiography to stress the role of space in the reproduction of capital. In a work like “The Land Below,” the locale is the geographic west in which Dorn grew up. With “The North Atlantic Turbine,” however, the West becomes a general category for acquisition and greed. The theme of the poem, like that of Olson’s Maximus series, is the displacement of individuals by the “turbine” of global capitalism:

Movement

occurs at the split displacement is a sign We are told the signs are men. Men rot. Trade revolved and revolves it remains the turbine the atlantic turgidity defines still our small era (Collected Poems 187)

The short lines, prosaic language, and patterned accents provide an astringent surface for Dorn’s dystopic view. At times the poem suffers the fate of any public address—that of caricature and generalization. But “The North Atlantic Turbine” moves Dorn’s concerns with geography and place into a new dimension that was necessary for the creation of Gunslinger. From the rum and slave trades to munitions sales to the war in Vietnam, the swirling force of North Atlantic mercantilism widens; its ultimate result is a transformation of the individual from independent consciousness to an arbitrary classification: any man can’t understand what gravity is that he has an ordered and endlessly transferrable

place

(Collected Poems 182)

Archaeologist of Morningâ•… 135

The nature of this new dispensation—what we now call globalization— becomes the subject of Dorn’s comic epic, Gunslinger. The difference between it and his earlier work is one of mood and design. A cool, sardonic tone pervades the work, created mostly out of sixties drug argot, scientific formulas, newspeak, bureaucratese, cybernetics, and westerns. On the surface, Dorn’s comic vision suggests a rejection of Olson’s historical methodology, but humor is a primary agent of the poem’s debunking power, offering a way of turning signs and rhetorics of exploitation back upon themselves: Entrapment is this society’s Sole activity, I whispered and only laughter can blow it to rags (155)

The laughter in Gunslinger is never of the rollicking sort but resonates rather with the darker laughter of Swift or Burroughs.7 As for Dorn’s historical method, one must return to Olson’s belief in the generative aspects of content: that poetic form must arise directly out of the objects of one’s conjecture. Dorn realizes that the “space” that carried such atavistic force for Olson no longer exists as such. All space has become a function of entrepreneurial forces, and no self-sufficient, gestural language can serve as a bulwark. Dorn flattens narrative into a masque, creates twoÂ�dimensional characters, and uses the vernaculars of popular culture in order to record the state of space in the new West. Instead of Olson’s giant representative Man, modeled on Blake’s Albion or Jung’s Homo maximus, Dorn creates the Gunslinger/Slinger, part deity and part Howard Hughes, whose function in relation to space is to “buy Vegas and move it.” Olson’s poem is nostalgic for certain types of heroic early settlers and frontiersmen who knew the land and whose labor benefitted the general good. It is an epic of origins, an attempt to recover an early American hardihood from the wastage of modern life. There is no place in Gunslinger for such nostalgia or, on the other hand, for personal testimony of the type that occasionally occurs in The Maximus Poems: “I have had to learn the simplest things last.€/ Which made for difficulties” (56). What Dorn chronicles instead is the displacement of a self-conscious, ratiocinative ego who goes by the name of “I,” and who is killed off in the second book of the poem. In his early form, “I” asks questions, doubts Â�appearances and

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generally accepts the rigid logic of causality. When he “dies,” the Slinger preserves him “for a past reference” in a batch of lsd. This allegory of death and resurrection to a higher consciousness will be familiar to the generation raised in the 1960s, and the purgatory of the “autotheistic chemical” provides some of Dorn’s greatest satire of the 1960s counterculture. At a deeper level, Dorn records the transformation of the Logos as reason into a kind of transcendental printout analogous to the portability of all human endeavor. Tract homes, drive-in churches, credit cards, fast-food chains, and centrally controlled shortages eliminate any semblance of particularity or autonomy. That basic coefficient of all reflective metaphysics, the first-person pronoun, is the figure most vulnerable to such dispersion. Dorn revives him at the end of his poem as a secretary to the pre-Socratic philosopher, Parmenides. “I” has become a witness to the “inside real” as well as the “outside real,” a change that Olson earlier formulated by imagining the postmodern via the pre-classic€past. Dorn’s hero is the Slinger, a figure who combines the high-rolling style of robber barons like Jim Fisk and Daniel Drew with the detachment of the frontier marshal. He journeys perpetually towards Las Vegas in search of the “Inscrutable Texan” named Howard Hughes. The journey can never be completed since Vegas is a “vast decoy,” a mirage controlled by omni-present financiers. In fact, it is never quite clear whether or not the Slinger and Hughes aren’t part of the same person, participants in an unholy trinity which features the Slinger as Christ, Hughes as the Holy Ghost, and a sort of corporate captain named Robart as “Valfather of this Race.” Dorn does not make overt judgments about the morality of Hughes’s business dealings either; he is fascinated with the enormous power that such a figure controls and the eccentric behavior such power permits. That authority once reserved for mythical heros and demi-gods has been actualized in Hughes’s ability to assume disguises, change names, buy entire hotels (or chains of hotels), fly (and build) airplanes, and finance international warfare. His idiosyncracies, many of which form the events of the poem, are no more unusual than Achilles’s tantrums or Odysseus’s craftiness. Clearly Hughes’s power defies the laws by which ordinary citizens conduct their daily business and demands an entirely new view of history: The scenario is all Emanation The nesting ground of number There are no things there as such Material is a not with the K detached

Archaeologist of Morningâ•… 137 All is transhistorical, functions have no date . . . (96)

Because of this displacement of history onto functions, Dorn is able to imagine characters created out of the re-producible materials of the media. Besides the Slinger, there are Lil, the celluloid dance-hall madam; the Stoned Horse who, as “horsepower,” rides inside the stage; Kool Everything, a sixties acid freak; Dr. Flamboyant, technologist of “post-ephemeral” subjects; and a “heliocentric” bard whose songs provide interludes for the Slinger’s journey. These and other eccentrics are introduced along the way as characters in a masque or tapestry: This tapestry moves as the morning lights up. And they who are in it move from sleep to Idea born on the breathing of a distant harmonium, To See is their desire as they wander estranged through the lanes of the Tenders of Objects who implore this existence for a plan and dance wideyed provided with a schedule of separated events along the selvedge of time. (43)

In this passage Dorn announces his allegorical purpose: to narrate the tale of his group of earth wanderers as they penetrate the mercantile world (“Tenders of Objects”) and expose the “schedule€/ of separated events” or linear history. “Only celebrations concur” to these aliens, time having been fragmented and diffused according to the fluctuations of the market. The group moves along a northwesterly trail from Mesilla, New Mexico, through Truth or Consequences (the town that gave up its original name, Hot Springs, for the name

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of a quiz show) toward Las Vegas. Their destination is never reached, as I have said, and by the end of the book, they have traveled only as far as Four Corners, where the giant power plant stands as a dramatic symbol of landscape modification. The language of the poem breaks down as well. In the early books, Gunslinger develops a fairly consistent narrative centering around Lil’s saloon or, in Book II, Universe City. But in the later books, the language becomes increasingly hermetic. Characters lose their particular identities and assume the function of random voices, commenting archly upon the passing scene. Book III, for instance, consists of a series of cartoon dialogues that deal, among other things, with Pindar’s theory of light, the horse as personification of knowledge, the nature of poetic authority, the cosmic code known as “Sllab,” Olber’s paradox, game theory, the role of contingency in generation, and serial transmission. Each of these subjects is covered by a series of witty digressions that frame them as set pieces or monologues within the masque. In a world of such discontinuous communication, there is little need to complete a linear journey toward a discrete place. Each book of Gunslinger furthers the breakdown of this Vegas-bound teleology and concludes at the site of the Four Corner’s power plant, where money literally “speaks.” If the history of the West is the history of its exploitation, it must be told in a language fully aware of its own ephemerality. Just as the global dollar mediates relationships between human and place, so it affects the nature of the sign. The kind of total control exercised by Hughes produces a network of communication in which all messages may be accommodated. “No thing is omitted,” the Slinger observes. All particularity is neutralized into a grid of binary functions. Characters may comment, disparage, assess, celebrate, but they do not exchange ideas. When messages come from outside of their range, they appear as complex distortions of an anticipated clarity. Parmenides sends a letter announcing the incarnation of “Robart” written in computer programming code. Dr. Flamboyant communicates via the “Great Beenville Paradoxes” which mix Whiteheadian philosophy with drug jargon. The movements of Hughes are chronicled in an impossibly difficult “Cycle” (modeled on Parmenides “Proem”) that charts the effects of Robart’s “enchanted Wallet.” Each set piece is written in its own enclosed, discontinuous style, refusing even the most generous paraphrase. Dorn recognizes the extent to which information is codified and controlled; his manipulation of such codes mirrors a more insidious production of meta-language in the corporate and technological world.

Archaeologist of Morningâ•… 139

The breakdown of the sign and of its diachronic function is reflected through a number of philosophical themes that reappear throughout the book. The metamorphosis of “I” as rationalizing ego into the secretary to Parmenides represents the post-humanist movement of man as Subject to man as integer. The Slinger’s sidekick, the Stoned Horse, goes alternately by the names Heidegger and Levi-Strauss, two foremost critics of Cartesian rationalism and the two modern thinkers most likely to accompany the un-centered Slinger through a landscape of binary oppositions (being and time, raw and cooked). Parmenides becomes the cosmologist of the book since his metaphysical system rejects all laws of causality and change. Even the Gunslinger’s draw refutes the laws of causality: To eliminate the draw permits an unmatchable speed a syzygy which hangs tight just back of the curtain of the reality theater down the street, speed is not necessarily fast, Bullets are not necessarily specific. When the act is so self contained and so dazzling in itself the target then can disappear in the heated tension which is an area between here and formerly in some parts of the western world men have mistakenly called that phenomenology (30–31)

The ordinary Hollywood cowboy must draw his gun, aim, and fire at a target beyond him; the Slinger, on the other hand, relies on his ability to frame his opponent as a mere name, a “plain, unassorted white citizen”:

140â•… ap p r o ac hi n g t h e ne w a m er ic a n p o et ry If you have a name you can be sold you can be told by that name leave, or come you become, in short a reference . . . (32)

As such passages suggest, a primary thrust of Dorn’s satire is directed at structures that dissolve difference and distinction. Language has been transformed from a vehicle of personal communication and historical record into an arbitrary system, capable of justifying war, humanizing technology, and classifying data. Dorn embodies this new version of language through what he calls “The Literate Projector,” a sort of ultimate cybernetic weapon that proÂ� jects the idea behind the image, the text before the idea: the Literate Projector enables the user to fail insignificantly and at the same time show up behind a vocabulary of How It Is Shake a circus up and down put funny music next to Death Or document something about military containment and let woodchucks play the parts . . . (77)

Given the fact that this poem was written at the height of the Vietnam War, one might say that the Literate Projector was already in service in justifying death by playing “funny music” to drown out the sound of war. Gunslinger exposes the mentality by which such systems work but does so within the language available to the projector. Dorn cannot get outside the language of containment by posing a transcendental principle or primordial archetype. The Slinger exists within the sign system of the Hollywood western. Unlike Maximus, whose virtues exist in fully inhabiting the historical present, the Slinger is a timetraveler, a deconstructing ironist. By refusing to ground history in dynastic succession (as in Pound) or in an archetype of self-reliance (as in Olson), Dorn charts the condition of history and time in the period of late capitalism. The

Archaeologist of Morningâ•… 141

poem in its complex use of codes (cybernetic, scientific, cultural) becomes a “language cleaner,” an example and, at the same time, a critique of language mediated by commercial interests. No doubt Olson must have felt somewhat abandoned by Dorn’s poem. Where Olson deplores the incursion of commercialism into small-town America, Dorn seems to celebrate its surfaces, finding in advertising slogans, celebrity biographies, and conspiracy theories a kind of enchanted rhetoric. It is through a close reading of Olson that Dorn is permitted to develop the necessary tone and structure of Gunslinger. Olson had encouraged a method of historical investigation that would implicate the poet/historian in the moment. He had no use for the generalized cultural despair of an Eliot or Pound. Rather, he encouraged his students to “search for a methodology by which each person in the class, by acts of writing and critique .€.€. may more and more find the kinetics of experience disclosed—the kinetics of themselves as persons as well as the stuff they have to work on,” a remark that appeared in a bulletin for Black Mountain College in 1952 (“The Act” 28). Edward Dorn, who arrived at the college around that time, interpreted such remarks in his own terms, taking the West that he saw in his own experience and exposing the systems by which it is incorporated into a nation’s imagined community. The method he chose was to write a comic epic out of the perishable materials of commercial life while retaining a distinct sense of how those materials may be reÂ�combined for historical critique. If, as some cultural critics of the 1970s claimed, the characteristic definitions of postwar writing include its avoidance of claims to truth and value or that it provides only a new form of romantic immanence, poems like The Maximus Poems and Gunslinger provide a significant alterative.8 They indicate a sustained interest in history and the possibilities of social critique within—not beyond—a radically innovative poetics. Olson’s greatest lesson to future poets was an active engagement with the present moment, utilizing a language engaged with its social context. Olson, as a former operative for Roosevelt’s New Deal, may have become disillusioned with party politics after the failure of the Henry Wallace campaign, but he never lost his belief in the importance of engagement with the here and now. If Dorn was skeptical of engagement as the last Enlightenment ruse, he wrote with a pen dipped in the bitter ink of Dryden and Swift. Dorn understood that in order to fulfill Olson’s pedagogical demand to “dig one thing or place or man” he had to first deconstruct the terms for “place” and “man” upon which historical method is based.

b 6

“The ╯ Repeated Insistence” Creeley’s Rage

“My ╯ Life Had Stood—a Loaded Gun—” For W.C.W. The rhyme is after all the repeated insistence. There, you say, and there, and there, and and becomes just so. And what one wants is what one wants, yet complexly as you say. Let’s let it go. I want— Then there is— and, I want. (273)1

T

his homage to William Carlos Williams would seem to contain many of those values that we identify with Robert Creeley’s early poetry. The pattern of monosyllabic words and heavily enjambed lines establishes a char-

“The Repeated Insistence”â•… 143

acteristic halting, broken rhythm that embodies the conflicted processes of assertion and qualification at the heart of the poem. The preponderance of function words—conjunctions, articles, prepositions—foregrounds the linguistic basis of assertion and exposes the device of rhyme as a provisional attempt to ground meaning in sounded equivalence. Provisional because the rage to order desire in language endlessly results in failure. Instead of finding continuity among like sounds, repetition only signals the persistence of absence. In order to emphasize the fatal dependence of words on the spaces they attempt to contain, Creeley repeats the phrase complexly: “And€/ what one wants is€/ what one wants.” The phrase rhymes, sure enough, but by repeating one as the complement of the other, Creeley evacuates the telos of desire—the desired object or person—and substitutes instead the emptiness, the “difference,” that is desire’s ontology. The nature of wanting is wanting, or as he says in “The Language,” “I heard words€/ and words full€/ of holes€/ aching” (283). If the nature of rhyme is “repeated€/ insistence,” to recognize it as such means that there can never be exact equivalence. Like Kierkegaard’s repetition, to understand that something has come round again is to acknowledge its difference from the inaugural occasion: “to look at it is more€/ than it was” (125).2 Creeley’s debt to Williams is evident here in the economy of the language but also in the emphasis on a certain erotic violence implied in any attempt to fix or organize repetition. The more the poet attempts to secure a place (“There, you say, and€/ there, and there”) the more the desired place becomes a function of speech acts enlisted in its pursuit. It’s not “there” but “There, you say,” and saying makes it so. As Charles Altieri points out in a brilliant reading of the poem, the twin impulses here—a rage for order and a commitment to flux— cannot be resolved: “Real desire .€.€. is not cyclic but durational and hence linear or spiral; it moves toward change, not repetition” (184). What seems like an attempt to spatialize desire through verbal equivalence—rhyme—is reestablished as temporal deferral. Because “there” can only function in a deictic relation to a subject, it exists as a mark of desire not as a final resting place. In the Heideggerian language by which Creeley’s early reception was cast, being is “there” in the temporal process of speaking, thinking, questioning. This cursory reading of “For W.C.W.” rhymes with a good deal of Creeley criticism in its emphasis on place, presence, and the speculative mind. The Stevensian oxymoron that I have deployed—“the maker’s rage to order words of the sea”—seems appropriate for poems of the 1950s and 1960s, in which reflective acts are often contained within tight, rhetorical boundaries.3 As such

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the violence of “insistence” is tempered by self-reflexivity; repetition compulsion becomes rhyme. What is left out of my reading, and that of a good deal of Creeley criticism, is the “rage” in the “rage for order,” the insistence that troubles repetition. As his various interviews, biographical accounts, and memoirs testify, Creeley was subject to numerous fits of rage and anger throughout his life and these make their way into the poems. After an evening of intense conversation, often fueled by drinking, he would turn to his interlocutor and lash out, sometimes resulting in a fight and, in several cases, a night in jail. He explains these moments as attempts to push the moment to its crisis: But my dilemma, so to speak, as a younger man, was that I always came on too strong to people casually met .€.€. I tended to go for broke with particular people .€.€. I just wanted to—I found myself absorbing their way of speaking. I just wanted to get in them, literally, to be, to be utterly with them. And some people, understandably, would feel this pretty damned exhausting to have someone thus hanging, you know, like coming at you .€.€. I mean everything was so intense and thus was involved always with tension, and that my way to experience emotion was to tighten it up as much as possible€.€.€. (Contexts 146)

It hardly needs to be said that alcohol consumption must be included in the poetics of rage, especially in talking about poets of the 1950s and 1960s and, while that may explain certain kinds of behavior, it doesn’t describe the form that rage takes in the poems. The characteristic qualifications and rephrasing in the quote above testify to Creeley’s desire to “get it right,” to tighten and exhaust language until it registers emotion by its sheer vulnerability. Why is the poetics of rage so difficult to talk about? Does rage have a language, and what pressures does it impose on the lyric form? Is there an aesthetics of rage or is it a subset of that larger discussion of the sublime? Although we have many examples of poetic rage—from Oedipus and King Lear to “Daddy” and “Black Dada Nihilismus”—we have few theoretical models for affective states whose basis, after all, is the inadequacy of expression.4 Unlike anger or fear, which have a noble philosophical and aesthetic lineage going back to Aristotle, rage has no object. In Sianne Ngai’s terms it is an “ugly feeling” that, like envy or anxiety, is “explicitly amoral and noncathartic, offering no satisfactions of virtue, however oblique, nor any therapeutic or purifying release. In fact, most of these feelings tend to interfere with the outpouring of other emotions” (6–7). Ngai differentiates such feelings in terms of their temporality, pointing out that rage, which occurs momently, differs from ugly feelings

“The Repeated Insistence”â•… 145

like envy and paranoia which have a “remarkable capacity for duration.” But it is the suddenness of rage, its inexplicable rise and sudden detumescence (the phallic association, as we will see, is particularly apt in Creeley’s case) that marks its deviation from most discussions of affect. My reference to the phallic implications of rage leads me to consider the significant body of recent scholarship that attempts to historicize male anger in the postwar period. These accounts focus on a crisis in masculinity in two distinct areas. The first, advanced by Robert Corber, Chris Breu, David Savran, Kaja Silverman, and bell hooks, has focused on the impact of World War II on gender roles through the emergence of women and racial minorities into the workforce. We might call this White Man (or Hipster) in the Gray Flannel Suit Panic. The second refers to a more recent diagnosis by Susan Faludi and others, for whom workplace and civil-rights gains by women and minorities during the 1960s and a concomitant downsizing of industry in the 1970s and 1980s have produced a backlash among males. We might call this Affirmative Action Panic. Both of these accounts describe, in general terms, a largely class-€and race-based gender trouble deriving from changes in the U.S. economy and shifting gender roles in the workplace, both blue and white collar. While these accounts may explain masculine anger in a good deal of cold-war cultural production—from film noir and the hard-boiled detective novel to The Simpsons and Fight Club—they describe a crisis in which feminization has become unmoored from traditional gender roles and now threatens to invade previously masculine domains. Heterosexual masculinity’s invisibility within the dominant culture has suddenly become visible, and it is now forced to vie against women, queers, and racial minorities for rights once taken for granted.5 Creeley’s rage is less directed at the threat of feminization than at the limits of masculine roles that constrain him but which he feels obliged to perpetuate: What should the young man say, because he is buying Modess? Should he blush or not. Or turn coyly, his head, to one side . . . (135)

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As I have said elsewhere, this poem stages a crisis for a “young man” of Creeley’s generation over the proper attitudes to adopt toward a feminine sphere within which he is increasingly becoming a consumer and participant.6 His impatience at these constraints leads to bad behavior in his personal life but, more importantly, rhetorical excess around perceived limits of social normalization. In this respect he is often closer to women poets of his generation—Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton are the obvious models—for whom poetry becomes a form of textual acting out around the limits of restrictive subject positions. A less historical but more philosophically suggestive analysis of these phenomena can be found in Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” which, although it deals with a different humor from our sanguinary focus, describes the etiology of rage in the psychic history of loss.7 Freud describes mourning as a reaction “to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as fatherland, liberty, an ideal and so on” (164). Freud differentiates the process of mourning, which detaches libidinal investment in the lost person or object until it can be put to rest, from melancholia, which is unable to resolve feelings around loss, leading to an ongoing engagement with its effects. This lack of validation prompts a set of accusatory and self-flagellating responses, an “impoverishment of [the] ego on a grand scale” that Freud saw as pathological (167). It matters little whether the melancholic’s self-abasement has any justification but that he feels correct in describing his condition. Most important in relation to Creeley’s situation is Freud’s observation that one cannot in the end avoid the impression that often the most violent of [his selfaccusations] are hardly at all applicable to the patient himself, but that with insignificant modifications they do fit someone else, some person whom the patient loves, has loved or ought to love. (169)

In this formulation Freud understands that negative attitudes about the loved one are transferred onto oneself. The ego is divided, one part standing outside and looking critically at the other part as an object. As I will point out, Creeley’s rage often takes precisely this form of splitting, the “I” and “he,” divided to represent the Subject as both self and accuser. Melancholia is seldom directed at a specific individual but at a side of oneself that must obviously concur with the putative accuser—as if to say, “because I have acted badly; you have every right to feel about me the way you do. Let me count the ways.” I am not saying that Creeley was depressed over a specific loss—although

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one might make a case for several significant losses in his younger life: his father at age four, his left eye at age two, his stepdaughter, Leslie, in 1961, as well as the failure of his marriage to his first wife, Ann—but that his inability to detach himself from such losses controls his sense of complicity and provokes a violent reaction, both at himself and others. The misogyny behind many of these outbreaks notwithstanding, it is worth noting that if melancholia confronts loss it also testifies to what remains, what “repeated insistence” cannot be put to rest. The accusation in many of his early poems is directed at the wife or lover, but because the angry address lacks any justification, its force is reabsorbed by the accuser. And while this recursive feature of anger may not mitigate misogyny, it tempers the unidirectional attack on the woman. The inability to resolve loss in melancholia can, contra Freud, be generative because it seizes hold, as Walter Benjamin says of history, “of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (255).8 Retaining this danger is part of the work of melancholy, as it is of poetry, making visible not the lost object but the effect of loss on the subject. Creeley often figures the danger as a hole or pit that, as he says in “Anger,” he “fills .€.€. with himself ” (306).9 The hole of loss, this unexpressible pit of loneliness, may also be the ground by which lost objects may be recovered, in which what seems irrevocably lost can be the basis for new representations. One reason why it is difficult to speak of Creeley’s rage is that it challenges a widely held view of him as self-conscious quester, the unsure egoist negotiating a set of antithetical terms within a tight lyric frame: What I understood, I understand. My mind is sometime torment, sometimes good and filled with livelihood, and feels the ground. (199)

In order to resolve the conflict of psychic torment and redemptive ground, he often resorts to systems of classification, rituals of organization and naming that promise a schematic order.10 In its mock-romantic version, the poet figures himself as a kind of Quixote or Childe Harold on a quest for the beloved. This mock-heroic scenario is flanked by a more familiar domestic frame: Yet I ride by the margin of that lake in the wood, the castle,

148â•… a p p ro ac hi n g t h e new a m e r ic a n p o e t ry and the excitement of strongholds, and have a small boy’s notion of doing good. Oh well, I will say here, knowing each man, let you find a good wife too, and love her as hard as you can. (168)

As we know from other Creeley poems, the word “knowing” must be approached with skepticism. The hero of the early poems claims to know himself, but because he is always talking, he cannot attend to his interlocutor. Rather, he rides by the “margin of that lake” and has a “small boy’s notion of doing good.” This self-mocking posture deflates any claims to heroic agency and diverts responsibility for action from the speaker onto a narrative code that precedes and organizes all agency. But there is a dark side to these lines represented in the final couplet. What poses as a kind of resignation to marriage is accompanied by a recognition of one’s complicity in its failure. It is one thing to desire the fair maiden and even mock the form of one’s desiring, but quite another to “love her as hard as you can.” The transition from small boy to knowing man, from quest romance to domestic agon, is actually no wider than a stanza break. Creeley anatomizes the romantic myth of participation by subjecting it to his own condition and, most important, to his own exculpatory rhetoric. As long as he can maintain a certain posture of ironic self-mockery he is saved from the darker meanings on the lake’s margins. “To € Foe of His—I’m Deadly Foe—” The lines from Emily Dickinson that I am using to title the sections of this chapter articulate a strong link between the two poets and the ways their lyrics negotiate anger. The lines express how both poets see “new Englandly,” as Dickinson called it, and how the long shadow cast by Calvinist doctrines of original sin continues to work its effects. Creeley often figures himself as forged in the smithy of Puritan preachers and country doctors (like his father)—for whom the virtues of self-denial and reticence are the models of moral rectitude. The poet’s modesty, his concern for a well-ordered desk and household, the importance attached to locale and place—these are all components of his Puritan imaginary that, in Dickinson’s hands, becomes a kind of Calvary in

“The Repeated Insistence”â•… 149

which “Renunciation—is a piercing Virtue” (365). But I use Dickinson as well because, like Creeley, her work often explodes with unexpected rage for which there seems to be no motivation. Feminists have explained Dickinson’s poetics of rage as a response to a patriarchy that surrounded her, like her father’s Amherst house, and whose lineaments she often adopted when she wanted to represent power. To seize the Phallus is to become complicit in its authoritarian regime, leading to self-accusations: “To foe of His—I’m deadly foe” (369). When Dickinson speaks from the standpoint of a loaded gun in poem 754 she understands the destructive consequences—and limits—of power defined in masculine terms. As active agent, she is “foe” to the objects of male wrath but because, as a woman, she is also such an object, she becomes a foe to herself. Far from escaping the self-lacerating implications of seizing the name of the Father, Dickinson’s poem incurs their destructive force as a performative gesture. Creeley’s most famous version of the self divided against itself is “I Know a Man,” a poem in which the claim of the title and the homosocial union it promises is gradually undermined as the poem proceeds. What often saves the unsure egoist in poems from For Love is a winning modesty and self-irony in the face of confusion. In other poems, we witness him “in the ridiculous posture of renewal” stumbling after the Lady who has “always moved on to the next town” (200). And in another well-known poem from For Love, the love lyric is qualified by the “counter stress” that love brings: The Warning For love—I would split open your head and put a candle in behind the eyes. Love is dead in us if we forget the virtues of an amulet and quick surprise. (140)

The opening quatrain’s unsettling trope announces love in its most abject form, divorced from any actual person and focused, instead, on the risk Â�attendant to giving oneself to another.11 This lyric contra lyricism maintains

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the wonder and shock of love’s emergence by retaining its alienating features. The rhyme of “eyes” and “surprise” brings the twin forces by which the lover is conceived—as the site of renewal and inspiration but also as a Halloween pumpkin head that alarms and discomfits. Like the amulet that contains the godhead in microcosm, the poem enacts its own rupture of that revery D. H. Lawrence called “making love to music.” But also like the amulet, the poem serves as a verbal icon, resolving the twin forces of desire and violence in a single—if startling—trope. With Words (1967), however, a change occurs; the verbal icon gives way to the problematics of representation. Creeley attempts to write, as he says, “from inside the emotion” without any barriers (Clark 65). Poems such as “Anger, “A Form of Women,” “One Way,” “Hole,” and others seem to court violence by presenting it in its most naked form: I wanted to kill her. I tried it, tentatively, just a little hurt. Hurt me. (341) I scream, I sing such as is given to me, roaring unheard (292) I club people in my mind I push them this way, that way, from the little way (324)

“The Repeated Insistence”â•… 151

A poetics of rage lacks critical distance and so ventriloquizes the most barren of social idiolects—the adolescent taunt, the confession, the graffito. The absence of object or person produces a language detached from any ontological ground; it pushes and cajoles, demanding recognition while lacking credibility. How can we tell the scream from the song? In contrast to Creeley’s minimalist confessions, the rhetoric in Sylvia Plath’s poems of rage (written during the same period) takes the form of over-elaboration, as if the act of finding figures for rage undermines the sufficiency of any individual one: There’s a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through. (224)

Unlike Creeley, Plath creates a persona whose childlike rhetoric and taunt embody the infantalized perspective from which the absent father is last seen. By creating a voice for her anger, Plath negotiates the unbridgeable gap between the adult woman and the bereft child, for whom the possibility of actual address has been denied. In “Daddy” the conflation of father with Dracula and other figures of threat (Hitler, S.S. officer, ghastly statue) allows her to dramatize the inadequacy of any adequate register of affect, opening the way to an endless stream of empty accusations (who are the townspeople, what did they know about him, by whose account?). The tension Plath creates by piling up image upon image, Creeley erases, leaving the agon of confession without objective correlative. His abjection demands to be witnessed by the reader yet requires, at the same time, a degree of compassion. He attacks, but then quickly retreats, hoping that he can turn sadistic pleasure into masochistic remorse. What seems to drive Creeley’s pleasure in self-mortification is his understanding of the banality of rage. In a lecture at the New College of San Francisco in 1991, Creeley describes anger as something utterly ordinary: “So, we go back to the fact that presumably anger—you know, sudden, violent outbreak—is at least a familiar if not a commonplace disposition” (Clark 95). To illustrate this fact he provides an anecdote about a horrible murder of a mother by her psychotic daughter. In an attempt to contain her daughter’s

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Â� violent Â�outbursts, the mother had rigged a wired enclosure or cage within the house, but the daughter somehow gained possession of a pair of scissors that she used to stab her mother through the wire. Creeley asks is that the imagination—is that the providence necessary within the commonplace? That having anger is the only system that can quote “deal with” the commonplace of anger? A system that overcomes it and confronts it with an absolute confinement and€/ or itself simply becomes adversarial and violent and wipes it out with an equal act? Then who cages that person? (Clark€95)

He might be speaking of himself. The cage is both within and without or, as Foucault observes of the panopticon, the position of being the object of surveillance and control is internalized so that the captive is made docile by his incorporation of the captor’s gaze. Yet as Creeley suggests, both agents are contained within the “commonplace of anger.” As I have said, Creeley often finds himself caged within gender roles over which he has no control. He has been forthcoming about the sources of his own rage, attributing a good deal of his anxiety about roles to growing up in a family of women, his father having died when he was a child: My father being dead, I didn’t know what the forms were. How did you be a man? You know, immediately I thought, “Gee, am I really going to be, not stuck with, but is it my life to sit with the girls?” And I thought, “Well, I certainly feel at home with the girls. And I dig their emotional condition because it’s been my life.” Growing up with five women in the house, man, I knew all the signs and gestures and contents, or at least I know a lot of them that were manifest in women’s conduct. Ways of saying things, ways of reacting, making the world daily. But I didn’t have a clue as to what men did€.€.€. (Contexts 148)

In The Island, Creeley gives one version of how he learned “what men did”: But fighting, often he was afraid. Deliberately he lost his temper, knowing it would carry him, make him brave. He raged, as his grandfather had taught him in some way to. Was it the sound of the voice only? The old man had died shouting, swearing, impatient. And yet he had been also quiet, so quiet, locked in a weary stillness.€.€.€. You have to stand up for yourself. And that was clear enough. He had to. If he was frightened, still he had to. In this family there was nothing else to do but that, his mother, his sister, all of them the same. There was no man now but him. His

“The Repeated Insistence”â•… 153 mother was gentle with him, and she understood, he thought, but he had to as she knew. You have no father, John, but I know he would have been proud of you. If he could see you take it, stand up for your rights, hit back when you have to. Don’t start it but don’t let them run over you. (Collected Prose€150)

This passage needs to be situated against the novel as a whole, in which the main character, John, is facing the breakdown of his marriage on an island in Spain—a variation on Creeley’s early life with his first wife in Mallorca. But their marital struggles are an extension of John’s early education into the rituals of masculinity. Growing up in a household of women provides the backdrop in which John/Robert must negotiate the empty space vacated by the father. The oedipal drama staged here between absent father and son is acted out in many of Creeley’s poems and fictions as the other side of Puritanism. Lacking a sign of God’s grace (or father’s approval), the son establishes authority by striking out, imitating the Law of the Father and taking on its vestments: “To foe of His—I’m deadly foe—.” “Pain—Has ╯ an Element of Blank—” When I spoke earlier of rage as inhabiting a kind of speechlessness, I had in mind poems from Words like “Anger,” in which the attempt to work out the terms of guilt and loss evacuates words of their referential function. Whatever prompts the emotion is so thoroughly imbricated in the language by which it is contained that there is literally no separation between word and event, a fact that differentiates Creeley from the confessionalists with whom he was initially confused. “Anger” begins, characteristically enough, in a domestic space where the speaker has achieved a kind of peace: The time is. The air seems a cover, the room is quiet. She moves, she had moved. He heard her. The children sleep, the dog fed, the house around them.

154â•… a p p ro ac hi n g t h e new a m e r ic a n p o e t ry is open, descriptive, a truck through the walls, lights bright there, glaring, the sudden roar of its motor, all familiar impact as it passed so close. He hated it. (305)

The poem opens in a deceptive calm. The tidy normalcy of the domestic scene (“The children€/ sleep, the dog fed”) is shattered by the sudden intrusion of a truck’s roar outside the house, leading the poet to respond, “He€/ hated it.” At this point we have no way of knowing what the pronoun refers to—the truck, the home that the speaker shares with the woman, the woman herself. The poem avoids naming the condition that has given rise to this sudden burst of anger. It seems that the attempt to contain things has produced its own antithesis: He is angry. His face grows—as if a moon rose of black light, convulsively darkening, as if life were black. It is black. It is an open hole of horror, of nothing as if not enough there is nothing (306)

Creeley often imagines nothingness as a hole—a zero, a vagina, a mouth— that promises sensual relief yet mocks the satisfaction it implies. Here, how-

“The Repeated Insistence”â•… 155

ever, the hole seems to be the ground of subjectivity itself, an emptiness that is both self-created (he exists outside of it) yet which is filled with himself (he is the object of his creation). As in many poems from Words, Creeley separates himself from himself, speaks from both subjective and objective viewpoint:

A hole

for anger and fills it with himself, yet watches on the edge of it, as if she were not to be pulled in . . . (306)

The feminine pronoun is made complicit with the masculine—as though the hole of solipsistic rage contains two persons: the aggrieved self and the object of that disaffection. In “Anger,” Creeley understands that the vacancy that holds anger is self-created, forcing him to seek some object or quality that would characterize its impact: Is there some odor which is anger, a face which is rage. I think I think but find myself in it. The pattern is only resemblance. I cannot see myself but as what I see, an object but a man, with lust for forgiveness,

156â•… a p p ro ac hi n g t h e new a m e r ic a n p o e t ry raging, from that vantage, secure in the purpose, double, split. (307)

The problem with anger is that there is no vantage from which it can be assessed. In his “lust for forgiveness” he continually forgets the person whom he solicits and sees only himself staring back: “The pattern€/ is only resemblance.” Here is repetition compulsion with a vengeance, the Cartesian reflective ego facing the dead end of thinking, not as proof of being but as mirror of its own insufficiency. Nor can rage be thought. Thinking of rage repeats itself: “I think I think€/ but find myself in it.” It is clear from these lines that the speaker is suffering from a burden of guilt, has “a lust for forgiveness,€/ raging.” and that from this vantage he is “double, split” between his former self and his current, abject version. By the end of the poem, Creeley’s confusion over act and object, subject and object, guilt and repression, is seen as a desire to stave off death. In the final lines, the melancholic’s self-division—accuser and object—can no longer sustain the burden of mortality. All of this pronominal play in the poem turns out to be a hedge against the silences to come: All you say you want to do to yourself you do to someone else as yourself and we sit between you waiting for whatever will be at last the real end of you. (309)

Masochism is acted out as sadism; the melancholic who lashes out at the other is, in fact, attempting to ward off a future loss. Desire for self-punishment is directed onto the other who poses as oneself. Yet the pronominal play is not over yet; “we sit between you€/ waiting for whatever will€/ be at last the real end of you.” What Creeley has posed throughout the poem as a drama of self and other turns out to be a memento mori for the end of language, the ability to name the other as distinct from oneself.

“The Repeated Insistence”â•… 157

“Like ╯ Eyes that Looked on Wastes—” When subjected to a poem like “Anger,” Creeley’s oft-repeated Poundian leitmotifs—“only emotion endures,” “nothing counts save the quality of emotion”—extend the possible meaning of affect into distinctly unsettling realms. As readers we become implicated in the poem’s contrasting gestures of rage and abasement. “Anger” is an unpleasant poem—perhaps an unreadable one—but it forces us to ask whether we can accommodate rage, trauma, bad behavior, narcissism, acting out—not only in our theories of the lyric but in our social behavior. A society that relishes the bad-boy exploits of Robert Lowell or Dylan Thomas, nevertheless wants poems of excess to scan (“Rage, rage against the dying of the light”). The problem lies less in the poem’s containment through rhyme or the rhetoric of reflection (“I think I think”) but in the social negativity such work implies. The poetics of rage implicates a world over which we have no control, over forms of community that fail to solidify or unite: “The rage€// is what I€/ want, what€/ I cannot give€/ to myself, of€/ myself, in€/ the world” (309). We could read such lines as a version of romantic dejection, the poet alienated from friends and lovers, the very memory of them transforming the moment’s anomie. We could also read them as a warning about the dangers of conceiving desire strictly in personal or psychological terms, as a problem that the poet must work out through the poem. Rather we could see these lines as expressing that which cannot be controlled in the world’s terms. A poetics of rage acts on the world, not within its terms. It may be for this reason that Olson called Creeley “the figure of Outward,” to mark his willingness to force introspection beyond himself.12 Consideration of Creeley’s rage permits us to question the limits of seeing affect in strictly expressive terms and to regard emotion in terms of what it produces. Sianne Ngai wonders about the “critical productivity” of ugly feelings like rage or anger—can they be enlisted to expand the category of aesthetic emotions beyond those of pity and terror associated with tragedy (in Aristotle) and the sublime (in Kant and Burke)? Ngai sees anger as serving “therapeutic” functions in art, but Creeley’s rage clearly operates according to a different modality, one that leads not to purgation but to further abjection. What, in Ngai’s terms, does such repetition compulsion “produce”? I have spoken of rage in terms of social negativity, the degree to which such emotions mark a distance—often through irony or idiolect—from a given collective or social agency. Ngai rightly warns against reducing dysphoric affects to “mere

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expressions of class ressentiment” (3), and yet this seems one important function that Creeley’s rage serves in exposing the limits of certain class-defined masculine roles. His adoption of various postures of abasement—the small boy, the failed hero, the reluctant consumer—are all gestures for white masculinity to assume in situations of crisis. When such gestures are ultimately found inadequate, then the rage begins. What limits Creeley’s later poetry is its thinning of the affective palette to more monochrome versions of the householder, husband, father, and elder poet. In short, his lyrics are no longer disturbing because they have become reconciled to things as they are. The poet is at last at home in the world he previously found so uncanny. Rage, in his early and middle-period works, testifies to what such reconciliation fails to accomplish, what seeing through the window of New England proprieties occludes. The “repeated€/ insistence” of a man pounding his fist on a table is also a kind of measure.

b 7

A Cold War Correspondence Gender Trouble in the Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov Bending the Bow I’d been in the course of a letter—I am still in the course of a letter—to a friend, who comes close in to my thought so that the day is hers. (Bending the Bow 7)

R

obert Duncan was often “in the course of a letter” to that friend—Denise Levertov—and their collected correspondence shows just how often each poet’s letters bled into poems and poems into letters. Duncan’s address to Levertov was profound, if problematic: You stand behind the where-I-am. The deep tones and shadows I will call a woman. The quick high notes . . . You are a girl there too,

having something of sister and of wife,

inconsolate, and I would play Orpheus for you again,

recall the arrow or song



to the trembling daylight



from which it sprang.

(7–8)

In this first poem of Bending the Bow, Levertov is centrally placed, both as a mythopoeic Eurydice to Duncan’s Orpheus, but also as bearer of the martial

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bow to the strings of his Orphic lyre. Duncan would descend to Hell to “recall” Levertov to her proper (poetic) sphere through his critique of her antiwar activism. But like Orpheus he would lose her by turning back to reify his friend into a demonic Ka¯lı¯, “whirling her necklace of skulls” and “trampling the despoiling armies and the exploiters of natural resources€/ under her feet” (Ground Work 49). Duncan recognized the extent to which his “where-I-am” is female, but when Levertov challenged his view of that feminine presence, his entire projection was unsettled. As his anima (in conversation Duncan wickedly placed the emphasis on the last syllable), Levertov would ultimately express animus at being fixed into roles—adept, disciple, Eurydice—and would seek a divorce from the Jungian dyad. In the powerful duplicity of Duncan’s figure for America at war—a Heraclitean bow that is both conflict and music—this relationship found its creative ground and foundered on that same ground. Although the close relationship between Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov is part of the history of postwar poetry, the depth of that relationship is revealed especially vividly in their correspondence, published in 2004 by Stanford University Press. Containing nearly five hundred letters written over a span of thirty years, this collection testifies to the sustaining love and creative respect that each felt for the other. Both used correspondence as a sounding board for their evolving poetics, framing their affections and disaffections with the work of fellow poets as a way of distinguishing their own practices. Their close attention to praxis—to the making and revision of poems at an almost microscopic level—is revelatory. Their readings of each other’s works—sometimes line by line, or even word by word—provide invaluable commentary, and their responses to the commentary often include equally important bibliographical information. Especially when their contention over the Vietnam War surfaces, the letters provide important insight into how each negotiated the conflicting claims of social activism and formal innovation. The story told by these letters can be read on several levels. At the first level is a narrative of two major poets of the postwar period, the gestation of their poetics, their debts to the Pound/Williams tradition, their domestic and personal formations. At a second level, the correspondence is a chronicle of gender politics in the second half of the twentieth century. Both poets began by adopting a familiar 1950s master/adept role, coded masculine/feminine, that changed through the crucible of the Vietnam War and the rise of the women’s movement of the late 1960s. This imbrication of gender and cold-war politics

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provides a third narrative level, perhaps the most important of all for a moment when the United States seeks to “contain” the expansion of a foreign power by “protecting” its domestic resources. The standard accounts of the cold war have been written by New York intellectuals and disaffected neo-cons who have used the political stalemate between the United States and the Soviet Union as an occasion to chasten modernism of its more extravagant gestures and reinforce a fiction of common American ideals.1 It is a narrative of cultural insiders and political pundits who criticize outsiders for failing to get behind the wagon of Keynesian free markets and American cultural superiority. These letters offer a corrective—an inside narrative written by those outsiders to the national consensus who yoked their innovative poetic practices to a revivified romanticism that was continuous with (not opposed to) modernism. In the end, their own consensus was tested by the event that most epitomized George Kennan’s famous doctrine of containment: Vietnam. As these letters attest, the political Manichaeanism of national security was being experienced on the domestic front as a drama of shifting gender roles. As an inside narrative written by outsiders to official verse (not to mention political) culture, the Duncan-Levertov correspondence highlights the vital role of community in poetics and the ways that the anti-Vietnam War, Black Power, and women’s movements challenged one model of sociality and replaced it with other, more identity-based versions. Andrew Epstein has described this as a paradox peculiar to U.S. innovative writing: “at the heart of experimental American poetry pulses a commitment to both radical individualism and dynamic movement that is sharply at odds with an equally profound devotion to avant garde collaboration and community. This tense dialectic— between a deep-seated aversion to conformity and a poetics of friendship—actually energizes postwar American poetry and poetics” (4). As Epstein€points out, friendship among poets is more than a matter for biographers or literary geneÂ�alogists; it exists at the heart of cultural production in a country whose vast size and cultural diversity militate against cohesion. And although the idea of collaboration is central to dynastic arts like opera or dance, it often seems anathema to a certain romantic view of the lyric poet composing in isolation. Nor is friendship necessarily “friendly”; it often gains tensile strength through contention and debate. It is precisely this agonistic aspect of coterie that drove certain movements of the 1950s and 1960s toward more innovative practices and, I would argue, political articulations. It would be hard to imagine Black Mountain poetics without the correspondence between Charles

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Olson and Robert Creeley or the New York School outside of competitive sparring between John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara or the San Francisco Renaissance without Jack Spicer’s agonistic bar talk.2 Material Matters One of the sub-themes of Duncan’s letters to Levertov is a concern over the material text in its published form. He lashes out at editors and typesetters who violate the poem’s physical form and worries over relinquishing design issues to trade presses. His debates with Jonathan Williams, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Donald Allen, John Martin, and other editors are legendary, resulting in open letters and published polemics on the role of independent publishing in relation to the independent poet. Levertov, although not quite so adamant about formal design, similarly focuses on the importance of the book and the poem on the page. Given these concerns for the physical design of poetry, it is worth commenting on the materiality of writing in an age of virtual reality. It is a supreme irony that literary history benefits most from writers who seldom meet. Since Duncan and Levertov lived on opposite coasts (or in some cases continents) their friendship, as Albert Gelpi says in his introduction to The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, “was conducted almost completely through letters” (xxxv). In an age of e-mail, faxes and global travel, this fact becomes almost bizarrely necessary to explain. Because e-mail has collapsed the temporality of writing, these leisurely missives—often written over a period of weeks and with lengthy addenda—seem documents from a different era. Their materiality testifies to a completely different mode of communication from our current nano-temporality. The letters were written on paper with pens or typewriters, sent through the mail with stamps, taking days or even weeks to arrive, and covering vast spaces (Mallorca, San Francisco, Guadalajara, New York, Maine). They refer to what now seem archaic forms of mechanical reproduction—carbon copies, tape recorders, and mimeograph machines, lp records, and telegrams. The poets respond at length to tape recordings that they send across the country to register the (then) new phenomenon of poetry readings. They also mention poetry radio programs, such as Cid Corman’s in Boston or Kenneth Rexroth’s in San Francisco, through which an imagined (audio) community was being forged. The making of that community is inextricable from the material conditions of art-making. At one point, Levertov recalls meeting Diane DiPrima after a reading at the Five Spot Café in New York:

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“We went to her house afterwards, it is an amazing place, with all sorts of people doing all sorts of esoteric things all over it—I mean, rehearsing a play in one room & mimeographing strange poems in another”€(451). The correspondence began in May 1953, when Duncan sent Levertov “An A Muse Ment” in response to some poems of hers in Origin which he had admired. He did not sign the poem/letter but left a cryptic “R.D.” at the end (the parallels to Whitman’s and Dickinson’s inaugural letters to Emerson and Higginson, respectively, are haunting). “An A Muse Ment” contains many of the key terms for their emerging poetics, especially what it would mean to “brew€/ another cup in€/ that Marianne Moore, Pound,€/ Williams, H.D., Stein, Zukofsky€/ Bunting, S.J. Perse, surrealist€/ Dada staind pot” (4). Levertov wrote back to Duncan asking if he were, indeed, “R.D.,” interrogating him about a tone that she thought might be accusatory (did the “staind pot” refer to her “stinking” poetry?). After assuring her that, on the contrary, the poem had been in homage to her, Duncan goes on to observe that he is “caught in the dismay of misunderstanding” and “rips .€.€. in the carpet” that anticipate future miscommunications. Whatever “spectacle of cross-purposes” the opening letters may have presented, the friendship was launched and, for the next twenty years, the two poets maintained a regular correspondence that, as Gelpi says in his introduction, “constitutes the most important exchange between two American poets in the second half of the twentieth century” (ix). The great bulk of the letters concerns domestic and aesthetic matters as the two poets establish households (Duncan and Jess in Mallorca and later in San Francisco, Levertov and her husband Mitch Goodman in New York, Mexico, and Maine) and poetics. The two areas are intertwined in important ways for two poets who placed a high value on the domestic sphere and for whom, as Duncan says, “The joys of the household are fates that command us.” The poets trade comments about much-loved children’s books (Hans Christian Anderson, George MacDonald, the Oz books, and E.€ Nesbitt are special favorites), gardening, music, and cooking. They gossip about fellow poets that they then analogize to characters in novels (Robert Creeley’s early household is likened to Madame Bovary, Lulu, and Crime and Punishment). Duncan discusses gardening in letters that describe the evolution of his book, The Opening of the Field, a work composed largely in Stinson Beach, where he and Jess maintained an extensive garden. The children’s books that Levertov reads to her son Nik become occasions for Duncan to talk about the cult of the child in romanticism. Levertov describes incidents concerning her sister, Olga, that turn into

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“The Olga Poems.” Storms arriving at Stinson Beach permit Duncan to discuss origins of “The Storm” in The Opening of the Field. The feeling one gets from reading the letters is of lives lived in and through writing, where the most insignificant domestic detail becomes a sign of cosmic potentialities. Familiar poems such as Duncan’s “Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar” or Levertov’s “Merritt Parkway” are returned in these letters to the paintings, apartments, landscapes, and books from which they emerged. The length and desultory quality of the letters are framed by economics. Since neither of the poets worked at a regular job, they were able to be relatively leisurely in their responses. Both maintained households in foreign countries—Duncan in Spain, Levertov in Mexico—in order to save expenses, and this very distance created the need to keep in touch. Yet economic insecurity is everywhere apparent: “the light bill, food, installments on refrigerator etc. .€.€. the damned money looms large,” Duncan complains. Both poets scrambled to find short-term jobs, readings, or grants, and when Duncan finally received a trust fund in 1961, following his mother’s death, the amount— $250 a month—finally enabled him to move into San Francisco and purchase a house. Current readers will be amused to read how difficult it was for Duncan to raise one-hundred dollars to bring Levertov to San Francisco for a reading. Her response to the fee—“I must say I find it hard to believe I cd. Make that much money”—seems amazing by today’s standards (75–76). The correspondence is especially interesting to genealogists of Black Mountain poetry, both for confirming well-known aesthetic sources (the romantics, modernists like H.D. and Williams, Olson’s “Projective Verse”) but also for displaying significant differences. They discuss fellow poets at a moment before familiar categories and aesthetic affinities were institutionalized. Thus, it is interesting to see how little the names Charles Olson or Jack Spicer are mentioned (perhaps due to Levertov’s distaste for both), and how important Larry Eigner, Paul Blackburn, John Wieners, Wendell Berry, Jerome Rothenberg, and Ed Dorn become in an emerging pantheon. Duncan is the more accepting reader, Levertov considerably more cautious. She displays animadversions about many of the artists and traditions that Duncan loves—Edith Sitwell, abstract expressionism, Dada, concrete poetry, Gertrude Stein—and supports the work of more mainstream poets such as Theodore Weiss, Hayden Carruth, Muriel Rukeyser, Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, and W.€D. Snodgrass. She cannot understand why Duncan would “waste his time writing ballads” and calls Emily Dickinson “that bitchy little spinster” (she revises this view in later

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letters). Duncan tries to address these prejudices by warning her of the dangers of confusing artists’ personal attitudes (in which case most modernist artists stand condemned) with the worlds they imagine. Duncan, using his companion Jess as a foil, warns, “Dearest Jess, who sees clear (where I try to struggle) says: The major sin is making the arts citadels to be defended or attacked, then our thought becomes military” (275). As it turns out, this military metaphor presages the major bone of contention between them when Levertov develops her more political poetry of the late 1960s. As Levertov became better known, differences in literary taste produced their first major split. As editor of The Nation and editorial advisor for W.€W. Norton, Levertov began to move in more mainstream literary circles and gained a readership outside of her Black Mountain friends. Perhaps in an indirect response to this growing fame, Duncan wrote an essay in Stony Brook (1969) that sneeringly dismisses the work of her close friends, Hayden Carruth and Adrienne Rich. Levertov took the essay to be an indirect critique of her own taste: I hope I can speak to you about this without incurring your wrath. I feel it was an attack not only factually unjustified and quite disproportionately contentious, but humanly a very thoughtless & cruel act. If you listened more attentively than you sometimes do (you can listen wonderfully, but often you don’t) you wd. have recalled, I think, things that I had told you about Hayden—that he had had a long illness—some of it spent in a mental hospital€.€.€. (645)

Duncan recognized his complicity in the attack and tried to ameliorate her anger in subsequent letters, but Levertov was, in fact, responding to a tone that she had read in many earlier letters. In 1966, for example, Duncan comments on books from Norton that she had been instrumental in publishing. Duncan says, I think I understand what appeals to you in these poets [Adrienne Rich, Joel Sloman, Helen Wolfert]; it’s a world of genteel sensibilities in which or before which I feel the more acutely how unfitting the violence of any inspiration must seem. It’s the difference between the kind of good soul for whom the policies of the US ruling party seems deplorable and the—it must seem extremist—outrage I feel of my spirit flaring up before the fact of an evil power manifesting itself.€(543)

We can see in such remarks about poetry the seeds of their larger disagreements about how to respond to the Vietnam War. For Duncan, the work of the Norton poets offers a liberal response to an “evil power manifesting itself.”

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Levertov felt implicated in the term “genteel,” and began to assert herself more forcefully. “Bitterly ╯ at War” A sure indication that this correspondence constitutes a cold-war narrative is its lack of reference to the cold war. The first mention of anything political occurs in a letter of 1964, with a sentence concerning the civil-rights movement, twothirds of the way through the volume. Until then, there are no references to the major historical events of the period—the Korean War, hydrogen-bomb tests, Sputnik, McCarthy and the huac hearings, the Alger Hiss trial, cia coups in Guatemala and Chile, the Montgomery bus boycott, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Bay of Pigs, Brown vs. Board of Education. This silence about contemporary history is strange given that both Levertov and Duncan were far from being apolitical. Duncan had been a conscientious objector during World War€II and had participated actively in anarcho-pacifist groups. Levertov and Mitchell Goodman had been involved in the early peace movement and continued to support the ongoing civil-rights struggle. One way to read this silence is by seeing how, in an age of consensus, “the political” could be separated from the cultural and domestic. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that during the cold war, the political was often written through the cultural and domestic. References to sectarian battles among poets, conflicts over careers and fame, and debates with publishers could be seen as enactments on the home front of what Duncan called a “cold war in the arts.” Although he was referring to the infighting among Cedar Bar artists, he could as easily have been referring to the cultural temper of the 1950s in general, in which art provided a safe haven against the eruption of ideology, nuclear annihilation, and the national security state. When the political did raise its head, it quickly worked to divide the two poets although, as I have indicated, this volume shows the extent to which the seeds of dissension had been planted much earlier. For Duncan, the first signs of trouble were evident in 1966, when he began receiving Levertov’s poems that would make up the book To Stay Alive: Denny, the last poem [“Advent 1966”] brings with it an agonizing sense of how the monstrosity of this nation’s War is taking over your life, and I wish that I could Â�advance some—not consolation, there is none—wisdom of how we are to at once bear constant .€.€. testimony of our grief for those suffering in the War€.€.€.€(563)

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Later, Duncan was more direct: “in ‘Tenebrae’ it is moralizing that sets in, to deny any ground the heaviness and the bitterness might have verity in” (666). And when To Stay Alive appeared in 1971, Duncan claimed that “the book clearly isn’t ‘revolutionary’ in the sense of the poem—and the theme may be anguish. I feel that revolution, politics, making history, is one of the great falsehoods .€.€. but Art has only one place in which to be and that is in our own lives right now” (660–61). These were strong words from a powerful supporter and mentor. For Levertov, to hear that her poetry was no longer revolutionary or that “revolution, politics, making history” were “falsehoods” was a deliberate provocation for which her characteristic deference was inadequate. At the heart of their disagreement was the status of the poem, the extent to which poetry could be the vehicle for political views. Although Duncan’s early anti-war poems—“Up Rising,” “The Multiversity”—are strident and even didactic, subsequent “Passages” treat the Vietnam War in mythic terms as a sign of cosmic disorder. Duncan saw the war as a national allegory, the return of America’s “unacknowledged, unrepented crimes” (the persecution of Antinomians, Indian genocide, slavery) in present history. To record these seismic changes, poetry must resist becoming a lever to achieve peace but instead become a place where the war, in all of its contradictory power and confusion can be experienced: “the poet’s role is not to oppose evil, but to imagine it: what if Shakespeare had opposed Iago, or Dostroyevsky opposed Raskalnikov [sic]— the vital thing is that they created Iago and Raskalnikov” (669). Speaking of “Up€Rising,” Duncan says “[it is] not that the war was or was not important to me, but how come it was of import to the poem” (666). To contemporary ears these remarks seem an overly aestheticized response to human pain and suffering, but for Duncan it was a way of yoking his aesthetics of responsibility to an ethics of witness and testimony. It was a distinctly postmodern understanding of the discursive character of moral and ethical claims. Levertov, on the other hand, increasingly used the poem as a record of personal positions and responses to historical events. Poems in To Stay Alive function as a daily diary of her political activities—from a march on the Justice Building in Washington to the construction and defense of People’s Park in Berkeley. Poems begin to feature names of friends, political slogans, descriptions of being tear-gassed at the Justice Department. Where earlier poems displayed a Williams-like pleasure in the textures of common objects and everyday life, she now editorialized:

168â•… a p p ro ac hi n g t h e new a m e r ic a n p o e t ry Heavy, heavy, heavy, hand and heart. We are at war, bitterly, bitterly at war (To Stay Alive 17)

For Duncan, such sentiments were empty moralizing, substituting “Polonius pieties” for outraged witness. Duncan saw Levertov instrumentalizing the poem, subsuming the complexities of political conflict to “empty and vain slogans” (669). In a letter of 1971 Duncan provides a clear sense of where his priorities lie: And as workers in words it is our business to keep alive in the language definitions as well as forces, to create crises in meaning, yes—but this is to create meanings in which we are the more aware of the crisis involved, of what is at issue. In posing ‘revolution or death’ you seem to feel that evolution .€.€. does not come into the picture. As if, i.e., Man got to ‘overthrow’ reptiles.€(661)

Here, the function of poetry in a time of war is not to take sides—and therefore replicate the power dynamics of the state in reverse—but to keep the poem open to crisis as a fundamental fact of human evolution. By limiting political choices to “revolution or death,” as Levertov does in “Staying Alive,” the poet fatally dichotomizes the former, seeing it as a hypostatized “good” against which “death” becomes a default. Such division (and rhetoric) removes revolution from its function in cyclic change and turns it into reaction, a form of reification that Blake figures as the imprisonment of the revolutionary Orc within a Urizenic rationalism. Instead of violent transformation and new growth, revolution becomes empty repetition. Duncan often validates aesthetic positions by adducing Darwinian precedent. He insists that evolution is itself a matter of violence in the struggle for survival, not a matter of a higher species “overthrowing” a more primitive one. He warns Levertov not to repeat the logic of the war-makers she attacks by using the mirror of vengeance and retaliation as justification for action. As far as Duncan is concerned, the only appropriate response to the evil of war is to enact it in the poem, create an open, dynamic space “to create meanings in which we are the more aware of the crisis involved” (661). In this respect, Olson’s “Projective Verse” was now being tested in contemporary historical terms. When Levertov responds to this letter, she queries whether his complaints about To Stay Alive concern its lack of formal innovation or whether Duncan

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feels that the quality of her poems has “fallen off ” through her extensive political work. Finally, she wonders if his objections are purely ideological— whether his “habit of projection” has mythologized her into an abstract representative of a political view he finds repugnant. Unlike her previous tendency to defer to Duncan’s judgment, here she stands her ground, saying that, although she mourns the loss of his support, she is no longer “crushed by it.” This is an important moment in the correspondence, since it brings to the surface a dialectic of deference and dependency that had animated much of their previous correspondence and shows a new confidence of statement that, if painful, is necessary for her to go on. Albert Gelpi’s editorial introduction provides an excellent reading of the sources of this debate. He defines their differences in religious terms, related to Duncan’s upbringing in a theosophical household and Levertov’s background in a mystical and visionary Christianity. For Duncan, as for his adopted parents, truth is hidden in the world, a mystery that cannot be recuperated or represented but must be enacted. The worldview here is radically dualist; darkness and light, matter and mind, good and evil, war and peace are components of life and cannot be reconciled on one side or another. For Levertov, on the other hand, God is immanent in nature, “immersed in human history, engaged in material and social existence” (xvii). Poetry participates in a sacramental relationship to objects, exposing presences hidden in ordinary things. The reconciliation of conflict is not “reserved for the isolated individuals or the privileged elite but is open to and required of the whole people in communion,” a belief that was fulfilled in social activism and, later, in her adoption of Catholicism (xvii). According to Gelpi, Levertov saw poetry as sacramental—as offering a collective access to a redeemed body of the godhead. While I would agree with Gelpi that religious and philosophical views often provided Duncan and Levertov with a rhetoric for debating the role of the poet in relation to history, I feel that there are other forces at work in their disagreements. I would give equal weight to the role that gender plays in articulating their differences. In a lengthy letter of 1971, Duncan claims that Levertov’s Vietnam War poems are less about Vietnam than about “the deep underlying consciousness of the woman as a victim in war with the Man” to which Levertov responds that is unmitigated bullshit, Robert. First of all, you again assume that I am active in the Women’s Liberation Mvt apparently. Well, I’ve certainly come slowly to a

170â•… a p p ro ac hi n g t h e new a m e r ic a n p o e t ry lot of sympathy for women’s problems I never realized existed. .€.€. But I am not and never have been (so far) a member of a wl group and I am not at war with men.€(678)

Levertov refuses to identify as a feminist, as if doing so would weaken her political position and narrow her commitment to issues of gender. Yet her sharp retort shows a feminist refusal to be contained in the male poet’s definitions. An important moment in Duncan’s changing imagination of Levertov occurred in 1968 when he saw her on a news broadcast giving a speech at a protest rally. In a letter that describes the event, he observes that “[the] person that the demos, the citoyen-mass of an aroused party, awakes is so different from the individual person” (607). Here he consigns her political principles to an outbreak of the erotic—of “sexual excitement .€.€. agonizing in the conflict between the sacrifice of all other functions that Eros or Eris .€.€. demand” (607). By appearing in public, addressing the masses (the event was a women’s protest against the war), Levertov’s “soul is sacrificed to the demotic persona that fires itself from spirit”(607). Her appearance on television reappears in Duncan’s poem, “Santa Cruz Propositions,” where Levertov is compared to the Hindu goddess of destruction, Ka¯lı¯ SHE appears, Ka¯lı¯ dancing, whirling her necklace of skulls, trampling the despoiling armies and the exploiters of natural resources under her feet.â•… Revolution or Death! Wine!â•… The wine of men’s blood in the vat of the Woman’s anger,â•… whirling, the crackling—Is it of bones? Castanets? Tommyguns? Fire raging in the ghettos? What is the wrath of Jehovah to thisâ•… almost blissful Mother Righteousness aroused by the crimes of Presidents? (Ground Work 49)3

Duncan’s reference to Levertov as Ka¯lı¯, “whirling her necklace of skulls,” is a projection—as Duncan would admit—of what Levertov was actually doing (delivering a rousing speech of protest) but his reference to her act as specifically female, his calling her “Mother Righteousness” (a reference perhaps to Brecht’s Mother Courage) and later as “Madame Outrage of the Central Committee” (combining the Reign of Terror’s Madame Lafarge and a Stalinist apparatchik) reinforces the idea that it is her female presumption that is un-

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conscionable. A good deal of Duncan’s projection responds to the importance of television as a public medium during the 1960s—its ability to bring the war and national security into the private sphere. Duncan’s fierce reaction to Levertov’s public persona reminds me of an address that Henry James gave to the Bryn Mawr graduating class of 1905. In his address, “The Question of Our Speech,” James urges young women not to leave the “private garden” for the “pavements of the town” and use their voices on the public stage. The danger of public speech by women is that, as votaries of the American idiom, women have a special responsibility to the culture not to allow “our collective medium of intercourse” to be sullied by the new immigrant masses and commercial culture (qtd. in Wardley 642). James’s comparison of the vulnerable vocal medium and female sexual reproduction was featured earlier in The Bostonians (1886), which satirizes the new public women of New England, transcendentalists such as Elizabeth Peabody (who appears as Miss Birdseye in the novel) and suffragists like his main character, Olive Chancellor. The latter appears as a neurotic, possibly lesbian predator on the young Verena Tarrant, whose vocal talents she exploits for women’s causes. As if thinking of this very aspect of James, Levertov in 1957 quotes a passage from The Bostonians that expresses her own “limited capacities” as a woman author. She is responding to an earlier letter from Duncan that outlines the need for a “total concept large enuf to include form and content that can allow width in intellection and feeling” (81). Levertov responds by saying that such a totalizing view “is of course much harder for the minor poet, or poet of feminine intellect [emphasis added], to have than for a major poet, in whom it exists as a matter of course” (87). As an example of this minor position, she thinks of Larry Eigner and how his physical condition as a person with cerebral palsy limits his view and structures his “broken” content and “nervous line.” To illustrate what she means, she quotes from a passage that shows Olive Chancellor looking out of her window at Boston’s: Charles St. toward which, in the rear, the afternoon sun slants redly, from an Â�horizon indented at empty intervals with wooden spires, the masts of lonely boats, the chimneys of dirty ‘works,’ over a brackish expanse of anomalous character .€.€.€(88)

These lines depict an “empty,” “lonely,” and “dirty” landscape, one that implicates Olive’s deracinated perspective and “failed” sexuality. Interpreting these lines to herself, Levertov observes,

172â•… a p p ro ac hi n g t h e new a m e r ic a n p o e t ry I was really only expressing my own feeling about myself, connected with my being shortsighted, as I feel Eigner’s “nervous line” as they say of drawings often, and his “broken” content, are connected with his physical condition.€(87)

This is a fascinating conjunction of intentions. Although Levertov uses€ the James passage to describe her own “limited capacities” as a writer, she chooses as her example James’s most overt representation of the limits of feminism and thus becomes, by extension, the sexually frustrated suffragist. It is as though Levertov links the disabled body of Larry Eigner to the “disability” of gender against two “masters,” Duncan and James, who presumably are “ableÂ�bodied” and thus capable of totalizing thought. In later years, Duncan would draw on precisely this dichotomy, using a discourse of mastery and embodiment to frame the limitations of Levertov’s anti-war poetry—a poetry that he viewed specifically as the adoption of a public voice in contrast to the animamuse of his projected view of her. Levertov gradually undercuts this discourse as the war heats up: And the range of response in you & in me overlaps—& that is a large area—but beyond the area of overlap extends in quite different directions. Years ago that shamed & embarrassed me—but now not. You are more the Master, a Master poet in my world, not less, just because I feel that the only emulation of such a master is to be more oneself.€(547)

Students of Emerson will recognize here his view that the great teacher is one who teaches the student how to reject the teacher. Duncan may serve as “Master” by permitting Levertov to be “more herself.” According to Levertov, Duncan refused to relinquish this authority and permit productive differences to exist. As Gelpi points out, the gradual shift from capitalized “Master” to subordinated “Master poet” to uncapitalized “master” tells the story of a gradual diminishment of Duncan’s mentor role, a change in their relationship to which Duncan could not assent. The Vortex By 1971, the relationship between the two poets was frayed beyond healing, a product of increasingly lengthy exchanges that attempted to set the record straight. No doubt this unsettled quality of their relationship reflects the increasing national despair over the stepped-up bombing in Cambodia, the

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rising body count, and disenchantment at home. Levertov wisely suggests a truce: “let us call a halt, and not go on with this whole thing, until it becomes more rancorous and destroys our long and deep regard for one another” (693). She suggests waiting a year and a day before returning to issues raised by To Stay Alive, and Duncan accedes. They follow this plan, writing only occasional, newsy letters, but it is clear that the scars have not healed. Duncan acknowledges the “year and a day” that have passed and speaks hopefully of a return to an earlier mode of address. On April 2, 1973, he writes “It’s spring, a year later. One of those bright mornings anyway, when my better spirits seem summond [sic] forth, with floods of sun and burgeoning tree leafing excited in the air, exuberant” (710). Despite this sunny invocation, there is no reply from LevÂ�erÂ�tov until December 1975. In this letter she describes her dismay at reading James Mersmann’s book, Out of the Vietnam Vortex, in which Duncan is quoted from an interview on the matter of the Ka¯lı¯ image. She’ll be writing about the war and suddenly—in one of the earlier poems that’s most shocking—you get a flayed penis, and .€.€. when she reads it you get an effect and tone of disgusted sensuality. (749)

Levertov felt betrayed at Duncan’s continued gendering of her political views and by his perpetuation of their battle behind her back: I was all set to write to you, Robert, a year or so? ago, when lo, that book by James Mersmann arrived with its long quote from an interview with you in which you once more accused me most unjustly & unfoundedly of taking sadistic pleasure in the horrors I’d forced myself to depict in “Life at War.”€(711)

Although Levertov acknowledges the “love and co-respondence in the early letters” that still move her, she and Duncan never re-establish their previous relationship. She writes a sympathetic letter when she hears of Duncan’s kidney failure that ultimately leads to his death. Duncan writes a moving poem, “The Torn Cloth” that attempts to re-weave their friendship out of the “frayd edges of the inner Reft€/ the torn heart of our€/ ‘Friendship’” (752). After Duncan’s death in 1988, Levertov writes an obituary poem that rearticulates the discourse of mastery in her own terms. Now she can control the terms of mastery and define the power dynamic on her own ground: You were my mentor. Without knowing it, I outgrew the need for a mentor.

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She ends the poem by describing a dream in which she and Duncan meet in a church, sit down, and silently reaffirm their friendship: I put a welcoming hand over yours, and your hand was warm. I had no need for a mentor, nor you to be one; but I was once more your chosen sister, and you my chosen brother. We heard strong harmonies rise and begin to fill the arching stone, sounds that had risen here through centuries. (755)

Levertov’s dialectic of mentorship and sibling friendship, oceanic in its ebbing and flowing rhythms, testifies to the historical schism felt by many women of her generation over patriarchal authority. She describes a process of education in which, through resentment and anger, she comes into her own voice. But so much has been lost that she can only regain her filial friendship with her “chosen brother” in an afterlife. But it is an afterlife of and through the poem and, to that extent, Duncan’s belief that the opening of the field provides an “everlasting omen of what is” continues to instruct. The collected correspondence between Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov marks two divergent trajectories for the intellectual and artist during the cold war. Seldom have those two positions been so fully embroidered and elaborated as they are here. Not only is this correspondence a key document in postwar literary history but it also provides a cultural history of the public intellectual. Readers who lived through the traumatic times of the Vietnam War will identify with the difficult choices each poet faced at that time, but there

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may be many who will not find the choices quite so black and white—perhaps thanks to debates like the one these letters chronicle. Duncan’s tendency to mythologize the war seems, by current standards, inadequate. Too often, his cavalier dismissal of social protest is elitist and, worse, ratiocinative in the face of palpable evil. Considering that the Bush administration pursued many of the same agendas in Iraq as the Johnson administration did in Vietnam, it seems inadequate simply to “imagine” evil in the poem. The attempt to read the war in Jungian terms as a primordial battle of the female and the male wills is far too schematic and seems insensitive to the role that feminism played in diversifying the political roles of that era. But having said this, I find myself in agreement with Duncan on the limits of Levertov’s war poetry. Levertov’s work of the late 1960s is pious and doctrinaire, often relying on a rhetoric of indignation and anger to deal with impossible contradictions. It may have been an important liberating stage for her, but the result is a considerably reduced verbal palette. Nor was she alone in this gesture. Duncan’s objections to Levertov’s adoption of a more “demotic” voice could be extended to many cultural nationalist, feminist, anti-war poets of the period who underwent a similar change of voice to suit the times. For many poets, it was not a time for nuanced verbal display and subtle bracketing of identity, and perhaps this led to a more various, more unmediated level of address among younger poets. But the danger, as Duncan points out to Levertov, is that the poem—qua poem—drops away and what is left is sheer vitriol and finger-pointing. What is lost is the meaning of poetry as a specific kind of expressive act, where the language of power and domination, so common in political rhetoric, is no longer effective. As we witness cycles of national elections, where such language is in abundant and flagrant display, Duncan’s cautions seem ever more prescient.

b 8

Looking Through Lithium James Schuyler as Jim the Jerk I guess I . . . am indelibly stamped by the outer suburbs. —James Schuyler (letter to Clark Coolidge)

“Jim ╯ the Jerk”

A

lthough lithium has been used to treat mental disorders since the mid 1940s, it wasn’t until 1970, with the publication of Baalstrup and Schou’s double-blind test, that lithium began to be widely prescribed.1 Their test showed that manic depression could be controlled through a prophylactic use of lithium carbonate—a compound found in baking soda—which helps reduce the severity and repetition of manic attacks. Scientists have not been able to trace the specific means by which lithium diminishes manic incidents but, because it alters the transport of sodium in the system, it may disrupt the circadian rhythms of the body and allow for an increase in neurotransmitters (norepinephrine and serotonin) in the brain.2 Since the inception of lithium’s therapeutic application in the early 1970s, its side effects—increased water retention, kidney malfunctions, a tendency to develop diabetes, thyroid problems—have been considered minor inconveniences in comparison to the benefits of evening out the manic highs and suicidal lows of bipolar disorders. The pervasive use of lithium as a treatment for manic depression would seem to explain the title of James Schuyler’s 1972 book, The Crystal Lithium. Schuyler had spent time in mental institutions earlier in his life (his first published poem, “Salute” from 1951, was written while at a Bloomington mental hospital) and, beginning in the summer of 1971, he suffered the first of a series of breakdowns that led to periodic hospital stays until the mid-1980s, when his manic attacks became stabilized through various drugs.3 Surely The Crystal Lithium and its long title poem must reflect his own treatment with the chemical during this period. It was this assumption that motivated me to read

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the book as the first chronicle of what we might call a post-therapeutic poetics, one that eschews the confessionalist Freudian framework that dominated poetry of the 1950s for a more medicalized—and in Schuyler’s case, queer— experience of cognitive disability. Yet as I read through the letters and manuscripts among his papers at the University of California at San Diego, and after consulting with friends who knew him during the 1970s and 1980s— Ron Padgett, Bill Corbett, Nathan Kernan, Eileen Myles—I have had to revise my opinion. In the absence of testimony from friends and psychiatrists, there is no direct evidence that Schuyler ever took lithium, although there is a strong likelihood that it was one of the many drugs that he was given throughout his later life. Furthermore, most of the poems—including the title poem of the volume—were written before his serious breakdown in July of 1971.4 This lack of evidence for any lithium use by the poet leads one to accept Schuyler’s defense of the title in a letter to Kenneth Koch: I like the sound of it; and, for me, the “crystal” connects directly with the snow imagery (Imagery, hunn-ee, what you doin’ in my sentence? I tol’ you nebber, nebber€.€.€.), Lithium; well, I thought everyone knew what Lithia Water was, or is. At my house, they used to guzzle it like Perrier water. Or club soda. Yes, I have convinced myself that I am not going to change the label on that poem.€(333)5

This passage is much like the title poem itself as it careens from one image to another, interrupting its narrative with comic asides, family memories, and self-reflexive comments, as though to convince by distraction. At one level, lithium is a homespun remedy, as common as salt or soda water, but its homeliness—like a good deal of gay camp—offers a way of signifying on the heteronormative. Schuyler’s desire to retain a title that would obviously signal a psycho-pharmacological reading of the book suggests that we should see lithium less as a code through which to read mental illness than the MacGuffin that diverts mental illness onto other surfaces. Schuyler’s rather chatty, distracted response to Koch marks a distinct contrast to the literary representation of cognitive disorders that we identify with “the tranquilized fifties.” Prior to the development of lithium, uni- and biÂ� polar disorders were treated with a variety of therapies, the “concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia” chronicled by Allen Ginsberg in “Howl,” based on his own experience at Bellevue (130). A more tragic view of 1950s mental illness among Ginsberg’s contemporaries was sounded in Robert Lowell’s poem for

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Delmore Schwartz, in which he quotes the latter as modifying Wordsworth’s famous couplet, “We poets in our youth begin in gladness;€/ thereof in the end come despondency and madness” by substituting “sadness” for “gladness.” 6 Although mental illness in this generation was traumatic for individual poets, its effects inadvertently helped produce the dominant tone of much poetry of the era. In the hands of Lowell, Sexton, Berryman, Schwartz, Plath and others, suicidal depression was, as A. Alvarez called it, a “Savage God” with which the poet must conduct heroic battle. As Lowell wrote:

And there,

perched on my trunk and typing-table, it cooled our universal Angst a moment, Delmore. We drank and eyed the chicken-hearted shadows of the world. (63)

This psychic angst can be seen in its most representative form in the famous opening to Lowell’s “Man and Wife”: “Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother’s bed;€/ the rising sun in war paint dyes us red” (93). The introductory modifying clause, the alliterations of Miltown and Mother, the double entendres of “sun,” “lie,” and “dye,” the relaxed iambic cadences, even the racialized association of mental anguish with Indian “war paint” establish a complex objective correlative for personal and cultural malaise. Marital bed becomes mother’s bed; redemptive sun becomes avenging Indian. Such inversions would demonstrate, to a critic of his day, that although Lowell is subdued by the era’s most famous tranquilizer, he manages a level of ironic distance that ensures he will not be confused with the subject of his poem. But since he is the subject of the poem, his irony can only reflect the paucity of his resources: All night I’ve held your hand, as if you had a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad— its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye— and dragged me home alive . . . Oh my Petite (93)

Here, the cloying apostrophe and forced rhymes negate the “madness” that is the poem’s theme, making it difficult to know whether Lowell’s address, “Oh

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my Petite,” is an example of “hackneyed speech” or a plea for intimacy in the face of bad behavior. In either case it is an inadequate response—perhaps intentionally so—to the poem’s inferno. In Schuyler’s hands, mental illness is not a heroic confrontation with inner demons (The Bell Jar, Life Studies), nor an allegory of subaltern psychiatric revolt (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Marat/Sade). Rather, it is a thoroughly banal experience, as pedestrian in its rituals of incarceration, medicalization, and group therapy as middle-class suburban life. I am not saying that manic depression was not a horrific experience for Schuyler and his friends, but that his representation of these bouts is filtered through a rhetoric of comic resignation: Wigging in, wigging out; when I stop to think the wires in my head cross: kaboom. How many trips by ambulance (five, count them five), claustrated, pill addiction, in and out of mental hospitals, the suicidalness (once I almost made it) but—I go on? Tell you all of it? I can’t. When I think of that, that at only fifty-one I, Jim the Jerk, am still alive and breathing deeply, that I think is a miracle. (Collected Poems 252)7

These lines, written while Schuyler was staying at the Payne Whitney clinic, are to my ears far more “confessional” than Lowell’s, not because they better

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contain psychosis in a figure of speech, but because they replicate some of its self-protective voices and gestures. Clunky words like “wigging,” “kaboom,” “claustrated,” and “suicidalness,” along with the heavy use of parentheses, asides, and evasions, deflate romantic madness and register its redundancies and repetitions. Against Lowell’s married couple tranquilized on mother’s bed, Schuyler poses himself as “Jim the Jerk,” amazed to be alive at all. The poetic line is determined not by patterned cadence but by the limited margins of the small spiral notebooks in which Schuyler wrote such poems while in hospitals. And whereas Lowell’s confessionalism poses as a public representation of private trauma (“My mind’s not right,” “We are all old-timers€/ each of us holds a locked razor”), Schuyler parodies a psychoanalytic session (“Tell you all of it?€/ I can’t”). Although Schuyler’s self-mocking persona is a far cry from Lowell’s impotent husband or Plath’s Lady Lazarus, he recognizes a certain theatrical—but not mythic—quality to his self-presentation. Lady Lazarus is out to avenge, Jim the Jerk to survive. “Inside€/ ╯ the Nut House€/ Gate” Despite the toll that his manic episodes took on his friends, Schuyler’s periodic hospitalizations seem to have been oddly productive and even liberating. During the ten-year period between 1971 and 1981, when he was the most severely depressed, he produced four major books of poetry, two novels, and numerous art reviews, culminating in his Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for The Morning of the Poem. While in various hospitals, he received a regular round of visits from friends, maintained an active schedule of poetry and letter writing, and even published two issues of a magazine, The Daily Planet.8 Describing the latter to Bill Berkson in 1971, Schuyler measures the close proximity of fellow patients and eccentric poets: “Here I am in another one. Vermont State Hospital .€.€. We crazies here are mimeoing our own little mag—the daily planet & I want to include work by live-out freaks: you, & selected Bolinas .€.€. Postcards always cheer the incarcerated” (364). The idea that the world consists of “in patients” and “live-out freaks” is a nice variation on a familiar countercultural attitude of the 1970s. Visitors to stoned-out Bolinas, where Berkson was living in this period, might well have wondered where the walls of the psychiatric institution end and bohemia begins. Other comments in letters and journals suggest that far from being a site of oppression and fear, the hospital provided a routine and sociality and, most important, regularization and monitoring of

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drug regimens. Some examples from Just the Thing, his selected letters, testify to the banality of illness: I’m in the circular tv freak-out lounge—Ward 5—I wish you all could groove on up here and see this brick beauty bath embowered in hills (hunh?).€(359) I’ve written up a storm of poems . . . it all hung up—I mean out. Hence the wiggery—never enjoyed myself more€.€.€.€(362–63) Well hysteria is contagious . . . especially the part where I landed in Suffolk County Psychiatric Hospital, an experience I loved [“no sarcasm” is added in a footnote].€(351) I would love to tell you all about my “spells” as Ron calls them—9½ days in Suffolk Co. Psychiatric, with a further Maine Chance type rest (24 days) in Vermont State Hospital. I had a ball, though I got good and bored before the end. Sleeping with 32 pair of feet not all that clean, I’m simply not used to. But it will all emerge when I get the poems I scribbled in both places typed and ready for viewing. Right now I’m absorbed in the mss. Of the crystal lithium. (372)

Such genial descriptions belie the often severe psychotic episodes that brought him to the institution, but their casual tone suggests that his time in psychiatric hospitals was represented by him less as incarceration than as an extended Hamptons weekend. Calling such manic episodes “spells” may have been a form of self-protection, but it was also a way of domesticating the “freakout lounge” of Ward 5 and projecting it onto the homes and communities beyond. The poems that he wrote while in hospital have the same qualities of immediacy and dailiness that one associates with his longer-lined landscape poems, yet now focused on the routines of pill-taking, visiting hours, and looking out the window: What’s in those pills? After lunch and I can hardly keep my eyes open. Oh, for someone to talk small talk with. Even a dog would do. (257)

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As the lines become shorter, they often take on a bluesy tone. Take for example “Roxy,” published in Daily Planet 2:

The sky

today is blue outside on grass with friends who’ll bite your toe nail off: that’s blue friendliness inside outside the nut house gate: it’s clear it’s wrong to lock inside all the best, the strong the great, like Lynn, like Wayne— like me, like you O Bob far out— it’s clear it’s wrong and I feel great (145)9

This is hardly Sexton’s Bedlam or Lowell’s Payne Whitney. Schuyler’s institutionalization provides an occasion for him to create a community of “blue€/ friendliness€/ inside outside€/ the nut house€/ gate” on a blue Sunday. The poem’s rhythms are determined, as I’ve said, by the narrow margins of his small notebook, but they also imitate rock lyrics of the era (Janis Joplin, Carly Simon) and stoned-out idiom: “rock it€/ Roxy—/ Roxy Rock€/ or Sunday Blue€/ it’s purple€/ I’m blue€/ you€/ are all€/ o wow€/ so really nice” (147). Schuyler gathers various patients (and friends)—Gary, Bob, Lynn, Wayne—as a band of insiders, “making it” despite the limits of hospital wards and walls. The breakdown of boundaries between “nuthouse” and outer world is the theme of his novel, What’s for Dinner? (1972), which reflects his experiences at hospitals in Southampton and Islip. The novel evenly divides its narrative between two sites: the domestic world of several suburban families and the psy-

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chiatric ward of the hospital where Lottie, one member of the community, is staying after bouts with alcoholism. Every other chapter chronicles the lives of the Taylor and Delehantey families, the latter’s twin boys, their dogs, cats, parties, and teas. Alternating chapters are set in the hospital: its family encounter sessions, medications, occupational therapies, and gossip. Each world reflects the other; the patients in the hospital suffer from a variety of maladies— drug addiction, suicide attempts, depression, alcoholism—yet they maintain a level of support and conviviality (and occasional meanness) that mirrors the bourgeois households they have temporarily left. At the same time, their families at home maintain a steady pattern of card parties, gossip, and chatter that mimic life in the mental ward. And just as patients in the hospital maintain the fiction of normalcy, so the family members at home maintain a fantasy of averageness, despite an undercurrent of sexual infidelity, alcohol and drug use, and incipient homosexuality. To some extent characters could easily change places without major conflicts. Schuyler is affectionate toward his protagonists, treating them—patients and family members—as wounded survivors of a competitive, commercial world. They speak in the homey bromides of middle America: “just a smidgin” (18); “I’ve got to hustle my bustle” (44); “I’m an independent cuss” (44); “I want to crawl into my hidey-hole” (93); “Heavenly days .€.€. two [drinks] and I’m squiffy” (57). Schuyler’s ear for middle-Americana permits him to represent an entire class of people through odd verbal habits that deflect meaning by innuendo. It is not what they say, but the ways they circumvent saying that partly explains their residence in the psychiatric wing. Biddy, the grandmother of the Delehantey family, summarizes the narrow divide between “normals” and “patients” when, after seeing Lottie during visiting hours, says, “it was a most interesting visit. All types and conditions of men. And women. Some you might meet in your own parlor and not think a thing about it” (73). It turns out that Biddy unconsciously states what Schuyler observes throughout the novel —that these people are persons one meets “in your own parlor,” sojourned temporarily in an institutional frame. By this very fact of incarceration, rituals of middle-class normalcy are seen in broad relief. When the parents of the twins, Patrick and Michael, advocate competitive sports—they hint at problems to come: “[sports] make a man of a boy. They prepare him for later life, for the give and take and the hurleyÂ�burley.” At the same time, the twins engage in acts of mutual masturbation and necking that signal a different trajectory for male companionship. And

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when one of the patients, Mr. Mulwin, finally agrees to participate in occupational therapy by making moccasins, he can only do so by asserting his masculinity: “I’ve tied trout flies—this should be a cinch” (96). Mulwin’s constant complaint to his fellow patients—that by being “cooped up” in the hospital he is ruining his business—speaks volumes about the reasons for his incarceration. At one point, he lectures Bertha, the hippy substance abuser, on the virtues of hard work: “You are a spoiled brat. That’s it in a nutshell. What you need is a good hard job you have to go to every day. That would snap you out of it, if anything can.” To which Bertha responds, “A good hard job? Is that what made you Mr. Mental Health Week?” (100). Despite Mulwin’s condescension toward his fellow patients, the patients send him a plant when he goes in for shock therapy and, by the end, he is posing for Bertha’s sculpture therapy. At the novel’s conclusion, the curmudgeonly Mulwin has a kind word for his accuser: “You stick to your guns, Bertha, don’t let them walk all over you” (166). What’s for Dinner? is a great satiric novel that manages never to lose its respect for the characters it satirizes. For all of their vulnerability and gossipy distraction, the residents of the mental ward create a kind of gemeinschaft—not in opposition to some panoptical medical authority but in their pursuit of normalcy. In various grudging ways, the patients realize their need for incarceration and medicalization against a world outside the hospital walls whose social rituals and proprieties seem stifling in comparison. Unlike Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), Schuyler never trades in stereotypes (the silent Indian “Chief,” the tyrannical Nurse Ratched, the heroic liberator, McMurphy) who allegorize aspects of American cold-war culture. Schuyler’s characters are relatively flat, sometimes indistinguishable from each other, and this ordinariness makes them all the more vulnerable to their institutional setting. What John Koethe says of Schuyler’s poetry applies to his novel as well: “the commonplace is not transfigured, but remains defiantly ordinary; but equally, the grandiose retains its grandeur, the sentimental retains its integrity (and thus its power) and death remains both a fact and a fable” (33). Looking for Lithium “The sea is salt” “And so are you” —James Schuyler, “The Crystal Lithium”

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As What’s for Dinner? makes clear, Schuyler’s response to cognitive disability has a queer component in its rejection of an oedipalized etiology based on the heterosexual family and the ideal of therapeutic cure. Whereas “Roxy” and What’s for Dinner? are self-mocking in their treatment of incarceration, “The Crystal Lithium,” written around the same period, has a more vatic quality (in the letter to Koch, Schuyler says that he could have called the poem “Grand Orison”) in its oceanic address. And whereas many of his poems written while in hospital are short-lined diary entries, “The Crystal Lithium” is the first of a series of longer, long-lined poems—including “Hymn to Life,” “The Morning of the Poem,” and “A Few Days”—that are among Schuyler’s greatest accomplishments. These poems, so meandering in their progress, hardly seem to be the same as those written by Jim the Jerk, yet all share a mediated or bracketed relationship to experience, as if the poet, in attempting to render the rush of sensations that threatens to engulf him, deflects them onto an utterly banal set of surfaces. Peter Campion calls this feature of Schuyler’s work “verbal eclipsing,” in which the poet’s inability to order the world is covered or shadowed by a secondary set of off-hand observations and asides. If oceanic feeling involves the loss of ego boundaries and the inability to separate subject from object, then “The Crystal Lithium” could well be the ode for this phenomenon.10 Most accounts of Schuyler’s poetry celebrate his unmediated sensory access, his precise rendering of the natural world. This emphasis on visibility is only the first stage, however, in a more complex form of seeing through institutional and psychological frames. His relationship to the natural world as well as the city often includes the window frame (and the aria playing in the background and the color of the cup on the coffee table and the memory of “the cold kiss€/ Of marble sheets”) through which he apprehends the world. Timothy Gray refers to Schuyler’s poetry as creating an “urban pastoral” that “aligns with the pastoral singer’s wish fulfillment but is always undercut by the reality principle of a civilization he never fully forsakes” (177). And while this emphasis on mediated sight is not necessarily a reflection on manic depression, it recognizes the difficulty of seeing through a normative€optic. “The Crystal Lithium” was written at the conjunction of two crucial events: the onset of a major manic phase and subsequent hospitalization, and the onset of a powerful love relationship with Robert Jordan (to whom the book in which the poem appears is dedicated). Both of these events, as his recently published letters confirm, caused a sensual derangement, the latter perhaps

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intensifying the former. Although the poem is not overtly about either situation, it blurs edges between natural surfaces and psychic depths that extends Whitman’s participatory naturalism into a psychic realm. The poem’s length and lineation, according to the poet, were inspired by a reading of Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” although the ocean landscape and mnemonic theme seem closer to the elegiac “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” 11 One can most hear the presence of Whitman in the relentless ebb and flow of his long lines and in the confusion of temporalities that merge a winter day in the present with a summer day in the past:

and the nail set is ridged with cold

Permanently as marble, always degrees cooler than the rooms of air it lies in Felt as you lay your cheek upon the counter on which sits a blue-banded cup A counter of condensed wintry exhalations glittering infinitesimally A promise, late on a broiling day in late September, of the cold kiss Of marble sheets to one who goes barefoot quickly in the snow and early Only so far as the ash can—bang, dump—and back and slams the door: Too cold to get up though at the edges of the blinds the sky Shows blue as flames that break on a red sea in which black coals float: (116)

The close layering of prepositional phrases and the confusion of syntactic elements (“always degrees cooler than the rooms of air it lies in€/ Felt as you lay your cheek”) creates a vertiginous, off-kilter progression of phrases that seem to stumble over one another. What, for example, does “A promise” refer to? Does the phrase form a parallel with “the counter” (a counter of exhalations, a promise of a kiss) or does it inaugurate a new clause: “A promise .€.€. of the cold kiss€/ of marble sheets”? It is hard to get one’s semantic bearings in these lines, where substantives turn into verbs, antecedents lose track of their modifiers, enjambments shatter one syntactic unit and start another. The constant oscillation between snow and sand, heat and cold, beach and room, is condensed in the passage’s final line, which moves swiftly from an image of walking barefoot through snow to an image of a sky lit by flames—perhaps at sundown—whose flecks of light resemble hot coals. Memories of running to the trashcan barefoot in snow combine with the erotic image of “marble sheets” whose coolness invites the lovers on a hot September day. Schuyler’s sensual immediacy is astonishing in its specificity—from€chapped

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lips to a “greasy sense-eclipsing fog” to remembered conversations (“I can’t see€ / Without my glasses”) to a description of driving on “the shimmering blacktop and mowed grass” that reminds him of a recipe: “Stir until it coats the spoon, remove from heat, let cool and chill.” The recipe, with its fusion of hot and cold, liquid and congealed, leads to a discussion of a sky “graying up for more snow” and a description of starlings, “bullies of birdland, lousing up€/ The pecking order.” Each association extends from the previous by a sensuous logic that imitates Whitman, less by its declarations of merging and joining and more by its confusion of contrasting associations. Speaking of how its waves form and dissipate, the ocean mockingly says, “Now you see it now you don’t,” and this could be the perspective of the entire poem. Schuyler has a keen eye for the tension between surfaces and what lies beneath, as if he wants to peel back the visible landscape to reveal its subterranean formations:

. . . behind the February dunes

Ice boats speed and among the reeds there winds a little frozen stream Where kids in kapok ice-skate and play at Secret City as the sun Sets before dinner, the snow on fields turns pink and under the hatched ice The water slides darkly and over it a never before seen liquefaction of the sun In a chemical yellow greener than sulphur a flash of petroleum-by-product Unbelievable, unwanted and as lovely as though someone you knew all your life Said the one inconceivable thing and then went on washing dishes (118)

This passage is like the ice boats that skate along the surface of frozen water, weaving an acoustic and imagistic calligraphy of great beauty and power without any particular direction. Prepositional phrases contribute to this pattern by constantly shifting relationships, situating one image on top of or beside another: “behind the February dunes€/ Ice boats”; “snow on fields turns pink and under the hatched ice€/ The water slides darkly”; “over it a never before seen liquefaction of the sun.” At the same time as Schuyler’s eye records visual, if seemingly random, associations, so his complex vowel music registers disparate acoustic elements. The line, “Ice boats speed and among the reeds there winds a little frozen stream,” resembles the Elizabethan lyric in its graceful internal rhymes and alliterations. The water that “slides darkly” under the ice is matched, on the ice by the unsettling image of the sun whose “chemical

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yellow” suddenly becomes “a flash of petroleum-by-product.” Whether he is describing the literal presence of an oily substance on water (and its characteristic marbling) or using the association of petroleum to describe the particular quality of yellow, Schuyler denaturalizes the natural “as though someone you knew all your life€/ Said the one inconceivable thing and then went on washing dishes” (118). The magic of Schuyler’s poetry is embodied here in his mixture of the “inconceivable” qualities of a landscape and its utter ordinariness. At the end of the poem, the fluidity of the wintry scene is contrasted to the constancy of the lover’s gaze: The sky empties itself to a color, there, where yesterday’s puddle Offers its hospitality to people-trash and nature-trash in tans and silvers And black grit like that in corners of a room in this or that cheap dump Where the ceiling light burns night and day and we stare at or into each Other’s eyes in hope the other reads there what he reads: snow, wind Lifted; black water, slashed with white; and that which is, which is beyond Happiness or love or mixed with them or more than they or less, unchanging

change,

“Look,” the ocean said (it was tumbled, like our sheets), “look in my eyes” (119)

Even here, where the poet seems finally to be in the room with the lover, he seems unsure of what he reads in the lover’s eyes: “we stare at or into each€/ Other’s eyes in hope the other reads there what he reads.” This is pretty provisional looking, the “that which is” confused with that “which is beyond€/ Happiness or love or mixed with them.” Where Whitman in “Out of the Cradle” hears the ocean’s “word most delicious” as “Death,” Schuyler hear’s an imperative: “look in my eyes.” Now the tumbled ocean merges with the tumbled sheets of the bed, and what had been a distracted kaleidoscope of brilliant surfaces becomes a demand for focus. “Look” has been the imperative of the poem all along, and Schuyler shows us through the poem’s desultory progress how to look and listen closely. As an optical image, the crystal lithium refers to the pattern of associations, interruptions, and enjambments that make up the poem’s long lines. The ocean becomes both the speaker of the poem, urging the poet to look into its abyss, and the lover himself, demanding that the speaker turn away from the unstable movement of natural forms and look into his eyes. Like the light

Looking Through Lithiumâ•… 189

refracted through a crystal, images quickly shift from one zone to another, scarcely allowing the reader time to adjust to the change. Light and dark, winter and summer, rural and urban, heat and cold—these are the core oppositions that dominate the poem. But, as a referent to an antidepressant, crystal takes on new associations with stabilization, control, and normalization of affective states. To look “through” lithium is to see the world, literally, in a grain of sand—where the phantasmagoria of emotional highs and lows can be focused, where the seasonal changes and locations can be sustained in a single verbal unit. If Schuyler was beginning his long regimen of medicalization at this time, the crystal lithium, as a book and as a title, announces a permission to fuse large contrasts (romantic vistas and Coca-Cola) in single lines. The poem is not “about” lithium, yet it lives within its orbit of emotional changes brought about by a love affair that unsettles the sensate world. Claiming Cognitive Disability The condensations and displacements that we see in “The Crystal Lithium” are usually attributed to Schuyler’s close association with painters, particularly Fairfield Porter, Alex Katz, Joe Brainard, Darragh Park, and Jane Freilicher.12 While focusing on these personal proximities is important, it tends to aestheticize the sociality—what I earlier referred to as Schuyler’s “blue€ / friendliness”—that he experienced “inside outside€ / the nut house€ / gate.” His ability to represent his mental state was not always easy, as we have seen, leading, alternately, to camp self-mockery and hymns to nature. The difficulty of claiming manic depression, like that of claiming queerness, may be due to the problem of visibility that “The Crystal Lithium” explores. Abby Wilkerson, speaking of the difficulty of accommodating depression within a disability-rights context, makes the point that “it is not visible in the way that many physical disabilities are, and the stigma of mental illness only reinforces the felt need to keep it that way. .€.€. What’s the depression equivalent [of queer/crip positionalities]? Eeyore? Walter Matthau in Grumpy Old Men?” (n.p.). Schuyler clearly saw himself in terms of such positionalities and made their camp potentialities into a kind of protective masque. Wilkerson points to a tension within disability studies between visible and/or physical disabilities and cognitive disabilities and the way that the stigma attached to the latter was historically applied to the former. “We’re not sick,” was the mantra of the early disability-rights movement, implying that disabled people are, but for a

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Â� missing sensory organ or limb, fully functional individuals, unlike those who have chronic diseases or mental illness. I mention this fact in order to suggest that Schuyler’s oblique response to his bipolar disorder may express both a winning diffidence about his occasional hospitalizations and a level of critical awareness of the historic conflation of homosexuality with mental illness:

Nor can I quite forget what someone

said: “I got her number:

‘Why did you tell him homosexuality is a neurosis?’”

I said, “She said

She didn’t say it, but she did,” Hard to

achieve with so much information

Available, so little to be believed. (261–62)

In this elliptical formulation Schuyler crystallizes links between mental illness and homosexuality by invoking the long history of psychiatric diagnoses of “deviant sexualities.” “She didn’t say it, but she did,” is the unspoken assumption about gayness that hovers over therapeutic discourse of the 1950s and 1960s and that helped create madness as an almost obligatory rite of passage for poets on their way to literary and sexual health. Another poem in which Schuyler debunks both the romantic view of mental illness and the pathologized view of homosexuality occurs in “We Are Leaves” (1972), written around the same period as “The Crystal Lithium.” Once again, the issue that links cognitive disability with sexuality is the way that clinical language brings queerness into visibility through the analytical gaze. The Â�poem’s title links the lovers to the leaves of a tree—separate and autonomous yet joined in an affection that must be reiterated: “you are€/ so with me€/ when apart” (131). In the final lines of the poem the love that they share comes into contact, briefly, with the psychiatric or medical frame by which this “natural” affection is measured in the larger world:

We are—

you are you, I am I, and we mesh. And to ourselves

Looking Through Lithiumâ•… 191 we speak our thoughts and touch and that is love, isn’t it? What Doc called, Gen ital contact. (131–32)

Here the assertion of love and erotic desire between (presumably homosexual) lovers is interpreted by the medical professional (“Doc”) as “Gen€/ ital contact,” thereby reducing affection to a clinical term. The enjambment emphasizes how technical language reifies “touch” into something else, while the capitalizing of the substantive links the word to the “Doc” who uses it. Against this bracketed reading of homosexual desire, Schuyler feels he and his lover are one with the leaves: lighter than a zeppelin the sense of touch brushed lightly one against the other we two, together here among the leaves. (132)

As in What’s for Dinner? and his poems written within mental institutions, Schuyler insists on the ordinariness, even banality of affectionate and mental states that are unnatural to the larger world. His insistent pronominal positioning (“We are€/ you are you€/ I am I”) reaffirms through deixis the possible subject positions that the lovers occupy as autonomous and “meshed” individuals. Against the world that regards homosexual love as aberrant, the speaker tests his and his lover’s participation in a natural world of swirling leaves, seasonal cycles, and self-identification through language. In so doing, Schuyler redresses Freud’s Holy Family in a kind of drag that he can then represent as

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his own extended family—including lovers, kids, dogs, and fellow patients. Schuyler’s response as an out gay male is to domesticate the theater of psychiatric disorder by becoming “Jim the Jerk” but at the same time turn the mirror of the madhouse or the clinical diagnosis back onto readers who might see themselves reflected there. Looking through lithium also looks back.

b 9

Ekphrasis and The New York School And then: if literature and painting are no longer held in a hierarchical reflection, one being the rear-view mirror for the other, why maintain them any longer as objects at once united and separate, in short, classed together? Why not wipe out the difference between them (purely one of substance)? Why not forgo the plurality of the “arts” in order to affirm more powerfully the plurality of “texts”? —Roland Barthes, S/Z (56) You can’t say it that way any more. Bothered about beauty you have to Come out into the open, into a clearing, And rest. Certainly whatever funny happens to you Is OK. To demand more than this would be strange Of you, you who have so many lovers, People who look up to you and are willing To do things for you, but you think It’s not right, that if they really knew you . . . So much for self-analysis. Now, About what to put in your poem-painting: —John Ashbery, “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name”

Beyond the Rear-View Mirror

I

t probably seems like an academic exercise to revive the Horatian formula, ut pictura poesis, these days, especially in dealing with contemporary poetry. How could a theory so thoroughly based on representation be applied to a poetry that seems to defy any mimetic function? Obviously for a poem to emulate those qualities of sensuous vividness (enargeia) and naturalness available to the

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painter, it has to be written with the conviction that its primary function is to represent something. Poetry written since Mallarmé challenges such an attitude by forcing greater attention on the medium as productive rather than reproductive. As Barthes asks in the epigraph to this chapter, can literature serve any longer as the “rear-view mirror” of painting, or would both be better described as discursive formations or texts? As Ashbery would seem to reply, “You can’t say it that way any more.” It is possible that ut pictura poesis is inadequate as a model and that our reading of the “sister arts” has been too narrowly viewed through the eyes of Gotthold Lessing, who even today continues to provide an Augustan corrective to the excesses of verbal painting. It was Lessing who applied the categories of spatial and temporal form to painting and poetry, by which their languages of representation were seen to differ. And it was Lessing who provided some of the central metaphors with which later commentators articulated a theory of modernist formal strategies. Joseph Frank, to take the obvious example, adapts Lessing’s idea of spatial form and applies it to modern poetry and fiction. The works of Flaubert, Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and others, through a desire to present simultaneous perspectives on a given moment and through unifying connectives (objective correlative, ideogram, “mythic method”), tend to destroy any sense of chronological sequence or naturalistic perspective. These writers, Frank contends, “ideally intend the reader to apprehend their work spatially, in a moment of time, rather than as a sequence” (9). The gap between the actual (temporal) reading of Ulysses or “The Waste Land” and the ideal (spatial) reading that Frank imagines is one of the most problematic aspects of his book, a gap that he must ignore in order to verify his thesis.1 Despite Allen Tate’s assurance, in his forward to The Widening Gyre, that Frank is not a New Critic, the concept of spatial form is precisely the model for the self-enclosed, auto-telic text that Tate’s own peers advocated. Frank’s particular virtue is that he provides a way of looking at formally difficult modernist texts that had, as yet, not been given a synoptic reading. The New Critics may have created a methodology for reading the lyric, but Frank takes on longer, more diffuse works and focuses on the tension between their seemingly disparate elements and their underlying unity. By extending Lessing’s classicism to cover such works, Frank reifies the complex arguments over modernist abstraction into a new version of Kunstwollen, or will-to-art, that the New Critics would find palatable. What Frank does for literary modernism, Murray Krieger does for the

Ekphrasis and The New York Schoolâ•… 195

whole of poetry and, like Frank, Krieger develops his spatial metaphor out of Lessing. In “Ekphrasis and the Still Movement of Poetry; Or, Laokoön Revisited,” Krieger studies the ways in which poetic meditations on three-dimensional objects signal their own formal and linguistic self-sufficiency. By incorporating metaphors drawn from the visual arts, the poet is able to signal an awareness of the poem’s status as object and to transform the linear movement of language into the spatial timelessness of Eliot’s Chinese jar from “Burnt Norton” or Keats’s Grecian urn. Krieger relies for his thesis upon ekphrasis, the use of literature to imitate a work of plastic art:2 The object of imitation, as a spatial work, becomes the metaphor for the temporal work which seeks to capture it in that temporality. The spatial work freezes the temporal work even as the latter seeks to free it from space. Ekphrasis concerns me here, then, to the extent that I see it introduced in order to use a plastic object as a symbol of the frozen, stilled world of plastic relationships which must be€superÂ�imposed upon literature’s turning world to “still” it. (325)

It would seem that the rhetoric here of “frozen,” “stilled,” “plastic,” and “superimposed” emerges out of a desire to remove all traces of contingency, human or historical. The work of art “proclaims as its own poetic its formal necessity” as viewed through the “still movement” of funeral urn or classic vase. The circular shape of such objects provides a felicitous image of time spatialized, just as the poem, by meditating on that shape, calls attention to its own object status. One could add to these two examples from Frank and Krieger a host of similar treatises in which the poem is viewed as a well-wrought urn, verbal icon, or objective correlative in order to signal its internal self-sufficiency, autonomy, and organic unity. Whatever ironies or tensions might appear within the poem are mastered by an overall design of which the reader is aware, as it were, in potential but never in the act of reading. That is, the poem’s internal coherence is retrospectively created by the critic, irrespective of what any reader might be aware of. Within this critical view, the hermeneutic circle is closed; interpretation depends upon recovering an intent that pre-exists and organizes the work.3 The fact that the artist may have been confused or that the reader misunderstands are consigned to fallacies of intention or affectivity. I rehearse these well-known staples of formalist criticism only to point out the critical heritage of “spatial ekphrasis” that has dominated one major reading of modern literature. More pertinently, I want to emphasize that this

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Â� heritage carries with it a rhetoric of pictorialism derived from early modern and neoclassical aesthetics designed to establish limits on what each art might accomplish. It is with such critical contextualism that most postmodern poetry argues, if unconsciously and unsystematically. In earlier chapters I have discussed the ways that an immanent aesthetic, often framed within Heideggerean existential phenomenology, has provided a significant critique of this tradition. The extreme “laocoönization” of modern criticism has been met by a critical hermeneutics that reads the processual, expressive character of 1950s and 1960s poetry as a re-temporalizing of the aesthetic field. But in order for hermeneutic critics to view the epochal transformations leading to postmodernism, they have had to reduce historicality to a subjectivist, existential character. What would such a criticism do, then, with poems that exist at the borders of spatial form, those painterly poems that most rely on formal self-reflection and for which recuperation and repetition seem to be their dominant activity? The contemporary painterly poem diverges from its predecessors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by stressing poetry’s ability to embody the painting’s formal strategies. This generalization concerning formal equivalences could be challenged by reference to more traditional examples of such poems from the 1970s and 1980s, including W.€D. Snodgrass’s “The Red Studio” (on Matisse), Adrienne Rich’s “Pictures by Vuillard,” Anthony Hecht’s “Master Bellini,” or Jorie Graham’s “San Sepolcro” (about Piero della Francesca), and many others, where the painting serves as the occasion for personal reflection and psychological interrogation. In such poems the painting remains relatively inert, an occasion for the poet to extend personal claims whose terms are limned in the painting.4 A poem about a painting is not the same as what I am calling a “painterly poem,” which activates strategies of composition equivalent to but not dependent on the painting. Instead of pausing at a reflective distance from the work of art, the poet reads the painting as a text, rather than static object, or else reads the larger representational problematic initiated by the visual or spatial object. The most extreme examples of these forms of equivalence would be the cubist poetics of Max Jacob, Apollinaire, and Gertrude Stein or the zaum poetry of Russian futurism. The collaborative work of musicians, artists, dancers, and poets following Marcel Duchamp (John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Jackson MacLow, David Tudor) would be the ultimate example of inter-art projects that complicate (or destroy) the

Ekphrasis and The New York Schoolâ•… 197

boundaries of the medium and interrogate the institutional status of artistic discourse. In order to see how poets of the postwar era have challenged a static ekphrasis, I have chosen three poems by poets of the New York School. My choices are somewhat inevitable, given the proximity of poets to painters within that movement, but the work of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and James Schuyler offer a challenge to a spatial ekphrasis that blurs the boundary between the visual and verbal. By choosing poems written on specific paintings, I do not mean to uphold the “hierarchal reflection” of painting to poem, as Barthes calls it, but rather to expose the difficulties of delineating their separateness. In each example, poetic reflection refuses to constitute the painting in an act of linguistic recovery. Realization implies dematerialization; the instability of the object, its semiotic variability exposed by the poem’s verbal play, deictic confusions, and stylistic code shifting. Painting and poems are, as John Ashbery says, “stable within€/ Instability,” and the elaboration of this paradox will be my concern here. “The ╯ General Fear”: Frank O’Hara and Larry Rivers Frank O’Hara is usually the first poet one thinks of in discussing contemporary relationships among the arts. As a curator at the Museum of Modern Art during the 1950s and early 1960s, as art critic and friend to many of the firstand second-generation New York painters, O’Hara was in a unique position to meditate on various artistic modes before they entered the critical and institutional canon. His close proximity to painters often figures actively in his “personist” poetics. In a National Educational Television documentary, O’Hara and Al Leslie, a painter, are shown collaborating on the libretto for a play. In the midst of typing the dialogue, a friend phones, and O’Hara mentions the circumstance of being with Leslie while being interviewed for educational television (“it’s called ‘performance,’” he remarks). The friend proceeds to supply the phrase, “a flashing bolt,” which O’Hara types into the dialogue. It is a perfect example of the immediacy of response in O’Hara’s poetry, but it also illustrates the collaborative character of composition within his circle. Marjorie Perloff has thoroughly chronicled many of O’Hara’s relationships with other painters (Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Mike Goldberg, Jasper Johns, Jane Freilicher), but here I would like to look at his use of Larry Rivers’s Washington Crossing the Delaware (see figure 9.1) in a poem that, on the surface,

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Fig. 9.1╇ Larry Rivers, George Washington Crossing the Delaware. Oil, graphite, and charcoal on linen, 835/8 in. x 1115/8 in. (212.4 x 283.5 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Art ©Â€Estate of Larry Rivers€/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Digital image ©Â€The Museum of Modern Art€/ Licensed by SCALA€/ Art Resource, NY

seems based on a traditional ekphrastic principle and yet inverts the stasis of the artwork by a series of puns and inversions. In “On Seeing Larry Rivers’ Washington Crossing the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art,” O’Hara recognizes a complex series of aesthetic, historical, and rhetorical frames within which the painter has situated a great, national cliché. The title itself reflects this complexity by emphasizing the “sight” of Rivers’s painting in a museum (O’Hara had worked at the Museum of Modern Art since 1951). That vantage, as Barbara Fisher says, reminds us of the poet’s “acute awareness of the physical and institutional conditions that frame encounters with art” (3). The fact that Rivers’s painting is based on an earlier painting by Emanuel Leutze that hangs in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art complicates the poem’s emphasis on the institutional framing of historical events. The ostensible event, George Washington’s heroic Christmas night crossing of the frozen Delaware River from Pennsylvania into New Jersey in 1776, was an event that many feel turned the tide of the Revolutionary

Ekphrasis and The New York Schoolâ•… 199

War in the colonies’ favor. The event is mediated by a series of perspectives, the multiplicity of which undermines the event’s autonomy and objectivity yet comments suggestively on Rivers’s own tendency to layer his canvases with multiple sediments of visual quotations. The poem’s title provides a further mediating frame by its oblique reference to Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” another work in which a chain of artistic inspiration is established. Thus, the poem exists in an ironic sequence of artistic, historical, and literary parentheses which imitate Rivers’s own framing of previous stylistic modes. Rivers’s use of the heroic style of nineteenth-century academic painting is rendered incomplete by erasures, blurring and gestural application more common to abstract expressionism. O’Hara seems to recognize the instability created by this mixture of styles as an enactment of General Washington’s own insecurity (the weather had already forced the retreat of other troops in the same area) in the face of his heroic challenge: Now that our hero has come back to us in his white pants and we know his nose trembling like a flag under fire, we see the calm cold river is supporting our forces, the beautiful history. To be more revolutionary than a nun is our desire, to be secular and intimate as, when sighting a redcoat, you smile and pull the trigger. Anxieties and animosities, flaming and feeding on theoretical considerations and the jealous spiritualities of the abstract, the robot? they’re smoke, billows above the physical event. They have burned up. See how free we are! as a nation of persons. Dear father of our country, so alive you must have lied incessantly to be immediate, here are your bones crossed on my breast like a rusty flintlock, a pirate’s flag, bravely specific

200â•… ap p ro ac hi n g t h e ne w a m er ic a n p o et ry and ever so light in the misty glare of a crossing by water in winter to a shore other than that the bridge reaches for. Don’t shoot until, the white of freedom glinting on your gun barrel, you see the general fear. (234)

The pun of the last line undermines all claims for Washington’s supposed honesty and heroism (“you must have lied incessantly to be€/ immediate”). As Washington stands in metonymic relation to the panorama of American history, so his “fear” repeats that of the general populace in the mid-1950s cold war. The poem rehearses all of the generalities attendant to a notion of “the beautiful history,” one presumably dominated by a continuity of great deeds. In place of this continuity, O’Hara extends a series of contradictions, each of which serves to mock the straight road by which “our hero has come back to us.” He comes back wearing white pants with his “nose€/ trembling,” hardly the subject for a noble portrait. To be no more revolutionary “than a nun” or to “smile” when pulling the trigger or to wear a skull and crossbones on one’s chest—these are severely diminished heroics, more appropriate to Tom Sawyer’s gang than any crisis-filled event. Like smoke clouds, these effects are “billows above€/ the physical event” that provide grit upon which the wheels of historical narrative can gain traction. Washington crosses not to a shore marked by historical destiny (he attacked a Hessian garrison at Trenton, losing only four men and went on to attack 1,200 British at Princeton in January of 1777) but to a “shore€/ other than that the bridge reaches for.” Washington returns to us, as the opening lines suggest, as a fiction that must be deconstructed in order to be seen as such. Each line gaily chronicles the contradictoriness of this fiction upon which ideas of freedom, heroism, and history depend. “See how free we are,” O’Hara exults, but then qualifies: “as a nation of persons.” The chatty tone contrasts with the serious matter behind it, and it is by this disparity of tone and content that the poet most emulates strategies in Rivers’s painting. However indebted the poem is to Rivers’s canvas (which I will describe presently), it refuses to remain bound to that single frame. The stability of its critical focus is undercut by its irreverent tone and linguistic playfulness; the continuity of its temporal references is constantly being undermined; orientation of persons is confused by O’Hara’s pronominal shifts in the final stanza

Ekphrasis and The New York Schoolâ•… 201

(“here are your bones crossed€/ on my breast like a rusty flintlock”); and, finally, the puns and wordplay defeat any sustained narrative, either of early colonial history or of the poet’s relationship to the painting. O’Hara has taken Rivers’s strategies of layering, blurring, and collaging into a verbal realm, so that he may speak directly to the “subject” (George Washington) of the canvas. Perhaps the “river” that supports “our forces” is also the (Larry) Rivers who maintains, by inversion, a history that remains beautiful because vulnerable. Larry Rivers’s painting created its own revolutionary furor when it appeared in 1953, with its curious mixture of nineteenth-century academic styles and abstract expressionist gesturality. It is based, as I have said, on Leutze’s painting of Washington’s crossing of the Delaware River, but what begins in Leutze’s painting as a depiction of a noble moment in American history is turned, through Rivers’s version, into an existential trauma. The painter’s comments on Leutze say as much: The last painting that dealt with George and the rebels is hanging at the Met and was painted by a coarse German nineteenth-century academician who really loved Napoleon more than anyone and thought crossing a river on a late December afternoon was just another excuse for a general to assume a heroic, slightly tragic pose. .€.€. What could have inspired him I’ll never know. What I saw in the crossing was quite different. I saw the moment as nerve-wracking and uncomfortable. I couldn’t picture anyone getting into a chilly river around Christmas time with anything resembling hands-on-chest heroics. (98)

Rivers later continued this mock-heroic theme by painting a variation on Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon that featured the emperor with his hand literally stuck in his vest. Titled The Greatest Homosexual, Rivers seems as interested in the hidden queer subtext behind certain heroic masculine postures as he is in paying a debt to previous artworks. Washington and Napoleon, represented in heroic poses, cease to become icons of historical mastery but blurred, halferased poses that “hint” at alternative histories. What is missing in Rivers’s account of his painting is a reflection on the period of its composition (1953), an important moment in his own career and a time in which the “heroic” period of abstract expressionism was at its zenith. By introducing recognizable figures, translated from over-blown sentimental canvases, Rivers deliberately thumbs his nose at the aesthetics of gesture, process, and flatness that were dominant in this period. And yet the painting exists between gesturality and pop art. Leutze’s figures are rendered

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relatively faithfully, but they seem to be in a process of completion; faces are blurred, figures are scattered around the canvas, and spatial continuity is broken by areas of muddy impasto. Some indistinct figures in the painting are derived from other works of the same period. Washington’s face is modeled on a Rubens cartoon of a Leonardo drawing, thus tripling the distance between the actual Washington and ourselves. On the other hand, a general abstract expressionist painterliness serves to blur outlines and draw attention to the surface of the canvas. Washington is surrounded by a kind of white wash, and many of the figures in the background are schematically outlined in the manner of de Kooning’s early paintings. Rivers has situated his subject in a troubled area between genres and styles, as though to mock bravura gestures with his own bravura. Hiding under this “visual polemic,” as Sam Hunter calls it, is a realization of the extent to which history is inscribed in the gaps between one representation and another (11). In this regard the Washington painting is continuous with his other paintings on historical themes like The History of the Russian Revoluition: From Marx to Mayakovsky, The Identification Manual, or Africa, with their emphasis on a kind of gorgeous and messy collage of signs around which ideological battles are waged to no discernible end. O’Hara seems acutely aware of Rivers’s use of these historical and cultural signs by presenting Washington as a series of bad puns, and “hands-on-chest heroics.” Where the classical painter poem, in Krieger’s view, attempts to gain a sense of its “formal and linguistic self-sufficiency” by finding in the painting or sculpture an analogous rhetoric of the autonomous object, O’Hara sees Rivers’s dislocations of figure and ground, his mixtures of styles, and his erasures as arguments against artistic self-sufficiency. What begins as an attempt to resee for the viewer what the poet sees in the museum becomes a recognition of the failure of any recoverable event, whether Washington crossing the Delaware or the details of a painting. O’Hara does this, to a large extent, because he understands Rivers’s own attempts to de-situate his painting stylistically and thus enforce the ambiguous nature of Washington’s cold passage. Rather than constitute itself in terms of “the still elements of plastic form” (Krieger), the poem undercuts its own semantic and thematic stability and returns a kind of nervous activity to the conventions of idealized history.

Ekphrasis and The New York School╅ 203 Fig. 9.2╇ Parmigianino (Francesco Mazzola), Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror. Oil on wood (1523), diameter 24.4€cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo credit: Erich Lessing€/ Art Resource, NY

“The ╯ Words Are Only Speculation”: John Ashbery and Parmigianino In O’Hara’s alternately witty and serious poem, Washington’s name is mentioned only in the title, as though to reinforce his absence as an actual presence (one thinks, in this context, of the absence of Billie Holiday’s name in “The Day Lady Died”). He is replaced by various epithets (“Dear father of our country,” “our hero,” etc.) as the poet attempts to account for the strangely dislocated position of Washington as both a historical icon and a biographical figure. O’Hara creates this indeterminacy in a relatively short poem partly through semantic doublings and puns, but a similar gesture occurs in John Ashbery’s lengthy “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” By its sheer length (over five hundred lines), the poem refuses to be easily contained; its scale undermines much of the ekphrastic principle as defined by Krieger, a principle that looks back to Poe’s strictures against the long poem in “The Philosophy of Composition.” In this meditation on Francesco Parmigianino’s self-portrait (see figure 9.2), Ashbery circles around the central question of artistic contingency. The painting serves both as a reflection of the painter (literally painted from a mirror) and as a bizzarria, since by being copied from a convex mirror the painting

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distorts the self-portrait dramatically. Ashbery makes no claims for either realism or mannerism, mimesis or expressive variation, but realizes that his meditation is itself a kind of self-portraiture, one that is never still, always revealing aspects of itself through time. The curious round painting refuses to remain in its frame but seems to move out into the world of the viewer. Parmigianino’s hand is “thrust at the viewer .€.€. as though to protect€/ What it advertises” (68). Later, the poet addresses the painter directly: “Francesco, your hand is big enough€/ To wreck the sphere” (70). The poet’s own method of breaking the sphere (showing his hand?) involves suspending all claims to verisimilitude by creating a highly subordinated syntax spread across an irregular pattern of four stress lines in which pronouns merge with various antecedents, assertions melt into queries, and closure is endlessly deferred. Where Krieger finds the circular shape of the urn in Keats’s sonnet to be an image of totality and stability, Ashbery sees Parmigianino’s curved mirror as a fragile bubble or balloon on the verge of breaking. What the rounded surface claims in the way of mimesis, it equally rejects through distortion. The results are unsettling, both for the viewer of the mirror, who sees himself as distorted other, and for the viewer of the portrait, who sees himself reflected as the painter: The velleities of the rounded reflecting surface (It is the first mirror portrait), So that you could be fooled for a moment Before you realize the reflection Isn’t yours (74)

At no point in mirror, painting, or poem is the “reflection .€.€. yours.” Ashbery has cannily drawn the meditation on a painting into a meditation on what the viewer asks to see in art or what the reader asks to see in a poem. And while this might seem like another instance of art reflecting on art, the end result is not to reify the work but to stress the practice of making. To reflect on Parmigianino’s painting is to meditate on meditating itself, a paradox that Ashbery embodies in almost every line: The words are only speculation (From the Latin speculum, mirror): They seek and cannot find the meaning of the music. (69)

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The formal rhetoric of verification in these lines belies its own proof: “speculation,” a word most appropriate for Ashbery’s own meandering style, derives from a word that would seem to be its opposite, “mirror.” Throughout the poem, documentary evidence (etymologies, accounts by Vasari and Sydney Freedberg, remarks by Alban Berg and Shakespeare) is brought to bear on the painting as though to solidify and ground its fleeting appearances. What such passages often deliver is the “momentum of a conviction” rather than its site. The use of Sydney Freedberg’s commentary on Parmigianino provides the illusion of authenticity for the poem just as Parmigianino’s mirror provides the illusion of exact representation, but we know that the mirror, rather than duplicate the original, distorts in order to “import the sense of novelty and amazement to the spectator” (74). The words are Freedberg’s, referring to the way that the painter embodied, rather than represented, tensions within early modern thought. Such quotations, rather than verifying the painting’s position in history (Renaissance pictorial space, mannerism, etc.) serve to signal Ashbery’s own difficult position within the poem in which he is alternately a detached observer and confused subject. The indeterminacy of this position drives from what Charles Altieri calls the poem’s “play of desires,” in which the soul, like the curved portrait itself, seeks to leave its bound frame to “(swim) out through the eyes” of the painter (677). Ashbery dramatizes the tensions involved in this transcendence by means of sustained enjambment: The soul has to stay where it is, Even though restless, hearing raindrops at the pane, The sighing of autumn leaves thrashed by the wind, Longing to be free, outside, but it must stay Posing in this place. It must move As little as possible. This is what the portrait says. But there is in that gaze a combination Of tenderness, amusement and regret, so powerful In its restraint that one cannot look for long. The secret is too plain. The pity of it smarts, Makes hot tears spurt: that the soul is not a soul, Has no secret, is small, and it fits Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention. (69)

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The open juncture confuses syntax in many of the lines: the soul “must move” but then, “As little as possible”; the soul must “stay where it is,” but it longs to be free; finally, the soul, that interlocutor with the spiritual world, adapts to everything, “its room, our moment of attention.” But that moment, as Ashbery’s operative lineation displays, is suspended; it “has no secret” outside of its individual occasions. The poet, by meditating on the painting, frees the soul to move in time. What the viewer sees as objective artifact can never be complete in itself; the self-portrait is constantly under completion by the viewer’s gaze, “until no part€/ Remains that is surely you”€(71). The active interchange between poet and painter thematizes the same exchange that occurs between reader and poem. The reader who hopes to locate Ashbery’s presence is doomed to seek for it in his maddingly inconclusive phrasing. Thematic centers like the imagery of boats, globes, or weather tend to change character from one appearance to the next rather than link one section to another. In the reader’s attempt to complete the lacunae in Ashbery’s syntax, “Something like living occurs, a movement€/ Out of the dream into its codification” (73). Reading becomes equivalent to the poet’s own processes of discovery and verification in relation to Parmigianino. It is this active interpenetration of reader and poet that most radially distinguishes the ekphrastic principle in this poem as temporal and that may be the defining mark of much postmodern poetry. These collapsing poles of reference between speaker and painting, poet and reader, serve to dramatize this crisis of temporal relations that finds its most thorough treatment in the sixth and final section. Here the poet returns to the painting as a “metaphor€ / Made to include us.” In subsequent lines, focus is brought to bear on the historical status of this metaphor/painting that is both lost in time and yet present. As an object, the painting is like the museum that houses it. “You can’t live there,” Ashbery warns, and yet the poem thus far has shown the ways in which a life takes shape around such objects and spaces. The “long corridor that leads back to the painting,” is simply one metaphor for time that stands as the “darkening opposite” pole to the object itself, a metaphor that may very well be an aspect of art’s ability to interpret or validate the present. Thus the first part of section six claims the presentness of Parmigianino’s face against the “locking into place” of historical periodicity. The second portion of section six blurs the edges of both the subjective and historical sense of time by speculating on various postures toward intention, determinism, and chance. The illusory life that Parmigianino hopes to cap-

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ture in the painting becomes a complex of propositions, each of which mediates all notions of centrality. Each “way of telling” alters what is to be told as in the game “where€/ A whispered phrase passed around the room€/ Ends up something completely different” (80). The phrase game is an apt figure for the way that the historical painting generates subsequent readings in the present. Parmigianino’s original intention is lost to us, but we read its multiple possibilities into our lives. Parmigianino “Must have realized this as he worked at his€/ Life-obstructing task.” The otherness in the painting (the ephemera of the painter’s world never directly presented) and the otherness of the painting (its emptiness before our gaze) become, for Ashbery, the strongest claims on our attention. The various partial identifications established between poet and painter are condemned to remain as such: partial. They are held in check by a series of metaphors (mirror, telescope, globe, game) that refuse an idealizing integration. The painting may be viewed, as the poet says, “through the wrong end€/ Of the telescope” in order to locate it in the past, or else we may view it as a “visible core,” like the human eye itself. The poem’s final lines, rather than turn the telescope around upon the present, leave matters in limbo: The hand holds no chalk And each part of the whole falls off And cannot know it knew, except Here and there, in cold pockets Of remembrance, whispers out of time. (83)

The double entendre of the final phrase performs in microcosm what the poem as a whole presents as the central problem of time. The “whispers” of art’s phrase-game are derived from time and also extend beyond time. No single perspective will account for both, and so Ashbery posits multiple frames in order to create a mimesis not of the artwork but of the act of imaginative thought itself. “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror” attempts the difficult task of creating a non-teleological narrative that “mirrors” (in the sense of “records”) the fluctuating movements of consciousness. The sudden dips and swerves toward and away from a given position do not posit a lesson about what we should learn from this exercise (“The hand holds no chalk”). In the truest sense, Â�Ashbery

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moves the static object into a “life,” so that the reading of the painting becomes an engagement with all hermeneutic acts, literary as well as existential. A rounded painting offers the solace of containment for the subject who wants to exist “out of time,” but this same rounded surface, like the physical eye it imitates, distorts the figure. Painting and eye are only the surface themes of a Cartesian rationalism trying over and over again to constitute itself. The deep structure is language itself in its ability to mediate and mask identity. Botanizing on Postcards: James Schuyler Ashbery uses his characteristic shifts of perspective, as embodied by a convex mirror, to ponder the soul’s relationship to the self. As much as we may want to imagine the soul as “personal” to and separate within each individual, it seems, in Ashbery’s mind, to escape the bounds of the body and extend into the world. In the opening of “The New Spirit,” the first section in Three Poems, Ashbery muses, “I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer way” (3). As readers of Ashbery have come to realize, neither “way” suffices; the poem oscillates freely between deletion and accretion, linguistic lacunae and over-ripe excess. It is not so much “what” the soul is than its manner of being endlessly proposed. And it is this constant movement of assertions that gives to a work like “Self Portrait” its sense of a life being lived in the present. The dailiness of expression that we have seen in O’Hara and Ashbery, complete with shifting social idiolects, is characteristic of all New York poets, but James Schuyler uses it to mark the social circulation of art in and through his personal life. As someone who lived close to or often with other artists—Fairfield Porter, Darragh Park, Jane Freilicher, Anne Dunn, Joe Brainard, Robert Dash, Alex Katz—Schuyler’s relationship to painting was often as much informed by domestic and affective considerations as aesthetic ones. Although Schuyler had a famously keen eye for natural details, he always situates his ekphrasis within relationships and friendships.5 One can see the close proximity between Schuyler the poet and the friend in the numerous paintings and drawings of him by Fairfield Porter, in which Schuyler is often shown reading a book or sitting with family members in a Bonnard-like perpetual summer. This domestic setting mediates Schuyler’s relationship to works of art; they exist alongside the people and possessions, the trees and flowers, that pop-

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ulate his poems. If O’Hara and Ashbery remain transfixed by a single work, Schuyler wanders among a community of painters, in their homes, rooms, and gardens. The fact that a poem might be addressed to Fairfield, Joe, or Jane does not necessarily mean that it attempts to imitate in verse the work of Fairfield Porter, Joe Brainard, or Jane Freilicher, but that these are his companions at that moment. In at least one poem, however, he does wander among paintings, reproduced in postcard form. In “Voyage autour de mes cartes postales,” Schuyler playfully combines the romantic travel narrative with a docent tour to describe the postcards on his—or more likely someone else’s—shelf: Traveling widdershins: The Shelf. No. The postcards on and above the shelf. A lurking pale-gray Irish castle by a pebbly river. A cuboid castle, like something torn down at Battery Park. A perfect castle for the message on the back:

Letter will follow.

(Collected Poems 64)

He quotes fragments from that postcard (“I wanted to write but .€.€.”€/ much of a mad whirl╅╇ ”), then moves on to another card—“A long lashed ’20’s chap, slick-haired,€/ blue bow-tied, puffy sleeved”—that seems to say, “Ain’t I cute?” A third card displays an Indian “enjoining a bison: ‘Turn not away your head€/ O brown and curly!’€/ They stand before two teepees and in the sky€/ fly two sides of a nickel.” Each image is described in Schuyler’s characteristic combination of visual precision and conversational insouciance, the emphasis less on the image described (“The Brown Palace€/ six balconies under glass”) than on the affective response it produces (“Hard times at the old Brown Palace?”). Unlike O’Hara’s debunking of historical grandeur or Ashbery’s phenomenological meditation, Schuyler includes himself as flaneur among a crowd of images, each framed by their proximity to a series of exposed wall studs: Working down the next stud from seven hand-tinted children posed as wading, swimming, rowing, diving greetings from lincolnville center, maine. greetings to you, too. How cold they must be Maine being what it is, how well they feign! (65)

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Schuyler turns the postcard greeting around by greeting it himself. He sympathizes with the children depicted in various activities, noting “[h]ow cold they must be€/ Maine being what it is” and moves on to a card depicting “the ice-cream-pantsed-and-blazered man€/ who plucks a banjo€/ for a fluffy flapper pointing with a pointed show€/ ’neath the world’s most silk-shaded bridge lamp.” Each description is economically detailed, the visual rhetoric interpreted through idiolects appropriate to the civic or touristic rhetoric of the card itself. He is as moved—or amused—by the corniness of a given image as by the message on its verso. The casual nature of his asides sets the stage for a longer pause before two cards depicting Henry Wallis’s The Death of Chatterton at the Tate Gallery in London and a terra-cotta sculpture by Claude Michel Clodion, Zephyrus and Flora (which Schuyler calls Cupid and Psyche) at the Frick Collection in New York. Wallis’s famous romantic portrait of the young poet sprawled across his bed after having taken poison and Clodion’s sculpture of lovers caught in an erotic embrace would seem to embody both sides of the ekphrastic principle by which an artwork claims its existence in time by stopping it. A memento mori for a young poet and a sculpture of a frozen erotic embrace offer precisely that oxymoron Keats invokes by his “still unravish’d bride of quietness.” One might assume that Schuyler’s careful delineation of each work would complete the ekphrastic pact by rendering in time what painter and sculptor have arrested in space. But by placing the images on postcards, in a domestic space, then serving as docent, Schuyler returns these images to time and, in the process, implicates his own desires in the bargain. Schuyler’s reflections on the Chatterton painting signify on himself as poet and as homosexual, gazing at a beautiful youth whose languorous pose complicates romanticism’s interest in the eros of death. Schuyler ventriloquizes a “bathetic minimizing of the event” appropriate, perhaps, to the extravagant romantic trope depicted: He’s sleeping—but his face is greeny-white! What is that snow? that phial? why is he lying on the bed one shoe on? O Chatterton, that marvelous boy, whoever it is it isn’t you. The little scene compels, though not a tear. A swift whisk up the next stud

Ekphrasis and The New York Schoolâ•… 211 of religious bits: a face from an annunciation, a bit of gaudy Gaudi flamed like Niagara Falls with colored lights a Rest on the Flight to Egypt (Jesus eats grapes, St. Joseph hits something with a stick) on past (next stud: gallery five) The Wedding Cake House, plain as a pie plate (66)

By combining a quizzical monologue about Wallis’s sentimental painting with a set of postcards from various eras and styles, Schuyler undercuts some of the quasi-religious mystique that surrounded Chatterton. By referring to the postcards arrayed on the shelf as a “gallery,” he creates an ad hoc museum in which he may lead a fanciful, if irreverent, tour (“Jesus eats grapes, St. Joseph€/ hits something with a stick”). This passage also hints at other forms that romanticism takes—a portrait of the Annunciation or the excesses of Gaudi’s architecture. By comparing the latter with Niagara Falls, Schuyler makes a canny connection between art nouveau and tourism, then reinforces the point by moving on to other postcards depicting religious themes and Americana. No reverential hush in front of the Mona Lisa here! Art seems part of Schuyler’s domestic world, as immediate to his experience as a series of postcards on a shelf. The final object on Schuyler’s vernacular tour is Clodion’s terra-cotta sculpture of Cupid and Psyche, later identified as Zephyrus and Flora (1799). Schuyler’s detailed description of the two lovers’ entwined limbs nicely evokes the sinewy, mobile quality of the sculpture (see figure 9.3). The two lovers stand in a pre-coital embrace, gut to gut her arms and one of his around thick and hearty, his other arm raised to hold a garland above her head and disclose that interesting flank, a pit no longer, where underarm meets chest. The nipple of a soup-bowl breast points up and across hefty dragonfly wings

212â•… a p p ro ac hi n g t h e new a m e r ic a n p o e t ry Fig. 9.3╇ Claude Michel Clodion, Zephyrus and Flora. Terracotta, 20¾Â€in. ©Â€The Frick Collection, New York

that rise with a tumescent weight. Down his back, across his rump, between their thighs flows an amazing bit of cloth or is it an effluvia that rises condensed into a steam like cloth? Two putti at hip level pound each other. Another strains as he lifts her leg, her foot free, just, of the ground, in aid of entry. Entwined like trees (66–67)

Schuyler’s description of Cupid’s “dragonfly wings,” Psyche’s “soup-bowl breast,” the two cherubs who “pound each other” and the drapery that appears to be “an effluvia that rises€/ condensed into a steam like cloth” brilliantly render the active sensuality of the sculpture. Its theme, as the pedestal declares,

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is “The Embrace,” but Schuyler wonders, like Keats before the urn’s wedding procession, at the incomplete nature of the erotic scene: Embrace indeed, Clodion! Seventy-six years of it (one hopes you had) seems a fair share. Passionate, virginal postcard to whom shall I scribble you? (67)

Here, at the poem’s conclusion, the poet links his gallery tour to the erotic theme embodied in the works of Wallis and Clodion. The stilled death of a beautiful young poet and the deferred erotic embrace of Cupid and Psyche now become the “virginal postcard” itself, which stands ready for the poet’s inscription to another. This is the real subject of the poem: the work of art as a form of affective response. “You ╯ Can’t Say It That Way Any More” In all three of my examples, a painting (or series of paintings) serves to trigger reflections that are particular to the semiotic and stylistic factors within the canvas. The canvas regarded as an object is correspondingly rendered unstable and porous, subject to institutions (museums, galleries) and critical forces (art historians, docent tours). In order to render the instability of this artifact, the poet becomes a reader of the painter’s activity of signifying. This act of reading is never passive or recuperative because its function is to produce a new text, not to re-capture the original in another medium. The poet who reads another work of art transforms his/her hermeneutic into performance, just as the reader participates in the various codes of the text to generate new readings. In a sense the contemporary painterly poem is “about’ the problem of reading in which a paradigm of reception as recovery is no longer operative. Rather than signaling its own artisanal self-sufficiency, as Krieger feels the poem does, the painterly poem questions its own materiality while displaying the odd, limnal space of the painting. O’Hara, Ashbery, and Schuyler treat such matters in considerably lighter and less ponderous terms than I have, but all three are acutely aware of how the painting offers a variety of formal solutions to their own compositional interests. Their painterly poetry offers the illusion of repetition and duplication

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while remaining profoundly contingent, subject to the intersection of historical moments or the random order of postcards on a shelf. Within the traditional definition of pictorialism, poetry maintains an authority over reality, “fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,” as Wallace Stevens says of the artist’s ability to order (130). But in the contemporary painterly poem, that authority breaks down, and the presumed hierarchy of prior to belated text no longer inheres. As Ashbery says in “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name,” “You can’t say it that way any more.€/ Bothered about beauty you have to€/ Come out into the open, into a clearing,€/ And rest” (45). This “rest” of which Ashbery speaks, in a poem that could serve as the epitome of our theme here, implies a kind of readiness or mood in which the world may be encountered—what Heidegger calls “state of mind” (Befindlichkeit). Ut pictura poesis as a prescriptive formula for how to render that world results in a mindless cataloging of materials: Now, About what to put in your poem-painting: Flowers are always nice, particularly delphinium. Names of boys you once knew and their sleds, Skyrockets are good—do they still exist? There are a lot of other things of the same quality As those I’ve mentioned. Now one must Find a few important words, and a lot of low-keyed, Dull-sounding ones. (45)

Regarded as an activity of finding appropriate descriptive flora and fauna in response to being “bothered about beauty,” the ekphrastic poem will only provide a chronicle of diversions, without challenging the formal and institutional meanings of a particular object. It is for this reason that O’Hara stresses seeing a painting in a museum, Ashbery a face in a curved mirror, and Schuyler an artwork on a postcard. What Ashbery substitutes for this static activity is a dialectical movement between “the extreme austerity of an almost empty mind,” and “the lush, Rousseau-like foliage of its desire to communicate.” Contemporary poetics could be seen as the undoing of hierarchical relationships between text and context, author and reader and, as Barthes indicates in the epigraph to this chapter, painting and poem. This undoing, rather

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than simply redistributing value among texts instead of genres or media, must also be seen as a critical task involved in studying the role of language in producing knowledge. The view of the painterly poem as something that renders temporally the spatial qualities of painting is based on a flawed belief in the essential differences between representational languages. O’Hara’s depiction of George Washington’s “general fear” means one thing for the Revolutionary War and another for the cold war. Painting often provides an analogue for this exploration of representational strategies, but often as not the object only serves as a springboard for the poet’s critical views (in this regard, consider O’Hara’s “Why I Am Not a Painter”). If contemporary poetry criticism seeks to provide epistemological and philosophical backgrounds for this poetics, it might examine more fully the spatial models it condemns, including those seemingly “artful” poems that once read dissolve into the “lush, Rousseaulike foliage” of their “desire to communicate.”

b 10

The Pleasures of Merely Circulating John Ashbery and the Jargon of Inauthenticity

“The ╯ Being of Our Sentences . . .”

W ╯

riting to James Schuyler shortly before leaving for Paris in 1956, John Ashbery commented on his reading of Henry James’s late novels:

I’m still treading the murky waters of “The Golden Bowl”—no I’m not ashamed. It is full of such toothsome treats. “that was what it all came back to again with these people among whom he was married—that one found one used one’s imagination mainly for wondering how they contrived so little to appeal to it.” 1

For readers of Ashbery’s work, James’s circuitous syntax and disconnected pronouns will seem rather familiar. The passage from The Golden Bowl that Ashbery quotes replicates at a syntactic level the novel’s circulation of its four principal characters within two interlocked marriages. The free indirect style reflects the perspective of Prince Amerigo who, having renewed his affair with Charlotte Stant, now thinks about his complex relationship to “these people among whom he was married” and the degree to which he feels unencumbered by their demands. James’s characteristic repetition of the impersonal pronoun, “one” embodies Amerigo’s odd narrative position, both subject and object of his own imagination. Ashbery often seems to have absorbed James’s late style into his own work: For we never knew what joined us together. Perhaps only a congealing of closeness, deserving of no special notice. But then the eyes directing out, living into their material and in that way somehow making more substance than before, and yet the outward languid motion, like girls hanging out of windows. .€.€. Is this

The Pleasures of Merely Circulatingâ•… 217 something to be guessed at, though? Can it be identified with some area in someone’s mind? (Three Poems€10)2

Like James, Ashbery’s pronominal ambiguity enacts what it describes. The problem of identifying what “joined us together” (lover and beloved, writer and reader) may be simply a matter of proximity, yet Ashbery suggests that the more we invest in the other’s reality, the more our autonomy is challenged. As Ashbery subsequently says, “you see yourself growing up around the other, posited life” (tp 11). But why “posited”? Isn’t the other real enough or are all personal relations dependent on sheer propinquity, on the one hand, or some cognitive area (“in someone’s mind”) on the other? The sentences enact this mediated condition by accretion, not by clarifying the point but by “making more substance than before.” The passage’s one figure of speech, “like girls hanging out of windows,” seems less a metaphor for the motion of consciousness than a placeholder marking the inadequacy of human intercourse. We could see the James and Ashbery passages embodying a kind of verbal inertia that promises progress yet endlessly diverts closure through subordination, parentheses, and compound constructions. Identifying the speaker is vexed by extensive use of the passive voice and by pronouns alienated from their antecedents. In the 1950s, when Ashbery wrote the letter to Schuyler, inertia was a distinctly un-American trait, as threatening to the forward-looking business culture of the Eisenhower era as it was to the expressivist poetics of mid-century writing. In both spheres, authentic individualism was a central value, whether in the financial boardroom or in the testamentary gestures of Ginsberg or Duncan. Liberal sociologists vaunted autonomy and inner direction to stave off McCarthyist enthusiasm on the right and Stalinist conformism on the left. Existentialism, as the reigning philosophical ethos of the day, had conferred a moral imperative on acts of choice and intention against collective and bureaucratic consensus. The new “religion,” as Adorno called the cult of authenticity, came complete with its own jargon, manifested most obviously in Sartre and Heidegger, but evident also in Walter Benjamin’s rejection of “aura” in favor of a politicized use of mass-produced art.3 For Adorno, the disintegration of the originality associated with aura leads, unfortunately in his mind, to a secular metaphysic that “overflows with the pretense of deep human emotion [but which] is just as standardized as the world that it officially negates” (6). Written against the backdrop of World War II and a disillusion with state and religious authority, The Jargon of Authenticity (1964) diagnoses a latter-day

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version of bourgeois consciousness that Marx made the subject of The German Ideology. Ashbery’s work could hardly be accused of such jargon, yet he often ventriloquizes the rhetoric of authenticity to destabilize its authority. Furthermore, his unapologetic display of kitsch objects, sentimental verse and, for lack of a better term, “suburban demotic,” would certainly have made Adorno uncomfortable. Charles Altieri has argued that Ashbery’s deflationary gestures and insouciant voice offer another form of authenticity, as gestural in its idiosyncratic way as the drips and splotches of Pollock’s canvases but, if so, it is a gesturality divested of its ontological props.4 I see Ashbery’s cultivation of the inauthentic, cliché, and bathetic not as a concession to mass culture but as posing a new form of queer identity based on a generic Subject created in postwar market society, a fluid identity that circulates among positional relations rather than inhabiting any one position. If his language is inauthentic—what Jonathan Morse calls “verbal Confederate money”—its surrogacy often stands for a past, an identity, or an affect he is denied (16). As a serious collector of antiques and Americana, Ashbery well knows the sumptuary value of such debased currency and uses it to mark his place, both inside and outside, of the dominant culture. He does not attempt to find a vantage within a more authentic voice to compel the polis to change, as does Charles Olson, nor to step outside of middlebrow America to deliver an ironic response, as do Lowell or Merrill. Rather, he mixes the heteroglossia of mass and high culture with a kind of affection and even nostalgia, finding ungrounded pleasure in the medleys of Constance Lambert, the light verse of Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and Daffy Duck cartoons.5 The cultivation of such signage is usually subsumed within the terms of gay camp, the self-conscious appropriation of cultural codes to destabilize and open them for critique. Style for Baudelaire’s dandy or for Oscar Wilde is “not an end in itself,” as David Bergman says, “but a protective device .€.€. to keep itself from being appropriated, corrupted, and destroyed by social controls and conformity” (105). A strategic use of style in the 1950s and 1960s provided a political voice for gay people in a homophobic period. Ashbery certainly recognized the social threat that such gestures represented within his generation. Commenting on Frank O’Hara, he observes that a poet “who in the academic atmosphere of the late 1940s could begin a poem, ‘At night, Chinamen jump€/ On Asia with a thump,’ was amusing himself, another highly suspect activity,” a remark that speaks as much to cold-war distrust of homosexuals as it does to the emerging expressivist poetics (sp 129). By appropriating Hollywood icons,

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pop-music stars, and opera divas, strategic camp parodies markers of authority while creating community and coterie. But consigning Ashbery’s inauthentic language to the discourse of camp treats it only as a compensatory response to a heteronormal society rather than offering an analysis by other means. A work like A Nest of Ninnies, as I will point out, has plenty of camp elements, but calling it a “camp” work divests it of any significant content, leaving it merely as an exemplary site of male homosexual bonding, rather than a satire of midcult America. Moreover, Ashbery’s work inhabits a much wider spectrum of cultural codes, from the sublime to the ridiculous, through which he creates his characteristic, if unstable, voice.6 I have adopted the title of Wallace Stevens’s poem, “The Pleasures of Merely Circulating” to characterize that instability in Ashbery’s early work, a quality that he shares with Stevens to be sure, but one which he puts to rather different ends. To some extent, “circulating” marks the divergent strains of aestheticism in their work—their debts to Paterian art pour art and Rossettian coloration. For Stevens, the term refers to the oscillating movement between reality and imagination that organizes the dialectical trajectory of his poems, shifting, as he says in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, between “that ever early candor to its late plural” (Collected Poems 382). Neither inaugural wholeness nor postlapsarian dispersal exist without the other, leaving the poem to supply the necessary tertium quid. For Ashbery, on the other hand, circulating is a desultory affair that courts its own inadequacy as a form of verbal flaneurie. In works like “Adagia” or in his prose, Stevens is fond of grand pronunciamentos (“The highest pursuit is the pursuit of happiness on earth,” “Life is the reflection of literature”; Opus Posthumous 157, 159) whereas Ashbery is inclined to deflect the question onto more inconsequential matters: That’s why I quit and took up writing poetry instead. It’s clean, it’s relaxing, it doesn’t squirt juice all over Something you were certain of a minute ago and now your own face Is a stranger and no one can tell you it’s true. Hey, stupid! (ShT 25) It is time now for a general understanding of The meaning of all this. The meaning of Helga, importance of the setting, etc. A description of the blues. Labels on bottles And all kinds of discarded objects that ought to be described.

220â•… ap p ro ac hi n g t h e ne w a m er ic a n p o et ry .â•… .â•… .â•… .â•… .â•… .â•… .â•… .â•… .â•… .â•… .â•… .â•… .â•… .â•… .â•… .â•… . But this is an important aspect of the question Which I am not ready to discuss, am not at all ready to, This leaving-out business . . . (rm 38)

Such examples ape a rhetoric of proof (“It is time now for a general understanding”) only to diffuse it in rhetorical tributaries (“Which I am not ready to discuss”) and empty qualifiers (“am not at all ready to”). Such deflection mocks the pedagogical imperative by refusing its discursive blandishments (“Hey, stupid!”). It also creates a good deal of humor in its endless merging of rhetorical frames and registers. We could think of a number of ways in which the term “circulates” circulates in his work: formally, rhetorically, syntactically, and collaboratively. His sestinas, pantoums, sonnets, and variations circulate words, phrases, and entire lines among different semantic locations, permitting novel frames for repeated terms. Within individual poems, as my initial example from Three Poems demonstrates, positional relations are often circulated among pronouns, prepositions, and other shifters that confuse the identities of speaker, addressee, and reader. His double-column poem As We Know circulates the poem itself between two speakers. Throughout his career, Ashbery has collaborated with other poets and artists (Joe Brainard, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, Frank O’Hara) in circulating authorial responsibilities and creating hypostatized social voices belonging to neither collaborator. One also sees this tendency in his appropriation of other texts (300 Things That a Bright Boy Can Do in “Europe”; Beryl of the By-Plane in “The Skaters”) to form a verbal collage. One could even extend this circulation of cultural materials to his apartment in Chelsea or his home in the upper Hudson Valley where, as Roger Gilbert observes, “Elegant Willowware plates and cups rubs elbows with a ceramic mug adorned with a portrait of Little Orphan Annie—presumably a prize acquired long ago in exchange for Ovaltine seals”€(n.p.). These various modalities of circulation offer a stark contrast to many features of postwar poetry—its confessionalism, expressivity, and sometimes vatic character. While poets of his generation as different as Ginsberg, Levertov, Duncan, Olson, and Creeley all exhibit a process aesthetic—writing as immanent discovery—Ashbery’s work offers no such ground. Moments of revelation or testimony tend to come with scare quotes, as if to say, with Whit-

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man, “Missing me one place search another.” 7 This allows him a level of generic authority, what Dan Chiasson calls “off the rack intimacy,” which gives his work specificity without tying it to an identity (62). Speaking of the differences between his work and confessionalism, Ashbery adds, “What I am trying to get at is a general, all-purpose experience—like those stretch socks that fit all sizes.” 8 If the tenor sounds a bit like Eliot’s impersonal theory of art, the vehicle is of a very different order indeed. “Whatever ╯ Is Doing the Living” I want to situate the potentially subversive qualities of inauthenticity at a moment when the authentic Self was the horizon for liberal individualism, both within social movements and personalist poetry.9 Responding to Frank O’Hara’s death in 1966, Ashbery made his most famous (anti-)political statement by seizing on his friend’s lack of engagement in the anti-war effort: Frank O’Hara’s poetry has no program and therefore cannot be joined. It does not advocate sex and dope as a panacea for the ills of modern society; it does not speak out against the war in Vietnam or in favor of civil rights; it does not paint gothic Â�vignettes of the post-Atomic age: in a word, it does not attack the establishment. It€merely ignores its right to exist, and is thus a source of annoyance for partisans of every stripe.€(sp€81)

Some partisans were annoyed by this seeming diffidence at a moment when poets were speaking out on behalf of social issues.10 And while Ashbery’s dismissive gesture may seem inauthentic, Ashbery suggests that O’Hara’s poetry, by refusing “[the establishment’s] right to exist,” participates in an alternative form of representational politics, one more appropriate to thirdwave feminism than to cultural nationalists or anti-war activists. Faced with a state of compulsory heterosexuality, an engagement with the question of one’s “right to exist” also marks Ashbery’s politics of representation. In this respect his poetry rearticulates the “gender trouble” diagnosed by Judith Butler of the self-identical Subject, one constituted in juridical regimes of power from which there is no place outside, no place to gain a perspective. A representational politics presumes that a subject exists to be represented and affirmed, and in so doing tends to “produce the subjects they subsequently come to represent” (Gender Trouble 2). In Butler’s terms, the presumed universality of

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a Â�female subject—a seamless category of woman—“generates multiple refusals to accept the category” (4). Much the same can be said of Ashbery’s unstable voice, which perversely refuses to be represented, refuses to occupy the Symbolic through which the Subject is constituted. It is not that Ashbery circulates queer subject matter—he mentions homosexuality only once in his oeuvre—but that, in his deflection and deferral of identity, he challenges its putative claims to normalcy. I would add to this a rather large caveat that identifying this resemblance between gay males and women risks obscuring the historic privilege accorded males in general and fusing two different histories of marginalization. Still, if we are to understand the politics of inauthenticity in Ashbery’s early work, we need to understand the politics of representation in which that work is situated. In Ashbery, the Subject is always bracketed, the mask stripped away to reveal another mask, an assertion qualified by its opposite. In Three Poems this constant substitution of identities is described as the “new spirit,” a kind of anti-logos strung between plenitude and absence: “there comes a time when what is to be revealed actually conceals itself in casting off the mask of its identity, when the identity itself is revealed as another mask, and a lesser one, anteÂ�cedent to that we had come to know and accept” (tp€8). As Ashbery says elsewhere, “Fine vapors escape from whatever is doing the living,” as if to suggest that, when the ground of being is displaced, the gay subject can only watch from afar (rm€22). One can attempt to recuperate some primordial, atavistic bios through chant, orality, or cultural tradition, but the Subject, in Butler’s terms, is always already represented. Ashbery seems acutely aware of this form of displacement that endlessly circles around presence, as a recurrent theme in his first four books: Still, as the loveliest feelings Must soon find words, and these, yes, Displace them, so I am not wrong In calling this comic version of myself The true one. For as change is horror, Virtue is really stubbornness And only in the light of lost words Can we imagine our rewards. (“The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers,” st 29)

The Pleasures of Merely Circulatingâ•… 223 Now he cared only about signs. Was the cigar a sign? And what about the key? He went slowly into the bedroom. (“They Dream Only of America,” tc 13)

Each moment

Of utterance is the true one; likewise none are true. Only is the bounding from air to air, a serpentine Gesture which hides the truth behind a congruent Message, the way air hides the sky, is, in fact, Tearing it limb from limb this very moment: but The sky has pleaded already and this is about As graceful a kind of non-absence as either Has a right to expect: whether it’s the form of Some creator who has momentarily turned away, Marrying detachment with respect . . . .â•… .â•… .â•… .â•… .â•… .â•… .â•… .â•… .â•… .â•… .â•… .â•… . Whether on the other hand all of it is to be Seen as no luck. (“Clepsydra,” rm 27) We hold these truths to be self-evident: That ostracism, both political and moral, has Its place in the twentieth-century scheme of things (“Decoy,” dd 31)

We could see these four examples as stages in Ashbery’s circulation of the inauthentic Subject during his “French period” of the 1950s and 1960s, when the jargon of authenticity was the centerpiece of intellectual life. In Some Trees (1956), he is still working within the Stevensian comic mode, engaged in forms of self-fashioning. In “The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers,” the poet reads a photograph of himself as an ekphrastic portrait of the artist as a young gay man. Unlike Andrew Marvell, whose child participates in an Adamic naming of flowers (“And there with her fair Aspect tames€/ The Wilder flow’rs, and gives them names”), Ashbery understands that naming of “the loveliest

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feelings” also displaces them, leaving the “comic version of myself€/ The true one.” 11 A picture holds him captive (“Yet I cannot escape the picture€/ Of my small self in that bank of flowers”), while the words he uses to retrieve his youth, like the photograph on which he muses, displace the speaker from his origins. If, as in The Portrait of Dorian Gray, “the change of age is horror” then, for Ashbery, “Virtue is really stubbornness” insofar as such persistence permits one to discover, as his terminal rhymes reveal, “rewards” in “lost words.” The poems of Some Trees, like the vision of Guadalajara that Ashbery presents in “The Instruction Manual,” offer a promise of happiness through the severely mediated frame of other poems, rhetorics, and dictions. Even if these words are lost or displaced by recognizing their contingent nature, they remain the means by which desire for what is lost may be expressed. The Tennis Court Oath (1962) continues the theme, now infused with surrealist dislocations and Freudian condensations and displacements. The subject, “leaving the Atocha station” in the book’s most infamous poem, is in perpetual movement, as unstable as the lines themselves. The notoriously fragmented quality of the poems—their collage of idiolects, potboiler fiction, detective novels, and B movies—would seem to break with the representational paradigm most dramatically: “The arctic honey blabbed over the report causing darkness” (tc 33). Not since the opening lines of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” have we been thrown into such indeterminacy—what “arctic honey” and how could it blab over anything? What report and why would it cause darkness? Here and in my prior example above, Ashbery seems to inhabit a structuralist combinatoire—in which everything has become a text, Freud’s cigar as a sign for the absent phallus. And like the structuralist appropriations of Freud that vied with existentialism for intellectual legitimacy in France during this period, Ashbery’s lines follow the logic of metaphor; if the world is always already represented, then a cigar and a key will lead to the bedroom in an infinite substitution of signifiers. Like the policier procedurals that Ashbery enjoyed reading, clues are everywhere present and yet invisible to view. In my third example, from “Clepsydra” in Rivers and Mountains (1966), Ashbery pushes representation toward the performative, each line striving to mimic the passing of time rather than to represent individual moments. The sheer size of the 253-line verse paragraph provides capacious room for “previsions” of immortality, intimations of a fulfillment without assurance. Assertions are negated (“Each moment€/ Of utterance is the true one; likewise none are true”) and contrasts collapsed into each other. The title of the poem re-

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fers to a kind of clock that keeps time by measuring the flow of water through a small aperture, an apt metaphor for the way that Ashbery’s lines appear to produce forward movement while erasing each positive term. His use of conjunctions and connectives (“likewise,” “in fact,” “but,” “so that”) promise development that is swallowed in further evasions. In a passage with so little upon which to base a narrative, the image of utterances “bounding from air to air” is oddly concrete. In “Decoy,” as in other poems in Double Dream of Spring (1970), the liberal subject is framed precisely in its Enlightenment wig as the national subject. The truths that Jefferson held to be self-evident in the Declaration of Independence turn out to produce the ostracism upon which independence is based. As Shoptaw notes of the poem’s title, such truths turn out to be “decoys for the hopeful” which Ashbery mimics through sociological jargon: “That urban chaos is the problem .€.€. For the factory, deadpanned by its very existence into a€/ Descending code of values, has moved right across the road from total financial upheaval€ / And caught regression head-on” (103; dd 31). Here the “crypt word” regression replaces recession, reminding us of the close proximity of the psychological to the economic and anticipating, as it turns out, our current economic crisis.12 In each of my examples, written from the mid-1950s through the late 1960s, Ashbery anticipates the linguistic turn posed by structuralism and post-structuralism, which locates the Subject not in a metaphysical prior realm but in a signifying system. The truth of utterances, as the example from “Clepsydra” demonstrates, exists in the “bounding from air to air,” a metaphor that erases itself in order to mark the provisional character of utterances. But what I am calling Ashbery’s courting of the “inauthentic” space between ungrounded utterances has implications for him as a political agent: Night after night this message returns, repeated In the flickering bulbs of the sky, raised past us, taken away from us, Yet ours over and over until the end that is past truth, The being of our sentences, in the climate that fostered them, Not ours to own, like a book, but to be with, and sometimes To be without, alone and desperate But the fantasy makes it ours, a kind of fence-sitting Raised to the level of an esthetic ideal. (dd 18)

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I see these lines from “Soonest Mended” (1969) as Ashbery’s attempt to locate himself in history, both as a gay man and as a historical actor. If the “message” that returns nightly in the movie marquee is news of the then ongoing Vietnam War, he is implicated in sentences over which he has no control. Hence his “fence-sitting€/ Raised to the level of an esthetic ideal” represents the situation of any citizen forced to observe and then shape calamitous history from afar. But it may be that his distance from history is not only based on a specular reality produced by the nightly news. Ashbery relocates the discourse of being in a linguistic realm: “The being of our sentences, in the climate that fostered them.” Charles Altieri explains Ashbery’s dislocations in Stevensian terms, seeing the “climate” in which sentences are produced as deriving “from the interplay between the voices of a writing self and the pressures on the empirical self in a concrete situation it cannot control” (Self 149). I would add that the “concrete situation” over which Ashbery has no control is the historical non-recognition of the homosexual subject, not some abstract debate between self and world. The poem’s title is based on the adage, “least said, soonest mended,” a principle of economy that Ashbery’s poetry hardly exemplifies. Yet that phrase—like our more recent variant, “don’t ask, don’t tell”—asserts a principal of verbal economy that means historical erasure. What begins as a piece of rhetorical Americana, turns out to hold a darker message about the “being of our sentences” that is not there and the being that is. Sharing Subjects Let me return briefly to the letter with which I began. The correspondence between Ashbery and Schuyler, sustained for almost forty years, involved a witty, gossipy exchange in which each poet addressed each other by a fictitious name (Dear Veterans Day Celebrant, Kewpie, Mr. Goodbar, and Janis Joplin are a few of their apostrophes). The letters are full of recipes, booklists, summaries of parties and dinners, records of furniture purchases and other items, along with gossipy remarks about friends. In many of his letters to Schuyler, Ashbery included cutouts of newspaper articles, advertisements, and other textual fragments, in some case pasting them into the letter itself as though providing a print commentary on material in his letters (see figures 10.1, 10.2, and 10.3). While this textual flotsam may simply be items that Ashbery found amusing, their inclusion is another reminder of his collagist tendencies, both in his poems and in his antique collecting. In fact, “collecting” could describe

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Fig. 10.1╇ Ephemera found in letters from John Ashbery to James Schuyler. ©Â€John Ashbery 2011. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc. for the author. Courtesy of the Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego

a good deal of his poetry, a tour through various verbal exhibits complete with commentary. In their letters, Ashbery collaborated with Schuyler to create an almost Â�eighteenth-century sort of public epistle meant to be read by subsequent readers.13 The two poets also collaborated on a comedy of manners in A Nest of Ninnies, a novel for which the labor of writing was circulated between the two authors during a series of trips from Manhattan to weekend destinations in upstate New York or the Hamptons, beginning in 1952 and continuing off and on for the next ten years (figure 10.4). In its refusal to engage traditional novelist features of character, plot, and scene, A Nest of Ninnies could be seen as the opera buffa of the inauthentic. Written during a period that includes novels of masculine alienation like The Naked and the Dead, Catcher in the Rye, Invisible Man, On the Road, and Portnoy’s Complaint, A Nest of Ninnies seems a throwback to the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett or Henry Greene (in a letter to Schuyler, Ashbery compared it to Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pecuchet).14 Its portrayal of Â�middle-class domesticity, dinners, and European travels seems wildly out of sync with national events from the civil-rights movement to the Vietnam War. The novel’s characters are hardly developed enough to be satiric portraits of the Â�bourgeoisie, but

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Fig. 10.2╇ Ephemera found in letters from John Ashbery to James Schuyler. ©Â€John Ashbery 2011. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc. for the author. Courtesy of the Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego

rather are interchangeable parts in a domestic melodrama. Although much of the novel takes place in touristic visits to Florida or various European cities, the social locale, as John Koethe says, remains “confidently suburban throughout” (“Metaphysical” 122). “What is that tune coming over the Muzak?” Mrs. Burgoyne asked. “The ‘Intermezzo’ from The Jewels of the Madonna surely?” Mr. Kelso said. “Doesn’t Alice play this on her cello?” Fabia asked Marshall. “I didn’t know your sister was musical.” Miss Burgoyne sounded hurt. “I’m Â�intensely musical, though I don’t read a note.” “Alice is musical,” Fabia explained, “and I read a great deal.” “I try to read what’s on the best-seller list,” Mr. Kelso said, “but sometimes I can’t stand the smut that gets printed.” “Separate checks?” the waitress asked. (98)

Fig. 10.3╇ Ephemera found in letters from John Ashbery to James Schuyler. ©Â€John Ashbery 2011. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc. for the author. Courtesy of the Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego

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Fig. 10.4╇ Notebook for John Ashbery and James Schuyler, A Nest of Ninnies. ©Â€John Ashbery 2011. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc. for the author. Courtesy of the Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego

Much of the novel is conducted through such deliriously inconsequential dialogue, each character adding a new element to a previous remark without necessarily advancing the conversation. The waitress’s intrusive question— “Separate checks?”—amidst references to Muzak, musical literacy, and best sellers is an appropriate punctuation of an otherwise discontinuous conversation. Their conversation at a restaurant in the Walt Whitman Shopping Plaza tells us a good deal about where “chants democratic” now take place. A Nest of Ninnies includes a set of “normal” families that live in an unidentified New York suburb: the Bushes, consisting of a brother and sister, the Bridgewaters, the Kelsos, and some assorted Europeans whom they meet on their travels. A blurb on the dust jacket—probably written by the authors— summarizes their activities: “They take cello lessons. They open gift shops. They work in offices, and they sell antiques. They listen to records and read books. They keep cats and dogs. And then finally come the unimportant things

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like marriage.” Ashbery and Schuyler maintain a level of affection for their buffoonish characters even as they ape a certain class and style, familiar with meatloaf, scalloped potatoes, crème de menthe, Rashomon, and Johnny Guitar. References to food and antique collecting invariably punctuate each scene and mark the deterritorialized character of middle America: “A ╯ New England boiled dinner!” Mrs. Turpin exclaimed shrilly. “I haven’t had one since we left Honolulu.” (73) “Marvelous,” ╯ Claire said. “Just the thing for a pair of Roycroft lamps I dug up in Vermont—hand-hammered copper, with those dark green pebble-glass shades.” Irving looked incredulous. “Is Paris really ready for Elbert Hubbard?” (145)

The “ninnies” are resolutely middle class yet they spout sophisticated references to operas, exotic foods, novels, and art, often mixing them together: “Surely ╯ you’re not going to serve a salad on top of all this. Personally, a cup of broth€and a taste of fish would be loads.” With that, she guided the professor from€the€room. “What was it Lenin said,” Alice mused cheerfully, “—those that do not work, shall not eat?” “How do you want these peeled?” Marshall asked. “What’s that supposed to mean?” (154)

We might well ask the same question of the novel itself. A Nest of Ninnies may have been a jeu d’ésprit for the two poets to pass the time while on vacation, but Ashbery and Schuyler have created a certain comedic style that manages to be both satiric and humane. The novel courts its own insubstantiality by mixing banal table conversation with sophisticated references to art, antiques, and culture. Political events are inevitably larded with comments on music, food, and board games. At one point Mrs. Kelso recounts a radio broadcast in which “a scientist explained how very close our planet is to being drained of its natural resources,” leading one guest to suggest moving to the South to “live, until the food started running low” (35–36). The guests complain about having to live on “collard greens with salt pork,” then turn the conversation to Bohemian glass goblets, modern painting, and the “new girl in accounts receivable” (36). A good deal of the novel’s comic effect is created by these non sequiturs, but they disguise a sober commentary on the deadening of social discourse, the substitution of formulaic speech for actual communication.

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It would be tempting to frame Ashbery and Schuyler’s collaboration in terms of what Wayne Koestenbaum describes as a kind of “double talk” among gay writers, a kind of patter to obscure their erotic burden, but the ambiguities of their discourse give the taboo subject liberty to roam. Men who collaborate engage in metaphorical sexual intercourse and the text they balance between them is alternately the child of their sexual union and a shared woman. (3)

This description imposes a normative scenario on homosocial collaboration that considerably reifies the work’s social satire as a compensatory agent for heteronormal desires: the gay writer “obscures” his “erotic burden” in camp banter; his repressed desire for heteronormal family is displaced onto an ideal of male gestation. What makes A Nest of Ninnies queer is not its masking of latent content but its erotic pleasure in the expansion of ephemeral surfaces. Referring to a collection of bibelots in a newly redecorated room, someone asks, “is there a central theme to all of this,” whereupon Victor answers, “you mean the figure in the carpet? That’s a poser you’ll have to solve for yourself ” (83). Ashbery and Schuyler’s reference to Henry James’s story reminds us that the figure in the carpet, like the board games that the characters play throughout, is a form of agency subordinated to rules, its moves made within an accepted code of limits. Individual talent depends less on skill than on knowing the appropriate bon mot for the occasion. Characters imitate at the level of plot what Ashbery and Schuyler perform as authors, each egging the other on to everhigher levels of discursive absurdity. What remains engaging about the novel is the degree to which A Nest of Ninnies does not devolve into camp stereotype but maintains its focus on the pleasure that characters experience by upholding their end of the conversation. “An ╯ End to the ‘End’ Theory” A good deal of A Nest of Ninnies was written quite literally on the road, as the two poets traveled back and forth between New York and the sites of their weekend vacations, taking their inspiration from the small towns through which they passed. Unlike Jack Kerouac’s more famous road novel of the same period, A Nest of Ninnies offers no idealization of masculine bonding or the territory ahead. Ashbery and Schuyler’s spirited debunking of the domestic family drama, made popular by novels of the period like Peyton Place and The Man in

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the Gray Flannel Suit, refuses a certain representational category through which the authentic Subject is validated, the narrative forwarded, and character elaborated. The plot could best be described in terms that Ashbery used to describe Giorgio de Chirico’s Hebdemeros: a novel that “has no story, though it reads as if it did” (sp 89). Something of the same quality, albeit in a different register, can be seen in another prose work written at the end of the 1960s, Three Poems, which poses as a vast philosophical meditation on the meaning of (depending on the reader) love, aging, metaphysics, and temporality, but which, like its more satiric partner just discussed, dissolves all distinctions in endless rhetorical detours and formulaic language. “These are fundamental absences,” Ashbery says in “The Skaters,” an oxymoron that speaks as well to Three Poems in its project of “putting it all in” and “leaving it all out.” The poem’s wandering, dislocated voice seems the opposite of both the jeremiad and the personalist lyric of the 1960s, yet one of its major subjects is the spiritual and cultural change marked by the period’s historical upheavals. The trilogy’s opening section, “The New Spirit,” describes the mood of an era whose lineaments are yet to be discerned. The volcanic historical changes occurring in the late 1960s serve as backdrop to a poem that, on the surface, seems absent of any historical references, but it is precisely through its embodiment of “fundamental absences” that Three Poems marks its understanding of the historical moment. That understanding is the preoccupation of the poem’s middle section, “The System,” which interrogates the Subject as the horizon toward which a public discourse yearns but fails to constitute: No, what was wanted and was precisely lacking in this gay and salubrious desert was an end to the “end” theory whereby each man was both an idol and the humblest of idolaters, in other words the antipodes of his own universe, his own redemption or his own damnation, with the rest of the world as a painted backdrop to his own monodrama of becoming of which he was the lone impassioned spectator.€(64)

The “gay and salubrious desert” also appears earlier in the book, as the landscape surrounding the Tower of Babel, “an eternal reminder of the advantages of industry and cleverness” (50). What serves as a vulgar, instrumental solution to social alienation—a totalized system of knowledge—now becomes “the system” that underwrites such institutional solutions, a Self that is both deity and worshiper in one. Although it is dangerous to ascribe a specific agenda to

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such a slippery work, it is hard not to see Ashbery addressing the decay of a certain humanist ideal by means of what the editors of the book’s first edition call the “quasi-dialectical language” through which that ideal is legitimated.15 The image of the solitary individual witnessing his “his own monodrama of becoming” is now etched against a “painted backdrop,” history revealed as text or film. The speaker chronicles an end to teleologies of Hegelian history, the hermeneutics of disclosure (aletheia) in Heidegger and, perhaps closer to his own period, an end to poetic immanence. Of course Ashbery doesn’t specify the “ends” that are ending; his point is not to write from beyond teleology but to inhabit its deceptive mirror room. To this extent Ashbery joins a number of French intellectuals of this same period who were calling for an end to “end” theories, as in Derrida’s 1968 lecture, “The Ends of Man,” which defined the limits of humanist existentialism, or in Foucault’s Les Mots et les Choses (1966), which concludes by speaking of Man, in a phrase hauntingly similar to Ashbery, “erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.” 16 Without ascribing any influence of post-structuralism on Ashbery at this point, it is worth observing how often his work marks the end of grand narratives of Subject and History: The system was breaking down. The one who had wandered alone past so many happenings and events began to feel, backing up along the primal vein that led to his center, the beginning of a hiccup that would, if left to gather, explode the center to the extremities of life, the suburbs through which one makes one’s way to where the country is. (tp€53)17

The opening paragraph of “The System” stages this drama as a quest romance or bildungsroman in which the road has been washed away, and the hero can no longer carry the burden of his own narrative. References to Alice in Wonderland, Don Quixote, Browning’s “Childe Roland,” and “the prince in the fairy tale before whom the impenetrable forest opened and then the gates of the castle, without his knowing why,” signal his understanding of the narrative frame that self-discovery often takes. But with the explosion of the selfidentical Subject, all relations between center and circumference, autonomy and world, dissolve in one grand “hiccup.” The center that could not hold for Yeats was a cultural and historical order buttressed by institutions and traditions; the center that does not hold for Ashbery is the idea of centeredness itself, the psychological Subject that organizes all propositions of agency and identity. Against this Cartesian, reflective ego that dominates most expressive

The Pleasures of Merely Circulatingâ•… 235

poetics, John Koethe sees Ashbery inhabiting a Kantian “metaphysical subject,” a “unitary consciousness .€ .€ . positioned outside the temporal flux of thought and experience” (“Metaphysical” 89). While I would agree that Ashbery rejects a psychological, reflective Self, I would not conclude that he speaks from some endistanced, ahistorical position. Rather I see him inhabiting the space vacated by the Subject, a heterotopia as it were, embedded in the city itself, not beyond it. The non-identical or queer subject that Koethe defines via Kantian transcendence is, to my mind, the subject fatally inscribed in “the system” of history and representation. Of course, “The System” is full of reassuring distinctions and qualifications that present the illusion of order and coherence. At one point, Ashbery posits two forms of happiness, the “frontal and the latent.” The first “is experienced as a kind of immediacy, even urgency .€.€. an ideal toward which the whole universe tends and which therefore confers a shape on the random movements outside us” (72). This state resembles the child’s libidinal pleasure prior to separation from the mother or, alternately, the Calvinist’s antinomian confidence of achieving God’s grace. The second kind of happiness, the state of latency, is a state of expectation, that certain pleasures of the past will return, that love and eros are just around the corner. In this state, we are, as Ashbery says, like passengers en route: “we have as it were boarded the train but for some unexplained reason it has not yet started” (75). Such anticipation of utopian fulfillment leads to a kind of false devotion, even a solipsistic disregard: “The great fright has turned their gaze upward, to the stars, to the heavens; they see nothing of the disarray around them, their ears are closed to the cries of their fellow passengers; they can only think of themselves when all the time they believe that they are thinking of nothing but God” (74). Against this ephemeral, ungrounded ontology—a send-up perhaps of 1960s alternative spiritualities—Ashbery poses a past in which “the truth was obstinately itself, so much so that it always seemed about to harden and shrink, to grow hard and dark and vanish into itself anxiously but stubbornly. .€.€. It really knew what it was” (55). This phallic version of truth, alternately tumescent and detumescent, is a male logos that must reproduce or cite itself so that “[now] at last you knew what you were supposed to know” (55). Such formulations, so characteristic in Ashbery, withdraw what they proffer, offering on the one hand a terminal knowledge (“at last you knew”) that is revealed in its ideological complicity (“what you were supposed to know”). Yet within this “obstinate truth” there is a supplement, “a residue, a kind of fiction that

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developed parallel to the classic truths of daily life,” and it is this “other tradition which we propose to explore” (56). This “other tradition,” the title of Ashbery’s lectures on a poetic counter-tradition, is characterized by errancy and even obsessiveness: “Better Don Quixote and his windmills than all the Sancho Panzas in the world” (tp€69). “The System” rehearses the various versions of happiness—immediacy and deferral, presence and absence, oneness and plurality—only to see that they are mirror images of each other: “So that this second kind of happiness is merely a fleshed-out, realized version of that ideal first kind” (81). We could compare these apparent alternatives to Freud’s pleasure and reality principles, the child’s desire for immediate gratification replaced by the ego’s deferral of pleasure in the interests of self-preservation. The two cannot exist without each other; happiness deferred becomes the material on which the ego’s authority is constructed or “fleshed-out.” This response is thematically represented by one of the poem’s rare concrete images, that of a conversation at a restaurant between the poet and his lover. The latter has asked a question and awaits an answer. It seems that in this gap in which nothing is said rests the condition for the entire preceding poem, its self-devouring sentences serving as deferrals of a unity or totality that the lover’s proximity renders inert. In the not-said of a conversation rests the possibility of saying and thus of moving on: “So it is possible to rest here awhile in this pause you alone discovered: a little repose can do no harm at this stage; meanwhile do not fear that when you next speak the whole scene will come to life again, as though triggered by invisible machines. There is not much for you to do except wait in the anticipation of your inevitable reply” (98). But even this most intimate interchange appears as a scene in a film: Movies show us ourselves as we had not yet learned to recognize us—something in the nature of daily being or happening that quickly gets folded over into ancient history like yesterday’s newspaper, but in so doing a new face has been revealed, a surface on which a new phrase may be written before it rejoins history. (102)

What served as the epitome of the inauthentic for Adorno—mass culture and film—now becomes Ashbery’s vehicle for self-discovery. For the gay writer, a place in history comes in a severely mediated, even cross-dressed, form: And it is here that I am quite ready to admit that I am alone, that the film I have been watching all this time may be only a mirror, with all the characters including that of the old aunt played by me in different disguises.€(105)

The Pleasures of Merely Circulatingâ•… 237

Film becomes Ashbery’s version of the mirror stage, in which the subject may see himself as both object and subject, not through the mirror of identity but through the film of alterity. What Ashbery describes as a kind of “nausea” produced by living in a “dimensionless area” outside of history is relieved by seeing himself in the “movie-theater dark” where he is a changed person, and can begin to live again. That is why we, snatched from sudden freedom, are able to communicate only through this celluloid vehicle that has immortalized and given a definite shape to our formless gestures .€.€. our story takes on the clear, compact shape of the plot of a novel, with all its edges and inner passages laid bare for the reader, to be resumed and resumed over and over, that is taken up and put aside and taken up again.€(103)

Three Poems has usually been read as a work of private meditation (its debts to Traherne and Descartes are often mentioned) that validates the reflective Subject. I see it as a work embedded in the changes of the late 1960s that promised new social identities and a “new spirit” of communion. But before social agency can be achieved, the Subject of representation must first be deconstructed, the language of proof subjected to infinite regress. This seems to me what is going on in both A Nest of Ninnies and Three Poems, albeit from different vantage points. In the former, the Holy Family is exposed as a series of replaceable parts. In the latter, the system of representations that produces the selfidentical Subject, the fairy tale or bildungsroman, no longer narrates the journey of self-fulfillment. Ashbery cannot step outside of the system in order to find its fissures and flaws. Rather, he must inhabit its inauthentic rhetoric to imagine a new spirit. “The ╯ Rejected Chapters Have Taken Over” It might seem that, by focusing on two prose works by Ashbery, I am making claims for his poetry by the wrong means. Yet the two works I have chosen— ridiculous and sublime in equal parts—show the variable influence of that Jamesian sentence with which I began and which plays such a crucial role in his lined verse. What Ashbery describes as “the being of our sentences” is not only a recognition of the linguistic turn in postwar poetry (identity produced, through not revealed, by discourse) but of the sense that, in a world where being is configured around a self-identical Subject, “inauthentic” subjects are emerging in verbal forms that lack predication. Such plural subjects could be

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seen at New York’s Stonewall Tavern during the period in which both works were published, but what Ashbery calls “previsions” of this can be seen in his early work. What James brought to the realism forged by Flaubert, Ibsen, and Howells, was the idea that the subject of representation is more than the truthful portrayal of moeurs contemporaine—and more than a simple mirror of the status quo—it is a new reality itself. We have grown accustomed to thinking of emerging identity categories as rearticulating each other, race through gender, class through race. Perhaps we could extend this formulation by noting that in the pre-Stonewall period, queer subjectivities were often articulated through the aesthetic, seen not as a category for endistanced appreciation but as a site for collective consensus about what constitutes beauty and possibility—utopia glimpsed in that “celluloid vehicle.” Ashbery’s work reminds us of the critical role that the aesthetic—and aestheticism in general—performed for modernists before they noisily distanced themselves from the shades of Swinburne and Rossetti. Speaking of Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation, Ashbery says that the work “reminds us of the late novels of James, especially The Golden Bowl and The Awkward Age which seem to strain with a superhuman force toward ‘the condition of music’” (sp 13). He goes on to quote lines from Stanzas, concluding that he can see in them, as in The Golden Bowl, “ambitious attempts to transmit a completely new picture of reality, of that real reality of the poet which Antonin Artaud called ‘une realité dangereuse et typique’” (sp 13). Reading Ashbery’s early work against the backdrop of a social reality, both dangerous and typical, may allow us to see his place in the New American Poetry more complexly as a response to cold-war normalization, not only through the auratic voice, but through the jargon of inauthenticity and the pleasures of merely circulating.

b 11

“Struck ╯ Against Parenthesis” Shelley and Postmodern Romanticisms Dare I uncreate Prometheus —Susan Howe

W

hen Shelley addresses the west wind in his 1819 ode, his apostrophe (“Be€thou me, impetuous one”) serves as an address to himself as much as to the natural forces he invokes. He desires the wind to make him a lyre, playing upon his emotional strings so that he, in turn, may produce a more fervent music: “The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,€/ If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” (301). If his song can be animated by the tempestuous wind, then the poet may participate directly in seasonal cycles, storms, and change, rather than merely representing them. Such appeals to nature for inspired song is, of course, a central feature of romanticism as well as the defining feature of pathetic fallacy, by which Ruskin condemned the tendency to grant human affect to nature. In “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” Wallace Stevens quotes from the “Ode to the West Wind” to show the limits of such rhetorical legerdemain, even as he illustrates, by his own music, its allure: Bethou me, said sparrow, to the crackled blade, And you, and you, bethou me as you blow, When in my coppice you behold me be. Ah ké! the bloody wren, the felon jay, Ké-ké, the jug-throated robin pouring out, Bethou, bethou, bethou me in my glade. (Collected Poems 394)

Stevens imagines Shelley’s apostrophe coming not from the bard but from a homely sparrow, producing an “idiot minstrelsy in rain,€/ So many clappers going without bells.” In place of Shelley’s Aeolian lyre, we have a cacophony of avian choristers shouting into the whirlwind, “bethou, bethou, bethou.” The

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music they make produces “A single text, granite monotony” and, as such, a song that will not advance the change Stevens feels is necessary toward achieving a supreme fiction. Rather, this music will simply be “A sound like any other. It will end” (cp 394). By re-siting Shelley’s vatic poet as a chattering bird, Stevens brings the romantic down a peg and returns his participation mystique to the material means, manifested in nonsense syllables, by which he addresses nature. At the same time, Stevens signals his enormous debt to romantic poets who gave voice, often quite literally, to an ideal of natural supernaturalism and immanent discovery. As I have argued in the previous chapter, Stevens was often a filter for the re-emergence of romanticism among postwar poets, but here I would like to look back at Shelley himself, who served a similar function for many postwar poets. Before considering Shelley’s relationship to postmodern poetry, however, it is necessary to ask which Shelley we are talking about. More than any of the great romantics, Shelley has been subject to mythologization, adaptation, and fictionalization, whether at the hands of the press during his own day or at those of his numerous biographers since. Licensed to fabricate ever-new Shelleys is granted, to be sure, by his own letters and public pronouncements, in which he provided varying and often contradictory stories about himself. His perpetual movement from city to city, his political activism, his sexual exploits, his participation in the Godwin circle, his death by drowning at age twenty-nine—all provide materials that cry out for dramatization in the latest film by Ken Russell.1 Therefore it is not disingenuous to ask “which” figure we mean when we talk about a “postmodern” Shelley. That we should make this question central to our task testifies to how effective postmodern theory has been in determining what questions we should ask. Until recently there have been two strong versions of Shelley, both constructed upon the body of the New Criticism. The first is that visionary Shelley we associate with poets of the late 1950s and early 1960s, who saw him as the prophet of social and psychological revolution in cold-war America. Although it was Shelley’s voice as a “trumpet of a prophecy” to which poets like Allen Ginsberg and Robert Duncan gave testimony, it was also his example as a committed political activist that inspired their passionate adherence. The second Shelley, the very antithesis of the first, finds itself in deconstructive theory for which Shelley’s textuality offers the purest example of linguistic self-Â�consciousness. In this reading, Shelley’s verbal complexity and thick interÂ�textuality stand for romanticism’s own skepticism and linguistic indeter-

“Struck Against Parenthesis”â•… 241

minacy. Both versions of Shelley contributed to a linguistic turn that dominates much postmodern thought, and it is out of this aporia that a third Shelley emerges, a synthesis that builds upon the performative rhetoric of much postwar verse but builds, as well, upon the post-structural critique of the unitary subject and autoÂ�telic text. If we wanted to affix a date for the emergence of the first Shelley, we might look at the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, where he was often invoked as a tutelary spirit for the poetics being articulated there. This historic event, organized through the University of British Columbia under the curatorship of Warren Tallman, brought together for the first time some of the major Â�players of those nascent movements (Beat, Black Mountain, San Francisco Renaissance) that had been collected in Donald Allen’s 1960 anthology, The New American Poetry: Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Philip Whalen, and the Canadian poet, Margaret Avison. Recorded versions of that conference show that Shelley was invoked to support varying and often conflicting agendas surrounding the new poetics.2 Disagreements among the participants notwithstanding, the most representative use of Shelley came at the end of the August 12 session, when Allen Ginsberg read “Ode to the West Wind” in a voice that we identify with those “Hebraic and Melvillian” cadences of “Howl.” For Ginsberg’s generation, Shelley revived a poetics of presence and testimony in which, to quote Michael McClure, “the energy of the universe [expresses] itself upon the complex organism of Shelley’s body as if he were a typewriter of protein spirit” (67). McClure is speaking about the “Ravine of Arve” passage from “Mont Blanc,” and it is through the music and verbal richness of Shelley’s language that an “older, deeper energy source” makes its presence felt. For the poet whose “beast language” was roared at the lions in San Francisco’s Fleishaker Zoo (recorded in a 1966 net documentary), McClure’s debt to Shelley permitted not only an atavistic return to nature, but also a form of cross-species vocalization that remained with him throughout his career.3 Shelley’s language is the instantiation, not the mimesis, of his body; his attention to the physiological and muscular resonances of words (“Thus thou, Ravine of Arve—dark, deep Ravine—/ Thou many coloured, man-voiced vale”) returns Shelley’s actual body, via his rich deployment of long, open vowels and alliterative r’s and v’s, and by extension returns us to our own lost mammalian-biological bodies (97). We could see McClure’s stress on Shelley’s body as another version of that oral impulse generally associated with the projectivist poetics of Olson, but we

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could also see it as a hagiographic interest in the poet’s corporeal remains. Ed Dorn in “The North Atlantic Turbine,” for example, speaks of seeing Shelley’s manuscripts at the Bodleian Library and remembers

the Lock

of his Hair, his glove, in a case. not two gloves as he must have had two hands to cover but that hip thing one glove you can do something

with

in terms of those and these brown spectacular times . . . (207)

Shelley’s glove is a marker of style, a dandyish affront to both “those and these brown spectacular€/ times,” and serves as the sartorial equivalent of his more extreme political verse. Dorn also contrasts Shelley, the person, to the institutional authority represented by the Bodleian Library with its fetishistic display of locks of hair and articles of clothing by great authors. Against modern industrial capitalism, Dorn poses Shelley’s single glove as a slap in the face of public taste. As I have said in chapter 5, “that hip thing” of style contributes to Dorn’s transformation of Olson’s identity-based historicism in Gunslinger. Gregory Corso echoes Dorn’s concerns with the materiality of the poet’s body in “I Held a Shelley Manuscript”: My hands did numb to beauty as they reached into Death and tightened! O sovereign was my touch upon the tan-ink’s fragile page! Quickly, my eyes moved quickly, sought for smell for dust for lace for dry hair! I would have taken the page breathing in the crime! For no evidence have I wrung from dreams— yet what triumph is there in private credence?

“Struck Against Parenthesis”â•… 243 Often, in some steep ancestral book, when I find myself entangled with leopard-apples and torched mushrooms, my cypressean skein outreaches the recorded age and I, as though tipping a pitcher of milk, pour secrecy upon the dying page. (58)

By touching the manuscript page, Corso assumes “sovereign” authority to appropriate Shelley’s rhetoric and to participate in the text’s darker meanings. In perhaps a veiled reference to his own petty thievery, he would steal the page as “evidence” for what he cannot claim from the “private credence” of dreams. By this (imagined) act of theft, he is able to return to poetry something of its lost whiteness, as though pouring “secrecy” like milk “upon the dying page.” But Corso touches another romantic page by paraphrasing Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”: “For oft, when on my couch I lie€/ In vacant or in pensive mood,€/ They flash upon that inward eye€/ Which is the bliss of solitude” (801). Corso’s surreal version (“Often in some steep ancestral book€/ when I find myself entangled with leopard-apples€/ and torched-skin mushrooms”) offers a succinct example of Beat irreverence toward official literary classics while carnivalizing their example. This fascination with literary and corporeal remains reflects an almost gothic obsession with Shelley’s body, but it also represents an attack on the academic institutionalization of romanticism in English departments and libraries where the bones of the saint are on display. Corso’s desire to steal a manuscript page is a theatrical reenactment of those adolescent qualities of Shelley’s poetry that Eliot and the New Critics found so unpalatable. And it was very much this tone of opposition and contention that the poets assembled in Vancouver embodied in their discussions. The one poem Eliot adduces as being possibly “mature” within Shelley’s oeuvre is “The Triumph of Life.” 4 It is this same poem that provided the occasion for another important literary forum in which Shelley was the focus. I am referring to the gathering of deconstructive critics in the 1979 volume edited by Harold Bloom entitled, Deconstruction and Criticism, which represented the first attempt at an applied deconstruction for English-speaking (and American) readers. For Hillis Miller, deconstruction attempts to destroy the “parasitical” relationship between text and interpretation by exposing the constant interchange of fluids between them (217). Once again, the relationship between

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Shelley’s text and its reception is thematized in terms of a body, vulnerable to invasion yet, as Miller points out, permeable to the outside world as well. Shelley’s “Triumph of Life” provides a felicitous example of literary mortality, since its incompletion comes as a result of the poet’s literal death and thus embodies the very contingency that attends all discursive products. Shelley’s untimely demise assures the “afterlife” of interpretation (as Derrida calls it in his contribution to the volume), validating a role for the critic in completing a life the poet could not. Or, more cynically, if Shelley hadn’t died, deconstruction would have had to kill him. Harold Bloom’s preface states that “the critic seeking the Shelley should be reminded that Shelley’s poems are language, but the reminder will not be an indefinite nourishment to any reader” (9). This volume will offer no nourishment for anyone who believes in unitary Shelleys or positivist semantic models. According to Bloom, texts refer to prior texts and tropes to tropes, as Shelley’s difficult rhetoric makes abundantly clear. For the New American Poets mentioned at the outset, Shelley was a body to be recovered in hagiographic acts of veneration; for Bloom he is a body that needs perpetually to be reburied, if only to remind us of what headstones can’t say. This theme of the recalcitrance of memento mori is made explicit in Paul de Man’s essay, which sees “The Triumph of Life” as a poem about language’s perpetual self-disfigurements, its inability to posit anything other than its own rhetorical character. De Man criticizes those (presumably historicist) readings of the poem whose “recuperative and nihilistic” techniques monumentalize events like the French Revolution (or Rousseau’s anticipation of it) in chronological and causal sequences (69). Such readings depend on an untheorized temporal model of antecedence which poems like “The Triumph of Life” deconstruct, even as they display the pageant of historical succession in broad, thematic relief. De Man’s ability to regard “The Triumph of Life” as a commentary on its own figurality can be seen in the pattern of interrogation that is repeated throughout the poem. The “I” of the poem asks questions concerning the “Janus-visaged shadow” driving the chariot of life (“Whose shape is that within the car? and why—“; line 178) that are then directed to Rousseau at a later point in the poem (“Whence camest thou and whither goest thou?€/ How did thy course begin”; lines 296–97) and are finally repeated by Rousseau to the visionary “shape all light” (“Shew whence I came, and where I am, and why—“; line 398). This pattern of questions without answers, sustained through three visionary scenes, becomes, for de Man the unstable structure

“Struck Against Parenthesis”â•… 245

of figurality in all poems. The reader, denied the understanding that a question or trope implies, is forced back upon the problematics of understanding itself. Figuration for de Man is not the attempt to stabilize questions of origin in spatial tropes; it is the sign of a failed attempt to remember something that never existed before. Hence he stresses the poem’s “structure of forgetting,” thematized via Rousseau (50). De Man notes that the Rousseau in Shelley’s poem attempts to narrate his past through images of effacement, erasure, and disfiguration. The scene in the poem in which Rousseau describes his encounter with the “shape all light” is conducted in metaphors of waking and sleeping, light and dark, music and silence that thwart any illusion of dialectical progress. When Rousseau asks the shape about his own past, she responds by administering nepenthe, sending Rousseau into a trance, whereupon his “brain [becomes] as sand” (line 405) and his history is effaced. Rousseau is “disfigured,” even as he becomes a figure. Whatever self-knowledge the speaker or Rousseau may have hoped to gain through questioning is undermined by the ways in which their language defers and disfigures truth. By forgetting his temporal moment, Rousseau may participate in the larger pattern of rhetorical substitutions and transformations that mark Shelley’s poem— and romantic poetry in general. We now know a great deal more about the historical reasons de Man might have had for granting such authority to forgetting in his structure of figuration. Whatever opinion we may have about his early relation to National Socialism, his willingness to remove Shelley’s poem from 1822 (his interest in starting up a new radical journal with Byron and Hunt; recent political poems like “Hellas” and “Charles the First”; concern over Greek independence) is a tactical way of returning Shelley’s poetry to the very critical tradition he (de€Man) had hoped to subvert. And if this historical context is kept in mind, de Man’s assertion that “the figure is not naturally given or produced but .€.€. is posited by an arbitrary act of language” initiates its own structure of cultural forgetting€(62). At the end of his essay, de Man criticizes any attempt to understand or circumscribe romanticism “in relation to ourselves and other literary movements.” As “The Triumph of Life” exhibits, nothing, whether deed, word, thought or text, ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to anything that precedes, follows or exists elsewhere, but only as a

246╅ ap p ro ac hi n g t h e ne w a m er ic a n p o et ry �random event whose power, like the power of death, is due to the randomness of its occurrence.€(69)

As an attempt to de-monumentalize readings of Shelley, this assertion is based on a monumental obtuseness about history and about Shelley’s lifelong concerns with social revolution. At the same time, de Man recognizes that Shelley’s rhetoric often demonstrates the limits to its own claims to truth—that whatever historical stakes animate his poetry, access to that realm is forever mediated by the material sign itself. Oddly enough, it is precisely this emphasis on the material character of historical knowledge that has inspired a younger generation of poets to rehistoricize—or perhaps refigure—Shelley. This third postmodern Shelley that I want to consider builds upon the projectivist language theory of the 1950s, with its view of the poet as prophet of social reform, and also incorporates the intertextual and discursive theories of deconstruction, not to remove agency but to problematize the relationship between author and text. In her series, “Melville’s Marginalia,” Susan Howe discovers Shelley quite literally in the margins of Melville’s manuscript page. Whereas an earlier generation of poets seized upon Shelley’s manuscripts as emanating the aura of the poet’s body (and by extension the organic life of the planet that speaks through him), Howe’s poem concentrates on the page as a locus of speculation and contestation. And unlike the rhetorically circular Shelley in de Man, Howe takes marginalia to be the place where the figural authority of the text relinquishes itself to critical practice. In one poem in the series, Howe consults Shelley’s own manuscript page for his last year: Shelley’s pen slipped referring to the Sun Isle Continent Ocean The date July 1st 1822 across “?fury” may be “day” or “fiery” by mischief superimposed on wild tercet mask tercet (119)

Like the marginal comment itself, Howe’s poem is partial and incomplete. She discovers slips of the pen that provide a haunting anticipation of the drowning

“Struck Against Parenthesis”â•… 247

that will occur on July 8 off the coast of Lerici. From “Sun” we are led through “Isle Continent Ocean” and from “fury” to “wild.” Howe does not provide ligatures to link these words but allows them to remain as they occurred in Shelley’s hand. The last line, “tercet mask tercet” would seem to refer to the terza rima of “The Triumph of Life” and to the masks within masks that make up its narrative structure. The reference also looks further back to “Prometheus Unbound,” a masque whose central character embodies all of the miswritten terms: “fury,” “day,” “fiery,” and “wild.” In the next poem of the sequence, Howe develops the Promethean refÂ� erence: Traveling in the direction of an imagination of morning he was brought back mortal Struck against parenthesis across an anarchy of light Dare I uncreate Prometheus Chorus Semichorus Semichorus flame in greek by a copyist (121)

Here, the references to Mediterranean landscape in the previous poem are linked to the poet’s death. By conflating nautical journey with textual practice (“Struck against parenthesis”), Howe suggests the inextricable relationship between oppositions (poetry/history, history/text, text/practice) that for de Man signify poetic language’s irreconcilability. This poem seems to ask whether or not Shelley’s fatal journey was not always anticipated in his poetry, as though the “anarchy of light” that brings ruin to Prometheus is also the fire of social reform that Shelley hoped to bring to a benighted Europe being strangled by modernity. That these realms were confused in his work can be seen on the notebook page, a page recovered from its marginal status in the poet’s oeuvre through Howe’s poem. The fact that these speculations are part of a longer series about another Promethean quester doublet (Melville/Ahab) makes them all the more provocative. Decoding Howe’s poem demands a rather different interpretive strategy from those proposed in de Man’s essay, since it takes its own contingent status as its point of departure. One might say that her poem is its own marginality,

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insofar as it refuses closure, either by reference to Shelley’s informing spirit or by some totalizing theory of textuality that will liberate all signifiers. Howe’s poem demands that we consider the page not as the background upon which questions are asked but as the questioning act itself, an interchange between authors and characters, word and variant, text and margin. She acknowledges Shelley’s Promethean goals for social amelioration, even as she calls attention to their constructed and discursive character. Moreover, Howe’s poem is fully conscious of its own marginal status within a tradition of avant-garde textual practices for which Shelley and Melville are antecedents. If an earlier generation of critics, inspired by Eliot, marginalized Shelley for his adolescent enthusiasms, it is for a later generation of poets to rediscover him in the margins where he continues to inform. One might complain that my mixture of poets and critics to explain Shelley’s postmodernism violates the boundaries of genre. It was precisely such a complaint that animated the New Critical reaction against Shelley in the first place. He was clearly a poet whose work was overly infected by his political views, whose abstractions bespoke (as John Crowe Ransom said) a Platonism unchecked by artisanal control.5 One contribution of postmodern theory to this debate is to call such generic distinctions into question and to derive authority for doing so from Shelley’s example. In this effort, however, Shelley has been once again denied a critical posture, as though his social and political views could only be allegories for further reading. The work of Susan Howe and other recent writers attempts to exhume the body of Shelley’s text in its complexity as a material artifact and social document. If these bones live again, they do so in the borders between contested words. Or as Howe wrote in a note to me, attached to the manuscript of “Melville’s Marginalia,” “he is buried here and there elsewhere.”

b 12

“Skewed ╯ by Design” From Act to Speech Act in Language Writing

Approaching the Performative

W ╯

hen Barack Obama was sworn in as the forty-fourth president of the United States on January 20, 2009, the oath of office was administered by Chief Justice John Roberts who veered, slightly, from the official wording. Instead of the word order in the Constitution (“I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States€.€.€.”), Roberts mistakenly placed the second adverb at the end of the clause, thus: “I do solemnly swear that I will execute the office of president of the United States faithfully.” Obama faithfully followed Robert’s recitation but, because of the misplaced adverb, the oath had to be administered again the next day, using the correct word placement. Some pundits and bloggers seized on the event as a portent of problems to come, while others saw it as a refreshing example of human linguistic fallibility. Although there was no legal need to re-take the oath (the Constitution stipulates, that regardless of the oath, the candidate becomes president at 12:00 noon on January 20), legal experts felt that a strict fulfillment of the rhetorical contract was necessary to reaffirm the social contract.1 J. L. Austin would have to agree. The British analytical philosopher held that certain types of utterances—promises, bets, marriage vows, or oaths of office—must observe certain criteria for their meaning to be realized. Such utterances, or “performatives,” differ from statements of fact in that they do something rather than represent it. The oath of office does not describe the transformation of a citizen into a public official; it makes it happen. And it is important who performs the speech act. If the oath had been administered by an ordinary citizen, it would not have fulfilled what Austin calls “felicity” requirements, since it would not have been administered by the authority empowered to utter the words. However innocently, Obama violated Austin’s

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rule€B.1, which states that “the procedure must be executed by all participants correctly,” and while we may feel that performatives such as oaths are largely ceremonial, their contractual character subjects them to particular civic scrutiny (15). Performatives are the most social of speech acts since they bind people, places, and things in contractual obligations; they cause a ship to be named, a couple to be married, a debt to be paid, a law to be enacted, a curse to be endured, and if believed, an apology to be accepted. If performatives are social speech acts they are also embodied acts insofar as they transform language into gesture. It is this latter aspect of speech acts that I wish to extend to modernist poetics, which has at least since Whitman aspired to the condition of physical action. (“My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach,€/ With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds,” Whitman chants in section 25 of “Song of Myself.”) The gestural potential of language occupies a privileged position in modern poetry but, since World War II, it has witnessed two distinct treatments. The first stems from expressivist aesthetics derived from romanticism, and the second from a range of linguistic theories that would include Russian formalism, speech act theory, and various forms of discourse analysis. Although both share a common concern for the materiality of language—its syntactical and pragmatic functions, its physical presence on the page or in the voice—they differ widely on the ends that this materiality must serve. I would like to explore that difference, using “gesture” as an operative term for the turn toward language that often links literary and theoretical discourse in the 1970s and 1980s. In the painterly aesthetics of the late 1940s and early 1950s, the term “gesture” had a rich and varied application. At one level it referred to the painter’s physical stroke on the canvas and its record of specific physical actions on a flat, two-dimensional surface. At another level, the uniqueness of that stroke embodied the painter’s individual signature, the stylistic mark by which originality and authenticity could be measured. Harold Rosenberg’s use of the term “action painting,” his description of the canvas as an “arena in which to act,” provided some of the major critical terms for abstract painting during this period. To some extent, these terms gained a further philosophical valence through their implied reference to existentialist ideals of engagement and commitment. By treating the canvas as an event within the world rather than a representation of it, the painter signaled a degree of personal agency in a world of increasingly alienating social institutions. As has become clear in recent years, the emphasis on such independence did not arise in a vacuum but

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derived, to some extent, from cold-war consensus on the advantages of U.S. democratic institutions over Soviet communism. cia-sponsored support for traveling art exhibits, symphony concerts, and publications, while celebrating American innovation and creativity, helped shore up State Department goals. “Gesture,” in this context, represents U.S. innovation and independence over Soviet repression and artistic censorship. Poets of this generation appropriated many of these same physical metaphors (energy, action, gesture) in their quest for a poetics of unmediated statement. Charles Olson’s emphasis on “breath,” Robert Duncan’s physiological and biological poetics, Robert Creeley’s stress on a poetry of intensities, Michael McClure’s “beast” language, and Beat “bop” prosody are only some examples of a poetics for which muscular and physical response is valued over reflective or discursive moments. The most direct statement of this position is Olson’s “Human Universe,” which argues that “habits of thought are habits of action” or that art “does not seek to describe but to enact” (Collected Prose 156, 162). For Olson, Western thought has been dominated by a reflective metaphysics in which language becomes an “act of thought about the instant” rather than an “act of the instant.” Olson and other poets of his generation attacked the reflective Cartesian ego by restoring the physiology of the poet’s breath, musculature, and proprioceptive response in the composition process. If one wanted to discover a change between the New American Poetry of the 1950s and 1960s and that which it spawned in the 1970s and 1980s, one could usefully speak of the latter’s revision of the term “gesture,” now used to describe the speech act rather than the act of speech. For the generation of Olson and Ginsberg, gesture implied single expressive moments, recorded spontaneously on the page and realized in the oral performance; for writers of a more recent generation, gesture refers to the interactive, social web in which language exists and acts occur. This has been particularly the case with language writing, even when it built upon the earlier generation’s accomplishments. Without rehearsing what I have already said about speech act theory, let me at least emphasize several aspects that lead to a more politicized understanding of that term. Speech acts (or what Wittgenstein called language games) are utterances defined in terms of their pragmatics, the relationships established between addressor and addressee. These relationships are rule-governed, bound by laws of appropriateness and acceptability. The ability of any recipient to respond to an utterance depends on the fulfillment of what John Searle

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calls “appropriateness” and J.€L. Austin calls “felicity” criteria. The effectiveness of a command depends on there being someone to carry it out; a question assumes a respondent capable of answering. Failures to meet such criteria result in “misfires” or “abuses” of felicity conditions. These positional relations in discourse situate individuals not only in relation to each other but to the ideological formations that every utterance serves, whether those of gender, class, sexual orientation, or race. A good deal of critical legal theory around race and gender has focused on precisely this issue of whether certain kinds of speech acts (commands, promises, threats) mean one thing when uttered by a white male and another when coming from a woman of color. Speech act theory, with few exceptions, has been silent on the ideological basis of speech pragmatics, but the poets with whom we are concerned have made this issue central to their poetics.2 By saying that recent writers foreground the pragmatics of speech acts, I do not mean that they invent new ones (one cannot single-handedly “invent” unique speech acts any more than one can invent a new language) or that they necessarily deform those that have already been defined by Searle, Grice, Austin, and others. Rather, language writing seizes upon the framing operations that situate utterances within a larger discursive matrix. When Lyn Hejinian repeats a series of quaint adages about women (“pretty is as pretty does”) within her long prose work, My Life, she underscores both the sexist implications of such remarks as well as the role that such truisms play in the production of gender. The same could be said for Bob Perelman’s “Flat Motion,” which employs the rhetoric of enumeration and description to embody the ways that consumer society transforms individuals into products: “There is a store, it is an individual,€/ like you, me, a body, corporate” (Ten to One 84). Or consider the opening passage from Ron Silliman’s “Sunset Debris,” a thirty-page poem made entirely out of questions: Can you feel it? Does it hurt? Is this too soft? Do you like it? Do you like this? Is this€how you like it? Is it alright? Is he there? Is he breathing? Is it him? Is it near? Is€it hard? Is it cold? Does it weigh much? Is it heavy? Do you have to carry it far? Are those the hills? Is this where we get off ? Which one are you? (Age of Huts€105)

By eliminating the anticipated response, Silliman also eliminates the dialogical aspect of interrogatives, injecting them with a level of sexual threat and violence. At the same time, by removing modifying clauses and rhetorical signposting, questions that vaguely suggest a pornographic mise en scène blend

“Skewed by Design”â•… 253

into more mundane language concerning labor, travel, and measurement. In such work, foregrounding the linguistic medium coincides with a speculation about the social relations that this medium upholds. When questions have no function other than to interrogate, they begin to act on rather than between the individuals who use them. This diacritical use of language by Silliman and his colleagues prompted a good deal of skepticism when language writing appeared on the scene. In a well-known critique of language writing, Frederic Jameson seizes on Bob Perelman’s non-narrative poem, “China,” as an example of “schizophrenic” fragmentation in postmodern art. Perelman’s discontinuous sentences and deadpan diction conjure, for Jameson, “something of the excitement of the immense, unfinished social experiment of the New China—unparalleled in world history .€.€. the freshness of a whole new object world produced by human beings in some new control over their collective destiny” (29). At the same time, Jameson finds the discontinuity among the sentences of the poem driven by a cultural logic endemic to the postmodern era in which the signifier is rendered inert, unable to connect to any other except by means of a “depthless” pastiche. Such discontinuity among sentences, instead of leading to critique, displaces “older affects of anxiety and alienation” (29). Jameson is nostalgic for a Sartrean engagement in the terms of historical change that would link linguistic disruption to some form of agency, however deracinated. Schizophrenia, in other words, has been severed from its “morbid content” in pathology and loosed onto a free-floating jouissance. Jameson, as his theoretical works demonstrate, wants narrative (“national allegory,” “narrative as a socially symbolic act”) to guarantee historical continuity. He is thus unable to read nonnarrative works like “China” through their immanent critique of that narrative impulse and the totality it implies.3 It is worth revisiting Perelman’s poem in its entirety: We live on the third world from the sun. Number three. Nobody tells us what

to do.

The people who taught us to count were being very kind. It’s always time to leave. If it rains, you either have your umbrella or you don’t. The wind blows your hat off.

254â•… ap p ro ac hi n g t h e ne w a m er ic a n p o et ry The sun rises also. I’d rather the stars didn’t describe us to each other; I’d rather we do it for

ourselves.

Run in front of your shadow. A sister who points to the sky at least once a decade is a good sister. The landscape is motorized. The train takes you to where it goes. Bridges among water. Folks straggling along vast stretches of concrete, heading into the plane. Don’t forget what your hat and shoes will look like when you are nowhere to be

found.

Even the words floating in air make blue shadows. If it tastes good we eat it. The leaves are falling. Point things out. Pick up the right things. Hey guess what? What? I’ve learned how to talk. Great. The person whose head was incomplete burst into tears. As it fell, what could the doll do? Nothing. Go to sleep. You look great in shorts. And the flag looks great too. Everyone enjoyed the explosions. Time to wake up. But better get used to dreams too. (Ten to One 32–33)

In his reading of “China,” Jameson omits the final word of the poem, a small mistake perhaps, but nonetheless important to the poem’s overall pattern of

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repetition. “But better get used to dreams too” rhymes with a previous sentence, “And the flag looks great too,” both of which reinforce a fantasy of rationalized freedom and liberation that is belied by the formal repetition of language. The sentences are disconnected, to be sure, exemplifying what Ron Silliman calls “the new sentence.” Yet the flat diction of the sentences and their formulaic character indicate that they are quoted from some secondary printed source—a pamphlet, a language lesson, an instructional guide for new citizens, a school primer.4 Jameson feels that Perelman is rendering China as if it—the nation-state—is speaking “in its own voice, for itself, as though for the first time,” but this misses the way that these sentences substitute for some unitary voice, the rhetoric of power that has no source: “The people who taught us to count were being very kind.” The poem is full of such comforting bromides that replicate the effects of power by citing the rhetoric of sentiment. Far from schizophrenic disjuncture, Perelman’s sentences reinforce the managed and even coerced nature of pedagogy: “Nobody tells us what to do” or “Pick up the right things” or “Time to wake up.” What characterizes these sentences is their uniformity as a socially discursive speech-act situation, at the same time that their relation, one to the next, creates an alternative narrative to the universal history Jameson wants to see represented. The politics of the poem, then, lies not in the allegory of cold-war China, as Jameson imagines it, but in what Perelman describes as the “utopian feelings that early education can invoke,” whether in China or anywhere else. “Nobody tells us what to do,” yet children who repeat this sentence in an instructional environment are being interpellated otherwise. The individual interpellated as a “free Subject” in an educational environment submits to a speech act that “hails” and thus constitutes him or her as Subject. Although he does not define it as such, Louis Althusser is describing a speech act that, rather than describing or explaining, produces the Subject desired by ideology.5 The speech act that most dramatically exemplifies language’s ability to act on others is the performative. Such utterances (promises, oaths, declarations, bets) are characterized by their ability to put into motion what they announce. When a judge declares a couple husband and wife or when a ship captain christens a ship, the utterance actually performs the declarative or contractual function. The appropriateness criteria for a performative pertains to legal sanction as much as to the fulfillment of a verbal contract; the person making the contract of marriage must be legally empowered to do so; the recipients of the performative must be in a position to receive it (e.g., they

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must not be already married). When Charles Olson, in The Maximus Poems, asserts, “I compel€/ backwards I compel Gloucester€/ to yield, to€/ change€/ Polis€/ is this,” he attempts to give performative status to what is otherwise a simple assertion: “I compel” (185). It is an expressive moment of great power, but unlike a performative, its authority is vested in the speaker’s will and not in any official sanction. In fact, one could say that Olson attempts to demolish a polis based on such sanction by one created out of individual utterances. “Polis,” as he says elsewhere in the poem, is “eyes” (30). When Barrett Watten employs a performative utterance in his poem, “Progress,” the effect of assertion is quite different:

I hereby christen

This destroyer the Rosebud As the ape shows its teeth, Alternately smacking her lips . . . . In expression of the abstract, Sound.

A reading must be

Above the ground in the light Of heartbeats in the dark . . . . As parked cars turn on engines Simultaneously.

McNamara,

Johnson, Westmoreland, Rusk. The names are no pun intended . . . .

A present dispensing its edges,



But I call them Bald Eagles



For lust,



lusty and silly

Happy and holy men and girls . . . .

(205–6)

Here, the performative is bracketed as an official act, linked to other forms of power. The ceremonial act of christening a ship is performed not so much by a person as by an institution whose military purpose is deflected through patriotic rituals of naming.6 Watten italicizes the “I” who performs the act in

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order to emphasize its arbitrary status as Subject-position—very different from Olson’s ontologically grounded speaker. In Watten’s example, the pronoun stands for the appropriate official (or, more likely, official’s wife) who wields the bottle of champagne. But the true antecedent is a litany of Vietnamera U.S. leaders (“McNamara,€/ Johnson, Westmoreland, Rusk”) who are ultimately the actors behind each national speech act. Their names cannot be confused (“no pun intended”) but stand as the final, real condition of the present historical epoch. Watten has done more than imply a connection between pronoun and antecedent; he has linked them structurally by creating lines that, however discontinuous semantically, are nonetheless linked syntactically. Each line modifies the next so that one may read the entire passage as a long, highly subordinated sentence made out of separate units. Watten seems to indicate that “progress,” both poem and modernist ideal, is not based on linear, narrative growth but upon discrete acts, held together by a common infrastructure. Phrases are partial elements in larger sentences that have been truncated; phrases re-Â�combine according to new logics of propinquity and proximity. When “progress” becomes synonymous with a war economy—the production of new destroyers as an index of national strength—it loses all associations with growth and improvement and becomes a metaphor for routinized production. The poem attempts to circumvent this form of production by creating an alternative version that links logically disconnected elements (apes and destroyers, parked cars and Vietnam), by discovering structural homologies. The fact that the ship’s name, Rosebud, is also that of Citizen Kane’s sled adds an additional irony. Given William Randolph Hearst’s (Kane’s) famous remark about the Spanish-American War and news (“I’ll supply the war; you supply the copy”), perhaps the ship has been more appropriately named than we know.7 Engendering Speech Acts Like many cultural feminists, Adrienne Rich writes back to male texts that authorize restrictive or stereotypical views of women. Her influential theory of revisionism, articulated in her 1971 essay, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” provided an important manifesto for this impulse. Despite her admiration for Wallace Stevens, Rich realizes that his tendency to treat the feminine as a symbol for bare life—earth, reality, nature, or reproduction— must be revised to see woman as a historical agent engaged in specific tasks

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of work, renewal, and articulation. Rather than seeing the nameless female singer of “The Idea of Order at Key West” as the material reflection of the male poet, Rich remembers that the poem “offered me something absolutely new: a conception of a woman maker, singing and striding beside the ocean, creating her own music, separate from yet bestowing its order upon the meaningless plunges of water and the wind” (What 199). Joan Retallack performs a similar revisionist act in How To Do Things with Words by looking at speech act theory through the lens of gender. Her target is not male poets so much as gendered philosophical models that take “ordinary language” as a concrete universal while limiting the terms for what constitutes “ordinary” usage. Despite their similar critiques of patriarchy, Rich and Retallack differ in the form their revisionism takes. In many of the poems that Rich wrote in the 1970s and 1980s, woman is a social construct that needs to be rescued from masculinist discourse—including prior male poets—and returned to her historical situation. She uses the master’s discursive tools because they are the only ones he understands. For Retallack, discursive tools are the problem. “She” is not some identity prior to or hidden within patriarchal discourse; rather “she” is constituted by that discourse which only to deconstruct is to understand. To unravel those contexts, Retallack subjects the work of John Searle, Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, and other philosophers of language to a variety of formal permutations, mistranslations, misquotations, and verbal sabotage that make ordinary language strange. In the first poem of the book, “The Woman in the Chinese Room,” Retallack refers to a well-known “thought experiment” used by John Searle to disprove the possibility of artificial intelligence.8 Searle asks us to imagine a man who knows only English, sitting in a room full of baskets containing Chinese symbols and a book of instructions for how to decode these symbols. Questions written in Chinese are sent into the room, and the man decodes them using the book of instructions and sends out correct answers written in Chinese. To persons on the outside of the room, it would appear that the person inside knows the Chinese language when, in fact, he is merely manipulating symbols. Searle concludes that “by virtue of implementing a formal computer program from the point of view of an outside observer, you behave exactly as if you understood Chinese, but all the same you don’t understand a word of Chinese” (Minds 33). Searle’s example opposes the idea that cognition is identical to artificial intelligence by showing that, although a computer may master a given set of rules, it does not “understand language” in our usual sense of the phrase.

“Skewed by Design”â•… 259

Retallack’s intervention into this contentious issue is to imagine, as she titles the first section of her book, “The Woman in the Chinese Room,” and the extent to which gender and race matter in the question of intelligence, artificial or not. The opening section appears to be a series of procedural notes for her own compositional method: Intersperse entries & numerals from notebooks (back to Chicago (Chinese story in tact (quotes from assordid pm sages =╇ Manual text ? She is captive in China " "

"

" a moment in history

" "

"

to a sense of history

but in the way a wordswerve could turn a century’s prose for a second or two away from history first from property then ideas then property as idea then idea as property creating parallel texts left and right full of opposing forces in a sad space of alternating dire lexical black and white squares the flat degraded feeling in telling the story or describing the passage and/but they are very proud of this Searle says suppose that unknown to you the symbols passed into the room are called questions by the people outside the room and the symbols you pass back out of the room are called answers to the questions (15)

The absence of any controlling narrator or speaker (or, indeed, punctuation) permits multiple perspectives for telling this story and permits its different elements to interact and create new combinations. In her imperative opening (to herself ?), Retallack provides notes toward a possible new text, one which will involve quotations from notebooks, travel journals, Searle’s anecdote, and remarks from “pm [postmodern?] sages,” presumably those, like JeanFrancois Lyotard or Jacques Derrida, who have elaborated on speech act theÂ� ory.9 The open parentheses in which these instructions are given suggest that these materials, far from being secondary, will be the major concerns of her

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work and mark her divergence from the standard forward-moving narrative of Western rationalism. This “wordswerve”—the use of pastiche, procedures, non sequiturs, and chance operations—redirects the epistemological debate about artificial intelligence to the historical narrative it would seem to underwrite: “first from property then ideas then property as idea then idea as property.” She “swerves” from a story about the superiority of the human mind over machines (“a century’s prose”) to one about how certain exemplary formulations like the Chinese room contain historical subjects. In the place of Searle’s cybernetic man, Retallack posits a Chinese woman who is not a free cognitive agent but rather like one of Plato’s chained figures in his allegory of the cave: “She is captive in China€/ [She is captive in] a moment in history€/ [She is captive] to a sense of history.” Searle’s neutral anecdote about a man decoding Chinese is transformed into a tale about a highly mediated historical actor trapped in a history not of her making. Throughout this section of the poem, Retallack subtitles each section “She,” to mark the various ways in which Searle’s anecdote is changed when the pronoun refers to a woman. For example: She-?. how do you know the person locked for all those years in the Chinese room is a woman there are few if any signs if she exists at all she is the content of a thought experiment begun in a man’s mind this is nothing knew and perhaps more complicated (16)

Retallack’s substitution of “knew” for “new” suggests the close proximity of knowledge and novelty when both are “begun in a man’s mind.” She suggests that the example is not neutral but participates in the long history of orientalism in which an Asian woman is used to represent both exoticism and passivity: imagine that you are locked in a room and in this room are several baskets full of Chinese characters she is glad they are Chinese of course glad to continue Pound’s Orientalism there will be no punctuated vanishing points she is given only rules of syntax not semantic rules she is relieved of the burden of making meaning she need only make sense for the food to be pushed through the slot in the door it is thought that these are situations more familiar than we would like to think them to

“Skewed by Design”â•… 261 be in the new technologies and to men more than to women but it oddly feels quite normal (16)

Of course Searle does not use the example of a Chinese woman, nor is his exemplary male a prisoner. One might complain that Retallack is violating the actual terms of Searle’s example by changing the gender and context, but she seems less interested in remaining faithful to his thought experiment than in diverting the direction and implications of its proof. Why, she asks, must the person in the room not be Chinese? The answer is that to most Western speakers, Chinese language is as “foreign” as can be imagined (Searle admits not to know Chinese) and therefore other to English. Extending this logic, we also could say that the man in the room might as well be “she,” since his function is not to think, only to manipulate signs in order to receive a reward. What if, the poet surmises, the person in the room is Gertrude Stein: “what’s to keep her from responding to their cues with syntactically correct non sequiturs in effect surrendering they might ask does the past tense give you vertigo she might reply there’s no sense in knowing what day or night it is they’re always changing” (17). As women writers whose material practice involves “responding to their cues with syntactically correct non sequiturs,” Retallack and Stein revisit the Chinese room armed not only with a different narrative from the orientalist version of modernity but one from within the semiotic frame posited by the example itself, evacuating words of their conventional statemental form while speaking from the “distance of a female Faust”: in this story to describe roundness you may have to think about a square you may have to retreat from decorum or just spell it out phonetically you may have to find an Oriental Jesus with a vertical smile you may have to calculate the rectilinear Â�coordinates of a blue duskless mountain with the distance of a female Faust (18)

In each section, Retallack rearticulates Stein’s linguistic strategies in works like Tender Buttons, describing an object or condition (“to describe roundness you may have to think about a square”) by discontinuous means. This, then, becomes an alternative way of responding to Searle’s example—by imagining the Mephistophelian epistemological pact from the standpoint of a female€Faust.10

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In the book’s third section, Retallack brings Stein directly into conversation with J.€L. Austin.11 In his lectures of 1955, collected as How To Do Things with Words, Austin argues that there are utterances in which to say or describe something is also to do or perform something. Performatives, as I have said, occupy an interstitial position between words and intentional acts and, by their very nature, rely on the circumstances and agency of their utterance. They differ from constative utterances, statements which describe what is happening or convey information. As we have seen in my example from Barrett Watten, performative language bears strong affinities with literary language, but Austin distinguishes the two realms, saying that a performative utterance will “be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy” (22). Poetic language (and here Austin reprises Plato’s repudiation of poetry in The Republic) is “used not seriously, but in ways parasitic upon its normal use—ways which fall under the doctrine of the etiolations of language” (22). Here Austin collapses several sorts of discourse under the umbrella of “literary language,” linking a speech in a play with poetic language and separating everyday usage from figural language. In doing so he implies that there is an uncontaminated realm of “normal” usage, of which poetry is a debased variant. Such normalization presumes an intentional Subject whose utterances can be measured by their fidelity to criteria of felicity, whereas the words of an actor or poet, because mediated, are inauthentic. Despite his position on “parasitic” usage, Austin makes extensive use of poetic figures throughout his lectures: Suppose, for example, I see a vessel on the stocks, walk up and smash the bottle hung at the stem, proclaim “I name this ship the Mr. Stalin” and for good measure kick away the chocks: but the trouble is, I was not the person chosen to name€it€.€.€.€(23) There are more ways of killing a cat than drowning it in butter; but this is the sort of thing (as the proverb indicates) we overlook€.€.€.€(48) For example, if I say “Go and catch a falling star,” it may be quite clear what both the meaning and the force of my utterance is, but still wholly unresolved which of these other kinds of things I may be doing.€(104)

If poetic language is “parasitic,” what happens when it is used in service to the host language? Can parasite and host live independently of one another, or are they co-dependent? Is Austin’s use of Stalin in 1955 a completely neutral refer-

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ence to a world leader? It would be hard to imagine analytical philosophy without Chinese rooms, cats on mats, and quotations from Alice in Wonderland, and so we have to wonder at what point ordinary and exceptional language diverge. These questions are Retallack’s challenge, but instead of simply reversing the dialectic between parasite and host, validating the former over the latter, she exposes the degree to which the successful performative depends on those utterances (poems, speeches in plays, lies) that fail the test of felicity.12 As Mark Cantrell points out, this is precisely Derrida’s point in challenging speech act theory: “Just as Austin himself dispenses with his initial hard-and-fast distinction between statements and performatives in How to Do Things with Words, Derrida’s critique of Austin in “Signature Event Context” calls on us to see the ‘anomaly’ of citation as a necessary feature of a general theory of speech acts” (149). In other words, to perform a speech act depends on the “non-serious citation” that underwrites its successful realization. The anomalous speech act (the poem) that Austin dismisses as parasitic becomes the supplement that makes ordinary language possible. Retallack seems to have the same concerns in mind but, rather than refute Austin on his own ground of linguistic philosophy, she challenges him on her grounds: of creating a usable past in here’s no where redistributive humor how to not inscribe yourself in the system you’re opposing opposing opposable thumbs up to a point of no turn no not the turn to oppose to it at all (64)

Her problem—one that she shares with Adrienne Rich—is “how to not inscribe yourself in the system you’re opposing,” how to create a “usable past” out of those that narrate the present? One answer is to extend gender trouble into textual trouble, to “perform subversions: parody, pastiche, ironic mirrorings, deconstructive replications” of the phallogocentric text (“:re:thinking” 346). Her model once again is Stein, and the poem from which this stanza is taken is based on the poet’s 1930s work, “Stanzas in Meditation,” which Retallack whimsically titles, “Steinzas in Mediation.” Retallack’s collapsing of Stein and stanza suggests that she is interested in the ways that her language mediates between speech acts and their doppelgangers, or between the author and her text.13

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One way to create a “usable past” is through a revised curriculum in which pedagogical performance is no longer dependent on previous historical narratives. In the second poem of the section, Retallack provides such an alternative pedagogy in a work titled, “western civ cont’d: a brief experiment in linguistics.” This title, its authority marked by its capitalized letters, refers to the standard undergraduate humanities survey, but following the title is an instruction in parentheses: “(please provide sign interpreter for performance).” This request for a sign-language interpreter points to pedagogical problems when members of the class are deaf. The request hints at fissures in “Western Civ” when certain members of the population do not take spoken language or written texts for granted, and for whom the “performative” is signed on the body, not uttered vocally. If this poem is to be an “experiment in linguistics,” it will have to imagine other types of languages beyond the standard oral and scriptural versions that uphold “Western Civ” and its institutions.14 As if to reinforce the embodied nature of language implied by signÂ�language, Retallack begins each section with directions for what appear to be yoga positions: Position 1: Stand erect with feet together, buttocks tight: (71) Position 2: Raise the arms over the head, look up: (72) Position 3: Bend backward, looking up at the hands, feet firmly planted: (73)

For the yoga teacher, such directives are performative insofar as they imply a student’s compliance in physical acts. The successful performance of these performatives derive from Eastern models, thereby complicating the Western Civ curriculum yet again. The individual prose poems that follow deal with the etymologies of certain words—dollar, robot, pistol, and couch—which correspond, according to Mark Cantrell, to commercialism, automation, violence, and passivity (156). Retallack’s subsequent etymological forays into these etymologically linked words trace the convoluted border-crossing that

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words undergo over time. Linguistic boundaries are shown to be porous, subject to wars, imperialism, and the diaspora of languages. The yoga positions at the top of the page imply manipulation of the body toward relaxation and meditative calm, but the etymologies that follow suggest different sets of rules for the body: while the Chinese have divided parts of the body differently from us with a word for the area between thumb and forefinger the ideogram for woman, nü, is a Â�kneeling person bartlett (pear) Enoch Bartlett, Massachusetts, date not given every code both rational and arbitrary wage diatonic we returned (wage) the trail led (diatonic) (73)

The reference to the Chinese character for woman as a “kneeling person” continues the first section’s depiction of her as passive, her submissive posture literally inscribed in the written character. Such etymologies exist in social attitudes that reify meaning in fixed codes, much like those that determine relationships of pitch in music. The “diatonic” scale refers to the seven-note structure of most Western music (as opposed, for example, to the pentatonic or five-tone form of much modal or Eastern music). Musical scales, like linguistic meaning, are arbitrary codes that, when reinforced by college curricula and orientalist attitudes, replicate structures of power and national authority. When Retallack says “every code both rational and arbitrary€ / wage diatonic” she collapses the forces I have been describing into an oxymoron: a code is both arbitrary and fixed, variable as parole yet seemingly fixed as langue. “Wage” can be a verb (to wage war) as well as a substantive (a living wage), and since “wage” also means a “return” for services rendered—another arbitrary scale—it has at least one secondary meaning (“we returned”), just as “diatonic,” in one sense a formula that establishes pitches, could be seen as a trail that leads to conventional Western harmony. Collapsed into this brief section are multiple references to codes that contain or rationalize meaning, including gendered meaning for the Chinese woman, that are then exploded in Retallack’s fragmented prose.

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The third section draws directly on Austin’s work, using epigraphs from How to Do Things with Words, his Philosophical Papers, and Sense and Sensibilia. This latter title reminds us that there is a second “o’sten” to which Retallack pays homage, Jane Austen, whose words are quoted in italics throughout the poem. Despite Austin’s dismissive reference to literary language, his own title, based as it is on Jane Austen’s 1811 novel, Sense and Sensibility, is clearly parasitic, thus placing its philosophical questioning of language in an odd limnal space. And although his use of her title may be verbal play, his choice of this novel offers Retallack a useful point of departure for studying the work of gender in the work of philosophy. Sense and Sensibility, like all of Austen’s novels, is manifestly about the complex interweavings of gender, class, marriage, and property, upon which knowledge of social forms and proprieties are essential. One could say that Sense and Sensibility is a woman’s proleptic response to How to Do Things with Words, showing how one man’s speech act becomes one woman’s disempowerment. Retallack begins each poem of this section with a quotation from one of J.€L. Austin’s books, followed by a solid line separating it from the rest of the text. That text includes a range of materials, from excerpts of Jane Austen’s novel to diacritical marks and highly fragmented prose passages that seem to mock philosophical language. For example: to find out what . . . a real colour is we just need to be normal .€.€. to observe it in conditions of normal or standard illumination here again not to say why seems less a mystery now that we can tell fashion from fate it may not be really the case at all with the many vocables that could be inserted here in place of I or T in form S just as any other émigré could just as easily have gotten stranded in just such a waiting room with her or his strange accent thoughts shoes hairstyle etc. . . . no one made any reply. She then yawned again, through the [long oral pause] saying I€do not notice anything strange about this at all (91)

Austin’s remarks about color reinforce what he says about language: in order to test the validity of a color or an utterance, “we just need to be normal .€.€. to observe it in conditions of normal or standard illumination.” Retallack’s remarks below the bar seem indirectly to respond to this idea by posing possible sub-

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stitutions for the “normal” case. For example, the immigrant with “her or his strange accent shoes hairstyle” complicates ideas of citizenship. The sudden interruption of Austin’s remarks about substitutions of alternative vocables that could be “inserted here in place of I or T in form S” allows us to contrast his mathematical example of a substitution set against the culturally loaded one of the immigrant. We may be able to substitute abstract sounds or letters in a mathematical formula without damaging the proof, but when we replace one “émigré” with another, we do damage to the historical reasons for each group’s presence in a “waiting room” where their citizenship status is under scrutiny. Retallack’s use of Jane Austen in the final stanza offers an ironic response to Austin’s requirement that we “be normal.” The italicized passage occurs in chapter 11 of Pride and Prejudice, in which the novel’s principal characters are seated in a drawing room. The ardent if naive Miss Bingley attempts to engage Mr. Darcy in conversation, with Elizabeth Bennet in the corner looking on. Bingley’s attempts are to no avail. As Darcy determinedly pursues his book, she remarks, “How ╯ pleasant it is to spend an evening in this way! I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book!— When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.” No one made any reply. She then yawned again, threw aside her book, and cast her eyes round the room in quest of some amusement; when hearing her brother mentioning a ball to Miss Bennet, she turned suddenly towards him and said€.€.€.€(100)

The mood of bourgeois boredom, punctuated by Miss Bingley’s ejaculations on houses, libraries and balls, is a pretty fair view of Austin’s “normal” condition, albeit one being pilloried by Austen’s wit. Retallack interrupts Jane Austen’s prose and substitutes her own variation on Miss Bingley’s words: “through the [long oral pause] saying I do not notice anything strange about this at all.” This would appear to be a meta-commentary on both quoted passages, suggesting how the denial of strangeness tends to reinforce its oddity. The bracketed phrase suggests the sort of instruction provided by closed captioning on television, a form of speech act that must be rendered by textual means. Retallack’s earlier theme of the relationship between ideas and property, manifested in these offhand remarks about the importance of libraries and reading, now take on greater force.

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Writing Language The issues raised by my examples are not particular to language writing. The question of poetic or literary language as a special domain of communication has been central to philosophy since Kant. The Russian formalists made this distinction the keystone of their definition of literariness, and it was continued in structuralism, semiotics, and post-structuralism. In her book, Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse, Mary Louise Pratt asks why the formalists did not consider examples of extraliterary discourse in their attempts to identify those properties unique to literature: throughout the exhaustive literature this century has produced on metrics, rhythm, syllabification, metaphor, rhyme and parallelism of every kind, the role of these devices do play in real utterances outside literature was never seriously examined or recognized. (5)

To explore these “poetic” features in everyday language, Pratt draws on the work of William Labov and his studies of dialect variations in Black English Vernacular (bev) spoken by black adolescents in New York. Labov discovers many of the same uses of figurative language, parallel structures, phonic equivalence, and rhyme in inner-city conversation that one would find in poetry. Although Pratt’s focus is on the possible literary elements in folk vernaculars, she acknowledges that forms of call-and-response, signifying, and calling out are also speech acts whose formulaic qualities signify on as well by means of some notion of average or normal speech. What Pratt does not discuss, but which is implicit in Labov’s examples, are the critical uses of such formulaic language in responding to a hostile, racist society. Language writing, although not addressing racism specifically, has developed a critical poetics by focusing on the speech-act situation and by exposing its complicity in structures of power and containment. Poets often draw on specific speech-act situations as their formal materials while bracketing the ideological function they serve. My brief examples suggest a challenge and a crisis for any materialist poetics. Unlike most political poetry of the last thirty years, language writing bases its analysis of authority not on the author’s particular politics but on the verbal means by which any statement claims its status as truth. Moreover, by foregrounding the abstract features of the speech act rather than the authenticity of expressive moment, the poet acknowledges the contingency of utterances in

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social interchange. The incompletion of each element in the verbal sequence demands a reading that is not recuperative but critical. The gestural potential of language, so important to the New American Poetry, retains a belief in the self-sufficient individual who, if not reflective, treats expressive moments as extensions of the body and cognition. Language writing draws on the innovative, non-linear qualities of this tradition but builds, as well, on Marxist and post-structural critiques of the liberal, self-sufficient subject. There is some question, however, whether this critical function can be adequately performed by any reader. For the critique of expression in language writing depends on its own felicity condition: that there be some interplay between poem and reception, that the expressive conduit between addressor and addressee be broken in order for the reader to be reinvented as active agent in meaning-production. The non sequiturs in Watten’s and Retallack’s work imply, in the best of worlds, an active participation between text and reception that cannot be assumed. If the terms for reading are already anticipated in the formal design of the poem, there is little room for the reader to interact with the actual pragmatics of literary discourse. Instead of being revealed as agents of ideological interests, speech acts become thematized as types of dramatic moments, no one of which has any more claim on our attention than another. The reader becomes a voyeur upon an artful attempt to seduce him or her into playing by the rules. Hence the felicity criterion upon which the poetic speech act is based is more of a horizon than a fact. These qualifications aside, I feel that language writing thinks through such questions, often incorporating them as active agents in the work itself. When Ron Silliman introduces his anthology of language writing, In the American Tree, by quoting Bob Grenier’s phrase, “I Hate Speech,” he articulates the distance that he and others in that volume feel from the speech-based poetics of projectivism (xv). At the same time, the violence of the phrase overdetermines its subject, pointing away from the direct object, “speech,” back at the discursive act itself. Far from being merely an attack on speech in favor of some indeterminate écriture, “I hate speech” embodies its own problematic of presence by shouting louder than it needs. The phrase refers to at the same time as it refers by means of. Silliman has been aided, in this respect, by an earlier generation of poets who treated the poem as shout—as an act addressed by the poet to an audience that has forgotten how to listen. It has been for Silliman’s own generation to explore the relationship between the two parties.

b 13

Vertigo Thinking Toward Action in the Poetry of George Oppen And the world changed. There had been trees and people, Sidewalks and roads —George Oppen, “Survival: Infantry”

G

eorge Oppen! you should be living at this hour. America has need of you! What girder still stands amidst this rubble,1

This activity, beginning in the midst of men . . . The lights that blaze and promise Where are so many—What is offered In the wall and nest of lights? The land Lacked center: We must look to Lever Brothers Based in a square block. A thousand lives Within that glass. What is the final meaning Of extravagance? Why are the office Buildings, storehouses of papers, The centers of extravagance? (New Collected Poems 64)2

“What ╯ is the final meaning€/ Of extravagance” if it has become a “storehouse” for papers; what is the meaning of being numerous if the masses can be Â�reified

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into a skyscraper? Lights “blaze and promise,” yet their multiplicity and uniformity provide an empty luminescence. Oppen’s constant themes—finding “lyric valuables” in a world inoculated against experience; social meaning within the “shipwreck” of the singular; poetry as test, not purveyor, of truth— achieve new meaning in light of September 11, 2001. The modernist skyscraper, the Kantian monad in its corporate form, has become a dystopic Pisgah, its glass screen mediating sight through the cash nexus. Oppen’s response to the modern city is not to witness it from the crowd (Baudelaire, Whitman) or harness its energies towards a new art (“Dithyrambic, audience-as-artists!” [167]). Rather he sees it as infrastructure, its “windows and the grimed sills,” “the city leaking€/ Rubble: concrete, conduit pipe, a crumbling€/ Rubble of our roots” (42). But now that the structure has been laid bare, the grimed sill pulverized to ash, can poetry still claim to differentiate among its surfaces? What lilacs in these dooryards bloom? As I say in chapter 4, George Oppen appreciated the qualities of craftsmanship and skill embodied in a structure, even as he saw the danger that its surface allure might hide the labor that went into its construction.3 To that extent he remained a man of the 1930s: The steel worker on the girder Learned not to look down, and does his work And there are words we have learned Not to look at, Not to look for substance Below them. But we are on the verge Of vertigo. (149)

At one level, the former member of the cpusa ponders what is lost when one learns not to look at the ground, the material base through which social relations are constructed. But at another level, the student of Wittgenstein and Heidegger decries a nominalist theory of language, where words become separated from acts of speech, generalized into categories for being numerous: the social, the masses, mankind, the people. Against this reduced code of the collective, Oppen remembers individuals: “Eric—we used to call him Eric—/ And Charlie Weber”; “Muykut and a sergeant€/ Named Healy”; “Phyllis—not neo-classic,€/ The girl’s name is Phyllis” (71, 171, 169). Oppen cannot altogether

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disengage himself from those men and women through whom he learned “the act of being€/ More than oneself ” (159).4 If there is a collectivist impulse in Oppen, it is always expressed in terms of the concrete and specific. We are on the verge of vertigo, not only because the social totality has failed to offer rescue from the shipwreck of the singular, but because things have been revealed to be more than things. Nouns do refer to something. To engage things qua things is to discover oneself among them. It does not mean that things may be made more real in the process or that, as Pound came increasingly to believe, poetry brings a preexistent truth across time through recovered fragments. Reznikoff ’s “girder amidst the rubble” is still a girder, yet its meaning has changed.5 After 9/11, the I-beam and the eyebeam coalesce in a new problematic of perspective that objectivism could hardly have anticipated. The experience of vertigo is not only spatial but historical. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Scottie (James Stewart) is afraid of heights not only because he fears falling, but because he fears repeating his own troubled past. It turns out that the past is not only personal but geopolitical. Set in Oppen’s hometown of San Francisco, the film surveys the ruins of California’s violent history—the dispossession of Spanish lands, the removal of native peoples, earthquakes, fires. As Scottie visits the touristic monuments of San Francisco’s gaudy past with Madeleine (Kim Novak), searching for her mysterious ancestor, Carlotta Valdes, he experiences the uncanny return of the frontier as libidinal threat. His personal failures as a police officer and lover are lived through his alienation from the social history of his city, a disconnect that Hitchcock reinforced through use of soft focus, lens filters, and Bernard Hermann’s brooding score. Vertigo is a film depiction of a man forced to relive—and thus repeat—historical trauma. In “The Building of the Skyscraper,” Oppen concludes: “[we] look back€/ Three hundred years and see bare land.€/ And suffer vertigo.” This reordering of past history through present trauma may explain the confusion that many felt shortly after the attacks on the twin towers and the concomitant rush to assign a meaning to these events. The Moral Majority’s Pat Robertson felt the events were overdue punishment for secular humanism and feminism; Karlheinz Stockhausen felt they constituted the greatest act of performance art in history. Against vertigo, Oppen supplies the “obvious,” which as he reminds us, comes from a Latin root, ob via, meaning “in the way,” what we can see from the street (211).

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The concept of thought as action which I developed in previous chapters may now cause a certain queasiness in the light of acts that could be seen as the purest embodiment of unreflective thought. We need to understand Oppen’s particular slant on this idea as a Marxist who became disenchanted with a binarist version of praxis—in which thought (critique) is severed from labor, activity from self-alienated work. For Oppen, thinking and doing coalesce around material reality in its most basic form. He was aided in this, as Peter Nicholls has shown, by his early reading of Jacques Maritain, whose remark, “We awake in the same moment to ourselves and to things,” provides the epigraph to The Materials as well as to his return to poetry after a silence of twentyfive years.6 Alfred North Whitehead provides a similar formulation: “In these explanations it is presumed that an experiencing subject is one occasion of a sensitive reaction to an actual world” (169).7 Maritain and Whitehead emphasize neither the materials themselves (a form of empiricism), nor their subjective apprehension, but the coalescence of both in action: “The fusion of subject and object where all is acted upon” (ucsd 16, 17, 1).8 If Oppen “awoke” to poetry in 1958 after a sleep of twenty-five years, escaping McÂ�Carthy’s witch hunts and fbi scrutiny, he did so through a re-thinking of poetic praxis—of thought as acting upon the instant. An impulse to action sings of a semblance to a vitalist spirit in modernism, beginning with romantic attacks on Lockean sensationalism in Emerson and Whitman, and extending through the vorticist cult of energy, (“the sphere thrown through space”); Pound’s Chinese ideogram as a “verbal idea of action” or his belief that The Cantos is a summary of “ideas going into action”; Marinetti’s futurist manifesto, its glorification of war and mechanical energy; Williams’s poem as a “field of action”; Dada’s challenge, in Hans Arp’s terms, to “reason, that ugly wart”;9 Heidegger’s ontology of being as daâ•‚sein, “thrown” forward in discourse or truth as aletheia (unconcealment); Nietzsche’s will to power; Bergson’s élan vital; Jung’s collective unconscious. The legacy of these themes can be seen in a range of postwar cultural forms, such as action painting (both its practice and theoretical justifications); Olson’s projectivism, with its faith in kinetics and physiological ratios or the “human universe” (“habits of thought are the habits of action”); Beat bop prosody (“first thought best thought”); Cage’s aleatory techniques of composition; performance art; free jazz—all of those forces that combine in what Daniel Belgrad has recently called “the culture of spontaneity” in the cold-war era. Oppen was deeply skeptical about the more public forms that such Â�spontaneity assumed in

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“Â�happenings” or the Living Theatre, but he certainly shared an interest in their epistemological foundations.10 The enemy, in all such formulations, is reflection, thoughts recollected in tranquility, “the lyrical interference of the individual as ego,” often given gendered form as feminine limit or boundary (Baraka’s bourgeois Lanie Poo or Ginsberg’s “one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom” [128]). And while some regard the heritage of rationalism as the repressive legacy of Enlightenment thought, the events of September 11—and the seeming consensus in favor of aggressive retaliation—make one wonder what is wrong with reflection and cool deliberation. Moreover, these attacks impel us to reconsider “thinking toward action” in terms of the of the phrase’s double—action as enemy of thought, vigilante justice, the final solution, show trials. Here thinking toward action is expedience, forged in the name of state unity. It is, in Benjamin’s terms, an aestheticization of politics that substitutes spectacle for reason and demonizes restraint as failure of will. I raise the specter of National Socialism or Stalinism not to imply that ideas of spontaneity or vitalism are in themselves reactionary or that its proponents were fascists. But if Oppen’s desire to achieve clarity means anything as a historical imperative, it means testing the surfaces of received wisdom for structural flaws. And this may mean tracing the etiology of progressive modernism back through its more reactionary currents to see what can be salvaged. Oppen offers an important lens on this problem since he built his poetic and philosophical foundations on two such reactionary figures—Pound and Heidegger, one a polemicist for Mussolini, the other rector of the Third Â�Reich’s Freiburg University. Yet he transformed their ideas, through social activism in the 1930s, to create something else on his return to poetry in the late 1950s. Pound observed of Oppen’s early writing that he managed a certain “void,” which I take to mean both a metaphysical as well as linguistic skepticism.11 This could equally apply to Oppen’s disjunct linguistic practice, his tendency to truncate phrases, leave semantic and syntactic elements incomplete. It also refers to his emphasis on the “little words”—“there” used as a deictic pronoun or prepositions, as in the lines “this€/ in€/ which”—that point and establish relations to a speaker.12 And this formal practice is directly linked to a philosophical skepticism about universals. Oppen’s odd blend of existentialism and pragmatism places ultimate faith in an ethic by which meaning is constructed from moments of conviction. During the 1930s, Pound managed

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the void by erecting a cultural edifice to be monitored by charismatic leaders and artists; Heidegger managed the void by filling it with German Geist, for which the German university would be the Zeit. Oppen managed the void by living within it, erecting a “morality€/ Of hope” amidst tenements and tall buildings€(50). While Pound’s imagism is the aesthetic base for Oppen’s poetics, its impact is the subject of much grousing in the latter’s letters and worksheets. On the one hand, it provided a model for clear thinking and precision—the natural object as sufficient proof. Yet Oppen argued with what he took to be a narrow emphasis on the image for its own sake, divorced from the cognizing subject. Oppen’s disagreement is not an oedipal struggle with literary predecessors, nor is it a claim to artisanal superiority, but a principled disagreement over the final meaning of perception. If sight is blinkered by preconceptions (by the time Oppen returned to writing in the late 1950s, Pound was calling his theory of culture, “totalitarian”), it fails to provide access to the world. Commenting on Pound in a daybook entry, Oppen worries, “Too much machinery Too many reading lists,” suggesting that Pound editorialized where he might have presented (ucsd 16). This tendency to make perception serve a particular cultural agenda limits Pound’s entire project and qualifies The Cantos’ goal of forging Achaia out of Dantean charity. And then there was the issue of race. How could Pound’s republic succeed if it excludes poets—Oppen included—whom the author of The Cantos had championed in 1931? In his later poems, Oppen looked back upon the traumatic experience of participating in World War II, where his Jewish background placed him in direct conflict with Pound’s anti-semitism, if not his Odyssean program: No man But the fragments of metal Tho there were men there were menâ•…â•…â•… Fought Burying my dogtag with H For Hebrew in the rubble of Alsace I must get out of here Fatherâ•…â•… he thinksâ•…â•… father Disgrace of dying Old friendâ•…â•… old poet If you did not look

276â•… ap p ro ac hi n g t h e ne w a m er ic a n p o et ry What is it you ‘loved’ Twisting your voiceâ•…â•… your walk (218)

Odysseus, in his confrontation with the Cyclops, calls himself “no man,” thereby escaping the one-eyed giant’s cave by deictic sleight-of-hand. Oppen assumes the same name against his myopic poetic forebear and, in the process, names his outsider status as an alienated Jew in the European theater. If he is “no man,” singular, he aligns himself with “men” plural, those soldiers with whom he is serving against the Axis powers supported by Pound. These lines also invoke the conclusion of the Pisan Cantos, “What thou lovest well remains€/ the rest is dross.” Rachel Blau DuPlessis notes that, for Oppen, “Pound did not really look .€.€. with that perceptual sincerity beyond system— which was his gift to poetry” (“Objectivist Poetics” 147). Moreover, he did not “look” at men he presumably loved and respected who, as Jews, complicated his program for cultural risorgimento. The poem’s title, “Of Hours,” thus speaks both for the temporal period that joins the two poets as well as the plural pronoun that links the differing histories that two poets made. Imagism, as a movement, was valuable for Oppen because it provided an ethical position that brings objects into relief—but only as they constellate a world. As he says in “The Mind’s Own Place,” imagist particularity “is the core of what ‘modernism’ restored to poetry, the sense of the poet’s self among things (Selected Prose 32). It is this phenomenological aspect of imagism, more than its technical hygiene, that links the literary moment of 1913 to Heidegger, a philosopher who, especially in his early phase of the 1920s, was precisely concerned with how one moved from data to Being-in-the-World, from things as such to things as encountered. The degree to which Heidegger’s notorious involvement with National Socialism was an extension of his philosophy (or the other way around) has been the subject of extensive recent debate.13 I will refrain from rehearsing the various arguments about when or whether the philosopher agreed with various elements of the Third Reich, except to say that Oppen appears to have been oblivious to any such connection. This is partly due to the fact that Heidegger’s speeches on German nationalism during the 1930s have only recently been published in English.14 What Oppen gained from the early Heidegger is the idea that Being is not something given but encountered, uncovered in the act of questioning its meaning. And since the form that questioning

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takes is linguistic, language is both the site and the subject of the Being it discovers. The key text for Oppen is Heidegger’s 1929 speech upon being offered a chair of philosophy at Freiburg, “What Is Metaphysics,” a lecture that should not be confused with the philosopher’s more infamous 1933 lecture upon assuming the rectorship of the university. Oppen encountered the essay in a collection of Heidegger’s writings, Existence and Being, which introduced him to the philosopher’s work in the early 1950s. In this earlier speech, Heidegger elaborates on a problem broached extensively in Being and Time, namely why is there something rather than nothing.15 Here, the problem is elaborated in terms of how one encounters “nothing” when all statements of identity necessitate that something must already be. Surely, in order to seek the nothing, we must already have a conception that something exists. Thinking, Heidegger says, “is always thinking about something [and] must act in a way contrary to its own essence when it thinks of the nothing” (99). In order to arrive at a state where things as such can be encountered, we must shift thinking from reflection on prior existence to thinking as active interrogation. But this encounter can only be had in certain states of mind, or what Heidegger calls “moods,” when we “are not actually busy with things or ourselves” (101). Conditions such as anxiety or boredom seek no end or telos but represent the necessary condition for thought. Oppen’s early use of boredom, as I have argued in chapter 4, was a leitmotif that recurred later in his life. Like Henry James’s Maude Blessingbourne, he ‘.╯ . . approached the window as if to see . . .’ The boredom which disclosed Everything— I should have written, not the rain Of a nineteenth century day, but the motes In the air, the dust Here still (186)

Here, Oppen’s critical use of boredom provided him with a crucial analogue to imagist perceptualism. It is not that one sees “petals on a wet black bough” as redemptive release from the urban Metro, but that such perception enables a consciousness of “faces in a crowd.”

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Heidegger went on to turn Being into a national imperative, the spirit of progress given a specific racial and cultural character. Oppen went on to confront specific beings in tenant strikes, labor organizing, and relief work in Â�Depression-era America. He stopped writing, believing like Brecht that “there are times when it can be almost a crime to write of trees” and, in that silence, turned thought into social action.16 When he returned to writing in 1958, it was with a sense that there are other forms of action that could put the “dust motes” of his current surroundings into motion. With the dust still settling on lower Manhattan, Oppen’s example urges us to rethink what can be seen from that late nineteenth-century window known as modernism at which Henry James, fingers hooked in waistcoat pockets, stood looking out. The window out of which George Oppen looked seems constructed less by James and more by Beckett—perhaps the tiny aperture that Clov must endlessly climb toward in Endgame. This window looks out on a ruin—the shipwreck of the singular (since for all we know about the end of the play, the world has come to an end) and the various failed meanings of social polity. Oppen’s solution is not to rebuild the city, à la Corbusier, in a shinier, more efficient version, nor to create ever-more ominous enemies to bomb back to the neolithic. Rather it is to testify to a feeling of vertigo that results from placing one’s faith on contingency—on thought as a kind of action. If modernists like Pound and Heidegger offered Oppen differing versions of thought as act, their final solutions to the meaning of being numerous washed up on Crusoe’s island during the 1930s. The poetry that emerges from this rubble must return a level of agency to speaking, lest talking heads do the talking for us. In his last poem, Oppen inverts Eliot’s lines from “Prufrock,” turning the latter’s solipsism into a hopeful conversation: the myriad lights have entered us it is a music more powerful than music till other voices wake us or we drown (286)

Afterword Impossible Poetries

I

return to George Oppen in these final pages of On the Outskirts of Form as well as to the condition of globalization with which I began. I want to use the historical and epistemological concerns of objectivism and the global present transformed by September 11, 2001, as bookends for a survey of U.S. poetry in a transitional moment. That transition can be described as one from poetry as a knowable category—reinforced through college curricula, publishing, anthologies, and journalistic debate—to what Charles Bernstein has called an “impossible poetry” within a trans-national consumer society.1 The imagined community that Benedict Anderson sees being forged through print culture within the nation state is, in Bernstein’s terms, imaginary, a nation “transected by innumerable overlaying, contradictory or polydictory, traditions and proclivities and histories and regions and peoples and circumstances and identities and families and collectivities and dissolutions” (113). The seeds of this impossibility were planted at a moment when the New American Poetry was truly new. In a 1948 review of several recent books of American poetry, the British critic and poet George Barker remarked that “American poetry is a very easy subject to discuss for the simple reason that it does not exist” (39). What Barker saw as America’s lack of a coherent poetic tradition, William Carlos Williams saw as its great advantage—the possibility of a new, perhaps violent beginning—and to illustrate his own role in this effort, he incorporated Barker’s remark into his long poem, Paterson. In the lines preceding Barker’s words, Williams posed the question that animated the work of many of his generation: How to begin to find a shape—to begin to begin again, turning the inside out: to find one phrase that will lie married beside another for delightâ•…â•… .â•…â•… ? —seems beyond attainmentâ•…â•… . (140)

280â•… aft e rwo r d

This unattainable phrase—jagged, partial, broken—marks the impossibility of poetry that makes a new poetry possible. For Williams, who came of age during the teens and twenties, the problem of a distinctly American literary tradition loomed large. Was Barker right? Did Americans live in a cultural wasteland, destined to repeat the styles and modes of European predecessors?2 How to “begin again” without recourse to Eurocentric models while incorporating the violence of beginnings as a formal imperative. More pertinently for Williams, son of a British father and a Puerto Rican mother, how “American” was American poetry when it was being written by the children of former slaves, Russian immigrants, Native Americans, Latin American exiles, and Polish mothers? Robert Frost’s famous line from “The Gift Outright,” “The land was ours before we were the land’s,” rings somewhat hollow for those who inhabited the land before it was America’s or who made it their own after arriving from somewhere else. One suspects that these new presences were among those “human voices” that threatened to drown Eliot’s solipsistic Prufrock, even as his author incorporated them into what we now call modernist poetry. These voices become a redemptive heteroglossia in Oppen, who transforms Eliot’s line to read, “till other voices wake€/ us or we drown” (286). The slight shift from “and” to “or” is the ethical chasm that separates two generations of poets, while the enjambment reinforces the tension between transitive and intransitive uses of the verb—one meaning that implicates a society waking to its own imperatives, and another that implicates those of us who are moved thereby. Appropriately enough for the objectivist, the change in conjunction emphasizes the importance of those small function words upon which the edifice of belief hangs. However problematic “being numerous” was for Oppen, the voices of the Other could never be cordoned off from the subjective condition. Poets who followed Oppen reinvigorated the romantic Subject and its participatory relation to nature, perception, and social action. This romantic revival during the cold war was a necessary response to aesthetic doctrines of impersonality in literary culture and political doctrines of containment and consensus in U.S. intellectual culture. When I began writing the essays collected here, a wellmeaning older colleague warned me that writing about such unknown figures as Spicer, Olson, and Duncan was an academic dead end, and that I should begin with poets who had a proven track record (Auden and MacNeice seemed like safe bets). Apparently the long shadow of political consensus continued to touch the humanities well into the 1970s.

Impossible Poetriesâ•… 281

What I have described in this book as a performative quality to this romantic revival—language as act—was often accompanied by a good deal of theatrical posturing and rhetorical extravagance that in itself must be factored into my older colleague’s distaste for poets who at that time inhabited the margins of literary culture. The strong linguistic turn during the 1970s challenged the expressivist poetics that emerged after World War II and inaugurated a new problematics of the Subject informed by developments in post-structural thought (Lacan, Derrida, Althusser, feminism, critical race theory), analytical philosophy, and new social movements. What for the New American Poets was a matter of restoring the Subject to center stage became, for Lyn Hejinian and her generation, a question of “Who is speaking” and its corollary, “Am I speaking?” (32). Such questions do not jettison the Subject, as critics of language writing have often complained, so much as subject it to the various constituencies and communities within which it gains credence. As I admit in my introduction, this book does not venture very far into the outskirts of form as it is embodied in recent digital, mixed-media, and performative experiments. Nor does it devote extensive time to dynamic emerging poetries within minority communities—black, Chicano/a, Asian American, disability—that would be the likely subjects of a book promising a cultural poetics. My previous books have dealt at some length with such issues through considerations of recording technology, masculinity, race and sexuality, youth culture, coterie and community, the gendering of literary movements, the material word, orientalism and the Pacific Rim, disability studies, visibility, and queer politics. In these earlier projects, as well as in Outskirts, I am pursuing a version of cultural poetics that remains committed to the text and, whenever possible, close reading. Perhaps because the study of poetry requires such attention to formal matters, it has run afoul of cultural theory. One reason why poetry has fallen off the cultural studies map—if it was ever there in the first place—has been a tendency on the part of cultural critics to treat poetry as symptom rather than practice, cultural capital rather than cultural production.3 Although poetry is demonstrably a “discourse,” in Foucault’s terms, its discursive potential within cultural studies has been limited to its role as what the Russian formalists called literaturnost (literariness), the embodiment of semantic intransitivity and a test case for linguistic indeterminacy.4 A symptomatic reading of poetry stops at the borders of the signified; it fails to engage with the ideology of form and the readers produced thereby. What if, as Anthony Easthorpe queries, poetry is both an element of a social formation,

282â•… aft e rwo r d

“subject both to the laws of its own material nature and .€.€. a term in social relations. In other words, what makes poetry poetry is what makes poetry ideological” (22). This is, to my mind, a concise formulation of what cultural poetics must accommodate: a recognition of poetry’s material difference from ordinary language and the particularization of what that difference means for any given reader. The question remains, however, is that difference productive of anything beyond the aesthetic? Does poetry really produce anything? Does poetry make nothing happen? Auden’s famous line appears in a poem that remembers W. B. Yeats’s long battle with his native country: “mad Ireland hurt you into poetry” (141). And while the poem itself, written in 1939, vaunts poetry over politics, the history that it remembers remains grounded in a colonialist moment that cannot be dissevered from the memorial gesture.5 For the postwar period that this book studies, it would take a pretty myopic view not to notice the role of poetry in the political and social movements of the day—Allen Ginsberg’s dominant presence at rallies and demonstrations, Amiri Baraka or Sonia Sanchez’s involvement in black nationalism, Adrienne Rich or Audre Lorde’s contributions to feminism, Gary Snyder or Wendell Berry’s impact on the environmental movement, Jose Montoya and Gloria Anzaldua’s creation of Chicano/a cultural nationalism. New queer identities were frontally expressed in the early work of Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, and Judy Grahn, while youth culture was invented through the novels of Jack Kerouac and the satiric poems of Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti (not to mention the songs of Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and the Last Poets). The small-press revolution that first printed many of the poets in this book also printed broadsides and alternative newspapers that supported anti-racist and anti-war struggles during the 1960s. Reference to this kind of interaction between literary and political culture is only the first stage in a response to the question of literary production. It was precisely against this more instrumental idea of poetry as a weapon of revolutionary struggle that George Oppen stopped writing. One could speak of his silence as a failure of will or a principled statement of convictions, but either way his silence speaks to subsequent generations. It marks a formulation of society in which poetry matters, an uncompromising ethos about what language could say that would provoke Oppen throughout his subsequent career. If cultural poetics simply means adding new authors to the canon, the concept demeans the meaning of “culture” as a richly textured site of contestation and

Impossible Poetriesâ•… 283

historical struggle, and fails to add anything to our knowledge of poetics. It may be necessary, as Pierre Macherey said years ago, to discover what a text does not say—what, because of ideological constraints, it cannot say. The question of a text’s silence also brings us back to the issue of globalization and the ways that an impossible poetry may represent the unimaginable size and scope of global reach. In my introduction I remark that more recent poetry’s problematizing of the Subject suggests “that all is not right with the liberal, individualist model that underwrites free-trade agreements and expressivist poetics alike.” The period that this book covers marks a triumphalist moment of unrestricted expansion of U.S. interests, whether economic or social, utilizing the banner of individual rights as its blazon. Western rights discourse is predicated on the idea of citizens as rational independent agents, yet much of the poetry written during the period that this book examines celebrates the rights of dependent irrational agents, individuals who for reasons of race, embodiment, political opinions, mental instability, regional isolation, and plain crankiness cannot easily thread the needle of national belonging. In a world in which independent rational agency has come to mean unrestricted exploitation of natural resources, attacks on social welfare, and (as of this writing) the “freedom” to wear guns in church, a genuine rights discourse has been debased by a discourse of libertarian self-interest and freemarket adventurism. If the liberal individual subject is the default position for such mediated agency, then perhaps poetry, as I say in chapter 1, “in its proximity to affective states, is the dreamwork of globalization.” That is, emergent social realities that have yet to enter a coherent narrative are already being experienced in art forms that live on the outskirts of form.

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notes Introduction The epigraph is from Glancy’s Claiming Breath, 7. 1.╯On “postliterary” see Maria Damon, “Postliterary Poetry, Counterperformance, and Micropoetries.” 2.╯On “poetic culture” see Christopher Beach, Poetic Culture: Contemporary American Poetry Between Community and Institution. 3.╯I discuss the “palimtext” in Ghostlier Demarcations, chapter 2. 4.╯Joseph Harrington usefully draws on Bennett’s genre theory in developing his own ideas of what he calls “social form” (4–5). 5.╯In addition to Nicholls’ treatment of Oppen’s ambivalent relationship to the collective, see Marjorie Perloff, “The Shipwreck of the Singular.” 6.╯See Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” See also Michael Warner, “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject.” 7.╯Michael Denning (in Culture in the Age of Three Worlds) has recently characterized this cultural shift as one from the “age of three worlds” to globalization, from the old “New Left” to a revitalized global Left of WTO and anti-sweatshop protests. 8.╯Lisa Lowe has discussed the role of (mis)translation in Dictee in “Unfaithful to the Original: The Subject of Dictée.” 9.╯This map appears in Dictee on page 78. 10.╯I have discussed Cha’s relation to the Pacific Rim in Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics (196–219). 11.╯The rejection of poetry in much cultural theory has led to a diminishment of poetry’s authority as a subject of debate and critique. On the one hand, more conservative critics feel that the very evidence of cultural studies has diminished poetry’s value. Works with alarmist titles like Vernon Shetley’s After the Death of American Poetry, Joseph Epstein’s “Who Killed Poetry,” Dana Gioia’s Can Poetry Matter, Peter Brooks’ “Aesthetics and Ideology: What Happened to Poetics, “ J.D. McClatchy’s White Paper on Contemporary American Poetry, and Jonathan Holden’s The Fate of American Poetry all denounce the arrival of theory into poetry at the same time calling for a return to an understanding of poetry as humanizing praxis. While this rearguard critique is being mounted in a more conservative sphere, Left theory has tended to remove poetry from most discussions of cultural studies, no doubt partially due to the im-

286â•… Notes to Pages 13–28 portant role that poetry played in structuralism, deconstruction, and semiotics. I discuss the implications of this symptomatic reading of poetry in my afterword. 12.╯Eagleton defines the mirror stage of the aesthetic as follows: “When, for Kant, we find ourselves concurring spontaneously in an aesthetic judgment, able to agree that a certain phenomenon is sublime or beautiful, we exercise a precious form of intersubjectivity, establishing ourselves as a community of feeling subjects linked by a quick sense of our shared capacities” (75). 13.╯I have capitalized the D in “deaf ” when speaking of deafness as a cultural category rather than an audiological condition. For further discussion of Deaf poetry, see my “Hearing Things: The Scandal of Speech in Deaf Performance” in Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body. 14.╯For an excellent survey of Deaf literary responses to the DPN protests see Kristen C. Harmon, “‘If there are Greek epics, there should be Deaf epics’: How Protest Became Poetry.”

1. On the Outskirts of Form 1.╯Aiwa Ong, “Flexible Citizenship among Chinese Cosmopolitans,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, 134–62. See also her book, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. 2.╯Walter Mignolo defines “globalization is a set of designs to manage the world while cosmopolitanism is a set of projects toward planetary conviviality” (721). As such, globalization as a tendency begins much earlier than its current post-fordist moment and is coterminous with the emergence of modernity: “Coloniality, in other words, is the hidden face of modernity and its very condition of possibility” (722). 3.╯John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge call the new transnational capitalist class, “cosmocrats,” defined by “their attitudes and lifestyles rather than just their bank accounts” (qtd. in Vertovec, 6). 4.╯See also Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, “In the Shadow of NAFTA: Y tu mamá también Revisits the National Allegory of Mexican Sovereignty.” 5.╯Recent attempts to address poetry in a global or transnational frame include Jahan Ramanzani, “A Transnational Poetics,” Charles Bernstein, “Poetics of the Americas,” and many of the essays in Maria Damon and Ira Livingston’s Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader. 6.╯It seems significant, in this context, that Subcomandante Marcos coordinates his Â�Chiapas-based movement on behalf of indigenous peoples and his critique of NAFTA through political protests as well as through his writings and novels. 7.╯E-mail communications with Cristina Rivera-Garza, 9 Aug., 2004. 8.╯On trade imbalances brought about by NAFTA see Robert E. Scott, Carlos Salas, and Bruce Campbell, “Revising NAFTA: Still not working for North America’s workers.” 9.╯Cristina Rivera-Garza, “Tercer Mundo,” in Sin puertas visibles: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by Mexican Women. The poem appears in Spanish in Los textos del yo, (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005). It is worth mentioning that Rivera-Garza’s work as an histo-

Notes to Pages 31–62â•… 287 rian focused on asylums and clinics for the mentally ill, a site that is featured in her novel Nadie Me Verá Llorar [No One Will See Me Cry]. Mexico/Spain: Tusquets, 2003. 10.╯Although the literary sources to “Tercer Mundo” could include Neruda’s Cantos General or Vallejo’s Trilce, or even Whitman, the poem displays magical-realist elements that one might associate with Garcia Marquez, Cortazar, or Vargas Llosa. The gender ambiguity of a futuristic “Terzo” bears some similarity to Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness and the idea of a collective identity forged within abjection is reminiscent of Sarmiento’s Blindness or J.€Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. 11.╯In a note to “Tercer Mundo,” Rivera-Garza explains that “ ‘Tlanesburgo’ is a nickname for Tlalnepantla, an industrial neighborhood on the north side of Mexico City; the ‘burgo’ in ‘Tlanesburgo’ refers to St. Petersburg. ‘Belvedere’ is the name of a neighborhood in Mexico City” (40). 12.╯Olson is the exception here in his warnings in the early Maximus poems of the corporatization of New England fishing and the “musickracket€/ of all ownership” (18). 13.╯In this regard, one might consider Daphne Marlatt’s Steveston, the sound poetry of the Four Horsemen, Ed Sanders’s Investigative Poetics projects, the sign-language collaborations of the Flying Words Project, or the collaborative poem, Leningrad by Michael Davidson, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten—works that break the artisanal integrity of the lyric poem and return to forms of speculation and critique. 14.╯In his poem, “The North Atlantic Turbine,” Ed Dorn imagines the spread of capital throughout the North Atlantic region, an early anticipation of globalist concerns within the new American Poetry. 15.╯On “structure of feeling,” see Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, 128–35.

2. The Dream of a Public Language 1.╯Quoted in F. P. Lock, Edmund Burke, 167. Henry Fielding wrote a satirical play based on the kinds of publicity featured in the journal. The Historical Register for the Year 1736 is “calculated for the public” who come to the playhouse where “there are some politicians too, where there is lying, flattering, dissembling, promising, deceiving, and undermining, as well as in any court in Christendom.” Henry Fielding, The Historical Register for the Year 1736 and Eurydice Hissed, ed. William W. Appleton (London: Edward Arnold, 1967), 16. I am grateful to Bruce Smith for pointing out this play to me. 2.╯I am grateful to Lars Eckstein of the Universität Tubingen for providing me with information about Edwards’s biography. 3.╯On Loy’s relationship to eugenics and anti-semitism, see Frost, Perloff, and SchreiÂ� ber. 4.╯Frost extends the idea of mongrelization beyond racial mixing to refer to Loy’s transformation of the epic as a genre that celebrates national ideals into a satire that deflates that tradition. Rather than celebrate inheritance and racial continuity, “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” “demonstrates the costs of economic and psychic deprivation” of the mixed-race protagonist in a racist British environment (158).

288â•… Notes to Pages 64–84 5.╯In “Magasins du Louvre,” Loy writes, “All the virgin eyes in the world are made of glass€// Long lines of boxes€/ Of dolls€/ Propped against banisters” (17). 6.╯On Loy and fashion see Susan E. Dunn, “Mina Loy, Fashion, and the Avant-Garde.” 7.╯A similar border arts project was commissioned by Claudia Smith and created by Alberto Caro that featured a series of coffins attached to the fence. This particular installation was a direct response to Operation Gatekeeper in the fall of 2003. I am grateful to David Avalos and Susan Yagata for their help in identifying this event. 8.╯These images can be seen in Heriberto Yépez, “Contexts and Signs of an Urban Visual Poetics,” Tripwire 4 (n.d.): n.p. They are also available on Yépez’s website: http://heribertoyepez╉.blogspot.com.

3. Life by Water 1.╯On gender and regionalism in U.S. literature see Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse, Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Woman, and American Literary Culture. 2.╯In The Constructivist Movement, Barrett Watten argues for a critical perspective on region, noting the ways that much of modernism depends on a center/periphery, metropole/margin dyad that reinforces a productivist economy. Using Detroit as his model of a problematic “region,” Watten shows how opening the “discourse of the modern to questions of region .€.€. is not simply to insist on a local and occluded history. Or better, it is to bring a local and occluded history, of those who have been placed at the margins of the modern as a source of negativity, directly to an analysis of the dynamics of a modern cultural order” (340). 3.╯I have discussed this poem at length in Ghostlier Demarcations, 140–49. 4.╯On links between class and gender in Niedecker, see DuPlessis in Penberthy, 113–37. 5.╯Unless otherwise noted, citations of Niedecker’s poetry and prose in this chapter refer to her Collected Works. 6.╯Writing to William Carlos Williams in 1970, Niedecker says “I probably show a folk base .€.€. and that so far as I see it it might actually be my only claim to any difference between most poets and meself ” (qtd. in Faranda 305–6). 7.╯Niedecker worked as a stenographer and proofreader at Hoard’s, the printer of Hoard’s Dairyman, between 1944 and 1950 (Faranda 309–10). 8.╯Jane Augustine regards this competitiveness as involving forms of sexual harassment as well: “The suggestion .€.€. that delivery of some forms of sexual favor—at least flirtation and ‘correct feminine’ behavior, if not more explicit acts—were expected from a woman in this workplace, in return for which she might get a better position and more pay” (PenÂ� berthy 143). 9.╯One can see Niedecker’s self-conscious view of herself as a poet in terms of cultural labor in several of her poems: Grandfather â•… advised me: â•…â•…â•… Learn a trade

Notes to Pages 85–92â•… 289 I learned â•… to sit at desk â•…â•…â•… and condense No layoff â•… from this â•…â•…â•… condensery (194) 10.╯In an unpublished story about her proofreading job, Niedecker writes from the standpoint of a male speaker. Commenting on her narrative position, Niedecker remarks, “I feel queer too as a man.” The story is printed in From This Condensery (281–84). 11.╯An exception would be James Agee who, in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, definitely establishes his distance from his proletarian subjects by implicating his own privilege as narrator of the text. 12.╯Peter Nicholls speaks of such passages as manifesting a “rebarbative materiality, creating awkward mouthfuls of sound which block the emergence of any compensatory syntactical logic. If there is a strand of meaning to follow here it is mainly determined by etymological connection” (Penberthy 202). 13.╯Consider the following: “I fear this war€/ will be long and painful€/ and who€/ pursue€/ it” (183). Here the conflation of war and war makers is produced by condensing the second part of the compound: “I fear this war€/ will be long and painful€/ and [I fear those] who€/ pursue€/ it.” The increasing enjambment at the end of the poem adds to the condensation of the statement. 14.╯Jenny Penberthy describes “Wintergreen Ridge” as an interior monologue with a topography and sequence of events of its own” (Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky 92). 15.╯On the public opposition to the women of Bailey’s Harbor who opposed the building of a trailer park in 1936, see Peterson (251, n.11). 16.╯Jenny Penberthy speculates that the “friend” is Louis Zukofsky who, in later years, became increasingly distant, refusing finally to allow Niedecker to publish an edition of his letters to her (Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky 98). 17.╯Lorine Niedecker, “Between Your House and Mine”: The Letters of Lorine Niedecker to Cid Corman (138, n.2). 18.╯“The last temptation is the greatest treason:€/ To do the right deed for the wrong reason,” T.€S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral (196). 19.╯The need to read Niedecker in terms of critical regionalism, folk traditions, the Popular Front, and cosmpolitanism has been ameliorated somewhat by a recent collection of essays, Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place, edited by Elizabeth Willis, in which an earlier version of this chapter appears.

4. “Closed in Glass” The first epigraph is from “Route,” New Collected Poems, 193; the second from Selected Prose,€228.

290â•… Notes to Pages 93–98 1.╯References to George Oppen’s work will be abbreviated within the text as follows: New Collected Poems, NCP; Selected Prose, Daybooks and Papers, SP; Selected Letters of George Oppen, SL; George Oppen, “Interview with L. S. Dembo,” CL. References to his papers held at the Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California, San Diego, will be listed by accession number, box number, and folder number (e.g., UCSD 16, 6, 14). 2.╯The reference to “man of the thirties” comes from Oppen’s poem, “Memory at ‘The Modern’ ” (NCP 295). In his interview with L. S. Dembo, Oppen comments on this poem, “There is a feeling of something false in overprotection and over-luxury—my idea of categories of realness” (168). 3.╯See Wilentz, 61–103. 4.╯“I think that a poem should be the work of a man who really means to drive a nail— not to posture or to show off—and who knows from childhood—how a hammer should be handled” (SP 191). In “The Mind’s Own Place,” Oppen describes the populism of the Ash Can School as well as poets such as Sandburg, Kreymborg, and Williams as a form of poetic immanence (SP 31). “It is possible to find a metaphor for anything, an analogue: but the image is encountered, not found; it is an account of the poet’s perception, the act of perception; it is a test of sincerity, a test of conviction, the rare poetic quality of truthfulness. .€.€. So much depends upon the red wheel-barrow” (32–33). 5.╯Mary Oppen discusses the poet’s San Francisco upbringing in Meaning a Life, 61–76. 6.╯Oppen published his first poems as “Mr. George A. Oppen of Belvedere Cal” in Poetry magazine. 7.╯That imaginary was partly oedipal: “The sentimental bourgeoisie always believes— and I remember my father on this point particularly—that the craftsman has a certain manual knack and that he, the bourgeois, has a higher intelligence, but there’s something about his hands which just won’t work” (Englebert and West 12). 8.╯Rachel Blau DuPlessis characterizes Oppen’s anxiety of wealth as twofold: “a horror of thinking that it controlled him and his choices. And a horror of being skilless, the one who (precisely because of wealth) did not know how to make with his own hands” (19). 9.╯Oppen records Kenner’s remark that “it took twenty-five years to write the next poem” in his interview with L. S. Dembo (CL 174). 10.╯By “structure of feeling,” I am adapting Raymond Williams’s term for social experiences “still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiÂ� osyncratic, and even isolating” (132). 11.╯For excellent accounts of Oppen’s debts to Heidegger, see Chilton and Nicholls. 12.╯“The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million—a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will,” Henry James, preface to the New York edition of Portrait of a Lady (1908). 13.╯Writing to L. S. Dembo in 1972, Oppen remarked that “I wanted James in the book— secretly, superstitiously. I carved his initials on that sapling book. .€.€. I argued .€.€. that James and not Hemingway was the useful model for ‘proletarian’ writers—and realized, in the ensuing discussion, if one could call it a discussion, that I must stay away from left-wing ‘cultural workers’” (SL 241).

Notes to Pages 99–111â•… 291 14.╯Izenberg faults Peter Nicholls and myself for reinforcing the idea that Oppen’s verbal gaps and fragmentations are signs of a a textual materiality that is valuable for its own sake. Like early critics of Discrete Series we are accused of seeing Oppen’s writing as being “like listening to a man with an impediment in his speech,” as if the very demonstration of speechlessness were an adequate formal solution to metaphysical skepticism (60). 15.╯Poetry, for Izenberg (and for Oppen) “is not a techne for producing that class of objects we call poems but a form of intentionality toward persons. What the poet intends— insofar as he intends poetry—is to indicate, reveal, exemplify, or make manifest a principle that minimally distinguishes what a person is” (48). 16.╯See Being and Time, 8–9. 17.╯In his interview Oppen remembers a ship captain who used this phrase to describe the ship’s engine and notes that “hot lump of an engine” represented a conscious refusal to see a motor: “He was consciously refusing to see a motor” (Hatlen 206). 18.╯The reference to the machine “staring out” anticipates a similar phrase in “Psalm” from This in Which: â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… The small nouns Crying faith In this in which the wild deer Startle, and stare out. (NCP 99) Here it is not machinery that stares out but animal life, though as with “Image of the Engine” the crucial mediating factor is language—the “small nouns” that assert that “this in which” exists. Asked by Dembo, “What exactly is the faith,” Oppen replies, “Well, that the nouns do refer to something; that it’s there, that it’s true, the whole implication of these nouns; that appearances represent reality, whether or not they misrepresent it” (CL 163). The distinction, which might be lost on a critic who only focuses on the ocular metaphor, is that deer are able to “look” and language asserts the fact, whereas if machines “look” they do so by means of a metaphor. The latter involves a more radical humanization of the labor process, a fact that is reinforced by Oppen’s reference to the rippled glass, the sill, and the person in the garden. The “faith” in reality to which these and other poems testify must be differentiated by the kinds of “staring” that the poem makes possible. 19.╯A similar use of vertical space to suggest power can be seen in a poem from Discrete Series, “Thus€/ Hides the€// Parts€.€.€.” which presents the image of a lunch counter at the base of a tall building. In this poem, “big-Business” conducts its business “Above the€// Plane of lunch, of wives,” thus using women as consumers on the base while corporate business is conducted above (NCP 7). 20.╯On another page Oppen says, “Women see no purpose, in art or in life, except to make things which are nice. And they are right. I too see no purpose in saying terrible things to people. They mean to sit by people, when they are ill, and to comfort them—until the end” (UCSD 16, 24, 1). 21.╯In his interview with Englebert and West, Oppen notes that, “There was a period— the sixties I suppose—in which the life style was important. And there was behind it an actual mission to speak of this life style and its possibilities. .€.€. But because there is a danger

292â•… Notes to Pages 114–132 in lecturing out of philosophy without saying ‘What does one want?’ And that was the movement of the sixties: to redefine what it is that we do want” (13). 22.╯See “O Western Wind” (NCP 7). 23.╯John Taggart has provided the most thorough reading of the Hawthorne passage, although Taggart reads the lines as a sign of Oppen’s alienation as a Jew in the homeland (Israel), which he had visited with some trepidation earlier. I read the remarks about being a stranger as applying equally to the disenfranchised Clifford as to the Jew within American anglo culture. See John Taggart, “Walk Out,” 29–63. 24.╯Speaking of Lukacs, Fredric Jameson notes that “for the bourgeois, a commodity is a solid material thing whose cause is relatively unimportant. .€.€. Moreover, inasmuch as he knows the interrelationship of tools and equipment to each other, [the worker] will come to see the outside world not as a collection of separate, unrelated things, but as a totality in which everything depends on everything else. Thus, in both of these ways, he will come to apprehend reality as process, and the reification into which the outside world had frozen for the middle classes will be dissolved” (187–88). Oppen devoted much of his writing to representing this process of reification by breaking the glass of class, not by adopting the anti-intellectualism of many Popular Front writers, but by thinking of material and intellectual labor as coterminous.

5. Archaeologist of Morning 1.╯There is some ambiguity about what Dorn actually intended as his title. In the 1975 Wingbow edition of the poem, the cover and title page indicate that the title is Slinger, but on the spine the title is listed as Gunslinger. In the republished version of this book, Duke University Press uses the title Gunslinger throughout. In this essay I will refer to the title character as “Slinger,” as Dorn tended to do in the later books of the poem. According to the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, a gunslinger refers to a “manager of a high-risk, high-performance mutual fund.” 2.╯A good survey of these boundary 2 essays can be found in Paul Bové, Early Postmodernism: Foundational Essays, which reprints many of the most important works from the journal. 3.╯This rhetoric is typical of boundary 2, which devoted many of its early issues to existential and phenomenological readings of postwar literature. Besides Spanos’s several essays on the subject, Nathan Scott, Richard Palmer, Paul Bové, and Joseph Riddel have written at length on the possible uses of Heideggerean hermeneutics in assessing postmodern literature. One entire issue (winter 1976) was devoted to a symposium on Heidegger and literature. 4.╯Anne Dewey has usefully discussed the importance of Weil on Olson in Beyond Maximus: The Construction of Public Voice in Black Mountain Poetry. 5.╯I have retained Olson’s idiosyncratic punctuation, spelling, and syntax throughout this discussion rather than mark each variation from a norm by intrusive brackets and repetition of “sic.” 6.╯I address the masculinist character of “Projective Verse” in chapter 1 of Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics.

Notes to Pages 135–146â•… 293 7.╯Donald Wesling has called attention to the influence of eighteenth-century thinkers such as Samuel Johnson and Jonathan Swift on Dorn’s satire. See his “ ‘To fire we give everything’: Dorn’s Shorter Poems.” 8.╯I am thinking here of remarks by Gerald Graff who, in a series of essays in the mid1970s, “The Myth of the Postmodernist Breakthrough” and “The Politics of Anti-Realism” (reprinted in Literature Against Itself), excoriated postmodern writing for its lack of any engagement with history. He seems completely unaware of developments in contemporary poetry, focusing instead on self-reflexive fiction, “counterculture” critics, and avant-garde happenings in the visual and performance arts.

6. “The Repeated Insistence” 1.╯Unless otherwise specified, all references to Creeley’s poetry refer to The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley. 2.╯In “Repetition,” Kierkegaard says, “In reality as such, there is no repetition. This is not because everything is different, not at all. If everything in the world were completely identical, in reality there would be no repetition, because reality is only in the moment. If the world, instead of being beauty, were nothing but equally large unvariegated boulders, there would still be no repetition. .€.€. When, for example, I see something in the moment, ideality enters in and will explain that it is a repetition” (275). 3.╯In his later poems the activity of thinking becomes an end in itself, the poem a kind of “scribbling .€.€. writing for the immediacy of the pleasure and without having to pay attention to some final code of significance” (Contexts 42). Poems from For Love and Words gain a good deal of their power by controlling the code, giving a shape to philosophical aporia. 4.╯Nietzsche, for whom the “highest concept of the lyric poet” was embodied in Heinrich Heine, celebrates the poet’s “divine malice” and warns against lyric poetry that can “conceive the god apart from the satyr” (Ecce Homo 245). 5.╯Although I have not adequately thought through the generational implications of this diagnosis of male anger, it would be interesting to think about how differently rage is expressed, in cultural terms, from the way it appears, say, in punk music of the 1980s. For the Sex Pistols or The Clash, rage is expressed as a cultural style, like piercings and tattoos, that mark the body as the site of opposition and resistance. Unlike the existentialist 1950s, in which rage implied some kind of heroic protest against social conformity, the punk 1970s and 1980s foregrounds rage as a mode of being, validating, perhaps, that “waning of affect” that Fredric Jameson sees as postmodernism’s cultural logic. 6.╯See Guys Like Us, 57. 7.╯Seth Moglen has seen the division between mourning and melancholia in Freud as a central dividing line within modernism itself. He argues that many modernists, on both sides of the political spectrum, were traumatized by the fact that “human potentialities they valued most had been imperiled or destroyed by social forces that were irresistible” (7). This canonical version of modernism—through Eliot, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and others—expressed such losses as a form of sustained mourning that promised Â�therapeutic

294â•… Notes to Pages 147–162 relief. A second, less canonical group—Zora Neale Hurston, H.D., Tillie Olsen, William Carlos Williams—shared a common feeling that “capitalist modernization was a contingent historical process that might be resisted, controlled, redirected” (9). The latter modernists represent a different response to psychic trauma for which no amount of mourning could ameliorate collective loss. Rather “The ‘other’ modernism is a literature engaged in the work of mourning” (11). 8.╯On the implications of melancholia for historical analysis, see Eng and Kazanjian. 9.╯One moment when melancholy and rage clearly merge occurred when Creeley’s stepdaughter, Leslie, was tragically killed in a cave near their home in New Mexico. As he reports in his “Autobiography,” Creeley went into a rage at a member of a local television crew and threatened him with a shovel. When the man confronted him in a parking lot a year later, demanding an apology, Creeley threatened him again (Clark, 140–1). 10.╯On the “pleasures of system” in Creeley, see Robert von Hallberg. 11.╯Responding to a claim by a woman friend that the poem seems “not demonstrably involved with usual sense of ‘loving’ the recipient,” Creeley responded that he felt “that poem a true measure of an ability to love” (Collected Essays 572). 12.╯Although Creeley turned away from the poetics of rage in his later work, moving, especially after 1975, to a poetry of praise and testimony, he returned to it in a different form with the invasion of Iraq during the first Gulf War. Angered by the Bush administration’s unilateral incursion into the Middle East, Creeley began a regular e-mail broadcast to a lengthy list of addressees containing news, websites, links, and stories about U.S. involvement. Although these e-mail communiques lacked the outraged persona of his early poems, they contained the enraged voices of public opposition to the war. This involvement in the anti-war effort continued in his public presentations and readings. The last time I saw him in person, at a conference celebrating the publication of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov’s collected correspondence, Creeley repeatedly raised the fact of the ongoing war in Iraq, linking his remarks to the rage that both of his old friends expressed (though differently) during the Vietnam War. Whatever private demons led him to lash out at friends and strangers in the early 1960s had turned to a direct confrontation with the public demons that have reduced American Exceptionalism to a driverless car; “for€/ christ’s sake, look€/ out where yr going,” has ceased to be a moment of personal self-correction but a historical imperative.

7. A Cold War Correspondence 1.╯Alan Filreis has provided a brilliant survey of the role of anticommunist, conservative commentators in attacking modernism in Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–1960. 2.╯The subject of poetic community has been the subject of numerous recent books and articles, including my own, San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century; Alan Golding’s From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry; Libbie Rifkin, Career Moves: Olson, Creeley, Zukofsky, Berrigan, and the American Avant-Garde: Ann Vickery, Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing; Daniel Kane, All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side

Notes to Pages 170–185â•… 295 Poetry Scene in the 1960s; Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian, Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance; and Lytle Shaw, Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie. 3.╯“Santa Cruz Propositions” was written in the fall of 1970, when Duncan was teaching at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The letters document in some detail the nature of his classes, his relationship with his students, and his friendship with Norman O. Brown, who was instrumental in bringing him to Santa Cruz. Yet when he publishes the series in Ground Work, Duncan dates it “October 1968,” fully two years before the actual teaching was to take place. Is this Duncan misremembering the actual date, or is he signaling the year 1968 as the epitome of a revolutionary agon with which Levertov is identified?

8. Looking Through Lithium 1.╯On the early diagnosis of bipolar disorders, see Francis Mark Mondimore, Bipolar Disorder: A Guide for Patients and Families (84–87). 2.╯See the entry on “lithium” in the American Medical Association’s Complete Medical Encyclopedia, 797. 3.╯Nathan Kernan has provided an invaluable chronicle of Schuyler’s life in his edition of The Diary of James Schuyler, listing the various periods in which the poet stayed at psychiatric hospitals. 4.╯Schuyler was probably taking thorazine as early as 1971. In a letter to Harry Mathews of August 16, while at the Vermont State Hospital, Schuyler writes, “My doctor here (a groovy babe in flame red pants suit—’Dr Colette’ her moniker, her hubby, ‘Dr Garcia,’ seems a swinger) agrees I do not need to be here: some thorazine & freedom—Southampton, Chez Ma Mère” (362). 5.╯The association of lithium (as a salt) with the sea is reinforced by Fairfield Porter’s painting on the cover of the book: it depicts ocean waves and a sandy beach. 6.╯The couplet is quoted in Robert Lowell, “To Delmore Schwartz,” 64. 7.╯All subsequent references to Schuyler’s poems are to this text. 8.╯This mimeographed journal appeared in two issues from the Vermont State Hospital and featured news items about programs and events (the drug rehab program, the softball team) and poems by inmates and friends of the poet. 9.╯In a letter to Ron Padget, Schuyler explains the origins of the poem: Please take some black ink, my poem ROXY ROSE, and eliminate ROSE, thus restoring the original title, ROXY. There is a reason & I will write about it sometime (in ’43 Sid Catlett [a jazz drummer] entrusted his cute sailor found-object to a “friend” who took me to meet a lady lush in a “Volunteer” uniform who once starred in a flop musical: her big number Rosy Rose—she, we, got bad drunk & she did her number. Hubby came home to his STAR looking pissed, friend took me to the Everard Baths—& me still ‘19’ well, just 20, maybe .€.€. where I grooved with a nifty soldier &, Ron, I can feel those dogtags this minute. Wonder where he is tonight—middle years & all—hot damn. (356–57) 10.╯In referring to “The Crystal Lithium” as an “ode,” I am thinking of Frank O’Hara’s

296â•… Notes to Pages 186–208 use of the term in his longer-lined tributes to friends and affective states such as “Ode to Joy,” “Ode to Michael Goldberg (‘s Birth and Other Births),” and “Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets.” 11.╯In a letter to Kenneth Koch, Schuyler reports that the name came from a postcard, “an old-timey spa, somewhere in the south Kaintuck” (333). This association ties in with the Â�poet’s love of Americana and vernacular objects and architecture. 12.╯Brooke Horvath sees a close relationship between Schuyler’s poetry and Action Painting, and while this helps to explain the poet’s process aesthetic as it is developed in his art criticism, it stints his larger debt to a pictorialist and naturalist tradition represented by the work of Katz, Freilicher, and Porter. I also feel that Horvath’s emphasis on Harold Rosenberg’s aesthetics cannot account for the more kitsch, pop-culture humor that Schuyler shares with younger painters like Joe Brainard.

9. Ekphrasis and The New York School 1.╯For a defense of Frank and an extension of his ideas into postmodern theory see W.J.T. Mitchell, “Spatial Form in Literature: Toward a General Theory.” 2.╯Ekphrasis is derived from classical rhetoric, where it implies two things. On one level, ekphrasis simply refers to those descriptive moments in any speech or essay. On another level, one pertinent to our concerns, the term implies self-contained descriptive moments inserted into an argument or poem that describe an object, such as Achilles’s shield in The Iliad or the Grecian urn in Keats’s sonnet. For thorough studies of ekphrasis, see Hagstrum or Hollander. 3.╯Paul de Man explores the nature of this closed circle of interpretation in terms of Heidegger’s Forhabe (forestructure) in Blindness and Insight (29–32). 4.╯Writing about Graham’s “San Sepolcro,” Barbara Fischer notes that in order to approach the painted image, the poet first must establish “a privileged vantage point before addressing Piero della Francesca’s Madonna: ‘I can take you there,€/ [€.€.€.€]€/ [€.€.€.€] This€/ is my house,€// my section of Etruscan€/ wall, my neighbor’s€/ lemontrees, and, just below€/ the lower church,€/ the airplane factory.’” Fisher goes on to point out that in this and other poems “Graham is concerned with an artwork’s vision of transcendence in a space that is vacant of economic activities, though for her these peripheral matters do encroach on the view” (9). 5.╯O’Hara makes this personal aspect of art appreciation a centerpiece of “Having a Coke With You”: â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time (360)

Notes to Pages 216–224â•… 297 10. The Pleasures of Merely Circulating 1.╯Letter from John Ashbery to James Schuyler, Sept. 6, 1955(?), James Schuyler papers, University of California, San Diego. 2.╯Three Poems will hereafter be abbreviated as TP. Subsequent references to Ashbery’s work will be abbreviated in the text as follows: Double Dream of Spring (DD); Rivers and Mountains (RM); Selected Prose (SP); Shadow Train (ShT); Some Trees (ST); The Tennis Court Oath (TC). 3.╯On Adorno and authenticity see Martin Jay, “Taking On the Stigma of Inauthenticity: Adorno’s Critique of Genuineness.” John Shoptaw says that Ashbery had not read Sartre but that he “‘absorbed the ideas’ which were in the air .€.€. at the time” (138). 4.╯“In fact, impurity of language becomes a mark of authenticity, since it registers the poet’s awareness of the duplicity of discourse and the complexity of intentions. In impurity is our freedom and our salvation “ (Self and Sensibility 132). James Longenbach has argued that regarding Ashbery’s “stylistic extravagance as a mark of authenticity is to reinforce the mimetic logic of the ‘breakthrough’ narrative [a poetics of authenticity]: the self-Â�consciously employed rhetoric is not in itself arbitrary but in fact provides a clearer picture of the arbitrary way in which language stages our world” (“John Ashbery and the Individual Talent”€120). 5.╯Jonathan Morse reads Ashbery’s use of cliché in terms of Baudrillard’s simulacrum: “Ashbery’s clichés aren’t representative communications from any imaginable history because they aren’t capable of representing anything, but as read texts they possess simulacra of meanings, and those simulacra have given them a function: to typify. Specifically, they typify themselves” (16). I would add that these “prefabricated blocks of language” do not necessarily escape referentiality. That is, they “typify” within a specific socio-sexual semantics in which the use of certain types of language signifies on who is empowered to use such forms of speech. See also Keith Cohen, “Ashbery’s Dismantling of Bourgeois Discourse.” 6.╯Bob Perelman remarks that in Longinus the sublime was always accompanied by its slightly debased other, the bathetic: “in terms of scale they were similar. The sublime: very high; the profound: very deep; thus either could signify the scope Longinus found compelling” (“Bathos and Mind-Reading” n.p.). Perelman adapts this relationship to Ashbery to qualify the tendency among many critics to divide Ashbery between two camps: the reflective/meditative poet of Three Poems, and the camp camp of “Daffy Duck in Hollywood,” when the truth participates in both realms. 7.╯Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 78. 8.╯A. Poulin, Jr., “John Ashbery,” The Michigan Quarterly Review 20.3 (1981): 250–51. 9.╯In the Port Huron Statement of 1962, the first manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society, the term “authenticity” is identified with “men’s unrealized potentiality for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity” in order to build a community in which one can find “meaning in life that is personally authentic” (qtd. in Berman xvii–xviii). 10.╯On critical responses to Ashbery’s statement, see Longenbach, “John Ashbery and the Individual Talent” (104–5). 11.╯Andrew Marvell, “A Picture of Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers,” The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Hugh Macdonald (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 36.

298â•… Notes to Pages 225–241 12.╯In other poems in Double Dream of Spring, Ashbery frames the individual subject within public discourses like the Declaration of Independence: The rise of capitalism parallels the advance of romanticism And the individual is dominant until the close of the nineteenth century. In our own time, mass practices have sought to submerge the personality By ignoring it, which has caused it instead to branch out in all directions Far from the permanent tug that used to be its notion of “home” (DD 53) Here Ashbery ventriloquizes the undergraduate humanities survey lecture, yet the historical summary quickly changes to a complex metaphor for the new, displaced subject. Ashbery provides a nice gloss on Benjamin’s “Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction” when he speaks of the ways that “mass practices” submerge the personality, causing it to “branch out in all directions.” The bracketing of “home” in quotation marks, with the slight qualification of “its notion of,” embodies the very process of circulation itself. 13.╯In Wayne Koestenbaum’s terms, homosocial collaboration, whether between two gay or heterosexual men, performs a “double talk” that makes a kind of “metaphoric intercourse .€.€. possible” (4). While this may have described earlier homosocial productions (his examples include Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads and Pound’s editorial work on Eliot’s “The Waste Land”), for Ashbery and Schuyler there seems very little to hide; everything is on the surface. 14.╯“I’m reading Bouvard et Pecuchet some more. You must read it—it’s so much like A Nest Of Ninnies.” Letters from John Ashbery to James Schuyler, James Schuyler papers, University of California, San Diego, n.d. 15.╯On the back cover of the Viking Press first edition, “quasi-dialectical language” is used to describe “The System.” 16.╯Jacques Derrida, “The Ends of Man,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 30.1 (Sept. 1969): 31–57; Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, 387. 17.╯Asked by Shoptaw what “system” he is describing in the poem, Ashbery replied that it included “everything from the biological to the cosmological, from the circulatory to the solar systems” (147).

11. “Struck Against Parenthesis” 1.╯Ken Russell did contribute to this mythologization in his 1987 film Gothic, which depicts in typically hallucinatory fashion the night that Byron, Percy, and Mary traded ghost stories—the outcome of which was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. 2.╯One can hear recordings (made by Fred Wah) of the events at the Vancouver conference at www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound. 3.╯McClure’s lion-house performance appears in the NET Presents series of documentaries on contemporary U.S. poets. The film depicting McClure is called USA: Poetry, Michael McClure and Brother Antoninus. Outtakes from the series can be found at the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University.

Notes to Pages 243–257â•… 299 4.╯Eliot speaks of “The Triumph of Life” in “The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism.” 5.╯Ransom uses Shelley as an example of Platonism in “Poetry: A Note in Ontology,” 874–76.

12. “Skewed by Design” 1.╯Some linguists feel that public oaths and proclamations are more symbolic than legal since they are not binding in the way a contract or a wager would be. A number of articles by legal scholars and rhetoricians appeared after the inauguration who pointed out that Roberts’s error bespeaks the pervasive prohibition in legal language against splitting verbs with an adverb. See Mark Liberman, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=523. 2.╯The exception to this rule is the work of Mary Louise Pratt, which offers an important critique not only of speech act theory but also of of Roman Jakobson’s theories of “literariness” as a discrete area of verbal experience, separate from everyday discourse. 3.╯For an excellent discussion of Jameson’s reading of “China,” see Barrett Watten, The Constructivist Moment, 213–14. Perelman discusses the poem and Jameson’s response in “Parataxis and Narrative.” 4.╯Perelman says that he “wrote the poem after looking not at a book of photographs, as Jameson writes, but at some sort of a Chinese primer containing simple four-color pictures of ‘the world’: family, kitchen, school, rivers, airports, and village festivals” (“Parataxis and Narrative” 176). 5.╯This is the argument of Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” which, although not about the form of the speech act, nevertheless invokes its ideological function in certain kinds of commands. 6.╯This agentless quality of the performative and its links to power are the subject of Judith Butler’s theories of gender citationality. In “Critically Queer,” Butler notes that the success of a performative “accumulates the force of authority through the repetition or citation of a prior, authoritative set of practices.€.€.€. This view of performativity implies that discourse has a history that not only precedes but conditions its contemporary usages, and that this history effectively decenters the presentist view of the subject as the exclusive origin or owner of what is said” (227). 7.╯Watten has commented extensively on this passage in an interview in Ottotole 2 (winter 1986–87) in which he describes actual sources for several of the lines, including a private association for “Rosebud” which links to the name of an ape at the Oakland Zoo. In conversation, the author has informed me that “Bald Eagles,” in addition to their obvious reference to the senior American military, was a phrase used for child prostitutes in Saigon during the Vietnam era. I have chosen not to use Watten’s commentary in forming my own reading in order to test what I take to be his larger pedagogical purpose in provoking the reader into working with the materials of his poem towards new and perhaps alternative interpretations. Unlike critics like Jameson, who might find in this decontextualizing strategy an argument for the liberation of neutral free-floating signifiers, I would say that Watten has carefully delimited the ideological horizon of his lines.

300â•… Notes to Pages 258–272 8.╯Searle, “Minds, Brains, and Programs” was reprinted in his book, Minds, Brains and Science. 9.╯See Jacques Derrida, “Limited Inc.” and Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition. 10.╯In Tender Buttons Stein often describes one thing by means of a contrastive quality or feature: “Is there not much more joy in a table and more chairs and very likely roundness and a place to put them” (314); and “Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same question” (314). Stein also wrote her own Faust story in the play, Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights. 11.╯Both Greg Kinzer and Mark Cantrell have written excellent, synoptic articles on the philosophical background to this section, and I am indebted to their work. 12.╯Although I read Retallack’s book as a critique of Austin, I also realize that her work is also an homage, one that she acknowledges as such in her phonetically spelled dedication: “o m’aj to the o’stens, Jane and J.L.” (85). Despite his inability to regard poetic language as “normal” Austin’s spirited uses of it suggests a level of wit and irony that Retallack finds provocative and interesting. 13.╯According to a note at the end of the book, Retallack based the opening of each section on corresponding sections of Part I of Stanzas in Meditation (156). 14.╯At my institution, the attempt to permit American Sign Language (ASL) to be used toward a student’s language requirement met a series of obstacles based on misunderstandings of its structure and usage. The most prominent of these objections included the assumption that ASL is not a language but a gestural version of English and that ASL has no literary tradition. Both assumptions are false. We were ultimately successful in adding ASL as a second language, but the resistance that we met was based not on the salient features of sign language but on whether it conforms to speech-based models of language.

13. Vertigo 1.╯The bulk of this essay was written in the days immediately following the attack on the World Trade Center, Sept. 11, 2001. My opening lines reprise Wordsworth’s sonnet, “London, 1802”: “Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:€/ England hath need of thee.” 2.╯All subsequent quotations from Oppen’s poems in this chapter are cited by page number in New Collected Poems. 3.╯Note, for example, the artisanal emphasis in “Antique”: “Against the glass€/ Towers, the elaborate€/ Horned handle of a saw” (72). 4.╯Oppen’s insistence that the name “Phyllis” is “not neo-classic” seems a riposte to William Carlos Williams’s Paterson IV which features an urban idyll featuring “Two silly women,” Corydon and Phyllis (149). 5.╯Oppen often praises Charles Reznikoff ’s brief lyric from Jerusalem the Golden (1934) although he usually mis-remembers the final word as “rubble”: Among the heaps of brick and plaster lies a girder, still itself among the rubbish. (121)

Notes to Pages 273–281â•… 301 6.╯See Peter Nicholls, George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism, chapter 2, for an excellent reading of Oppen’s relationship to Maritain and Heidegger. 7.╯There is some ambiguity about the origin of these lines. Burton Hatlen claims they occur in Whitehead’s Process and Reality but, in a series of notes discovered among Oppen’s papers, the poet says that this passage derives from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. 8.╯Oppen’s papers are located at the Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego. References to this collection (UCSD) will be included in text, followed by the collection number, box number, and folder number. 9.╯Hans Arp, “The Elephant Style versus the Bidet Style,” in Mary Ann Caws, ed., Manifesto: A Century of Isms (292). 10.╯On Oppen’s response to 1960s happenings and youth culture, see Nicholls, 110–35. 11.╯Quoted in Tom Sharp, “George Oppen, Discrete Series, 1929–1934,” 271. 12.╯On Oppen’s use of deixis, see Paul Naylor, “The Pre-Position ‘of ’: Being, Seeing, and Knowing in George Oppen’s Poetry.” See also Nicholls, 74–75. 13.╯The philosopher’s relationship to National Socialism has been documented most recently in Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933–1935 (New Haven: Yale University Press), 2009. 14.╯See Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism. See also the special feature on Heidegger and Nazism in Critical Inquiry 15.2 (winter 1989): 407–88. 15.╯According to Peter Nicholls, Oppen encountered Being and Time through Werner Brock’s introductory essay to Existence and Being. Although there is a copy of Being and Time among Oppen’s books held at the University of California, San Diego, it does not seem to have been consulted extensively. On Oppen and his reading of Heidegger, see Nicholls, 194–96. 16.╯Brecht is paraphrased in “The Mind’s Own Place” (Selected Prose 36).

Afterword 1.╯Bernstein discusses “impossible poetry” in his essay, “Poetics of the Americas.” 2.╯According to Mike Weaver, Barker somewhat recanted his remark. In a letter to Weaver, Barker confessed, “Certainly it is a remark that, in and out of my cups, I made several times too often in those days. Myself I don’t think it disputable that an American poetry is beginning to happen now. More power to its elbow” (qtd. in Weaver 211, n.167). 3.╯Barrett Watten has taken issue with Charles Bernstein on this issue, claiming that the latter overstates cultural studies’ focus on “symptomatic reading of poetry” and tends to unify the various tendencies toward idiolect and dialect-use into one univocal form that stands against some putative standard language (111). At the time that Bernstein’s essay was published (1996), study of poetry within cultural studies—and especially within postcolonial studies, to which his essay was specifically addressed—was fairly limited. Thanks to Watten’s work in intervening years (and that of many others, including Bernstein), the symptomatic treatment of poetry is less an issue. 4.╯The most thorough treatment of poetry as discourse is Anthony Easthorpe’s Poetry as

302â•… Notes to Pages 282–283 Discourse. Currently out of print, parts of it have been reprinted in Damon and Livingston, Poetry and Cultural Studies, 67–73. 5.╯For an excellent reading of the poem, and of the relationship between poetry and politics during the 1930s, see Michael Thurston, Making Something Happen.

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ind e x Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Titles of poems given substantive treatment in the text are indexed with their authors. abstract expressionism, 164 Adams, Henry, 43, 122 Adorno, Theodor, 8, 217, 236 Agee, James, 96, 289n11 Algren, Nelson, 80–81 alienation: alienation from historical trauma, 271–72; Marx on alienation from labor, 273; neoliberal individualism as appropriation of, 29, 36; in Oppen Altamont poetry, 114, 116–18, 292n23; postwar masculine alienation, 145–46, 227, 293n5 allegory: allegorical travel in “Tercer Mundo,” 32; allegorized national narrative in Babel, 24; Marinetti manifesto as modernist birth allegory, 59–60; modernist wish images and, 42–43; Niedecker’s Rock River landscape as, 75 Allen, Donald, 162 Altamont music festival, 96, 111 Althusser, Louis, 255, 299n5 Altieri, Charles: on authenticity in Ashbery, 218, 226, 297n4; on the play of desires, 205–6; poetics of immanence in, 124–25; as postwar critic, 123; on speech acts in Creeley, 143 Alvarez, A., 178 American Sign Language, 264, 300n14 Anderson, Benedict, 279

Anderson, Sherwood, 116 Andrews, Bruce, 28 Annual Register, The (Burke), 53–54, 55–56, 59, 287n1 Antin, David, 125 Anzaldua, Gloria, 282 Apollinaire, 196 Aquinas, Thomas, 104 art: ekphrasis as poetic device, 195–97; exposure of globalization in, 2, 28; New€Historicism, 12–13; painting as “Crystal Lithium” influence, 189–90; theories of action in, 273–74, 296n12. See also pictorialist poetry Artaud, Antonin, 238 Arteaga, Alfred, 28 ASCO group, 28 Ashbery, John: aesthetic commentary in, 205–6; ambivalence as theme in, 124; Ashbery-Schuyler correspondence/collaboration, 216, 220, 226–32, 227–30, 298n13; bathos in, 218–19, 297n6; Henry James influence on, 216–17; O’Hara collaborative relationship with, 161–62; pictorialist poetry by, 17, 193–94, 197, 214; post-structuralist subjectivity in, 233–35, 298n17; public address style in, 9; subjective displacement in, 221–23; subversive inauthenticity in, 51–52, 65, 72, 218–23, 225–26, 232–38, 297n4. Works: “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name,” 193–94, 214; As We Know, 220; “Clepsydra,” 223, 224–25; “Daffy Duck in Hollywood,” 218,

316â•… Index 297n6; “Decoy,” 223, 225; Double Dream of Spring, 225, 298n12; “Europe,” 220; “The Instruction Manual,” 224; A Nest of Ninnies, 219, 227–32, 230, 237; “The New Spirit,” 233; “The Picture of Little J. A. in a Prospect of Flowers,” 222–24; “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” 203–8, 203; “The Skaters,” 220, 233; Some Trees, 223–24; “Soonest Mended,” 225–26; “The System,” 233–37; The Tennis Court Oath, 224; “They Dream Only of America,” 223; Three Poems, 222, 233–37, 297n6 Ash Can School, 290n4 Auden, W. H., 282 Augustine, Jane, 288n8 (Chap. 3) Austen, Jane, 266–67, 300n12 Austin, J. L., 18, 249, 251–52, 258, 262–63, 266–67, 300n12 authenticity: modernist authenticity of experience, 94–95; postwar personal liberty and, 221, 298n9; subversive inauthenticity in Ashbery, 17, 218–23, 225–26, 232, 297n4 authoring. See subjectivity; writing autobiographical poetry, 3–4 Avison, Margaret, 241 Babb, Sanora, 80 Babel (Iñárritu), 23–24, 29, 35, 65–66 Baraka, Amiri, 126, 274, 282 Barker, George, 279–80, 301n2 Barthes, Roland, 5–6, 193–94, 197, 214–15 Basho, 37 Baudelaire, Charles, 25, 28, 45, 70, 124, 297n5 Beach, Christopher, 12 Beatles, the, 282 Beat poetry, 241, 243, 251, 273. See also Corso, Gregory; Ginsberg, Allen; Snyder, Gary Belgrad, Daniel, 273 Benedict, Ruth, 127

Benjamin, Walter: on the aestheticization of politics, 274; Ashbery on “mass practices” and, 298n12; botanical observational strategy, 44–45, 48; on capitalist aura, 217–18, 297n4; on history, 147; on imitating the organic, 90; on modern cities, 26, 36; on wish images, 42; Yépez influenced by, 70 Bennett, Tony, 6 Bergman, David, 218 Bergson, Henri, 117, 273 Berkson, Bill, 180 Bernstein, Charles, 279, 301n3 Berry, Wendell, 164, 282 Berryman, John, 17, 178 Bishop, Elizabeth, 94–95 Blackburn, Paul, 164 Blake, William, 57, 94, 135 Bloom, Harold, 126, 243–44 Border Arts Workshop (BAW), 28 borders, 2, 28, 65–66, 288n7 Borges, Jorge Luis, 3 Bové, Paul, 123 Brainard, Joe, 189, 208, 220 Brand, Dione, 28 Brathwaite, Kamau, 14 Breslin, James, 123 Breu, Chris, 145 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 14, 90–91 Brown, Sterling, 14 Bulosan, Carlos, 79–80 Burke, Edmund, 53–54, 55–56, 59 Burns, Robert, 57 Butler, Judith, 221–22, 299n6 Caddel, Richard, 75–76 Calhoun, Craig, 25 Campion, Peter, 185 Cantrell, Mark, 263–64 capitalism: discursive subjectivity and, 51–52, 65; Fordism as poetic image, 47, 78; individualism and, 7; locality/place as appropriated entity, 123, 135–36;

Indexâ•… 317 outskirts of capitalist production, 50; psychological effects from, 225, 298n12; representation of global capitalism, 4–5; soft architecture relationship with, 44; transnational capitalists as social class, 286n3 Caro, Alberto, 288n7 Carretta, Vincent, 57–58 Carruth, Hayden, 164, 165 cartography, 129–30. See also spatiality Cather, Willa, 76 Cendrars, Blaise, 26 Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung, 9–11, 49 Chartists, 94 Cheever, John, 80–81 Chesnutt, Charles, 6 Chiasson, Dan, 221 Chicano literature and art, 28 Chin, Vincent, 40 Chopin, Kate, 61, 76 cities: Benjamin modern cities as ruin, 36; critical regionalism and, 76–77; modernist “unreal city,” 25, 28; soft architecture in Robertson’s Vancouver, 28–29, 36; urban decay in Nowak, 26, 29, 36; urban infrastructure in Oppen, 270–71; urban utopia in El Terzo, 32–34; Williams’s Paterson as local place, 29, 36 citizenship: citizen subjects, 28–29, 54, 57–59; discursive subjectivity and, 51–52; in El Terzo, 34, 49; flexible/ cosmopolitan citizenships, 24–25; global citizenship, x, 9, 15, 54, 65; in manifesto poetry, 15–16; post-NAFTA discrepant cosmopolitanisms, 49; rationality as fundamental to, 283. See also global citizenship; subjectivity class: artisanal representation of, 94–95, 290n7; authenticity of experience and, 94–95, 290n4, 290n8; bourgeois aesthetics of the public sphere, 8; class consciousness in writing, 84–85,

288–89n9; class nostalgia in Robertson, 48–49; class spectacle in Oppen, 97–101, 291n14; “class spectacles” as collective representation, 16; class ventriloquizing in Niedecker and Williams, 84–85; cultural poetics and, 13; cultural theories of, 96; globalization and, 27–28, 286n3; Marxist theory of, 92; Oppen critique of ocularcentrism, 116–18; social isolation and, 104–7; theory of material objects, 101 Clifford, James, 25 Clodion, Claude Michel, 210–13, 212 Coetzee, J. M., 287n10 Cold War. See postwar literature Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 124, 298n13 colonization, 24–25 community: “class spectacles” as, 16; collective collaboration, 43–44, 287n13; collective subjectivity, 7; economic dependencies as basis for, 26; Oppen on sociality, 7, 111, 271–72; poetry readings as basis for, 162–63; “Polis” as perceived collective, 129; postwar collaboration and, 161–62. See also public language; public sphere Compton, Wade, 28 Compton-Burnett, Ivy, 227 concrete poetry, 164 condensation, 37–38, 186, 189, 289n13 confessional poetry, 17, 124, 179–80, 221 Conover, Roger, 60 contextual poetics, 70–71 Cook, Eliza, 57 Cook, Peter, 13–14 Corber, Robert, 145 Corbett, Bill, 177 Corman, Cid, 75, 80, 162 Corso, Gregory, 242–43, 282 Cortázar, Julio, 287n10 cosmopolitanism: critical cold war cosmopolitanism in Cha, 11; flexible citizenships and, 24–25; global

318â•… Index citizenship and, 9, 15; modernist concept of, 25–26; post-NAFTA discrepant cosmopolitanisms, 25, 28, 49; Robertson OSA tourguide and, 44. See also global citizenship; globalization; individualism counter publics, 53, 57. See also public sphere Creeley, Robert: ambivalence as theme in, 124; biographical sketch, 144, 146–47, 152–53; as Duncan-Levertov correspondence subject, 163; as New American Poetry figure, 241; Olson collaborative relationship with, 161–62; poems as reflection in, 143, 293n3; on poetic nonconformity, 19; poetics of rage in, 16, 143–46, 150–56, 293–94n7, 294n9, 294n12; poetry of intensities in, 251; process aesthetic in, 220; public address style in, 9; temporality as feature in, 125. Works: “Anger,” 150, 153–57; “The Door,” 147; “A Form of Woman,” 150; “For W.C.W.,” 142–44, 158; “Hole,” 150; “I Know a Man,” 149, 294n11; The Island, 152–53; “The Lover,” 145–46, 293–94n7; “One Way,” 150; “The Warning,” 149; “The Way,” 147–48 critical regionalism, 16, 76–77, 79–80, 86–87, 90–91, 288n2. See also Niedecker, Lorine “Crystal € Lithium, The” (Schuyler): comic resignation in, 179–82; “Jim the Jerk” protagonist, 179, 180, 192; mental illness as poetic optic, 17, 177–78, 186–91; as ode, 295–96n10; painting as influence on, 189–90, 296n12; significance of title, 176–77, 185, 295n5, 296n11. See€also Schuyler, James cubist poetics, 196 Cullen, Countee, 14 cultural geography, 134 cultural poetics, 11–12, 13–15, 16, 281–82 cultural studies: role of aesthetics in, 13,

286n12; role of narrative in, 11; role of poetry in, 281–82, 285–86n11, 301n3; role of spatiality in, 29–30 Dadaism, 54, 164, 273 Damon, Maria, 11–12, 13 Dash, Robert, 208 Davidson, Michael, 287n13 Deaf poetry, 13–14, 286n13 de Chirico, Giorgio, 233 Declaration of Independence, 53–54, 56, 298n12 deconstruction: critical regionalism and, 76; in Dorn’s Gunslinger, 141–42; in Goldsmilth’s Day, 3; Retallack on gendered language, 258–59; Shelley as€subject for, 18, 243–48 defamiliarization, 2 Defoe, Daniel, 99–100 Degnan, June, 108 Delaunay, Sonia, 26 de Man, Paul, 126, 244–47 Dembo, L. S., 102, 291n18 Denby, David, 24 Denning, Michael, 16, 79–80, 90 Derksen, Jeff, 28 Derrida, Jacques, 19, 234, 259, 263 dialect speech, 14–15 Dickinson, Emily, 6, 85–86, 148, 164–65 DiPrima, Diane, 162–63 disability studies, 17 documentary poetry, 36 Dorn, Edward: anticipation of globalization, 287n14; as Duncan-Levertov correspondence subject, 164; on landscape, 133–34, 138; on the “North Atlantic turbine,” 50; as Oppen student, 5, 122, 141; projective verse in, 132–33; Shelley as influence on, 242; on spatiality in Olson, 122, 135–36. Works: Gunslinger (see main entry); “Idaho Out,” 133–34; “The Land Below,” 133–34; “The North Atlantic Turbine,” 133–34, 242, 287n14;

Indexâ•… 319 “The Problem of the Poem My Daughter Left Unsolved,” 133–34 Dos Passos, John, 81, 83, 96 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 127 Douglas, C. H., 94 Du Bois, W. E. B., 58–59 Duchamp, Marcel, 116, 196 Dunbar, Paul Lawrence, 6 Duncan, Robert: field composition model in, 3; individualism as value for, 217; as New American Poetry figure, 241; physiological/biological poetics, 251; “place of first permission” concept, 29; on postwar poetic re-presencing, 124; process aesthetic in, 220; public address style of, 9; queer identity in, 282; Shelley as influence on, 240; temporality as feature in, 125; on typesetting/layout of poetry, 162. Works: “An A Muse Ment,” 163; “Bending the Bow,” 159; “The Multiversity,” 167; The Opening of the Field, 163–64; “Passages,” 3; “Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar,” 164; “Santa Cruz Propositions,” 170, 295n3; Stony Brook, 165; “The Storm,” 164; “Structure of Rime,” 3; “The Torn Cloth,” 173–74; “Up Rising,” 167. See also Duncan-Levertov correspondence Duncan-Levertov correspondence: discussions of other poets, 164–65; domestic and aesthetic matters in, 163; gender mapping in, 160–61, 170–75; sound recordings of poetry, 162–63; Vietnam War as subject, 160, 165–70, 172–75; views on romanticism in, 17. See also Duncan, Robert; Levertov, Denise Dunn, Anne, 208 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 12, 95, 111, 276, 290n8 Dylan, Bob, 282 Eagleton, Terry, 13, 286n12 Easthorpe, Anthony, 281–82

Eastman, Max, 96 Edwards, Brent, 11 Edwards, Bryant, 56, 59 Edwards, Jonathan, 122 Eigner, Larry, 164, 172 ekphrasis, 17, 195–96, 223–24, 296n2. See also Lessing, Gotthold; pictorialist poetry Eley, Geoff, 53 Eliot, T. S.: ambivalence as theme in, 124; atmosphere of despair in, 141; authenticity of experience and, 94–95; cosmopolitan characters in, 25; impersonal theory of art, 221; modernist aesthetics of, 124, 127; mourning as therapeutic relief in, 293–94n7; “Murder in the Cathedral” and critical regionalism, 90; pictorialist style in, 194–95; Pound-Eliot collaboration, 298n13; representation of class in, 85; as Rukeyser influence, 77; on Shelley, 243, 248; subjective indeterminacy in “Prufrock,” 224; Yépez influenced by, 70. Works: “Burnt Norton,” 195; “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” 25, 94, 224, 278, 280; Murder in the Cathedral, 90; “The Waste Land,” 194 Ellison, Ralph, 80–81 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 172, 273 Engels, Friedrich, 92 epic poetry, 4–5 Epstein, Andrew, 161 Equiano, Olaudah, 16, 54, 57–59, 72 ethnopoetics, 124 existentialism, 217, 293n5 Faludi, Susan, 145 Fascism, 18–19, 274 Faulkner, William, 293–94n7 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 162, 282 Festival de la Frontera installation (Yépez), 54, 66, 67–68, 69–71, 70–71, 288n7 field composition, 2–3

320â•… Index Fielding, Henry, 287n1 Filreis, Alan, 12 Fischer, Barbara, 296n4 Fisher, Barbara, 198 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 293–94n7 Flaubert, Gustave, 45, 194, 227, 238 Flying Words Project, 287n13 Foucault, Michel, 52, 87, 117, 152, 234 Four Horsemen, 287n13 Frampton, Kenneth, 76 Frank, Joseph, 125, 194–95 Frankfurt School social theory, 96 Fraser, Nancy, 8, 53 Freedberg, Sydney, 205 Freeman, Sarah Wilkins, 76 Freilicher, Jane, 189, 208, 296n12 Freud, Sigmund, 17, 52, 146, 224, 293–94n7 Frost, Elizabeth, 61–62, 287n4 Frost, Robert, 280 Futurism, 54, 59–61, 65 Galton, Francis, 61 Garcia Marquez, Gabriel, 287n10 Gates, Henry Louis, 58–59 Gelpi, Albert, 123, 162, 163, 169, 172 gender: articulation of feminist public sphere, 64–65; Creeley’s poetics of rage and, 152–53; discursive subjectivity and, 72; feminine agency in Stevens and Rich, 257–58; Futurist scorn for women, 59–61; gender mapping in Duncan-Levertov correspondence, 160–61, 170–75; heteronormative address, 9; imagism as gendered discourse, 103–4; Loy “Feminist Manifesto” and, 54, 61–62; normative subjectivity and, 17; Oppen class theory and, 109, 111, 291n20; post-NAFTA gendered citizenship, 49; postwar masculine alienation, 145–46, 227, 293n5; public language as gendered speech, 71–72; reflective ego as gendered form,

274; self-identical subjectivity and, 221–22; speech act theory and, 263–67; workplace interactions in Niedecker, 84–85, 288n8 (Chap. 3), 289n10. See also sexual orientation and sexuality geography. See spatiality gesture, 18, 250–51 Gilbert, Roger, 220 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 61–62 Gilman, Perkins, 61 Ginsberg, Allen: account of exploitation in, 31; agonistic form in, 124; individualism as value for, 217; mental illness and, 177; as New American Poetry figure, 241; political activism of, 18, 282; process aesthetic in, 220; public address style of, 9; reflective ego in, 274; Shelley as influence on, 240; temporality as feature in, 125 Glancy, Diane, 4 globalization: anti-globalization activism, 26, 287n6; Babel as allegory for, 23–24; borders as definitive sites for, 2, 28, 65–66, 288n7; defined, 286n2; discursive subjectivity and, 51–52, 65, 283; global citizenship, x, 9, 15, 54, 65; globalizational scale, 3–5; locality/ place as appropriated entity, 123, 135–36; “The North Atlantic Turbine” as anticipation of, 287n14; “outskirts” metaphor and, 50; post-national voicing, 9–11; transformation of consciousness in Gunslinger, 134–39. See also cosmopolitanism; global citizenship; North American Free Trade Agreement Gold, Mike, 96 Golding, Alan, 12 Goldsmith, Kenneth, 3 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, 28 Goodman, Mitchell, 166 Graham, Jorie, 196, 296n4 Grahn, Judy, 282 Gramsci, Antonio, 96

Indexâ•… 321 Gray, Timothy, 12, 185 Greenblatt, Stephen, 12 Greene, Henry, 227 Grenier, Bob, 269 Grice, H. P., 252 Gunslinger (Dorn): epic characterization in, 122–23, 135–38; historical methodology in, 16–17, 135–37, 242; ironic language in, 139–41; locality/place as appropriated entity in, 123, 135–36; projective verse in, 133; as response to Olson, 5, 122; title of, 292n1; transformation of consciousness in, 134–39 Habermas, Jürgen, 8, 52–53, 55 haibun poetry, 37 Hardt, Michael, 70 Harlem Renaissance, 14–15 Harrington, Joseph, 12 Harvey, David, 134 Hassan, Ihab, 123 Hatlen, Burton, 103 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 114, 116, 292n23 H. D., 164, 293–94n7 Hecht, Anthony, 164, 196 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 51–52, 113, 234 Heidegger, Martin: critique of rationalism in, 18, 139; critique of spatial ekphrasis and, 196; as existentialist, 217; hermeneutics of disclosure in, 234; National Socialism affiliation, 274, 276–77; on the ontology of tools, 102; in Oppen Altamont poetry, 113; Oppen exposure to, 277, 300n5; Oppen on boredom and, 97–98, 277; Oppen on language and, 271, 273–75; panopticism in, 117; on states of mind, 214, 277–78; temporality of Being in, 125–26 Heine, Heinrich, 293n4 Hejinian, Lyn, 252, 281, 287n13 Hemingway, Ernest, 293–94n7 Herr, Cheryl, 76–77

heterotopias, 87 Higgins, Keith, 44, 45 Hitchcock, Alfred, 272 Hofer, Jen, 34 Hoffman, Eric, 95 Homberger, Eric, 95 Homer, 127 Hone, Vivian, 81 hooks, bell, 145 Horvath, Brooke, 296n12 Howe, Susan, 18, 246–48 Howells, William Dean, 238 Hughes, Langston, 14 Hurston, Zora Neale, 6, 14, 80–81, 293–94n7 Ibsen, Henrik, 238 ideology of form, 5–6 imagined communities, 26 imagism, 94, 103–4, 116, 275–76 impossible poetry, 279–80, 283, 301n2 Impressionism, 116 Iñárritu, Alejandro González, 23–24, 26, 29, 35, 65–66 individualism: Cold War liberal individualism, 17, 29, 217; heroic individualism in The Maximus Poems, 16; inauthenticity in Ashbery and, 17; Lockean individualism, 52; market capitalism and, 7, 298n12; neoliberal appropriation of alienation, 29, 36; postwar personal liberty and, 221, 298n9; role in expressive poetics, 4; transformation of consciousness in Gunslinger, 134–39. See also cosmopolitanism Izenberg, Oren, 99–100, 291n14–15 Jabès, Edmond, 113 Jacob, Max, 196 Jakobson, Roman, 299n2 James, Henry: aestheticism in, 238; free indirect style in, 216–17; as Oppen influence, 98–99, 100–101, 277–78,

322â•… Index 290n12–13; touristic modality in, 25, 43, 45; views on gender, 171 James, William, 128 Jameson, Fredric, 5–6, 253, 292n24, 293n5, 299n4 Jensen, Rich, 48 Jess, 165 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 76 Joyce, James, 194 Jung, Carl, 135, 273 Kalaidjian, Walter, 12 Kant, Immanuel, 13, 25, 124, 286n12 Kapoor, Anish, 2 Katz, Alex, 189, 208, 296n12 Keats, John, 127–29, 195, 199, 204, 213 Kennan, George, 161 Kernan, Nathan, 177 Kerouac, Jack, 232, 282 Kesey, Ken, 179, 184 Kierkegaard, Søren, 142–43, 293n2 Kim, Elaine, 11 Kinnell, Galway, 126 Kline, Franz, 19 Koch, Kenneth, 177, 185, 220 Koestenbaum, Wayne, 232, 298n13 Koethe, John, 228, 234–35 Koolhaas, Rem, 26 Kreymborg, Alfred, 290n4 Krieger, Murray, 194–95, 202, 203 Kripke, Saul, 100 Kumar, Amitava, 25–26 Labov, William, 268 Lambert, Constance, 218 landscape, 133–34, 138 language. See speech act theory; writing Last Poets, 282 Lawrence, D. H., 61, 127, 150 Lechtlitner, Ruth, 96 Lefebvre, Henri, 30, 134 Le Guin, Ursula, 287n10 Lentz, Ella Mae, 13–14

Leslie, Al, 197 Lessing, Gotthold, 194. See also ekphrasis Leutze, Emanuel, 198, 201–2 Levertov, Denise: as New American Poetry figure, 241; Oppen debates with, 111; process aesthetic in, 220; public address style in, 9; self-conscious voicing in, 126. Works: “Merritt Parkway,” 164; “The Olga Poems,” 163–64; “Staying Alive,” 168; “Tenebrae,” 167; “To R.D., March 4th 1988,” 173–74; To Stay Alive, 166–69, 173. See also Duncan-Levertov correspondence Levi, Eliphas, 104, 106 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 139 Lewis, Sinclair, 81 Liñea, La, 28 “linguistic € turn” theoretical orientation, 12, 18, 59, 72, 225, 237, 241, 281 Livingston, Ira, 13 Locke, John, 52, 273 Longenbach, James, 297n4 Lorde, Audre, 282 Lowe, Lisa, 2, 11 Lowell, Robert, 9, 17, 126, 157, 177–80, 218 Loy, Mina: citizen subject status and, 72; eugenicist views of, 61–62, 287n4; feminist public sphere in, 64–65; manifesto poetry by, 16; response to Marinetti, 60–61; response to masculinist modernism, 54, 60–63. Works: “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose,” 61–62, 287n4; “Feminist Manifesto,” 16, 54, 60–63, 64–65; “Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots,” 63–65 Lukács, Georg, 96, 101, 116, 292n24 Lyon, Janet, 56 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 259 lyric poetry, 8, 293n4 Macherey, Pierre, 282 MacLow, Jackson, 125 Magritte, René, 116

Indexâ•… 323 Mallarmé, Stéphen, 55, 124 manifesto writing: overview, 8, 54–55; articulation of citizenship in, 15–16; Declaration of Independence as, 56; performativity of, 56; postmodern voicing in, 28–29; Robertson’s Occasional Work as, 44; Yépez frontera installation as, 69 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: as modernist, 59–60; post-human views, 54, 62. Works: “Against Past-Loving Venice,” 26; “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” 54, 59–60, 63, 273 Maritain, Jacques, 101, 104, 273 Marlatt, Daphne, 287n13 Martin, John, 162 Marvell, Andrew, 223 Marxism: alienation from labor in, 273; base/superstructure relationship in Shut Up Shut Down, 37–40; class consciousness in, 217–18, 292n24; counterculture rejection of the Old Left, 111; discursive subjectivity and, 52–53; Frankfurt School theory, 96; instrumentalized/ partisan poetry, 95; Marx on Robinson Crusoe, 99–100; Popular Front as poetic influence, 16, 79–80; theory of class, 92; theory of ideology, 116–17; theory of material objects, 101; theory of spatiality, 29–30, 134; Zukofsky translations of Marx, 81 Maximus Poems, The (Olson): Gloucester (Massachusetts) as American space in, 36, 121–22; heroic individualism in, 16; historical contingency in, 135, 141; mercantilism as subject of, 4, 131–32, 141; performative speech acts in, 256–57, 299n6; psychological description in, 3; spatial perception in, 129–31 McClure, Michael, 241, 251 McKay, Claude, 14 McWilliams, Carey, 79–80 Melville, Herman, 121–22, 127–28, 246, 248

mental illness, 17, 176–78, 253, 255 Merrill, James, 218 Mersmann, James, 173 Mignolo, Walter, 286n2 Miller, J. Hillis, 123, 243 modernism: alienation in cold war poetry, 29; authorial detachment in, 126; cosmopolitanism concept in, 25–26; Futurist scorn for women, 59–61; modernist poetics, 16, 124; mourning/ melancholia in, 293–94n7; ocularcentrism in, 116–18; spiritual localism, 26; theories of action in, 273–74, 296n12; transcendent wish images of, 42–43 Moglen, Seth, 293–94n7 Molesworth, Charles, 123 Montoya, Jose, 282 Moore, Marianne, 89 Moraga, Cherrie, 28, 90–91 Morris, William, 49 Morse, Jonathan, 218, 297n5 Moten, Fred, 12 Mulvey, Laura, 117 Myles, Eileen, 177 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement): discrepant cosmopolitanisms and, 25, 28, 49; effect on literature, 28–29; hemispheric poetics and, 15; imagined transparency of borders in, 66; production of economic displacement by, 27; representation of space and, 29–30; Rivera-Garza description of El Terzo, 30–32; U.S. plant closings, 37–42. See also globalization nativism, 40 Naumberg, Nancy, 77 Negri, Antonio, 70 Neilsen, Aldon, 12 Nelson, Cary, 12 Nelson, Deborah, 12 neoliberalism, 29, 36, 65 Neruda, Pablo, 287n10

324â•… Index New American Poetry: Ashbery as voice in, 238; critical language in, 268–69; impossible poetry and, 279, 301n2; Long Popular Front and, 16; restoration of the Subject in, 281; romanticism and, 17; Shelley as influence in, 241 New Criticism, 12, 124, 243 New Historicism, 12–13 New York School poetry, 17 Ngai, Sianne, 144–45, 157 Nicholls, Peter, 7, 75, 95, 113, 273, 289n12, 291n14 Niedecker, Lorine: complaints about regionalist label, 75; critical regionalism of, 6, 16, 86–87; folk poetry influence on, 80–81; Popular Front affiliation, 16, 79–81; synamism technique of, 85–86. Works: “For Paul,” 83–84, 288n8 (Chap. 3); “Grandfather,” 288–89n9; “Lake Superior,” 85; New Goose, 80–83; “Uncle,” 81; “Wintergreen Ridge,” 86–91; Wisconsin (American Guide Series), Â� 80–81. See also critical regionalism Nietzsche, Fredriech Wilhelm, 52, 273, 293n4 9/11: critique of rationalism and, 18, 274; impossible poetry and, 279–80, 283; Iraq War opposition, 294n12; Oppen urban/modernist themes and, 271–72, 300n1; Yépez frontera installation and,€66 North American Free Trade Agreement. See€NAFTA Nowak, Mark: fluidity of space in, 30; on post-NAFTA masculinity, 49; on urban industrial decay, 26, 29; use of framing devices, 42. Works, Shut Up Shut Down (see main heading) objectism, 132–33 objectivism, 92–93, 101, 116 Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office

for Soft Architecture (Robertson), 26, 28–30, 43–50, 45, 48 O’Hara, Frank: ambivalence as theme in, 124; camp style in, 218; collaboration with Ashbery, 161–62, 220; field composition model in, 3; ode style of, 295–96n10; personal references in, 8; pictorialist poetry by, 17, 197–98, 214; queer identity in, 282; subjective displacement in, 221; temporality as feature in, 125–26. Works: “At night Chinamen jump,” 218; “Biotherm,” 3; “The Day Lady Day Died,” 203; “Having a Coke With You,” 296n5; “On Seeing Larry Rivers’ Washington Crossing the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art,” 197–203, 198, 215; “Personism,” 126; “Why I Am Not a Painter,” 215 Olsen, Tillie, 79–80, 293–94n7 Olson, Charles: activist methodology of, 128, 141; authentic voicing in, 218; Creeley collaborative relationship with, 161–62; critical regionalism by, 90–91; as Duncan-Levertov correspondence subject, 164; field composition model in, 3; gestural language in, 251; Gloucester (Massachusetts) as American space, 36, 121–22; historical contingency in, 127–31, 133, 135, 140–41; as New American Poetry figure, 241; on postmodernism, 127; process aesthetic in, 220; on projective verse, 132–33, 164, 168, 273; temporality as feature in, 125–26. Works: “Bibliography on America,” 133; Maximus Poems (see main heading); “On First Looking Out Through Juan de la Cosa’s Eyes,” 129–30; “Projective Verse,” 4 Ong, Aiwa, 24 Oppen, George: anti-rationalist themes in, 18–19; authenticity of experience in, 94–95, 290n4, 290n8; biographical sketch, 95–96, 100, 104, 111–12, 275–76;

Indexâ•… 325 cities as theme in, 270–71; class theory of, 92, 109, 111, 116–18, 291–92n21; critique of ocularcentrism, 116–18; Heidegger on boredom and, 97–99; imagism as influence for, 275–76; as James influence, 98–99; language as action in, 273–75; leftist activism of, 16, 81, 95–96, 278, 282–83, 292n24; objectivism as theme for, 92–93; on the ontology of machines, 101–3, 291n17–18; poems as “forms of intentionality,” 99, 291n15; self-conscious voicing in, 126; on sociality, 7, 111; theory of material objects, 101, 104, 106, 108. Works: “The Book of Job and a Draft of a Poem to Praise the Paths of the Living,” 117; “Boy’s Room,” 108–9, 111; “The Building of a Skyscraper,” 271–72, 300n4–5; “Closed car—closed in glass—,” 92–93; “Debt,” 94, 112; “Disasters,” 113–14, 115; “Eugenics—The Strong Man,” 109, 110; “Guest Room,” 104, 106, 107, 108–9, 111, 291n20; “Image of the Engine,” 101–3, 291n17–18; “The knowledge not of sorrow,” 96–97, 100–101; “The Mind’s Own Place,” 276; “Miracle of the children,” 112–13; “Ninth Floor,” 106, 107, 108, 292n19; “The noise of wealth,” 105; “Of Being Numerous,” 98–100, 111, 113, 116, 280; “Of Hours,” 275–76; “Prufrock,” 278; “Psalm,” 291n18; “Rationality,” 112; “Senility,” 114, 116; “Survival: Infantry,” 270; “Tourist Eye,” 270–71 Oppen, Mary, 95–96, 108 Orientalism, 260–61 otherness, 34, 84–85 “outskirts” € metaphor, 1–2, 5, 35, 50 Padgett, Ron, 177, 295n9 painterly poems. See pictorialist poetry palimtexts, 6 Park, Darragh, 189, 208

Park, Josephine, 11 Parmigianino, Francesco, 203–8, 203 Peabody, Elizabeth, 171 Pearce, Roy Harvey, 123 Penberthy, Jenny, 75, 80, 289n16 Perelman, Bob, 252, 297n6, 299n4 performative poetry: Austin on poetic language, 262; critique of rationalism in, 18–19; gestural language and, 251; manifesto writing as, 56; “new sentence” disconnected syntax, 255; performative deixis in Creeley, 143; performative speech acts, 249, 255–56, 299n1, 299n6; postwar importance of, 250. Works: “China” (Perelman), 253–55; “Flat Motion” (Perelman), 252; My Life (Hejinian), 252; Progress (Watten), 18, 256–57, 299n7; “Sunset Debris” (Silliman), 252–53. See also speech act theory Perloff, Marjorie, 197 Peterson, Jeffrey, 86–87 Phillips, M. Nourbese, 28 pictorialist poetry: cubist poetics, 196; early proponents of, 194–96; ekphrasis as trope in, 17, 195–96; gestural language in, 250–51; painterly poems, 196, 250, 296n4; reading as subject of, 213; self-description in Ashbery, 223–24; zaum poetry, 196. Works: “Master Bellini” (Hecht), 196; “Ode To a Grecian Urn” (Keats), 194–95, 204; “On Seeing Larry Rivers’ Washington Crossing the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art” (O’Hara), 197–203, 198; “Pictures by Vuillard” (Rich), 196; “The Red Studio” (Snodgrass), 196; “San Sepolcro” (Graham), 196; “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror” (Ashbery), 203–8, 203; “Voyage autour de mes cartes postales” (Schuyler), 209–13. See also art; ekphrasis Plath, Sylvia, 146, 151, 178, 180 Plato, 262

326â•… Index Poe, Edgar Allan, 25, 203 poetics of presence, 4 poetry readings, 162 Pollan, Michael, 27 Pollock, Jackson, 218 Popular Front, 16, 79–80 Porter, Fairfield, 189, 208, 296n12 postmodernism: critique of rationalism in, 18–19; historical contingency and, 126–29; poetics of immanence in, 124–26; projective verse critique of form, 132–33 post-structuralism, 17–18, 72, 225, 233–37, 281 postwar literature: avoidance of truth claims in, 141; “linguistic turn” theoretical orientation, 12, 18, 59, 72, 225, 237, 241, 281; marginal spaces as foundation for, 90–91; mental illness and, 176–78; metaphors for physical agency in, 250–51; nuclear paranoia as historical framing, 84–85; performative language and, 250; pictoralist trends in, 196–97; political efficacy of style in, 218; political involvement of postwar poets, 282; postwar masculine alienation, 145–46, 227, 293n5; problem of form in, 123–24; psychoanalytic interpretation and, 224; road novels, 232; romantic subjectivity importance in, 240–41, 280; syntactic inertia and, 217; theories of action in, 273–74, 296n12; Vietnam War as influence on, 100, 111, 114, 134, 140, 160, 165–70, 172–75, 294n12 Pound, Ezra: atmosphere of despair in, 141, 157; on Chinese ideograms, 273; collage presentation in, 39; cosmopolitan characters in, 25; critique of rationalism in, 18; Douglas theory of value in, 94; Ecbatan as city in, 36; Eliot-Pound collaboration, 298n13; historical contingency in, 140; misogynistic views of, 60; modernist poetics of, 16, 124,

127, 275, 278; pictorialist style in, 194; political views/affiliations, 274–76; public address style in, 122; representation of class in, 85, 114; as Rukeyser influence, 77 Pratt, Mary Louise, 268, 299n2 projective verse, 132–33, 164, 168, 273 public address, 9, 122 public language, 7–8, 71–72. See also community public sphere, 8, 52, 55–56, 59, 64–65. See€also counter publics public voice, 8–11 public works projects, 16 Rakosi, Carl, 81 Rankine, Claudia, 28 Ransom, John Crowe, 248 reader-response theory, 6 readings (poetry readings), 162 realism, 54, 98–99, 238 regionalism. See critical regionalism reification, 101 religion: Duncan-Levertov political differences and, 169; in Oppen Altamont poetry, 112–13, 117–18; Oppen religious estrangement, 96, 292n23; Puritan imaginary in Creeley, 148–49 Rennie, Debbie, 13–14 representation: of global capitalism, 4–5; infinite substitution in Ashbery, 224, 237; mirror representation in Ashbery, 205; role in globalization, 2; selfidentical subjectivity and, 221–22 Republican artisanship, 94 Retallack, Joan: speech acts in, 18; “wordswerve” technique of, 259. Works: How to Do Things with Words, 18, 258, 300n12–13; “Steinzas in Mediation,” 263; “WESTERN CIV CONT’D: A BRIEF EXPERIMENT IN LINGUISTICS,” 264–67, 300n14; “The Woman in the Chinese Room,” 258–62

Indexâ•… 327 Rexroth, Kenneth, 80–81, 162 Reznikoff, Charles, 36, 272, 300n5 Rich, Adrienne, 71–72, 126, 165, 196, 257–58, 263, 282 Riddel, Joseph, 123 Rifkin, Libbie, 12 Rimbaud, Arthur, 34–35, 127–28 Rivera-Garza, Teresa, 5, 26, 30–35, 49 Rivers, Larry, 197–203 Robertson, Lisa, 26, 28–30, 43–50, 45, 48 Robertson, Pat, 272 Robinson, Mary, 57 romanticism: deconstruction of Shelley and, 245–46; expressivist aesthetics and, 250; nature as humanized affect in, 239–40; New American Poetry and, 17; postwar revival of, 240–41, 280; subaltern empathetic voicing in, 57 Rosenberg, Harold, 250, 296n12 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 238 Rothenberg, Jerome, 124, 125, 164 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 43, 45–46, 244–45 Rukeyser, Muriel, 36, 77, 96, 126, 164 Ruskin, John, 239 Russell, Ken, 240, 298n1 Russian formalism, 2, 196, 250, 268, 281 Ryan, Mary, 53 Saint-Point, Valentine de, 60–61 Saldana-Portillo, Maria Josefina, 27 Sanchez, Sonia, 126, 282 Sandburg, Carl, 290n4 Sanders, Ed, 287n13 Sanger, Margaret, 61 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 287n10 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 117, 217, 253 satire, 4–5 Sauer, Carl, 133 Savran, David, 145 Schnorr, Michael, 28 Schuyler, James: Ashbery-Schuyler correspondence/collaboration, 216, 220, 226–32, 227–30, 298n13; mental

illness of, 17, 176–77, 180–81, 295n4; pictorialist poetry by, 17, 197, 208–14; public address style in, 9; relationship with Robert Jordan, 185–86; satirization of normativity in, 182–84. Works: “The Crystal Lithium” (see main heading); A Nest of Ninnies, 219, 227–32, 230; “Roxy,” 182–83, 295n9; “Salute,” 176; “Voyage autour de mes cartes postales,” 209–13; “We Are Leaves,” 190–91; “What,” 181; What’s for Dinner? 182–84, 190–91 Schwartz, Delmore, 177–78 Schwerner, Mickey, 111, 117 Searle, John, 251–52, 258–62 self-fashioning, 58 Sexton, Anne, 17, 146, 178 sexual orientation and sexuality: heteronormative address, 9; homosocial collaboration, 227, 298n13; inauthenticity as queer subjectivity, 218, 221–23, 225–26, 232, 236–38; interrogative speech acts and, 252–53; Loy proposed destruction of virginity, 61–65; rejection of heteronormativity in Schuyler, 17, 177, 185, 190; workplace sexual harassment in Niedecker, 84–85, 288n8 (Chap. 3). See also gender Shelley, Percy Bysshe: dehistoricization of, 18, 243–48; in Oppen Altamont poetry, 114; as postwar influence, 240–41. Works: “Mount Blanc,” 241; “Ode to the West Wind,” 239–40; “Prometheus Unbound,” 18; “The Triumph of Life,” 18, 243–46 Shoptaw, John, 225 Shut Up Shut Down (Nowak): as documentary poem, 36; framing devices in, 42; haibun form of, 37–38; industrial decay in, 26, 36; plant closing theme in, 38–42 Silliman, Ron, 3–4, 252–53, 269, 287n13 Silverman, Kaja, 145

328â•… Index situationism, 26, 43 124–25; cosmopolitan characters in, 25; Sitwell, Edith, 164 critique of romanticism, 239–40; femislave narrative, 16, 56–59 nine agency in, 257–58; on the “rage for Sloman, Joel, 165 order,” 143–44; subjective “circulating” Smith, Claudia, 288n7 in, 219, 223, 226. Works: “The Idea of Snodgrass, W. D., 164, 196 Order at Key West,” 257–58; “Notes ToSnyder, Gary, 90–91, 124, 126, 282 ward a Supreme Fiction,” 239–40; “The sociology of literature, 6 Pleasures of Merely Circulating,” 219 Soja, Edward, 134 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 272 sonnets, 14–15 structuralism, 224–25 Sorrentino, Gil, 75 structure of feeling, 50, 96, 290n10 Spahr, Juliana, 11 subjectivity: citizen subjects, 28–29, 54, Spanos, William, 123, 125 57–59; class ventriloquizing in Niespatiality: capitalist mediation of, 123, decker and Williams, 84–85; collective 135–36; landscape as man-space collaboration, 43–44, 287n13; discurrelationship, 133–34, 138; Marxist sive subjectivity, 51–52, 65, 72, 233–37, historiography and, 134; NAFTA effect 281; inauthenticity as queer subjectivity, on, 29–30; pictorialist poetry and, 194; 218, 221–22; mirrored consciousness in redemptive geography in Olson, 121–22; Ashbery, 207–8; normative subjectivity, spatialization of history, 127–31; spatial 17; Olson “local body” perspective, metaphors in poetic culture, 1–2; 4; performative speech acts and, spiritual localism, 26 255–56, 299n6; in reader-response speech act theory: gender mapping in, theory, 6; reflective thought and, 274; 263–67; host language problem for, response to globalization and, 4; 262–63; ideological component of, romantic subjectivity, 57; self-identical 252, 299n2; performative speech acts, subjectivity, 221–22; split subjectivity in 18, 249, 255–57, 262, 299n1, 299n6; Creeley, 146–47; subjective “circulating” poetic critique of performance theory, in Stevens, 219; transformation of 18; reader agency and, 269; speech acts consciousness in Gunslinger, 134–39; defined, 251–52; subjective agency and, “walk” as poetic model, 43–45, 48–49. 51. See also performative poetry See also citizenship; writing Spencer, Anne, 14 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 238 Spicer, Jack, 7, 8, 51, 55, 161–62, 164 synamism, 85–86, 289n12 Stein, Gertrude: Ashbery on, 238; in Duncan-Levertov correspondence, 164; Taggart, John, 292n23 eugenics and, 61–62; painterly poems Tallman, Warren, 241 and, 196; Retallack citation of, 260–63, Tate, Allen, 194 300n10. Works: Stanzas in Meditation, “Tercer € Mundo” (Rivera-Garza), 26, 30–35, 238, 263; Tender Buttons, 261, 300n10 49, 287n10–11 Steinbeck, John, 79–80, 81 Thomas, Dylan, 157 Stendhal, 49–50 Thurston, Michael, 12 Stevens, Wallace: on art as ordering of Tompkins, Jane, 13–14 reality, 214; artisanal composition of, Toscano, Rodrigo, 28

Indexâ•… 329 Toynbee, Arnold, 127 Turner, Nat, 59 uncreative writing, 3 Vallejo, César, 287n10 Valli, Clayton, 13–14 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 287n10 Vesey, Denmarck, 59 Vietnam War, 100, 111, 114, 134, 140, 160, 165–70, 172–75, 294n12 von Hallberg, Robert, 128 Wakoski, Diane, 111 Walker, Margaret, 80–81 Wallis, Henry, 210–11 Wal-Mart, 36, 38 Warner, Michael, 53 Watten, Barrett, 11, 12–13, 18, 256–57, 262, 287n13, 288n2, 299n7, 301n3 Weaver, Mike, 301n2 Weil, Simone, 113, 128 Weininger, Otto, 61–62 Weiss, Theodore, 164 Whalen, Philip, 241 Whitehead, Alfred North, 128, 273 Whitman, Walt, 47, 98, 186–88, 250, 273, 287n10 Wieners, John, 164 Wilbur, Richard, 164 Wilcox, Ella Wheeler, 218 Wilentz, Sean, 94 Wilkerson, Abby, 189 Williams, Jonathan, 162 Williams, Raymond, 50, 96, 290n10 Williams, William Carlos: authenticity of experience in, 290n4; Creeley’s “For W.C.W.” as homage to, 142–43; as Duncan-Levertov correspondence subject, 164; modernist poetics of, 16, 279–80; mourning as therapeutic relief in, 293–94n7; objectivism in “The Red

Wheelbarrow,” 92–93; Oppen citation of, 300n4; Paterson as local place, 29, 36; poems “fields of action” in, 273; representation of class in, 84–85, 96 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 100, 258, 271 Wolfert, Helen, 165 Wong, Rita, 28 Wong, Shelly Sunn, 11 Wordsworth, William, 57, 124–25, 177–78, 243, 298n13 Wright, James, 90–91 writing: aesthetic commentary in pictorialist poetry, 205; collective collaboration, 43–44, 287n13; comic indirection in Schuyler, 183–84; condensation, 37–38, 186, 189, 289n13; critical language in, 268–69; discursive subjectivity and, 12, 18, 51–52, 65, 72, 233–37; free indirect style in James and Ashbery, 216–17; functional language in Creeley, 142–43; gestural language, 250; Gunslinger as coded “language cleaner,” 139–41; literary language, 268; lyric address as solitary voicing, 8; mental illness and, 180; postmodern voicing in, 28–29, 125–26; process aesthetic, 220–21; public language, 7–8, 71–72; public voice, 8–9; rhetorical double-voicing, 58; “uncreative writing” as deconstruction of, 3. See also subjectivity X, Malcolm, 112 Yeats, William Butler, 72, 282 Yépez, Heriberto: citizen subject status and, 72; contextual poetics of, 70–71; Festival de la Frontera installation, 16, 54, 66, 67–68, 69–71, 70–71, 288n7; NAFTA as theme for, 28 zaum poetry, 196 Zukofsky, Louis, 80–81, 117, 289n16

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a b out t he aut h o r Michael Davidson is Professor of Literature at the University of California at San Diego. He has published eight books of poetry, including Post Hoc (1990) and The Arcades (1998), as well as several critical works, most recently Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body€(2008).