Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy
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Differentials Modern and Contemporary Poetics Series Editors Charles Bernstein Hank Lazer Series Advisory Board Maria Damon Rachel Blau DuPlessis Alan Golding Susan Howe Nathaniel Mackey Jerome McGann Harryette Mullen Aldon Nielsen Marjorie Perloff Joan Retallack Ron Silliman Lorenzo Thomas Jerry Ward Differentials Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy Marjorie Perloff The University of Alabama Press Tuscaloosa Copyright © 2004 The University of Alabama Press Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380 All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Typeface: Minion ∞ The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Science-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Perloff, Marjorie. Differentials : poetry, poetics, pedagogy / Marjorie Perloff. p. cm. — (Modern and contemporary poetics) Chie®y essays previously published in various sources. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8173-1421-0 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8173-5128-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Literature, Modern—History and criticism. 2. Poetics. I. Title. II. Series. PN511.P47 2004 809′.04—dc22 2004001811 Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Differential Reading xi 1. Crisis in the Humanities? Recon¤guring Literary Study for the Twenty-¤rst Century 1 2. Cunning Passages and Contrived Corridors: Rereading Eliot’s “Gerontion” 20 3. The Search for “Prime Words”: Pound, Duchamp, and the Nominalist Ethos 39 4. “But isn’t the same at least the same?” Wittgenstein on Translation 60 5. “Logocinéma of the Frontiersman”: Eugene Jolas’s Multilingual Poetics and Its Legacies 82 6. “The Silence that is not Silence”: Acoustic Art in Samuel Beckett’s Radio Plays 102 7. Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject: Ron Silliman’s Albany, Susan Howe’s Buffalo 129 8. After Language Poetry: Innovation and Its Theoretical Discontents 155 9. The Invention of “Concrete Prose”: Haroldo de Campos’s Galaxias and After 175 10. Songs of the Earth: Ronald Johnson’s Verbivocovisuals 194 11. The Oulipo Factor: The Procedural Poetics of Christian Bök and Caroline Bergvall 205 12. Filling the Space with Trace: Tom Raworth’s “Letters from Yaddo” 227 vi contents 13. Teaching the “New” Poetries: The Case of Rae Armantrout 243 14. Writing Poetry/Writing about Poetry: Some Problems of Af¤liation 258 Notes 269 Index 299 Acknowledgments The following essays appeared, most in different form, in the following pub- lications and are reprinted here by permission: “Crisis in the Humanities? Recon¤guring Literary Study for the Twenty-¤rst Century,” as “In Defense of Poetry: Put the Literary Back in Literature,” Boston Review 24: 6 (Dec.–Jan. 1999–2000): 22–26. “The Search for ‘Prime Words’: Ezra Pound as Nominalist,” Paideuma: Stud- ies in American and British Modernist Poetry 32, Numbers 1–3 (fall 2003), 205–28. “‘But isn’t the same at least the same?’ Wittgenstein on Translation,” in The Literary Wittgenstein, ed. John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer (London: Routledge, 2004), 34–54. In an earlier version, this essay appeared in Jacket, http://www.jacketmagazine.com/14/perl-witt.html, and in Salt 14: The Jacket Issue, ed. John Tranter (2003): 17–43. “‘Logocinéma of the Frontiersman’: Eugene Jolas’s Multilingual Poetics and Its Legacies,” Kunapipi 20 (1999): 145–63. “‘The Silence that is not Silence’: Acoustic Art in Samuel Beckett’s Radio Plays,” in Samuel Beckett and the Arts: Music, Visual Arts, and Non-Print Media, ed. Lois Oppenheim (New York: Garland, 1999), 247–68. “The Beckett/Feldman Radio Collaboration: Words and Music as Hörspiel,” Beckett Circle 26, no. 2 (fall 2003), 7–10. Used by permission of Routledge/ Taylor & Francis Books Inc. “Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject: Ron Silliman’s Albany, Susan Howe’s Buffalo,” Critical Inquiry 25 (spring 1999), 405–34. “After Language Poetry: Innovation and Its Theoretical Discontents,” in The World in Time and Space: Towards a History of Innovative American Poetry, 1970–2000, ed. Joseph Donahue and Edward Foster (Talisman House Press, 2000), 333–55. “The Invention of ‘Concrete Prose’: Haroldo de Campos’s Galaxias and Af- viii Acknowledgments ter,” Contemporary Literature, special issue: American Poetry of the 1990s, ed. Thomas Gardner, 42, 2 (summer 2001): 270–93. “The Oulipo Factor: The Procedural Poetics of Christian Bök and Caroline Bergvall,” Textual Poetics, 17.3 (winter 2003). “Filling the Space with Trace: Tom Raworth’s Letters from Yaddo,” The Gig, ed. Nate Dorward, 13–14 (May 2003): 130–44. “Teaching the ‘New’ Poetries: The Case of Rae Armantrout,” Kiosk: A Journal of Poetry, Poetics, and Experimental Prose, 1 (2002): 235–60. “Writing Poetry/Writing about Poetry: Some Problems of Af¤liation,” Sym- ploke 7: 2 (2000): 21–29; rpt. in Af¤liations: Identity in Academic Culture, ed. Jeffrey R. Di Leo (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 133–43. The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint excerpts from the following sources: Rae Armantrout, The Pretext (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2001). Used by per- mission of Sun & Moon Press. Christian Bök, Eunoia (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2001). Used by permis- sion of Coach House Books. Jorie Graham, “Evolution,” in Never (New York: Ecco/HarperCollins, 2002), copyright © 2002 Jorie Graham. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc. Susan Howe, “Secret History of the Dividing Line,” in Frame Structures: Early Poems, 1974–1979 (New York: New Directions, 1996), copyright © 1974, 1975, 1978, 1979, 1996 Susan Howe. Used by permission of New Di- rections Publishing Corporation. Harryette Mullen, Muse & Drudge (Philadelphia: Singing Horse Press, 1995). Frank O’Hara, “Lana Turner Has Collapsed!” in The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, ed. Donald Allen (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1995), copyright © Frank O’Hara. Used by permission of City Lights Books. Ezra Pound, “Canto LXVIII,” in The Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1993), copyright © 1934, 1937, 1948, 1956, 1959, 1962, 1963, 1966, and 1968 Ezra Pound. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corpora- tion. Tom Rawor t h, Collected Poems (Manchester, Eng.: Carcanet Press, 2003). Used by permission of Carcanet Press, Ltd. Joan Retallack, How to Do Things with Words (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1998). Used by permission of Sun & Moon Press. Jacques Roubaud, Quelque chose noir (Paris: Gallimard, 1986). Used by per- Acknowledgments ix mission of Gallimard; and Rosmarie Waldrop, trans., some thing black [from “Unlikeness,” a section of her translation of Quelque chose noir] (Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1990). Used by permission of Dalkey Archive. Ron Silliman, “Albany,” in ABC (Berkeley, CA: Tuumba Press, 1983); and “Under Albany” (Detroit: Gale Research Center, 1997, in Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, vol. 29, ed. Joyce Nakamura, Gale Research, Detroit, MI, 1998). Used by permission of Ron Silliman. William Carlos Williams, “The Young Housewife,” in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, vol. 1, 1909–1939, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986), copyright © 1938 New Directions Publishing Corporation. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. Introduction Differential Reading Reading Closely Not long ago I was teaching a graduate course called “Theory of the Avant- Garde,” which covered such major movements as Futurism and Dada as well as two individual American “avant-gardists”—Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams. The course material was largely unfamiliar to the class: F. T. Marinetti’s parole in libertà, Velimir Khlebnikov’s Tables of Destiny, Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass and the “notes” for its execution in the White Box, Kurt Schwitters’s collages and sound poems, and Raoul Haussman’s political satire. The students were remarkably astute on the larger aesthetic and ideo- logical issues involved and especially perceptive about visual works. I was therefore astonished when at semester’s end we came to what I took to be the more familiar American modernist exemplars and found that the same stu- dents who could discuss with great aplomb the relation of the Milky Way to Bachelors in the Large Glass were largely at a loss when it came to Williams’s short lyric poems like “Danse Russe” or “The Young Housewife”—both, in- cidentally, well-known anthology pieces. Here is “The Young Housewife”: At ten A.M. the young housewife moves about in negligee behind the wooden walls of her husband’s house. I pass solitary in my car. Then again she comes to the curb to call the ice-man, ¤sh-man, and stands shy, uncorseted, tucking in stray ends of hair, and I compare her to a fallen leaf. xii Introduction The noiseless wheels of my car rush with a crackling sound over dried leaves as I bow and pass smiling.1 In the self-consciously feminist eighties, readers often objected to what they perceived as the rape fantasy in this poem: if the young housewife is compa- rable “to a fallen leaf,” and the “noiseless wheels” of the poet’s car “rush with a crackling sound over / dried leaves,” he is evidently longing to “ride over” the young woman, to possess her. This analysis, I shall suggest later, is not incorrect, but the reference to rape ignores the wry humor of the poem’s tone, the delicacy of its irony. In 2002 the response was much more bizarre. A number of students, for example, took the young housewife to be a prostitute because she comes to the curb and calls men. She is, moreover, in a state