Notes
Introduction: A Social Reading of Postmodern Poetic Form 1. In The Political Unconscious (1981), Fredric Jameson makes a stark distinction between intellectual and physical work. Nearly three decades later, in a postin- dustrial service economy, this stark distinction is less evident, though Jameson’s caution remains relevant: “One cannot without intellectual dishonesty assimilate the ‘production’ of texts . . . to the production of goods by factory workers: writ- ing and thinking are not alienated labor in that sense, and it is surely fatuous for intellectuals to seek to glamorize their tasks—which can for the most part be subsumed under the rubric of the elaboration, reproduction, or critique of ideology—by assimilating them to real work on the assembly line and to the experience of the resistance of matter in genuine manual labor” (45). 2. “Over the course of the Cold War, the United States devoted enormous resources to achieving and maintaining an advantage over the Soviet Union in most areas of military technology. Indeed, for the better part of half a century, reliance on qualitative superiority was at the heart of US military strategy, and its pur- suit was the central, defining feature of the entire American defense effort” (Friedberg 207). 3. Pointing to “the anticommunist crusade of the late 1940s and 1950s” as a major cause for the decline of American organized labor, Ellen Shrecker argues that “McCarthyism tamed American labor and brought it into the Cold War politi- cal consensus. Moreover, by preventing the nation’s unions, if so inclined, from building a broad-based social movement that challenged corporate values and championed social justice, McCarthyism narrowed political options for all Americans” (7). As a result of the McCarthy-era “purge of the left-led unions, there was no longer any question about [labor’s] support for American foreign policy. Both the CIO [Congress of Industrial Unions] and the AFL [American Federation of Labor] enlisted in the Cold War and, by the time they merged in the mid-fifties, most of the labor movement had been so thoroughly co-opted that its leaders provided cover for the CIA, and its conventions endorsed the war in Vietnam” (19). 170 ● Notes
4. “In the advanced capitalist countries in the boom years between 1950 and 1973, industry expanded by 5.5 percent on average and trade by 7.7 percent per annum” (Heller 105). 5. “Wherever consumerism dominated it reinforced the rule of capital by tending to undercut the significance of mass politics based on organized labor. The golden years saw a visible ebbing away of the political strength of organized labor, especially in the United States” (Heller 108). 6. “la consommation aliénée devient pour les masses un devoir supplémentaire à la production aliénée” (Debord 40). 7. OPEC raised the price of oil significantly in 1973 and again in 1979, and eco- nomic growth declined over the course of the decade (Heller 225). From 1974 to 1975, the international capitalist economy entered a recession that “defi- nitely brought to a conclusion the so-called golden years of the previous two decades” (227). 8. The recession “was followed by a period of stagnation punctuated by bouts of persistent inflation,” and this economic stagnation “ended in another sharp recession in 1981–82” (Heller 227). 9. In her introduction to the “Reading for Form” (2000) special issue of Modern Language Quarterly, Susan J. Wolfson alludes to one scholar who, “though meaning to be hospitable to a formalist criticism refreshed for the 1990s, slipped into negative description and defensiveness” (2). Such defensiveness is not surprising, she notes, since “[t]he most influential stories in criticism typi- cally proffered the narrowest versions of literary form to serve accounts of its covert work” (2). In Wolfson’s narrative of methodological rupture in a “post- (and anti-) New Critical climate” (3), critics rejected the “social isolationism” and “intellectual constraints” of formalist criticism, as well as “the impulse to regard [form] as the product of a historically disinterested, internally coherent aesthetics” (2). 10. “Hé, monsieur, un roman est un miroir qui se promène sur une grande route. Tantôt il reflète à vos yeux l’azur des cieux, tantôt la fange des bourbiers de la route” (Stendhal 479). 11. In an interview with Charles Bernstein, Antin explained that, though he “was closer to the New York School” than the Beat poets, and though he “shared a world with John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara” in the sense that all three were art critics, he did not identify with “their investment in a kind of urban dandyism. Or their kind of connoisseurship” (Antin and Bernstein 96). With regard to “the next generation of poets,” Antin told Bernstein, “I suppose I had most in common with the so-called Language poets, though I was mov- ing away from a procedural poetry just at the time you were all starting to work at it” (97). But if Antin’s formal methods were similar to those of the Language poets, his philosophical commitments were not, and he referred to the Language poets’ critical writings as “futile exercises based on antiquated linguistics, Marxian nostalgia and empty French and Russian theory” (97). 12. In Lukács’s words, “To posit oneself, to produce and reproduce oneself—that is reality” (15–16). Notes ● 171
1 Procedural Form: An Overview 1. In this sense, the individualist ideology of romantic poetry recalls the ideo- logical function of the abstract expressionist’s studio space: “However hum- ble, the studio is the domain of a single artist—even if other persons should occupy the space, or other functions occur there. To the extent that it is X’s studio, it is the domain of X’s authorship, the space in which a given X constructs himself as the independent creator/author of a unique product identified with his name” (Jones 3). Jones explicitly identifies elements of “the individualism and isolation of Romanticism” in abstract expressionist discourse (24). 2. Cf. Andy Warhol’s formulation, “I think everybody should be a machine” (qtd. in Jones 189). 3. By allowing for the mixing of “constraint and invention” in Language poetry, Conte seems to implicitly acknowledge the fact that proceduralism can incor- porate authorial volition: “Language poets have explored the capacity of serial- ity to accommodate the many ways beyond the logical and the sequential in which things come together. These poets also account for a significant number of the procedural forms in which constraint and invention join to reveal mean- ing and not merely to confirm a thing already understood” (Conte 280). 4. Cf. Jones’s discussion of painterly finish (9–10). 5. Branden W. Joseph notes that “By 1951, Cage’s ideas of sound and silence were further coupled with an emerging interest in Zen Buddhism, which conceived of being and nothingness not as opposed to one another but as necessarily inter- twined” (46). 6. I have tried to approximate some of the typographical effects of Mureau, but the constant changes in typeface and the justified right margin make it impos- sible here to do justice to the visual presentation. 7. See, for example, Antin’s description of his writing process in the introduction to Selected Poems (13–22). 8. See Dworkin, Language xii. 9. Of course, there are arguably no uses of language that entirely avoid politics. As Antin points out, “language is the cultural matrix in which the value systems that determine politics are held” (SP 14). 10. The quote is italicized in the original. 11. For more on the similarities between postmodern American procedural poetry and the proceduralism of digital poetics, see Glazier; in addition to the work of Jackson Mac Low, John Cage, Charles Bernstein, and Bernadette Mayer, he discusses the proceduralism of Silliman’s Tjanting and Hejinian’s My Life (128–135). 12. Funkhouser identifies the writing praxes of Dada and Oulipo as precur- sors of digital poetics (33–35). He also notes that “computer programs” are able to “emulate classical styles of poetry, written with strict parameters to engineer sonnets, renga, occasional poems, aphorisms, and other traditional forms” (34). 172 ● Notes
2 Making Poems: The “method” of Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets 1. Attridge also explains that “singularity functions like a signature” (64) a char- acteristic that ties in with my later discussion of Perloff’s notion of the poetic signature. 2. Notley’s assertion that sonnet XV proceeds “according to the formula, line 1, line 14, line 2, line 13, line 3, line 12, and so on in” (x) is, in fact, incorrect. The poem’s lines proceed according to the following reordering, from top to bottom: 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 14, 12, 10, 8, 6, 4, 2. However, Notley’s formula does partially govern the procedure in sonnet XXI. 3. Here and throughout this chapter, I am indebted to Notley’s valuable comments and annotations. 4. Moreover, unlike its syntactically normative counterpart, sonnet XV manages not to sound like a pastiche of an O’Hara poem. (One thinks, for example, of O’Hara’s “Why I Am Not a Painter”—a poem that, like sonnet LIX, involves an implicit comparison between working techniques in painting and poetry.) In “The Business of Writing Poetry,” Berrigan acknowledges his tendency to mimic O’Hara, but he also argues that The Sonnets exceed mere imitation: “In 1960 and ’61, I wrote a bunch of poems saying ‘it’s 5:15 a.m. in New York City & I’m doing this & that & now I think this & this & this, & next this hap- pens, that happens, & in conclusion I can say blank blank & blank.’ I thought I was blatantly imitating Frank O’Hara. But I was wonderfully dumb, and thank god! It turns out that when Frank was writing his poem and saying it is 4:16 a.m. in New York City, he meant that it wasn’t 4:16 a.m. at all. It was a flashback. Whereas when I wrote my poems, whatever time I said it was, that’s what time it was” (Level 67). 5. As Notley notes, the poem is derived from “an earlier, slightly different ordering of the sonnets” (Intro x). 6. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein describes the encounter with Eliot at 27, rue de Fleurus, that caused her to write the poem: “Eliot and Gertrude Stein had a solemn conversation, mostly about split infinitives and other gram- matical solecisms and why Gertrude Stein used them. . . . Eliot said that if he printed anything of Gertrude Stein’s in the Criterion it would have to be her very latest thing. They left . . . and she began to write a portrait of T.S. Eliot and called it the fifteenth of November, that being this day and so there could be no doubt but that it was her latest thing. It was all about wool is wool and silk is silk or wool is woollen [sic] and silk is silken. She sent it to T.S. Eliot and he accepted it but naturally he did not print it” (857). 7. “By 1963 . . . Ted was also familiar with Tristan Tzara’s cutups, poems made from words cut out of newspapers and combined by a chance procedure” (Notley, Intro ix). Berrigan specifically describes the composition of sonnet LX as a cut-up procedure (TS 87). 8. See Berrigan’s journal entry from November 20, 1962 (CP 668). 9. William S. Burroughs’s postmodern application of Dada-derived cutup tech- niques provides an interesting prose analogue to Berrigan’s proceduralism. Notes ● 173
Laszlo K. Géfin notes that “Burroughs has repeatedly made reference to the collage compositions of the Dadaists and Surrealists as the direct antecedents of the cutup” (91), and “Burroughs applauds the cutup because it, like the col- lage for the Dadaists, destroys univocality, uniformity, linear structure, and ownership” (95). 10. My translation. 11. Cf. Watkin on Silliman’s “site-specific procedurality wherein the dominance of such agencies as chance and found vocabularies in the field of procedural poetics can be sacrificed if the problem to hand requires different procedural rules” (526–527). Watkin finds in Silliman’s poetry a complex proceduralism similar to the proceduralism I have been documenting in Berrigan’s Sonnets: “It is hard, then, to place exactly where Silliman’s procedural works stand, if they are indeed procedural in any easily definable manner. They are not tradi- tionally procedural in that, rejecting chance and vocabularies, they are overtly intentional, yet nor are they examples of an intentional poetics, as clearly this form of poetry is not a means of self-expression or self-making but quite the opposite” (526). 12. David Lehman finds Berrigan to be a sort of spokesperson for the working class within the New York School: “Living in cheap apartments in the East Village long before that was a fashionable quarter, Berrigan and his friends translated the idiom of the New York School across class lines. In the 1950s the move- ment was predominantly shorthaired, Harvard-educated, and well dressed in an Ivy League way (tweed jackets and pleated khaki trousers). The poetry project at St. Mark’s Church disseminated the gospel among the drug-taking, jeans-wearing, longhaired, antiwar children of rebellion” (Lehman 364). Kane points to class, as well as heterosexism, as key differences between first gen- eration New York School poets and Second Generation followers: “The New York School poets—Koch, Schuyler, Ashbery, Guest, and O’Hara—really weren’t part of the Les Deux Mégots scene [a Lower East Side café where Second Generation poets gave readings from 1961 to 1963 (Kane 34, 39)] and were in fact, considered by some to be a bit too ‘uptown’ for the downtown crowd. The writer Jim Brodey, who knew Paul Blackburn during the 1960s, said of Blackburn’s attitude toward the New York School, ‘Paul Blackburn & I didn’t get along very well. He had this side of his personality that indulged in discouraging or competitiveness at least. MOMA / Edge of the Big Money school is what Blackburn called the New York School at that time.’ Some of the writers associated with the Lower East Side poetic community viewed the poets of the New York School as perhaps a little too urbane, witty, and chatty to be welcomed fully into the relatively macho heterosexual scene that initially dominated the Lower East Side scene” (Kane 41). 13. Original in italics. 14. Notley explains that Berrigan’s “journal entry indicates the kind of composi- tional method used throughout The Sonnets, as well as the types of materials employed” (CP 668). 15. See Notley’s note (TS 86). 174 ● Notes
16. In various permutations, the first line of sonnet II will continue to turn up in The Sonnets. Cf. sonnets XVIII, XXX, XLII, LXXX, LXXXI, LXXXII, LXXXIII, and LXXXVIII. 17. In All Poet’s Welcome, Kane reproduces a 1971 photograph that seems to sum up the relationship between Berrigan and Ashbery. The two are posing for a pic- ture in front of the St. Regis Hotel in New York City, Ashbery smartly dressed, Berrigan not, and the latter—in a gesture that is amusing but also rude—is holding his hand directly in front of Ashbery, so that his palm and fingers liter- ally efface the older poet from the photograph. 18. Stephen Mitchell’s translation.
3 The Tactics of the Text: Experimental Form in David Antin’s “Novel Poem” 1. Marjorie Perloff identifies section #244 ff. of the Philosophical Investigations as the specific source of Antin’s text (“Visual Text” 126). 2. The success of Antin’s talk poems has perhaps led critics to privilege his oral improvisation over his earlier language experiments. For Barry Alpert, “Getting up on his feet and talking is Antin’s ideal and practical embodiment of human intellectual activity” (190). Sherman Paul puts it quite succinctly: “Talk poems. Antin’s inevitable form” (47). Of course, the division between orality and écri- ture is far from clear in Antin’s talk poems, as Henry Sayre points out: “And yet, for all Antin’s championing of oral societies, his text is written down” (Sayre, Performance 207). 3. The title of the talk poem “remembering recording representing” (from talking at the boundaries) comes to mind. 4. A textual equivalent of Fountain would be Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day (2003)—a rewriting of the New York Times. For an account of the relationship between the historical avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde, including discussion of Duchamp and Rauschenberg, see the introduction (ix–xix) and chapter one (1–34) of Hal Foster’s The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. 5. James Meyer explores the careers of these six artists in Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (2001). His account of the development and reception of minimalist art has been important to the present study. 6. Cf. Lippard 19. 7. Cf. Lippard 58. 8. Perloff does compare Antin’s talk poems to Cage’s verbal performances (Indeterminacy 288–339). 9. For a discussion of the procedural poetics of Cage and Mac Low, see Craig Dworkin’s Reading the Illegible, where he describes a procedural poetics of “writing-through” used by both Mac Low and Cage to reconfigure Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Illegible 88). Dworkin also makes an interesting Wittgensteinian con- nection: “In Wittgensteinian terms, then, Cage and Mac Low might be seen as reading machines set to different idling speeds” (92). Notes ● 175
10. In pointing to differences between Antin and his poetic influences, I do not want to overstate the issue. Antin himself is quick to acknowledge the exam- ples of Cage and Mac Low. For example, “In the first section of my book Meditations—probably drawing inspiration from Jackson Mac Low—I built every line around a word taken alphabetically from a list of words that high school children had trouble spelling” (Antin and Bernstein 35). 11. The argument that Antin should be read as a procedural poet seems to have achieved some degree of critical consensus. Hank Lazer explains that “Antin emphasizes process over product” (Poetries vol. 1, 111) and that his “principal affinity as a poet lies with poesis as process” (Poetries vol. 2, 98). Perloff calls Antin’s talk poetry “a process-oriented art” (Indeterminacy 318). Aji refers to collage as “the procedure at the center” of Antin’s work from the 1960s (“1960s” 90). Antin himself points out that “The poems of Meditations, like Code of Flag Behavior and definitions, looked like poems. They were a procedural poetry that drew on source texts subjected to various operations and organized in verse lines” (Afterword 188). Antin also compares his early process to film produc- tion: “I was very committed to the process of composing, working at poems, putting things together and taking them apart like some kind of experimental filmmaker” (Antin and Bernstein 42). 12. For a related take on Antin’s self-reflexivity, see Dworkin’s discussion of Antin’s procedural poem “Separation Meditations.” Using the notes to a translation of Epictetus, Antin fashioned a procedural work that is self-referential in much the same way as “Novel Poem”: “In the new context of Antin’s page . . . the excerpted lines take on a distinctly self-reflexive aspect, gesturing to their new context rather than to the body text of their original volume” (Dworkin, “Prostheses” 9). 13. For Antin’s full description of the writing of “Novel Poem,” see Selected Poems (15–17). 14. In his book Textual Politics and the Language Poets, George Hartley dedicates an entire chapter to refuting Jameson’s reading of “China” and the new sen- tence form. For Hartley, Jameson’s use of the Lacanian concept of schizophre- nia “leads him to the traditional Marxist denunciation of modernist (and now postmodernist) fragmentation, rather than to an appreciation of Perelman’s particular use of the material signifier as a political critique” (45). Perelman himself has pointed out that “in discussing the parataxis in ‘China,’ ” Jameson’s “vocabulary registers significant alarm” (63). Yet Jameson’s critique of schizo- phrenic disjunction is misplaced, Perelman explains, because “What from one perspective may look like a sign of radical disconnection may from another be a gesture of continuity” (64). 15. Hal Foster explains that “the minimalist suppression of anthropomorphic images and gestures is more than a reaction against the abstract-expressionist model of art; it is a ‘death of the author’ (as Roland Barthes would call it in 1968) that is at the same time a birth of the viewer” (50). 16. Dworkin makes a similar point in his reading of Antin’s “Separation Meditations”: “Indeed, when separated from the body of the text and taken by 176 ● Notes
itself, even the most earnestly objective and utile system of notes can appear as a paratactic prose poem of ‘new sentences’ that invite alogical connections— sometimes surrealist or absurdist, sometimes simply nonsensical. David Antin’s ‘Separation Meditations,’ which transforms the supplemental clarifications of an editor into evocative and gnomic statements, provides a perfect illustration” (Dworkin 8). 17. Cf. George Leonard on Antin’s use of improvisation: “Improvisation, then, is not mere spontaneity or automatic writing. Antin can be said to improvise with materials without having to create all the materials then and there. Combining is also improvising” (111). 18. Aji astutely notes that Antin’s use of “everyday life and everyday language” serves as a challenge to the capitalist reification of art: “Whereas modernists, Pound for instance, protested against capitalism as the intrusion of money and commerce into the field of art, Antin, as a postmodern poet, shows that art can escape this reification precisely by working with it, reifying everyday life and everyday language. Thus the process already started in definitions, which aimed at debunking ready-made phrases, is pursued in his overall action aiming at debunking the act of poetic creation and the status of the poet” (“Hermeneutics” 101–102). 19. Cf. Antin and Bernstein 97.
4 “A new content”: Procedural Form and Concrete Reality in Ron Silliman’s Tjanting 1. For a related discussion of Silliman’s use of procedural form, see William Watkin’s “ ‘Systematic Rule-Governed Violations of Convention’: The Poetics of Procedural Constraint in Ron Silliman’s Bart and The Chinese Notebook.” Watkin discusses, among other things, Silliman’s use of “chance, preexisting text / vocabularies, and performativity” (501); his “avant-garde intention of applying procedure to dominant norms so as to destabilize them” (501); and his application of “a procedure designed to make the activity of working on the poem manifest” (518). 2. Of the year 1980, W. Carl Biven writes, “The inflation rated soared to the high- est level since the early 1950s. Charles Schultze, [President Jimmy] Carter’s chief economic adviser, reported to the president that the inflation rate in January and February was in the 18 to 20 percent range. Unemployment rose, cresting at just under 8 percent in midsummer and much higher in key indus- trial areas” (4). 3. For overviews of the origins of the Language movement, see Perelman’s The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History (1996), Ann Vickery’s Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing (2000), and chapter two of Watten’s The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (2003). Perelman’s Hills and Watten’s This were notable San Francisco-based magazines. Tuumba and The Figures, edited by Hejinian Notes ● 177
and Geoff Young, respectively, were important presses for the San Francisco Language poets. 4. George Hartley’s Textual Politics and the Language Poets (1989) provides a use- ful introduction to the politics of the Language movement. 5. Although the original “Politics of Poetry” issue does not have page num- bers, I have added them for ease of reference. Thus, the title page is page 1, and so on. 6. See Watten, Syntax 107 for a discussion of Silliman’s tendency to use “the sentence rather than the word” as a basic compositional unit. Watten also provides a useful discussion of the various source materials that Silliman uses in his work. 7. Silliman discusses Stein’s influence on the new sentence at some length (NS 84–87). George Hartley explains, “The attraction of Tender Buttons for poet Ron Silliman lies in Stein’s use of the sentence rather than the line as the unit of composition. The sentences in Stein’s portraits of homely objects are juxtaposed so as to create friction, like the units of perspective are in a Cubist painting” (6). 8. Various critics have described the check upon narrative development caused by the new sentence, as well as the formal and political implications of this check. See e.g., Bernstein, Dream 308; Perelman 78; and Watten, Constructivist 234. 9. For a discussion of the Saussurean dimension of Stein’s writing, as well as a general summary of the importance of Saussurean linguistics vis-à-vis the Language poets, see Hartley (5, 59–61). 10. This equation can also be read as a meta-poetic statement. As a computer com- mand, A = A + 1 can be used to generate a numerical series of increasing value; this increase is similar to the Fibonacci structure of Tjanting, which I discuss in the next section of this chapter. Also, given the influence that Zukofsky’s work has had on Silliman, one has to wonder if there is a pun lurking in the “A + 1” formulation. Perhaps Tjanting—as a long poem influenced by Zukofsky’s life poem “A”—might, in a sense, be “A” + 1. 11. In Radical Artifice, Marjorie Perloff provides a brief but helpful account of Silliman’s use of the Fibonacci series as a form (161–162). Benjamin Friedlander discusses the form and its political implications in “Poetics, Polemic, and the Question of Intelligibility” (see especially section 10). 12. Cf. Watkin on Silliman’s “site-specific procedurality wherein the dominance of such agencies as chance and found vocabularies in the field of procedural poet- ics can be sacrificed if the problem to hand requires different procedural rules” (526–527). Watkin finds in Silliman’s poetry a complex proceduralism that allows for authorial intention: “It is hard, then, to place exactly where Silliman’s procedural works stand, if they are indeed procedural in any easily definable manner. They are not traditionally procedural in that, rejecting chance and vocabularies, they are overtly intentional, yet nor are they examples of an inten- tional poetics, as clearly this form of poetry is not a means of self-expression or self-making but quite the opposite” (526). 178 ● Notes
13. Cf. Friedlander: “The poem (Tjanting) is an attempt to show what one par- ticular aesthetic form (the Fibonacci number series) ‘might look like’ as text; the aesthetic form is in turn an attempt to show what one particular political content (class struggle) ‘would . . . look like, viewed as a form’ ” (section 10). 14. In The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740, Michael McKeon provides a thorough discussion of “the familiar correlation between the rise of the novel and the rise of the middle class” (22). 15. Content—which is derived from “the very components of our concrete social life itself: words, thoughts, objects, desires, people, places, activities” (Jameson, Form 403)—has a formal existence within the literary work; the cultural significance of content will only become completely clear in the light of a dialectical formal criticism, a criticism that deals with content in its own right and as a part of the historically determined formal structure of the work. As Jameson explains, “the first methodological consequence of the dialectical notion of form and content is that, depending on the progress of the interpretive work and the state at which it has arrived, either term can be translated into the other” (Form 403). 16. Hartley’s analysis of realism and the Language poets’ critical relationship to it represents an important moment in the early scholarly reception of Language poetry. I am especially indebted to Hartley’s chapter “Realism and Reification: The Poetics and Politics of Three Language Poets” in his Textual Politics and the Language Poets (53–75). The book has been a valuable guide in the writing of this chapter. 17. Hartley argues that, even in a traditional poetic form like the sonnet, the “conventional organization of material elements” points to “the traces of the social production of language”: “One never loses sight of the gesture behind the object; in Saussurean terms, one never loses sight of the signifier behind the signified; in Marxist terms, one never loses sight of the labor process behind the commodity” (Hartley 63). 18. Hartley defines “the material signifier” as “the significatory unit (whether the phoneme, the word, the phrase, or the sentence) which has been isolated from standard syntactical patterns, drawing attention to itself as much as, or more than, to any concept it may point to” (42). 19. Donald Wellman has identified a direct link between Williams’ and Silliman’s respective poetics of the real. In “A Complex Realism: Reading Spring and All as Seminal for Postmodern Poetry,” Wellman argues that Silliman’s What pres- ents “a reflexive literalism that concerns the very possibility of observation”; like William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All, it functions as “a web of interlaced associations that speak to a complex realism that is very much of the world” (Wellman 315). 20. Conte discusses Zukofsky as a procedural poet in Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry. 21. In “Artifice of Absorption,” Bernstein contrasts the quality of textual “absorp- tion,” which is “engrossing, engulfing completely,” and so on, with “imperme- ability,” which is, among other things, “unintegrated, fractured, fragmented” (20). I would argue that Tjanting falls on the impermeable side of this dialectic, Notes ● 179
yet I also find accurate Fredman’s assertion that the text is “inexhaustibly per- meable by an outside reality” (Poet’s Prose 146). In this case, the contradic- tion is a result of the metaphor itself, which—for all of its suggestiveness—is somewhat imprecise. For Fredman, the text is permeable because it can include anything. Yet to the extent that readymade or borrowed language maintains its former identity, it gives an impermeable quality to the text (in Bernstein’s sense of the word). 22. “Semiology therefore aims to take in any system of signs, whatever their sub- stance and limits; images, gestures, musical sounds, objects, and the complex associations of all these, which form the content of ritual, convention or public entertainment: these constitute, if not languages, at least systems of significa- tion” (Barthes, Semiology 9). 23. The quotation is italicized in its original context. 24. See especially the beginning of the “The Body of the Condemned” in Discipline and Punish (Foucault 3–10). 25. For more on “everyday life” in Tjanting, as well as Tjanting’s use of the new sentence form to represent the quotidian, see Watten, Constructivist 106, 231.
5 Objectivist Form and Feminist Materialism in Lyn Hejinian’s My Life 1. On Hejinian’s formal and procedural constraints, see Perloff, Artifice 162–164; Lazer vol. 2, 29; Monte 218–219. 2. See Fink (no pagination). 3. The title My Life is, in itself, somewhat subversive, in that it calls to mind a number of other eponymously titled autobiographies (by Richard Wagner, Isadora Duncan, Leon Trotsky and Marc Chagall, among others) that function in more traditional narrative modes. 4. On Stein’s influence, especially concerning Hejinian’s notion of realism, see “Two Stein Talks” (Language 83–130). For Hejinian’s treatment of Objectivism and the Objectivist poets Zukofsky and George Oppen, see Language 190, 330–332, 347–351. In the essay “Phenomenal Poetics: Reading Lyn Hejinian,” Peter Nicholls has discussed the connection between Hejinian and the Objectivist poets. He explains that “the second half of the seventies saw the publication of new collections by Zukofsky, Niedecker, Rakosi, Reznikoff and Oppen—whatever ‘objectivism’ had meant in the thirties, these writers’ work was still very much a presence to be reckoned with and much remains to be said about their importance for the Language poets” (Nicholls 245). For Nicholls, Oppen is the Objectivist poet most relevant to Hejinian’s phenomenal poetics and her interest in ethics (245, 251). Although my approach to Hejinian’s work is materialist rather than phenomenological, I have found useful Nicholls’s discussion of metonymy (244), “singularity” (246), “the ‘gap’ between our- selves and things” (247), defamiliarization (247), and “the ‘impenetrability’ of objects” (249). 180 ● Notes
5. To an extent, Hejinian’s treatment of emotions as objectifiable marks a return to Ezra Pound’s imagist dictum, “Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether sub- jective or objective” (Pound, Essays 3). In a sense, then, she is returning to the imagist source of Objectivism and using it in new ways. 6. In practice, however, the distinction between an object-oriented parataxis and a discursive, hierarchical hypotaxis often breaks down. For example, Brian M. Reed has found in Hart Crane’s poetry an “attenuated hypotaxis” that results in neither “a catalog strung together by conjunctions” nor a coherent grammar of subordination; Reed also finds examples of this attenuated hypotaxis in several postmodern poets, including Hejinian (“Victrola” 117). 7. The particularity of objects has a special connection to realist writing, in that, as Hejinian puts it, “Things are real separately” (ML 157). Thus, the tree- tunnel corresponds to Roland Barthes’s notion of a “reality effect,” the “useless detail” (Language 143), the instance of “concrete reality” (146) that “becomes the very signifier of realism” (148). Realism, then, like Objectivism, is in the details. Though Hejinian’s most extensive treatment of realism (“Two Stein Talks”) takes Stein’s writing as a primary exemplar, Zukofsky’s object-oriented particularity could also serve as a foundational model for a poetics of realist description. 8. Carla Harryman’s description of rule-based procedural writing is apropos here, in that it echoes Hejinian’s understanding of form: “In my use of it, the rule is the rule of thought, not of literary convention. This rule of thought is the con- vention on which the experimental work relies and what the experimental work cannot question without destroying itself. This rule of thought or intellectual position is then what allows the difficult text to come into being at all, and it is what limits its own complexity” (117). 9. Perloff refers to the fragment “a pause, a rose something on paper” as a “leit- motif” that “goes through endless permutations, appearing each time in a new context” (Dance 223–224). Dworkin explains that “The disorienting element of Hejinian’s rhythmic writing and its blatant ‘rejection of closure’ arises from the alinear arrangement of its sentences and phrases in a strict parataxis set against the tension of occasional intimations of hypotactic motivation and the syncopation of repeated and slightly varied ‘leitmotif’ phrases. My Life, that is to say, disrupts conventions of writing by manipulating the relation of syntactic units, rather than by disrupting syntax itself or by dislocating text at the level of the page” (“Penelope” 59). Stephen Fredman notes that “Single sentences in the book are not just statements or propositions or commands or interjections; they also gain and change meaning by their placement among other nearby sentences, by their relationships to other sentences within a chapter, and by being repeated and permuted throughout the book” (“Inquiry” 66). Moreover, “As one reads and rereads My Life, the relationship of figure to ground remains in flux, causing sentences to emerge and recede with respect to other sentences around them. This perceptual flux mimes an epistemological flux, in which words and phrases act as both ‘subjects’ and ‘objects,’ as both referential and material signifiers” (Fredman 66). On the difference between Hejinian’s use of Notes ● 181
the sentence and Ron Silliman’s, see Perelman 71. On Hejinian’s “jump-cutting between sentences,” see Bernstein 284–285. On the antithesis between the rep- etition of “key phrases, such as the beginning ‘a pause, a rose, something on paper’ ” and “autobiography’s linear progress,” see Spahr 68. For Hejinian’s own interpretation of repetition within My Life, see Inquiry 44. 10. See Spahr’s Everybody’s Autonomy for a discussion of My Life in terms of readerly praxis. 11. Hejinian has “the famous madeleine scene” in mind when she cites Proust as an influence (Inquiry 185). She notes that “Proust’s style of accretion, of accumu- lation, meditation, and release (release into consciousness and as such into the book) was and is inspiring to me” (185). She goes on to quote a translated section of the madeleine passage. 12. Cf. Christopher Beach’s discussion of the doll imagery and of gender (70–71). 13. See especially Brown’s A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature and “Thing Theory.” 14. According to Brown, “the doubleness of the commodity (its use value and exchange value) might be said to conceal a more fundamental difference, between the object and itself, or the object and the thing, on which the success of the commodity, the success of capitalism, depends. Put differently: value derives from the appropriation of a pre-existing surplus, the material object’s own excessiveness” (Sense 13–14). But Brown’s critique does not remain neatly within a Marxist framework. He is willing “to sacrifice the clarity of thinking about things as objects of consumption, on the one hand, in order to see how, on the other, our relation to things cannot be explained by the cultural logic of capitalism” (Sense 5–6). 15. My reading of Woolf’s “Solid Objects” is informed by Brown’s. I am particu- larly indebted to his discussion of the role of objects, things, and materiality in the story. 16. See Juliana Spahr’s entry on Hejinian in the Dictionary of Literary Biography (Spahr 103). 17. Cf. Brown on “thingness,” which “amounts to a latency . . . and to an excess (what remains physically or metaphysically irreducible to objects)” (“Thing Theory” 5). Works Cited
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Acconci, Vito, 34–36, 75; “My Beckett, Samuel, 93 Performance of Ezra Pound’s ‘Alba,’ ” Beckett, Tom, 104, 106, 107 35–36, 37; “Place, Pass (Off the Bell, Daniel, 105–106, 108 Ground),” 35 Bénabou, Marcel, 23 Adorno, Theodor, 85 Bernstein, Charles, 57, 99, 106–107, Aji, Hélène, 75, 175n11, 176n18 130, 167–168, 170n11, 177n8, Alpert, Barry, 174n2 178–79n21, 180–81n9 Altieri, Charles, 133–134 Berrigan, Ted, 2, 4, 13–15, 25, 26, Andre, Carl, 74 29–30, 32–33, 34, 42–44, 56–61, Andrews, Bruce, 95, 99 71–72, 97, 106, 123, 131, 140, 168, Antin, David, 1, 4, 13–15, 19, 25, 172n4, 173n12, 174n17; “From a 29–30, 32–35, 71–75, 97, 99, 106, Secret Journal,” 69; “Penn Station,” 123, 131, 140, 141, 168, 170n11, 51–52; The Sonnets, 16, 31, 36, 171n7, 171n9, 174n2, 175n10, 41–42, 44–48, 55, 57, 61–64, 175n11; “The Black Plague,” 72–73, 67–70, 71, 173n14; sonnet I, 64–65; 95, 174n1; “code of flag behavior,” sonnet II, 65–66, 174n16; sonnet III, 36–37; “a list of the delusions of 66–67; sonnet IV, 67–68; sonnet V, the insane,” 71; “the marchers,” 71; 68–69; sonnet XV, 48–51, 172n2, “Novel Poem,” 16, 76–95, 175n13; 172n4; sonnet XXI, 51–53, 55, “November Exercises,” 75, 95; “The 172n2; sonnet XXX, 48–51; sonnet Separation Meditations,” 95, 175n12, XLVIII, 65; sonnet LIX, 48–49, 175–76n16; “tuning,” 93–94; “who 172n4; sonnet LX, 172n7; sonnet are my friends,” 71; “W.S. Male,” 71 LXX, 67; sonnet LXXI, 65, 67, Ashbery, John, 13, 23, 43, 44, sonnet LXXIII, 69 66, 174n17 Biven, W. Carl, 176n2 Attridge, Derek, 44–45, 172n1 Bochner, Mel, 75 Auden, W.H., 67 Brainard, Joe, 49, 62 Braverman, Harry, 59, 60, 63–64 Baldessari, John, 75 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 5 Baraka, Amiri, 5 Brown, Bill, 150–152, 155, 158, Barthes, Roland, 14, 112, 113, 114, 159, 162, 181n13, 181n14, 125, 179n22, 180n7 181n15, 181n17 Beach, Christopher, 159, 162, 181n12 Brown, Nicholas, 165–166 192 ● Index
Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 51–52 Fink, Thomas, 179n2 Burroughs, William, 29, 172–73n9 Flavin, Dan, 74 Fluxus, 23 Cage, John, 23, 29–31, 34, 73, 75, form, 5, 7, 8–9, 11, 18, 49, 57, 107, 111, 171n5, 174n8, 174n9, 175n10; 113, 114, 115, 117, 124, 127–128, Mureau, 31–32 131–132, 134–135, 140–141, Certeau, Michel de, 16, 76, 78–79, 94 166, 168, 170n9, 178n13, 178n15; Clark, Hilary, 159 procedural, 2–3, 9, 11–16, 18–19, Clark, William, 139 21–27, 31, 38–39, 41, 44–45, 48, commodity fetishism, 15, 18, 39, 55, 50–51, 53, 57–58, 60, 62, 69, 71–72, 110, 121, 124, 130, 131, 148–150, 94, 97–98, 107, 109, 111–112, 115, 152, 156 –157, 158, 163; 121, 129–130, 131–132, 140–143, see also reification 147, 162–163, 165, 170n11, 171n3, conceptual art, 74–75 173n11, 176n1, 177n12 Conte, Joseph M., 14, 23–24, formalist criticism, 5–6, 165, 170n9 25–26, 50–51, 53, 55, 141, Foster, Edward Halsey, 60 171n3, 178n20 Foster, Hal, 128, 174n4, 175n15 Crane, Hart, 67 Foucault, Michel, 14, 128, 179n24 Creeley, Robert, 10, 23 Fredman, Stephen, 114–115, 117, culture industry, 17, 72, 85, 94, 178–79n21, 180n9 165–166, 168 free verse, 2, 22, 109, 134 Friedberg, Aaron L., 169n2 dada, 30–31, 61–62, 172–73n9; Friedlander, Benjamin, 177n11, 178n13 see also Tzara, Tristan Funkhouser, C.T., 38, 171n12 Darragh, Tina, 26–27 Darwin, Charles, 139 Géfin, Laszlo K., 173n9 Davidson, Michael, 10 Glazier, Loss Pequeño, 37–38, 171n11 Debord, Guy, 4, 72, 170n6 Goldsmith, Kenneth, 25, 174n4 Delville, Michel, 112, 113, 119, Gysin, Brion, 29 148–149 digital poetry, 37–38, 171n11, 171n12 Hardt, Michael, 5, 108, 109 Duchamp, Marcel, 32, 48, 74, 174n4 Harryman, Carla, 69, 180n8 Duncan, Robert, 5, 120 Hartley, George, 109, 113, 175n14, DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 10–11, 117, 177n4, 177n7, 177n9, 178n16, 119, 133, 134, 135 178n17, 178n18 Dworkin, Craig, 34–35, 142, 171n8, Hartsock, Nancy C.M., 155–158, 161 174n9, 175n12, 175–76n16, 180n9 Hejinian, Lyn, 2, 4, 13–15, 19, 26, 29–30, 34, 37, 50, 72, 99, 133, 156, Eagleton, Terry, 8 168, 176–77n3; “The Composition Eliot, T.S., 46, 50, 69, 172n6 of the Cell,” 81; Language of Inquiry, 18, 111, 133, 135, 138–141, 142–144, Fahlström, Öyvind, 73 159–160, 162; My Life, 4, 11, 17–18, Faulkner, William, 85 31, 131–134, 135–136, 140–150, feminist poetics, 10–11, 15–16, 18, 152–153, 155, 157–163, 179n4; 132, 147, 157–158, 161 My Life in the Nineties, 132 Index ● 193
Heller, Henry, 3, 170n4, 170n5, Levertov, Denise, 5 170n7, 170n8 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 125 Hershberg, James G., 1 Lewis, Meriwether, 139 Horkheimer, Max, 85 LeWitt, Sol, 74 Howe, Susan, 5 Lichtenstein, Roy, 73 Lippard, Lucy R., 74–75, Jameson, Fredric, 7–8, 9, 38–39, 44, 174n6, 174n7 45–46, 57, 58, 61, 64, 76, 84, 91, 93, Locke, John, 47 107–108, 115, 126–127, 155, 169n1, Lopez, Tony, 42 175n14, 178n15 Lukács, Georg, 8, 12, 37, 61, 100, 110, Jarraway, David R., 162 148, 150, 157, 168, 170n12 Johns, Jasper, 73 Johnston, Georgia, 143 Mac Low, Jackson, 10, 23, 29–30, 32, Jones, Caroline A., 15, 28, 171n1, 73, 75, 174n9, 175n10; Asymmetries, 171n2, 171n4 32–34 Joseph, Branden W., 171n5 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 23 Joyce, James, 75, 85 Marxism, 4, 15, 23, 71, 95, 97, 98, 108, Judd, Donald, 74 124, 131–132, 133, 136, 147–148, Junkerman, Charles, 30 155–157, 168; and literary criticism, 6–8, 9, 10, 18–19, 152; Kane, Daniel, 42, 57, 173n12, see also Jameson, Fredric and 174n17 Lukács, Georg Kaprow, Allan, 28, 73 Matthews, Harry, 23 Kaufman, Robert, 5 Mayer, Bernadette, 34 Keats, John, 43, 52 McCaffery, Larry, 132 McHale, Brian, 21–22 Labelle, Brandon, 30 McKeon, Michael, 178n14 labor, 2–4, 5, 8, 12, 13, 15, 22, 42, Meyer, James, 174n5 49, 54, 72, 74, 77, 87, 94, 100, 114, Miles, Barry, 29 121, 132, 148–149, 152, 156 –157, minimalism, 74, 90, 174n5, 175n15 165, 169n1, 169n3, 170n5; literary, Mitchell, Stephen, 174n18 3, 4, 14, 17, 26–28, 32, 39, 44–48, Monroe, Harriet, 134 49, 54–55, 57–64, 70, 97, 108, 110, Monte, Steven, 179n1 120–121, 122, 130, 131, 141, 165, Morris, Robert, 74 168, 178n17; postindustrial, 2–4, 12, 14, 17–18, 38, 41, 58–64, 70, 71, Negri, Antonio, 5, 108, 109 97–98, 106, 108–109, 131, 156, 165 New Criticism, 26 Language poetry, 5, 10, 13, 17, 47, 90, new sentence, 17, 101–104, 111, 118, 95, 99, 101, 109, 111, 126, 133, 124, 125, 126, 127–130, 146, 141, 146, 155, 168, 170n11, 177n7, 179n25 171n3, 178n16 Nicholls, Peter, 179n4 Lazer, Hank, 111, 143–144, Noland, Carrie, 11–12 175n11, 179n1 Notley, Alice, 42, 48, 49–50, 51, 53, Lehman, David, 173n12 57, 65, 172n2, 172n3, 172n5, Leonard, George, 176n17 172n7, 173n14, 173n15 194 ● Index
Objectivist poetics, 17–18, 117, 119, Saussure, Ferdinand de, 103, 132–140, 147, 163; see also 125, 177n9 Zukofsky, Louis Sayre, Henry M., 28, 174n2 O’Hara, Frank, 13, 43, 44, 172n4; “In Shakespeare, William, 43, 44, 55–57 Memory of My Feelings,” 88–89 Shrecker, Ellen, 169n3 Oldenburg, Claes, 73 Silliman, Ron, 2, 4, 13–15, 26, 29–30, Osman, Jena, 27, 54 34, 37, 71–72, 95, 99, 131, 132, 133, Oulipo, 22–24 140, 168, 173n11, 176n1, 177n12 178n19; The Alphabet, 99; In the Paul, Sherman, 79, 174n2 American Tree, 99; Ketjak, 114–115; Perelman, Bob, 84, 99, 102, 103, 126, The New Sentence, 99, 101–102, 175n14, 176n3, 177n8, 180–81n9 109–110, 116, 119, 146; Paradise, Perloff, Marjorie, 22–24, 25–26, 112, 119; Tjanting, 4, 17, 30, 32, 46–47, 79–80, 81, 124, 97–130, 134, 141, 157, 163, 132, 136, 141–142, 172n1, 166, 177n10, 178n13, 174n1, 174n8, 175n11, 177n11, 178–79n21, 179n25 179n1, 180n9 Spahr, Juliana, 180–81n9, 181n10, Pollock, Jackson, 28 181n16 Pound, Ezra, 24, 65, 79, 115, 116–117, Stein, Gertrude, 13, 16, 50, 80, 84, 180n5; “Alba,” 35–36; Cantos, 101, 133, 143, 147, 172n6, 116–117 177n7, 180n7 Prevallet, Kristin, 26–27 Stendhal, 9, 170n10 procedural form, see form, procedural Stevens, Wallace, 152 Proust, Marcel, 69, 144, 181n11 Sweezy, Paul M., 98
Quartermain, Peter, 117, 119, 133, Thoreau, Henry David, 31–32, 75 134, 135 Truitt, Anne, 74 Queneau, Raymond, 22–23 Tzara, Tristan, 53–55, 62, 172n7
Rauschenberg, Robert, 42, 73–74, Verlaine, Paul, 69 91, 174n4 Vickery, Ann, 176n3 realism, 14–15, 17, 97, 106–107, 108, 109–114, 115, 117, 118–119, 121, Wagner, Richard, 69 124, 128, 134, 136, 178n16, Warhol, Andy, 28, 42, 73, 75, 178n19, 180n7 149, 171n2 Reed, Brian M., 166–167, 180n6 Watkin, William, 173n11, reification, 45–46, 71, 110, 131, 176n1, 177n12 133–134, 147–150, 152; see also Watten, Barrett, 12–13, 90, 99, commodity fetishism 127, 166, 176n3, 177n6, Rich, Adrienne, 5 177n8, 179n25 Riding, Laura, 120 Wellman, Donald, 178n19 Rifkin, Libbie, 42, 43–44, Williams, William Carlos, 22, 24, 49, 50, 56–57 115–116, 178n19; “The Attic Which Rilke, Rainer Maria, 67 Is Desire,” 122; “Brilliant Sad Sun,” Rimbaud, Arthur, 66–67, 87 122; “The Great Figure,” 115–116 Index ● 195
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 34–35, 72–73, Young, Geoff, 176–77n3 89, 174n1, 174n9 Wolfson, Susan J., 6, 170n9 Zola, Émile, 136 Woolf, Virginia, 152; “Solid Zukofsky, Louis, 10, 23, 115, 117–119, Objects,” 152–155, 158–159, 133–140, 141, 142, 177n10, 178n20, 162, 181n15 180n7; “A”, 118–119, 122, 147, 151; Wordsworth, William, 160 “Mantis,” 117–118; “Train-Signal,” Wright, C.D., 122, 125 137–138; see also Objectivist poetics