Poetics of the New

Also in the series

Horizons
The Poetics and Theory of the lntermedia
By Dick Higgins
The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book
Edited by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein
Total Syntax
By Barrett Watten
Writing/Talks

Edited by
Bob Perelman

Sou thern Illinois University Press

Carbondale and Edwardsville
 Copyright© 1985 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Edited by Cynthia Miller
Designed by Quentin Fiore
Production supervised by Kathleen Giencke

88 87 86 85 84 5 4 3 2 1

T he text of "The Middle" was first published by Gaz. "Subject Matter" am

"Autobiography, Memory and Mechanisms of Concealment" were original!:

published in Hills 8. The complete text of "Language/Mind/Writing" was pub
lished in Poeticsjourna/3. Portions of "Silence" were published in Poetics}ouma/3
"At the Faucet of June," W illiam Carlos Williams, Collected Earlier Poems of Wil
liam Carlos Williams, © 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corporation. Lines 1·
38 from "Canto 84," © 1948 by Ezra Pound. Both of the above are reprinted b•
permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Main entry under title:

Writing/talks.

(Poetics of the new)

Bibliography: p.
1. American literature-20th century-History and criticism-Addresses,
essays, lectures. 2. American literature-California-San Francisco Bay
Area-History and criticism-Addresses, essays, lectures.
I. Perelman, Bob. II. Series.
PS22 .W74 1984 808' .042 83-20338
ISBN 0-8093-1180-1
 Contents

Bob Perelman
Preface vii

Robert Gluck
Who Speaks for Us: Being an Expert 1

Charles Bernstein
Characterization 7

Rae Armantrout
Poetic Silence 31

Kit Robinson
Song 48

Bob Perelman
Sense 63

B ruce Boone
Writing and an Anti-Nuclear Politics 87

Alan Davies
Language/Mind/Writing 97

Beverly Dahlen
A Reading: a Reading IIJ

Carla Harryman
The Middle 135

Barrett Watten
Olson in Language: Part II 157
 Ron Silliman
Spicer's Language 166
Fanny Howe
A rtob iogra ph y 192
Michael Palmer
A u tob iogra phy, Memo ry and Mechan isms
o f Concea lmen t (Pa rt 1 o r One Pa rt) 207
Robert Grenier
Language/Si te/World 230
Alan Bernheimer
Sub jec t Ma tter 246
Lyn Hej inian
The Rejec tion o f C lo su re 270
Boo ks b y Con trib u to rs 292
 Preface

To my mind , these 16 talk s are part of an overall con versation:

Robert Gliick: W ho gets to talk ?
Charles Bernstein: All word s reflect society's characteriza-
tions and d istortion s.
Rae Armantrout: So can you write silence into a poem?
Kit Robinson: Or, pen in hand , burst into song?
Bob Perelman: How about trying to hear the word s before
and after they mak e sense?
Bruce Boone: How can you if the world blows up?
Alan Davies: The most important thing to d o is to write with­
out strayin g outsid e that activity.
Beverly Dahlen: But the meaning of writing lead s in an end ­
less regress back into the mind .
Carla Harryman: No, the ( nonpsychological) surface is the
only place of instruction.
Barrett Watten: Does the writer's bod y tie it all together?
Ron Silliman: Or the writer's absence?
Fanny Howe: How d oes art tak e place in a life?
Michael Palmer: How can the "I" mak e itself k n own ( or un-
known) ?
Robert Grenier: Is the world k nowable anyway, in word s?
Alan Bernheimer: Yes, but.
Lyn Hej inian: And there's more to say.
Of course, I now owe the contributors an apology for having
characterized their talk s so mercilessly.
These talk s were d elivered in the San Francisco Bay area d ur-

Vll
 Vlll

Prefac e

ing the last three years. A community of writers was consid erin
writing, an activity of equal interest to all. So no one was "the ex
pert. " The mod e varies at times from formal essay to wid e ope
conversation, but in all cases the talk was not for talk's sake, but fo
the sake of writing.
As the title, Writing/Talks, ind icates, some speakers read writ
ten- out essays, others d id n't. Some talks were more of a group ef
fort, others were mostly solo. In all cases, d uring or after th
speaker's presentation there was conversation, not all of which i
transcribed here. And what was transcribed has been ed ited d own
by me, for space and clarity, ex cept for the excerpt from Robe
Grenier's talk, which he transcribed as nearly verbatim as possible
Since writing is the contex t and goal of all these talks, I wan
to call the read er's attention to the list of books by contributors a
the end of this vqlume. I shou ld also mention here another volum
of talks I ed ited three years ago: Talks (Hills 6/7).
Thanks to Renny Pritikin and Barrett Watten, coord inators o
the Writer in Resid ence program at Langton Arts, Aaron Shuri
and David Levi Strauss, coord inators of the "Works and Word s'
series, Jim Hartz, coord inator of the Intersection Writer in Resi
d ence series, and johanna Drucker and Norman Fischer, who als
coord inated talks at Intersection.

Bob Perelman
 Robert Gli.ick

Who Speaks for Us :

Being an Expert

Robert Gliick: I'm teaching the Writers on Writing class at San

Francisco State this spring. Writers come in and talk about their work ,
and I was struck by a common theme. Many writers talked about a
"child" in them . The image: an ideal child, the creative life of the art­
ist, constantly distracted, besieged, and hemmed in. The image inter­
ested me because it seemed so peculiar to here and now. What would
it have meant to Dante or Shakespeare, to whom being a child mostly
equalled small understanding, undeveloped faculties? And how does
it tally with the maladjusted children we writers probably were?
So I thought about it, helped by Philip Aries' Centuries of Child­
hoo d. Aries is one of a group of French historians who chart the history
of subjectivity. I learned that in earlier times play was integrated into
our lives to a degree we can hardly imagine . I came to the conclusion
that when these writers said "child" they meant flexibility and open­
ended play, resistance to u niformity, "a promise of bliss, " polymor­
phous utopia. The distinction between child and adult is recent and
only recently has play been relegated to children as their special prov­
ince. Like other books on the history of subjectivity, Centu n'es of Child­
hoo d maps out the dolorous transition from an integrated society to
one that specializes. Childhood itself is something of a specialization,
1
 2
Robert Gluc k

and ou r ability to be flexible-playful-is reclassified as a child

qu ality:

In 16oo the specialization of games and pastimes did not extend be­
yond infancy; after the age of three or four it decreased and disap­
peared . From then on the child played the same games as the adult, either with
other children or with adults. [p. 71]
In the society of old, work did not take up so much time during the
day and did not have so much importance in the public mind: it did
not have the existential value which we have given it for something
like a hundred years . One can scarcely say that it had the same mean­
ing. On the other hand, games and amusements extended far beyond
the furtive moments we allow them : they formed one of the principal
means employed by a society to draw its collective bonds closer, to feel
united . [p. 73]
I t is important to note that the old community of games was de­
stroyed at one and the same time between children and adults, be­
tween lower and middle class . The coincidence enables us to glimpse
al ready a connection between the idea of childhood and the idea of
class. [ p . 99]

These separations inform our mod els for art and wntmg.
Flexibility, resistance to u niformity, are hallmark s of twentieth-cen­
tu ry art. Literature d oesn't look mod ern u nless its surface is messy,
or playful, or constru cted in some way that resists commod ification
( as a limit: a "langu age without d iscourse" ) . Nineteenth-centu ry
Natu ralism and its d escend ants have come to be associated with
work . The charge leveled at mod ern art by a self-righteou s work ing
world has always been "a child could d o it." This is rightly threat­
ening, and the accu sation u nd erscores the connection between
child hood and art.
So most experimental writing has an ad versary relation to
professionalism, to work -ethic mentality, a resistance to fetishizing
the "expert" or what ever is au thoritarian. I'm also thinking of per­
formance art-a k ind of art that says "no ex perts" -where we find
flexibility, spectacle, and the child emotions of awe and fear.
 3
Who Spea ks fo r Us: Being an Expe rt

But when the avant- gard e talk s about itself, it becomes ex­
tremely professional. If the language that ad d resses experimental
writing has any charm, it is often based on d ifficult syntax and
te rms that want to be technical, associated with science. Maybe
this expertise valid ates play-mak es it look lik e work and so appear
accessible; and this may be just another separation into parts (in
this case the analytical and spontaneous) that characterizes late
capitalism.

I think when we say public speak ing, whether actually spok en

or written, we mean setting or reaffirming or challenging the terms
that legitimate d iscourse, and ultimately legitimate writing. The
expert sets terms, an act of will that calls for a lot of footwork be­
cause it's d ifficult to marshal id eas-they seem to prefer d isjunc­
tion. A new set of terms brings cod es to bear on each other. It legiti­
mates new work and at the same time creates the native soil of
future writing. We move toward or away from a given set of terms,
but we are rarely ind ifferent. (This is a mixed message regard ing
the role of the expert-it's born of mixed emotions. )
"The d iegetic function of this sequence is thoroughly incom­
mensurate with the hyperbole of its presentation. " I lifted this sen­
te nce from an article in October. To my mind it says, "I am an ex­
pe rt. " It's long on terms, short on d iscourse. If we rewrote this
se ntence-"The d iegetic presentation of this hyperbole is hard ly
commensurate with the fluctuation of its sequences" -would its ef­
fe ct be altered ? But these very terms carry an urgency-they are a
language that constitutes a community. (In the case of October the
community might resemble a faculty club. ) Of course the terms
will be simpler for a wid er community.
For example, gay male d iscourse usually carries some per­
fun ctory citation to sex. We often see ourselves and are seen by oth­
ers as purve yors of sex. So any gay journal, whether literary or
simply a newspaper, has lots of sex in it. Sex is the terms: if it's not
in the text, it's in the visuals. In these terms we invest our subjec­
tivity; they invok e group activities that are gay related , and in gen­
e r al they reaffirm our attraction to one another. In this way gay
 4
Robert Gluc k

men recognize that a given journal or newspaper pertains, and cer

tainly these terms carry an urgency that has more to d o with d irect
ing one's subjectivity than emptying the libid o. These images in
vite and ex clud e much the same as the semiotic vocabulary o
experimental writing .
An article by Dennis Altman in Socialist Review illustrates th
cross circuiting of d iscourses. The article was called "Sex: Th
Front Line for Gay Politics" [SR No. 65, pp. 74-84]; it was flank ed
by a sexy Joe Brainard d rawing and an ad for Gay Sunshin
Book s. One book in the ad was Mea t: How Men Loo k, Ac t, Talk,
l#llk, Undress, Taste & Smell. Many of the read ers' subsequent at·
tacks tried to d elegitimize Altman's essay based on the d rawing
and the ad . "We emphasize that we co nsid er the pornographic ad ·
vertisement that follows Altman's article to be offensive, politically
incorrect and d amaging to SR" [SR No. 67, p. 124]-that from part
of the SR collective itself. And another letter: "However, what,
bothers me most of all is the conclud ing frame of the article-the ad
for 'Gay Sunshine Book s. ' To my mind this ad is completely irrele­
vant to SR 's political concerns and purposes, and I find its appear·
ance in SR as poor jud gment in the extreme" [p. 125]. Here two k ind s
of d iscourse meet. Naturally there is resistance. One group's terms
can be the exact formula that invalidates another group's terms.
W hat would happen if you belong to both? SR is not friend ly to ex·
perimental writing, and would not consid er semiotic analysis, so
what happens if you belong to three ho stile groups? I suppose the
answer is that you have a pretty average writer's life, but that d oes
not mak e public speech any simpler. Unless you are motivated to
connect the d ots, to mak e these cod es inform each other.
Although earlier mod els persist-romantic, aristocratic, ivory
tower-experimental writers want to be the ed ge of the new.
Newer than new: in fact, critiquing the new. In post mod ern d evel­
opment, we are self-consciously critical of the various technological
vocabularies. The most reward ed expert prod uces the most in­
sights-the best commod ity-by d e-expertizing the other experts,
by giving their partializing cod es the lie. He find s common cod es
or brings one cod e to bear on another, and shows u s to what ex tent
writing, sex, and other "last bastions" of subjectivity are perme·
 5
Who Spea ks for Us: Being an Expert

ated by commod ity life. So, in the case of the SR controversy: I

might use the terms of the Left to portr ay the gay ad as a commod i­
fication of sex uality, but then I would turn the tables and say that
commod ification of sex is part of a community as it ex ists-and use
that notion to critique the Left's blind spot in the ter rain of sexual­
ity, community, and the prod uction of d esire. In the end I will have
played the part of technician with d exterity, prod ucing an insight
lar ger than either set of terms.
Then it's not surpr ising, historically speak ing, that experts
create a max imum power imbalance. In horror movies, after all the
lyr ical super natur al events (transgr ession, awe, flex ibility, specta­
cle, fear), we meet the expert, the scientist with a stack of book s
who says, "Yes, these events r eally happened . "

To claim that events happen, you must have confidence in

your per ception. But ther e is a second k ind of confid ence based on
physical safety. A speak er feels physically safe in the wor ld , or d eals
with fear of physical har m, urgency to speak tipping the scales.
And ther e ar e d ifferent ways to speak . When I was a k id , ad ult men
all seemed to be experts. They talk ed politics with authority. The
basic message was author ity; it was ted ious and fr ightening. The
women wer e mor e tentative, ir onic; still, they ex changed informa­
tion and , as opposed to the men, all the women talk ed . Both groups
reaffirmed their fr iend ship, the terms of their community, but the
women were mor e socialized and a lot mor e fun. By now you are
getting the id ea that I'm introd ucing the theme of gender. Because
the experts tend to be men, and ther e ar e objective reasons why
men feel physically safe in the wor ld . (How much better, then, to
be without a bod y completely. The mor al of Donovan 's Brain, for ex ­
ample, is that without a bod y we would seek limitless power fueled
by limitless ar r ogance. )
When I start to speak , when I think about starting to speak , I
am confronted with a cliff, vertigo, to jump or not to jump. Her e I
am a child again-but in this ver sion of child hood , speech abid es
by the absolute verd ict of a fair y tale, one wrong wor d and you'r e
out. As I get used to speak ing ther e is a psychic cost, some restr uc­
turin g. Going from an object to a subject-whether as an ind ivid -
 6
Robert GlUck

ual or as a movement-first I experience the urge to account fo

my self completely. So now I occur in language. I master technique
to claim the audience, physical techniques and the going vocabu
lary. W hat comes with practice eventually becomes part of me.
must know how my presence is felt-in fact, it becomes part of m
bag of tricks-an expert's bag of tricks. If I send it out into thi
room-a warm presence, jewish/gay, with a subtext, not too bur
ied, say ing "don't hurt me"-and I master projection of this pres·
ence, then I gain something to manipulate but lose something inte·
gral. (That's why we resist being described-it limits us.) As a
second option I could junk my personality and opt for scientific ob­
jectivity, arrogant, blank as a TV test pattern. W hat I gain from all
this is that I become part of other people's psy chic lives. That'si
power. I set the terms that will govern their imaginations, shape
their subjectivity.· I also create for myself more elbowroom in my
own writing. I will no longer be afraid to speak, but the audience
will be afraid of me. And rightly. I will be an expert who represents
oppressed minorities. After all, when there are power inequalities
favoring one side, like racism and sexism, inequalities of other
kinds often gather round the other side.
In an ideal community I would be reciting the terms the com­
munity gave to me. The greater the power differential and the
more I am fetishized as an expert, the greater will be the distance
between me and my audience. That's why movements and com­
munities are wary of experts. (The Right prefers "common
sense." The Left criticizes "elitism.") And the more I turn my au­
dience into a classroom, into children, frightened and bored, the
less chance there will be of any real community. One way to open
the discourse-if that is a goal-is to arrange for more people to
feel a personal stake. In a community of writers, a bottom line will
be which kind of writing, whose writing, is taken seriously , written
about, discussed. Enlarging the canon would expand the terms. Fi­
nally, if we want more people to engage in our discussions, then we
must pay attention to what is physically threatening-body lan­
guage, tone of voice, and other expressions of power imbalance.
 Charles Bernstein

Characterization

Charles Bernstein: I found this in The New lii rk Times for Octo­
ber 5th on the back page of the first se ction: [se e ne xt page]. I don't
know how much that costs-
Tom Mandel: Oh, a fortun e . $15,000, anyway.
Bernstein: "Bill Bernbach, Ign-1g82. He said, 'The re al giants
have always be en poets. Men [laughte r] whojumped from facts into the
re alm of imagination and ideas. ' "
Ron Silliman: You mean, lik e "jumpe d back. " [laughte r]
Bernstein: I've n ever bee n able to figure out what it is I have to
say about this, but something. "He ele vated advertising to high
art ... " He e le vated advertising to a comme rcial art is re ally what he
did. " ... and our jobs to a profe ssion. "
Mandel: But it's more than that he created comme rcial art. Ele ­
vating adve rtising to a high art would actually me an that he was
among those "men" -that generation that made adve rtising work . In
othe r words, that made it possible to manipulate, to totally identify
n e eds, and do the work of targeting who you were going to address
with your satisfactions of those n e e ds. Before, advertising had simply
be en publicity.
Bernstein: And "Doyle Dane Bernbach" right he re , no com­
mas-for those of you who are doing proofre ading. It's one of the big­
gest age ncies in the U.S. You would have seen thousands of images
from them.
7
 Bill Bernbach
1911-1982

He said,
''The real giants have always been poets
men who jumped from facts
into the realm of imagination and ideas.''

He elevated advertising to high art

and our jobs to a profession.

He made a difference.

Doyle Dane Bernbach

 9
Charact erization

I love the way they use "flush center" : it' s a very class look. Of
cou rse , if l were a different kind of person I would discuss this difference
here: making " Doyle Dane Bernbach " very small here, and these two
black lines . . .
So this to me is a really interesting instance of characterization .
How do you make something seem classy, something that's actually
very offensive to many people , even people who read The New .lVrk
Times. And I think they did a very good job with it, even though it ' s
really kind o f weird .
" He made a difference . " What I especially like about the charac­
terization of this is this is not a piece of advertising. This is a tribute to
a man we love . You can ' t even see " Doyle Dane Bernbach" from a
distance . If they were really advertising, obviously they'd make it
really big.
I 've always objected , actually, to the characterization of myself as
a poet, much because of the way they have " He was a poet . . " This .

idea of the poet being singled out . In fact , I 've noticed recently that
when you want to say somebody does something . . . I saw a bathroom
poster for "Jim Morrison , an American poet . " Obviously he was a
great American musician , not a great American poet . It's as if you
want to say that Zukofsky is a great American poet, you would say
that he is a " great American musician. " Somehow, to be character�
ized as excelling in your field they want to jump you into another
field .
Michael Palmer: It's interesting, too, that when Zukofsky is
characterized as such, to distinguish that kind of " great American
poet" from "the great American poets , " let ' s say like Robert Frost ,
who people actually know about, it ' s then followed parenthetically by
" a poet ' s poet . " I t ' s a removal from the domain of the nominative,
som ehow . And so it ' s at once " poet squared " but also "poet dimin­
is hed . "
Bernstein: You see this in respect to some American playwrights
wantin g to say that what they' re doing is opera. Robert Wilson , in
Lett er to Queen Victo n·a, which he called an opera, -it was, to me, one
of the best pieces of theater I 've ever seen . But it had to be called an
opera because it was so good.
 10
Charles Bernstein

Silliman: There was a review in last Sunday ' s paper: "A 3-

movie good enough to be 2-D. " [laughter]
Barrett Watten: You better look out or you might start doing
performance piece, Charles . [laughter]
Bernstein: So thinking about how writers tend to get topped
in this trivializing way as being " poets , " I 've always preferred
term "writer, " which is more neutral , which refers anyway to the m
dium, since there is some difficulty in separating out what the diffe
ence is between poetry and writing.
Or else I tend to like the most perverse types of characterizatio
the ones that can 't possibly be accepted because they imply . . . That'
why I ' m amused by David Bromige ' s " dialectical materialist.
That ' s a great term for poets because nobody' s ever going to sa
"The new dialectical materialist poets are doing exciting stuff in S
Francisco . " It just has too much baggage with it, whether or not it '
more accurate than other terms. I t ' s interesting just as a difficulty.
Last night , reading " Words and Pictures , " I quoted from w·
Iiams in terms of the poetics of sight , when he talks about catching an
holding- "The Lily" was caught and held , and quoted from Richar
Foreman saying you have to kill something in order to catch it an
hold it, and I suppose that ' s my basic hesitation about characteriza
tion , that it' s naming, it' s defining. At the same time, there isn't an
escape from some degree of characterization, of talking about ,
pointing to . But I think there can b e different approaches t o it . Essen·
tially any kind of characterization involves a system of metaphor be·
cause you ' re characterizing something by something else . It's always
partial view . Or it gives a different view but at the same time it ob·
scures other parts of it .
To me , one of the most significant examples of taking over a sys·
tematic characterization is the way Marx takes over the metaphor and
characterization of political economy from bourgeois economics,
which is what, in The Mirror if Production, Baudrillard criticizes him
for. Essentially he feels that Marx falls short by accepting certain
words that characterize social life in terms of value and instrumenta­
tion . That by continually using terms like the production of value, he
characterizes society in terms of production as the only inherent value
 11
Cha racterization

that can be defined, and thus accepts the whole world of bourgeois
economics rather than doing a thoroughgoing critique of it. And yet
it's Marx who did do the most thoroughgoing critique of the economy
of his time in the West . And it suggests to me not so much that he was
in error than that there ' s an inherent problem with all criticism and
with all characterization.
So for myself in writing criticism I 've often found an odd situa­
tion of focusing in on certain terms which always imply more than I
would like . I spoke of this last night in criticizing the terms I used in
"Words and Pictures" : sight , optics, focus , vision, perspective, reflec­
tion, shadow , vortex . These are all terms which are partial and sug­
gest certain domains which can be explored but at the same time char­
acterize them in such a way as to suggest that they' re not something
else. So that when I set up sight vs. vision, that, to me , is a false di­
chotomy insofar as it ' s taken out of the context of what it is that I 'm
trying to consider there , and I 'm suspicious of it myself.
Chomsky, in Language and Responsibility, points out how he feels
people in the humanities are particularly caught up with fiXing on cer­
tain positions because they have so much invested in them . Whereas
scientists in his view-a romanticized view of science, I think, but
nonetheless I think it ' s fair to say of him-scientists are willing to to­
tally reverse themselves. Certainly he feels he' s totally reversed him­
self over a 20-year period . He no longer feels he has to defend or even
think in terms of the argument he made in his earlier work.
I think that what happens sometimes is that writers get charac­
terized in terms of their positions. It ' s very hard ; when they change
their work they get flak . You have the case of Ashbery who only be­
came accepted in terms of the work of the last 1 0 years. Self-Portrait in a
Convex Mirror received a great amount of critical attention and prizes
and so on. And so it was incumbent upon so many of the writers in
Lehman ' s B eyond A mazement to attack as gibberish portions of The Ten ­
nis Court Oath, almost like party doctrine . And then one finds Ashbery,
in Cra fts o f Poetry, interviews with William Packard, saying he ' s no
longer interested in The Tennis Court Oath. And then it becomes incum­
bent upon me and other people to say, " Well , that's his best book. "
Because, for one thing, it is his best book. [laughter ] That ' s a big rea-
 12
Charles Bernstein

son. But Th ree Po ems is pretty good. And, of course, Bloom is the hi
demon in respect to Ashbery. He totally obliterates Ashbery for th
early work where he's not dealing with Stevens . But Ashbery himse
has capitulated on this score . It's almost as if the poetry has to be a d
velopment.
Mandel: But Ashbery lost interest in that work, or had engag
in a self-critique well before he was accepted .
Bemstein: That ' s right . It might be fairer to say that Ashbe
was doing what Chomsky is doing.
Watten: You can say that if the words are completely surfa
words.
Mandel: You could say it if he 'd made more than one such
change, perhaps. But you might want to compare him to someone
like Wittgenstein , who critiques his earlier work.
Bemstein: Well, yes, you have a lot of artists who progress . But
I agree with Barry on Ashbery. On the surface you could say that it
seems like early Wittgenstein vs. later Wittgenstein, where the later is
a psychoanalysis, almost , of the early work, showing the limitations.
But it so goes in line with the particular academic characterization of
his work in removing it from the context that it exists in that I'm not
concerned with John Ashbery as a person or his attitudes toward his
work so much as what the politics of the extrapolation and division of
his work exist as and how he participates in it and doesn't wish to
challenge it .
My own tendency is that it' s useful for people not to accept char·
acterizations that are made of them at any level . A poem like "Stand­
ing Target" in Co ntrolling Int erests includes quotes by which I was char·
acterized as a child by my camp counselors. It quotes them verbatim.
It's a poem about my own hostility, my resistance to characterization,
to the use of code words that should definitely be attacked .
Silliman: When you finish, will you talk about David Demotte,
and then those other people who are characterizing you in that way?
Bernstein: Well, what was great was I got a letter from Ron that
one of his students down in San Diego recognized one of the charac­
ters that I have a quote about . I worked for Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich . Men who . . . made a gutter art out of publishing.
 13
Characterization

jovanovich' s goal was, rather than be gobbled up by the big compan­

ies, that he would become one of the big companies . They publish
more magazines , -HairDo Magazine, Modem Medicine was the one I
worked for, Quick Frozen Foods was right next door. They publish about
35 different magazines , that ' s primarily what their business is. And
they had a national circular which included some people who worked ,
as you shall see, in the San Diego division . As it turned out, Ron ' s
student actually worked for this guy. S o was he amused, o r . . . ?
Silliman: I don ' t know if she ever gave it to him . Her job was
trimming the wings of flamingos.
Bernstein: I' II read parts of "Standing Target . "

Deserted all sudden a all

Or gloves of notion , seriously
Foil sightings, polite society
Verge at just about characterized
Largely a base , cups and
And gets to business, hands
Like "hi " , gnash , aluminum foil
Plummeting emphatically near earshot
Scopes bleak incontestably at point
Of incompetence, blasting back
Past imperceptible arrogance , . . . .
. . . So sad
Sitting there . Slows as sense
Descends , very oracular warmth
Would go by maybe years, unnerving.
Redress of slant. Limitless like
Listless. I aim at you , slips
Behind my back, that neither of us
Had told , kept . . . .
All of a sudden all deserted.

As President and Chief Executive Officer

of Sea World, Inc. , David Demotte is
responsible for managing all aspects
of the Company's operations at Sea
 14
Cha rles Bernstein

World parks in San Diego, Aurora,

Ohio, Orlando, Florida, and the Florida
Keys. A native Californian, Demotte,
and his wife Charlotte, enjoy hunting,
fishing, and tennis in their spare time.

The end result was a gradual

neurosis superimposed upon a pre-existing
borderline character structure .

Note the exclusive n'ght-side-up feature.

Awkward constellation
points, margins
washed " in good
voice, " vanished
in good voice . Delirium
tyrannizes the
approximate moment .
To vanish
outside the circuit.

Last spring Charles put himself on record

that he didn 't like crafts. We soon
came to understand his feelings
when we worked with him . Charlie

This is not about me, by the way. None of my work is about me.
[laughter]

is not strong in manual dexterity. (This

may be part of a mixed dominance
situation Mrs. B. and I discussed in
relation to tying shoes. ) Fortunately,
what he lacks in developed skills
he makes up for in
patience, determination, and
 15
Characterization

knowledge of what he wants as

results.

Charlie has grown to enjoy our organized games.

His interest carries throughout the
period , as a rule. He pulls his share in
team set ups and cheers loudly for
his team . During free time Charlie
has succeeded in busy ing himself with
friends . Sometimes it's Running
Bases, or digging for coal , or
club meetings in the
"private hideout . "
fatigue
of of
open for
to , sees
doubles

Discussions, fair play, group life­

Pattern of careless work and sloppy
Appearance- included is integral ,
Quiet and rather vague, at one period ,
Skills and coordination , enthusiastic business ,
When in actu ality the class had merely,
And often both . He seems to feel depressed
And unsure of himself. I hoped,
Holds himself back by doing, this is
Especiall y true , omits many times.

Bob Perelman: Charles, could you give a close reading of the

first section? The way I read it, there 's some charged, blunt stuff in
the middle that radiates outward, and it ' s easy to read the poem in
terms of a person getting socialized , but the very beginning, before
that's set up, how do you hear that?
Bernstein: My sense is that we are characterized insofar as we
 16
Charles Bernstein

let ourselves be characterized, that one can resist characterization hi

becoming conscious of its techniques and its inevitability. We live in;
world which communicates through characterization, but we can re
sist its reification, its finalization, by understanding it as a provision·
thing that exists in time for a particular use. Insofar as that use ·
agreed upon-perceived and acknowledged-in the communication
there may be no problem with characterization. But if it's thought tr
come from above or it hits y ou from behind and y ou don't know tha
it's happening, it mystifies y our conception of y our personality. It cr
ates the sense that persons are these objects that exist discretely an
outside of time.
I've always been fascinated by the kind of clinical psychologica
description in the poem; it's the clinical description I find most offe
sive. And I think it does pop out on the reader because it's very differ
ent from other things in my work. But it's not my intention or rn1

reading to have those particular paragraphs stand out over an

against other sections.
To me, the key lines are, not so much the opening ... But, look
you have this opening stanza, "Deserted all sudden a all," which lat
is echoed in "All of a sudden all deserted." "Gloves of notion" is anoth
kind of characterization of characterization. "Omits"-there's
section which is the most sparse in the poem, which is omitting wh
would fill out and determine, fix, hold, stamp down like the butterfl)
in Stein, if you know that in The Making of Americans where the bo)
catches the butterfly and puts it in an album and the father says, "Oh
how could you do that?"
So I think the first part is a comment in general on this issue
"Limitless like I Listless," "Behind my back," "That neither of U!
has held." But what to me is the key ... Well, and then there'
that . ..
Perelman: The "like" is confusing, not that that's bad. But be­
fore y ou've been characterized as having y our right hemisphere and
your left hemisphere battling so y ou can't tie y our shoes, that's wh t
a
that dominance was about ...
Bernstein: I suppose. "Mixed dominance" is a concept that this
"
person made up, as far as I'm concerned. "Confused dominance is
 17
Characterization

what I use in another section , which I think is great . I mean, that's

what I would hope for in my work: confused dominance. [laughter]
" Limitless like I Listless. " " Limits are what we are inside of. " Olson
really got that in my ear: a limit . That' s what I hear. " Limitless like I
Listless" : that ' s like the deterritorializing flows in Deleuze and Guat­
tari for those who have read Anti-Oedipus or even for those who
haven ' t . And then there ' s another stanza about how sad lines-lim­
its-are , " crisscrossing I out the hopes of an undifferentiated I expe-
.
nence . "
Perelman: But " Limitless like I Listless" seems to be saying the
opposite . It seems to be validating limits .
Bernstein: I think " Limitless like I Listless" suggests both. I ' m
interested i n statements that you can ' t take . . . I wrote i n " Part
Quake , " " They ridicule revolutionary theory I and sneer that having
a correct I position is sectarian . " And Bruce Andrews said, "I'm sur­
prised that you thought that . " And I don 't think that , actually. That
is, I think there are a lot of problems with the sectarianism of taking a
correct line . On the other hand, I think it's interesting to struggle to
have something that ' s correct for yourself, but not to have the arro­
gance of that kind of Stalinist correctness, or many other kinds of cor­
rectness. But , nonetheless, the idea of trying to come up with good
politics is reasonable, and there ' s a danger on the left of people being
so against coming up with correct lines because of sectarianism that
we give up the idea of having any politics at all, which is certainly the
case with many of my friends, and what I see out there.
And I think that the problem with Deleuze and Guattari is that
they idealize the schizo flow as deterritorializing, where there's just
this free flow of energy between people who don 't exist in material ,
historical conditions , and I don ' t believe that . I believe that every­
thing exists within material, historical situations, within contexts. And
that there ' s nothing wrong with territorializations or characteriza­
tions, if we understand them to be provisional contextualizations. In
fact, these territorializations and characterizations that we make are
our language, are our world . We create these structures with our lives,
"taking hands into our history. " And so to discount those things as
merely arbitrary, to me , is the problem .
 18
Charles Bernstein

And that' s why I disagree with the way language is characterized

within French structuralist thought from Saussure to Derrida, in
which language is thought to be divided in a polarity between the sig·
nifier and the signified, as two different things, and that the relation
between the sound and the mental image is arbitrary. I don' t thinl
that relationship is arbitrary and to characterize it as arbitrary sug·
gests that characterization is purely arbitrary.
Watten: But that ' s two different meanings at two different times.
When Saussure wanted to talk about the arbitrariness of the sign what
he meant was that it was not mystic . He v:as trying to get rid of undue
concern with etymology in 1 9th-century linguistics , and that ' s exact!)'
what that means, and it doesn ' t mean a nything e lse. I wish somebody
would put it on a billboard someplace . Because , absolutely, the arbi·
trariness of the sign just means he's separating his characterization of
language from the historical description of 1 9th-century linguistics,
that ' s al l.
Bemstein: Criticism insofar as it's provisional sets up terms.
And those things do have value within their context , but when they
get reified and taken out of their context , then you have this monster
which gets created . In every generation the work is summarized, and
characterized from one to the next, and this gets compounded when
you 're dealing with different languages. It gets increasingly reductive
and problematic because it embeds basic ideas and dualisms which
had a strategic function within the context of the original criticism but
become these universal principles which then have to be attacked just
in the way Saussure has to attack etymology by proposing his things,
just as I could be forced into attacking those things because of the
monster that was created from that. ·

It seems to me that criticism , rather than trying to establish fixed

things which are good for everything, in its best exists at a provisional
level, and that that provisional quality doesn ' t need to be masked . But
the wrinkle in it is that that masking has social power. If you don't
mask it , it doesn't have the impact on an audience .
And , again , I'm going to be ambivalent about this issue, which
is certainly somethi ng that I should be criticize d for.
 19
Characterizatio n

Watten: Okay, Charles, I really think you should purge your vo­
cabulary of phrases like " structural linguistics from Saussure to Der­
rida. "
Bernstein: I should purge my . . . ?
Watten: You shouldn ' t allow yourself to say that . And that would
be the answer to the whole thing. I mean , if you know better . . .
Kit Robinson: Why can 't he say that?
Watten: Because it ' s not only a provisional construction , but it 's
an illusory and unexamined construction that you in fact know better
of. And so in fact you can do better.
Bernstein: Yes, but I can 't really. That ' s the point . I can't make
this point sufficiently about how perverse, to me, this particular char­
acterization of language as an arbitrary distinction between the signi­
fied and the signifier is, which I think infects a good deal of the criti­
cism that we deal with in the United States. The arbitrariness, this
idea of decoding, all this is built into that notion .
Silliman: But your concept of resistance to characterization re­
constructs exactly the kind of structure-to use that term-that you ' re
criticizing Deleuze and Guattari for. That ' s why I asked about the guy
from Sea World in " Standing Target" as distinct from the characteri­
zations of yourself. There ' s a real question of the social frames that
these characterizations occur in. Just as with the Bill Bernbach, which
is in fact an ad for an ad company. It's not about Bill Bernbach at all .
He's a great excuse to do an ad .
The same kind of social use occurs in a wide range of ways. And
you recognize that and say, yes, it 's always partial , it 's a form of vio­
le nce, it's manipulative, it socially encodes who we are , and yet this
idea of resistance seems to privilege some kind of natural , native pro­
priocep tive sense of self-image . Right now, you 're the person who' s
the spe aker here , right? The lights are shining down and you 're re­
sponding to it with a whole series of different social factors than if you
were interviewing one of your doctors for one of those monographs.
And you don' t get away from that. Yet you seem to be privileging
that . . . space between self and self-image, to just use that term
rou ghly.
 20
Charles Bernstein

Bemstein: I actuall y think that it's the opposite. My sense is th�[

there ' s no way to get outside of these kinds of characterizations a

selves and self, and so it ' s a blank category to speak of being freed o
self-image . But I do want to privilege the role of critique in question·
mg.
Mandel: But, let ' s say, in your treatment o f " the treatment of
Bill Bembach, were you engaging in critique and questioning or wen
you simply putting it in further frames?
Bemstein: No, I was doing both . . .
Mandel: Bill Bernbach, whosoever he may have been , could bt
characterized in a way that would be consonant with some good use Oi
characterization , right? I mean , he was a person , and that ' s a start
1
But that ' s not somethin g you did . Does that pose a problem for you
Is characterization strategic and , if so , is there not some requirement
that the strategy be laid bare ?
Bemstein: I f there is n o escape from characterization , then om
thing you can do is to try to characterize the characterization , but in
characteri zing the characterization you ' re not escaping from the char·
acterization . You ' re simply, as you ' re saying, creating another frarm
around it . It seems to me there is a value in tryin g to locate that kina
of thing.
There are two things I want to talk about in respect to thi s : strat·
egies for criticism , and how you can deal with these things in poetry
itself to create a music of contrasting characterization s , so that you can
have not only this monoplanar or dyadic movement to characteriza·
tion , framing the frame , but that you can have lots of different angles
in compo sition so that the whole sounding of the various characteriza·
tions gets heard and made palpable .
In editing L A N G U A
= = = = = = G E, we were interested in
=

allowing for a space for writing which did n ' t exist at the level of expos·
itory discourse . That ' s something I ' ve always been sympathet ic with.
The problem with expository pattern s , but also w hat accounts for
their social force , is that they repress some terms or issues because
they are complicated or contradictory or just " other" and overftXate
on others that fit the " picture " and add to its impact . C ertain tech·
niques are used to create a little more dramatic focus-I want to at·
 21
Characterization

tack Derrida, I don' t attack the Yale critics who are easier targets be­
cause it's less effective than attacking the more interesting people who
are more formidable , and even to mention Saussure , and so on .
These kinds of strategic things constantly operate within the realm of
criticism. In other words, the expository mode itself forces certain ar­
guments and excludes others .
Actually, the TV Shopper; one of my favorite magazines in New
York, has this article on C harlotte Curtis who' s the editor of the Op­
ed page of the Times, who says the following: " Our method was to
take an issue , decide what we thought should be said about it, and
then find an independent writer who would express our point of
view . " [laughter] This is why you have to read the TV Shopper, it' s
really an extraordinary [laughter] method .
What I love is that she ' s really very clear about this. "Our
method . . . " -because she 's an editor, and she does have a method,
"was to take an issue . . . and find an independent writer who would
express our point of view . We had no ideology. . . . " (laughter]
I ' m going to do like in the magic shows, have somebody verify
that I ' m really reading this. (laughter] This is in contradiction to my
theory that I have to make up the quotes because I can make them
more outrageous . But C harlotte Curtis has provided me with some­
thing better-well , as good as I could have written. [laughter]
" We had no ideology ; we went issue by issue . " And I think one
of the claims to power within normative discourse is that claim to non­
ideology.
I think Silliman runs into a lot of criticism because people think
his work is didactic . And it is, hopefully, because it has a method , and
that is to elucidate certain issues that he deals with . People say to me,
"That Ron , he 's such a beautiful poet , why does he have these didac­
tic essays? " And I say that the beauty of Ron ' s work is that it' s not
there to fool you into thinking it ' s this neutral truth . And when you
hear the gears of his argument grinding from first to second to third,
that's what makes that work important. If it was these seamless webs
of the New C riticism , it couldn ' t do what it ' s doing.
And it ' s very hard for us, for me, to get over the desire for this
elega nt, seamless , logical discourse when writing criticism , because
 22
Charles Bernste in

for on e thin g it has a real power. People all of a sudden start to liste�
to what you say when you talk in that lan guage. I don't thin k by an:
means one should abandon that field. Because I thin k that to cede th
power only to people who want to use it fo r things that you disagr.
with is politically foolish.
Mandel: So what is the function of it? "I don 't want to take o
the Yale critics. It's more fun to tak e on people who are more formida·
ble like Derrida himself. " There's also a strategies of influence there
too. If you keep takin g out hordes of footsoldiers as they approad
with the ir de rived an d reduced version s of things, you can ne ve:
really clear away . . .
Bernstein: "The king speaks to the king."
Mandel: Right. So it's a position in g of the self.
Bernstein: It's positionin g where your argument is. An d tha
kin d of characterization, especially if you can do it without bein g no
ticed, is on e of the most powerful social forms. It has a very spe cifi
relation ship with diplomacy-who you address an argument to, wh1
you leave out. For example, it's a mark of criticism who can under·
stan d what it is you're talking about, the references, the n ature of th1
referen ces. Now I didn 't actually explain who Derrida was. That's·
measure of what I assume people in this audien ce to understan d, bu
it also has that inherent positionin g in it. It's a matter of etiquette
social codes that include by excludin g.
Mandel: So this is exactly what Ron was sayin g about the Bem
bach ad. That ad, while it uses the foun der of the agency, actually u
designed to characterize Doyle Dan e Bernbach and the people then1
n ow.
Bernstein: You know it because it was the smallest thin g. Th1
smallest thin g is obviously what it's an ad for.
Silliman: It's like the Dewar's scotch ad.
Bernstein: You mean the Philip Glass one? "When Phil get!
home from a hard day composin g . . . " [laughter] and "Twelve note!
that revolutionized music. " Now there's a characterization of Phu
Glass that surely he must need to drin k a bottle of scotch to get over.
[laughte r] And he's holding the.se pictures of notes. And it says, "Phu
Glass started out as a typical, derivative young composer." I me an
there's another. I hope they gave him a lot of scotch because . ll . .
 23
Characterization

fact , the only difference is that when he started out he didn ' t have the
budget for the big-scale works , didn ' t have the recognition , the pub­
licity. So he started out as a typically derivative , i . e . , not approved by
The New York Times and Dewar ' s scotch , young composer, and drove a
cab , and then he discovered twelve notes, period . Twelve notes which
revolutionized music, period . When Phil gets home from a hard day
composing- I ' m sure he must have drunk more when he was driving
the cab . [lau ghter]
Mandel: But not Dewar' s .
Bernstein: It ' s a beautiful color picture , too . B u t we may have
the brand wrong. But anyway. " We had no ideology. We went issue
by issue. Often we ' d later run comment by a thinker on the extreme
left and extreme right . " I ' ve never actually seen an article in The New
York Times by anybod y on the extreme left .
Silliman: Walter Mondale? [laughter]
Bernstein: The extreme right . . .
Mandel: . . . has not yet been found .
Bernstein: . . Not by Charlotte Curtis . Now she ' s talking to the
.

TV Shopper, which is not the New lVrk Magazine audience or The Wall
Street journal audience . They presumably buy TV Guide. Or have the
Sunday Times section . This is the thing you get in the supermarket .
And it' s mostly ads . I get it in my local xerox store .
" Often we ' d later run comment by a thinker on the extreme left
or the extreme right . The point was to help readers understand an is­
sue by trying to present all 360 degrees of it. " Now somebody should
verify that I ' ve read that . [laughter] "All 360 degrees. " All of a sud­
den we have this metaphor o f the globe .
I used to feel , being influenced by Stein, that there was no place
for straight expository writing . There are poets now , and poets from
the pre vious 20 or 30 years , who were so appalled by the kind of dis­
co urse , the kind of positioning that went on in criticism that they sim­
ply refus ed to do it. And I think that was a choice . To simply say,
" I ' m not going to get involved with that kind of characterizing, be­
cau se the best thing to do is be silent , apart from the poetry. ' ' Another
cho ice was the " Composition as Explanation " mode , which was the
one that very much struck me for a long time , that Stein was the great
exponent of, and Greeley in his essays, Will iams in his imaginative
 24
Charles Bernstein

prose. L= A= N= G= U= A = G= E had a lot of essays in that m?�e ,

that weren ' t expository. Oddly, I have lately found myself wntmg ,
things that would fit some of the prescriptions that the MLA , � tc.,
puts forward. And I'm not quite sure why I ' ve done that . Certamly
last night was an instance. They' re a little bit quirky at times, but the
quirkiness is not that great .
Palmer: But also, Charles, there' s a way in which what you 're
saying is quite clear, that there' s a functional strategy involved with
normative prose that would serve your purposes equally. And I think
that it doesn' t seem strange at all that at a certain point you would
move over there any more than it would seem strange that Barry
[Watten] and Lyn [Hejinian] would decide that for Poetics journal they
would more or less be emphasizing a version of normative critical dis·
course to show how certain kinds of thinking can operate in that terri·
tory.
Bernstein: That's right. That's exactly the way I can under·
stand that . I think that one of the reasons that I feel the freedom to do
that , and even to do this, is the intense distrust I have for normative
expository form . But , also, I questioned the hierarchialization of style,
or mode let ' s say, that I found myself guilty of. That this particular
thing, Poetry, capital P-that Poesy and expressing yourself is some·
how better, whereas when I talk to people , this is pretty much the way
·

I would talk. Ron?

Silliman: I think you ' re absolutely right . But the other aspect of
that , which I find more and more distressing, is the degree to which
"Composition as Explanation , " if you want to call it that, or artsy
criticism might be another characterization of it, is as much an anti·
intellectual gesture as is the refusal to speak . Both of them come out of
negative reactions to the previous discourse. So when people do actu·
ally make those attempts to go in the direction you' re talking about, as
in Poetics Journal- I mean , I ' ve heard from at least two friends th at
I 've completely capitulated to the New Critics by speaking, quote,
more plainly than I have on other occasions.
Bernstein: Well , probably in a piece persuasively attacking the
New Criticism !
Silliman : But it' s clear-and by printing so much of the stuff
 25
Characterization

L = A = N= G = U = A = G = E is one of the things that makes it

clear-that it is absolutely as easy to be manipulative , or to mask con­
fusions using that form . . .
Bernstein: . . . as it is using the regular. I think that ' s true . To
privilege any mode immediately m asks certain aspects, that ' s what
I'm saying, which becomes problematic .
The other thing is-see , I have a very suspicious mind and I feel
that what you ' re saying about this anti-intellectualism , and being si­
lent-if there ' s some kind of social pressure that makes you feel you
can be silent and leave the world and this kind of discourse to them
and let them play in that field , I ' m too good for it- I ' m suspicious of
that because it cedes this discourse of power over to those who are will­
ing to use it. I mean , who profits from this attitude exactly, like you
" express " and leave the power to us? " But they like being marginal ! "
Still , entering into the discourse of power is painful , if you have ears ,
because power is crude . I ' m no temperance-preaching ex-alcoholic in
this. I don ' t have a problem with poets who choose not to write criti­
cism , or who choose to write in the composition as explanation style .
B u t I agree with what you ' re saying nonetheless.
Palmer: C an I disagree ? First of all , I don ' t take either of these
gestures as anti-intellectual , necessarily. Remember the place of si­
lence , when and where and how it ' s used-for example, the contex­
tual use of silence can be an enormously powerful political act . It can
be an absolutely articulate rejection of the procedures themselves.
Also, I ' d be reluctant to characterize that Steinian mode of refusal of
discurs ive explanation as anti-intellectual .
Bernstein: I don ' t . I didn ' t quite understand Ron to be saying
that , either. Look, I love that stuff as much as any other kind of writ­
ing. I also published a magazine with Bruce Andrews which had hun­
dreds and hundreds of pages of such writing. But I understand Ron to
be saying that there ' s the possibility for an anti-intellectualism within
that . Much as I think that rationalism has that same possibility. One
of the points I made last night in " Words and Picture s " was that , in
t alking about Zukofsky and Williams, a lot of people ' s reaction
against the academy tended to cede rationality to- I certainly have
done this at times , so I don ' t mean to exclude myself-has ceded this
 26
Charles Bernstein

kind of rationalistic discourse to the academy. That ' s what I object to.
Because I think that unthought , unmethodical , rote, rationalized ex·
pository writing is as anti-intellectual as anything' s going to be .
Watten: What upsets me is this characterization of a form.
Because I ' m much more interested in positive values of that kind of
writing than I ' m interested in moving away from what has been char·
acterized as " composition as explanation style " in L=A=N
= G = U= A = G = E. There ' s a whole tradition of what I consider ex·
pository, and I think it' s great , like Pound and Williams, that wasn't
really reached by the works in L = A = N= G= U = A = G = E. I n Wil·
Iiams' critical writings he ' s very thematic , he takes on a question and
he writes about it in a very inspired way. That ' s what I ' d like to see as
values for that rather than " Let ' s not indulge ourselves with composi·
tion as explanation " and going for some strategic motivations.
There ' s a constant looking at a form in a static way in your approach.
When I hear strategic . . .
Bernstein: I was saying strategic not referring to what you were
doing. The oddness of my making this point, rather than someone
who doesn ' t do i t , is that I certainly have been putting forward , to my
ability to do so, as straight an expository work as anyone else in this
context . So when I talk about strategic, I ' m talking about impulses
within myself.
I find it hard to put forward Williams in the Selected Essays, -I
think that stuff is very strategic . Pound is incredibly strategic. I don' t
criticize him for that , but certainly that ' s what a lot of that is .
Palmer: He considered it primarily strategic .
Bernstein: And what I ' m saying is-and this may be the dis·
agreement with you [Watten)-that I don ' t think there ' s anything
wrong with being strategic, if you ' re clear about the fact that you ' re
being strategic and you understand the context , because sometimes
being strategic is the only thing that ' s going to get heard .
One has to be aware of the inherent values within , and the inher·
ent limitations of, any kind of mode . I think there ' s an attraction to
power that is, for me , disingenu ous to deny. I like to get responses
when I write things . I got more response to " Three or Four Things I
Know About Him" than to anything else I had written up to the
tim e
 27
Characterization

because here it was in this . . . it wasn ' t expository exactly, it was sort of
about working, and it was about . . . I mean , you can ' t miss those
thi ngs .
Silliman: A lot of people at first couldn ' t tell whether that was ,
quote , a piece , or a piece of criticism .
Bernstein: That ' s right . Even though it was ambiguous in that
way, it nonetheless had chunks that were more normal than other of
my works . So I ' m just saying it ' s hard for me as a writer dealing with
these things not to be swayed . Various styles have various extrasocial
implications which are implicit within them and it ' s not that the au­
thor can control them . By using those modes authors participate in
them , and they can try to confute them or call attention to them , or
they can not .
In some ways, there hasn ' t been that much genuinely straight
stuff in Poetics Journal. I actually think that it ' s funny that we may
think that . In a lot of ways, that stuff is extremely bizarre . It ' s only the
measure of our own intense , intense bizarreness that we take a
slight . . . [laughter] Certainly " Three or Four Things I Know About
Him " is a very bizarre looking thing, but to me that was like my put­
ting on patent leather shoes . And the distinctions we make between
more or less expository poeticizations are , while very real, and tangi­
ble , are to somebody outside all lumped together, compared to Char­
lotte Curtis' globe . This is what the discourse of power is about in the
sense that I mean , not Poetics Journal. " . . . and then find an indepen­
dent writer who would express our point of view . "
But I also wanted to get to poetry, why we should call criticism
" fictio n " and save " nonfiction " for poetry. Because I have been writ­
in g poetry that also contains discursive sentence s . And by combining
tho se sen tences with other types o f l anguage , the clash in the sounds of
the discourses creates a polyphony that interests me . So for instance I
may not agree with a particular political opinion in a poem , it may be
false from my point of view . But it is the anxiety of indetermination
th at is of interest . The political dimension is not the opinion of any
isolated sentence , but the experience of hearing the possibilities of truth
and lies and in-between, and , as readers , choosing. Because to read is
to ch oose ; I j ust want to bring that process to the fore .
 28
Charles Bernstein

I try to create a situation where it' s hard for me to know what I

think about something. I like very strong statements; I like especially
statements that first appear to be either false or true but then begin to
destabilize-like a radioisotope. And that sound . . . I don ' t want to
say . . . I was going to say it stops being content, but that ' s false . . . and
then once again . . . see that interests me because I don' t know what
that means. I don't know how anything could stop being content,
"and that's false" comes upon it, what gets to interest me is the sound
of "and that's false. " And then you lay down another sound under
that or over it. That's what the process of writing is, dealing with that
level of tone and never discounting it. If you focus in on the so-called
meaning as divorced from the sound, you have no idea what the
meaning is. It' s when you start to hear the tonal qualities as the mean­
ing of that . . . You hear the tones, which is to hear characterizations,
and then resonate them, attach additional possibilities that destabilize,
and then work to make that indefiniteness tangible, audible .
Larry Eigner: The question is how you get going and how you
keep it up. That may be a real mysterious question , especially when
you can ' t do it . [laughter) But you say that the words get destabilized
that began as stronger statements . You say the sound becomes the
meaning, so you pay more attention to the sound the more doubtful
the statement becomes.
Bernstein: And that resonance brings you closer to the meaning
of the words . For any given person, the appro ach to, the hearing of,
language is going to be different . We come at this thing we share-our
language , our world , what we see , which is in common , but we come
at it from different angles . We have different resistances to language
that create the different sounds in people' s poems or speech or concep­
tions.
Carla Harryman: When you say " resistances" do you mean
blocks, how am I going to get from this point to this point when all I
see is a blank, or resistance to the past , resistance to tradition, or re­
sistance to your mother?
Bernstein: I mean it also in the physical sense-if I go from here
to there air is resistant. Gravity. An impedance, a weight, that you ' re
pressing against and by pressing against it you create " sound . " And
 29
Characterization

what you ' re pressing against is the enormous amount of built-in char­
acterizations that are already there before you characterize anything.
Silliman: In your work , at any given point , there is the meaning
of the words immediately in front of you , but it ' s not necessarily the
meaning of the work as a whole-by a long shot . There ' s one almost
abstract , or constructed , sense in which every individual poem , as in
fact every individual book , means something, however inexpressible
in an individual newspaper phrase it might be . At the same time , at
any given point in the book you are so far from that by mechanisms of
irony and , in the most neutral sense of the word , distortion that
you 've set u p . In " Substance Abuse " the sentence about " death is the
only apparent limit " can be read in about eight different ways and
there are few cues as to which the context woul d edit out . At the same
time , the books clearly set up limits . ---'

Bernstein: I don ' t think I manage to achieve as many different

possible interpretations as I might like . [ laughter ] I' m very much lim­
ited by what makes sense to me , because of this horribly mistaken but
nonetheless ongoing concern for the poem to sound right . I have a de­
sire for an infinitely negative capability, and yet I am always coming
upon very concrete forms of stabilization , characterization , that make
patterns in respect to one another, which is what you notice at the level
of this book .
So there ' s a desire to push thin gs as far as they will go and the
recognition that it doesn ' t go all that far. But if you don ' t push, you
don ' t even find out the most obvious relations , the most obvious
meanings . The process, to call it destabilization is itself false , ends up
creating these tightly woven , webbed formations .
B u t you say I get a t this b y irony and distortion . Now , distor­
tio n , that ' s one thing . . . but I ' ve never operated with irony. [ laughter ]
Comedy yes , schticks is more my . . .
Susan B . Laufer: But you do use irony.
Bernstein: I don ' t think of it that way. Even
if that appears to be
the case in some instances-and it ' s always deceptive-you have to
take into account the context in which the statement appears . And
that whatever I include I like, am fascinated or engaged by, in some
way that doesn ' t reduce simply to irony.
 30
Charles Bernstein

This is not to make the nice-guy distinction between laughing at

and laughing with . There ' s nothing so great as to laugh at. But con­
tempt and condescension and righteousness are not irony either; or

we laugh at the arrogance of those attitudes, and so on through a mul­

tiple regression of frames . By " resistance " I ' m perhaps suggesting
something like laughing at , myself included .
My problem with irony is that it is a set-up in which the " real "
meaning is the opposite of the surface meaning. X equals not X . It's
just another binary system , like the ambiguity in a drawing of a duck
that can also be read as a drawing of a rabbit . I t ' s the difference be­
tween a double entendre and j oycean word play. Irony is simple am·
biguity : ironic/iconic . What I want is humor that opens out i nto a

multivolitional field destabilizing to any fixed meaning that can be as·

signed and that persists out of context . Octavia Paz has used the term
" meta- irony : an irony that destroys its negation and , hence , returns
in the affirmative . " But I wouldn ' t want to stop at that flip back to the
affirmative but to go beyond yes and no . Humor as destabilizing not
only the negation to mean affirmation but the affirmation also-the
idea of a perpetual motion machine that never stops pinging and
ponging off the walls, ceilings, floors. So returns to . . . let ' s say " the
absolute , " maybe the ineffable-everywhere said , nowhere stated.
But then I would n ' t want to make humor into too serious a business.
 Rae Armantrout

Poetic Silence

Rae Armantrout : There is an aesthetic effect I am attracted by,

interested in , which has been difficult for me either to explain or de­
fine . I felt it had something to do with empty space left in a work, or
following one , a kind of palpable stoppage , a silence that was a ges­
ture . I'm using the occasion of this talk to examine my feelings for
what Max Picard called, " The gleam that surrounds the word en­
closed in human silence . "
There is little natural silence left in the world . There i s the con­
t inual noise of engines, but beyond this there are constantly in our
ears or memory the ghostly messages from television , radio, bill­
boards, etc. These voices are a noise which requires no response , so it
may be received subliminally. But , I think, the impulse to response re­
mains. Somewhere , beneath consideration , are thoughts which are
automatic, random answers to bits of the media barrage . Words no
longer come from silence , but directly from other words. One finds
oneself speaking, involved perhaps in a debate the terms of which are
always already set . And there is the impulse to call a halt, the impulse
to silence .
What are the types of human silence?
There is the silence which admits mistake .

The silence which concedes personal limit, or finitude.

The silence which indicates the presence of the ineffable . Heidigger
31
 32
Rae Armantrout

says, "The earth appears as itself only when it is perceive � and � re­
served as that which is by its nature undiscloseable , that whiCh shrmks
from every disclosure and constantly keeps itself closed up .

There is the silence which is silenced by the presence of another.

The silence which waits for an unknown response. Picard says of a poet
he adm ires, " He leaves a clear space into which another can speak. He
makes the subject his own , but does not keep it entirely for himself.
Such poetry is therefore not fixed and rigid , but has a hovering quality
ready at any moment to belong to another.

There is the silence that occurs when someone you have been consider·
ing from a distance turns and stops you with thei r look.

Negative interpretations of deliberate silence can also be made.

Silence can be used to inflate a subject with false grandeur ; it can be
the crutch of a weak argument ; it can be a cloaking device u sed to dis·
courage the reaching of a possible conclusion. And yet silence may
also mark the legitimate bounds of certainty.
In this talk I intend to discuss poems in which I see silence as a
conscious component, and poems in which I do not . I 've chosen all
my examples from what I consider to be good work.
As we know , a new sort of long prose poem has developed and
gained increasing influence over the last few years . I want to argue,
not against this sort of prose poem , but for the value of the lyri c for·
mat , and its greater potential for evoking silence .
To describe it simply, maybe over-simply, this new p rose poem is
most often composed of non-narrative , declarative sentence s . The de­
clarative sentence declares. Thu s such poems tend to create a t one of
certainty, of resolution and completeness which leaves little room for
the experience of silence . The relations between these non-narrative
sentences tend to be many, dense and problematic . After each period
the reader is left more with a puzzle than a pause . How does this part
fit the whole .
Before I begin to use example s, I want to say that I am character·
i �ing work, not writers , since most of the writers I will quote
could , in
different instance s , inhabit either of my categories .
 33
Poetic Silence

My first example of this prose poem which makes less use of si­
lence is a passage from Bob Perelman ' s a. k. a.

A man mows his lawn and you are there, or Richard Eberhart. No ter­
ritory so neutral it doesn ' t hold thousands of the wrong dead . Obstacles
doing time in myth emit a steady stream of words. A protein chain
sounded like a good investment .

I choose this passage for two reasons : First because it says (in fact
every sentence restates differently) that silence is no longer possible
because each scene of our lives suggests conditioned verbal associa­
tions. The other, nonthematic , reason I chose this is because , in keep­
ing with its meaning, the sentence breaks here do not invite silence .
After each sentence one makes a certain effort and then has the sensa­
tion , and satisfaction , of getting the point . And , at least for me , there
is t he experience of assent . Yes , he ' s right . Beneath the apparent dis­
creteness of these sentences, there is a hubbub of su rprising connec­
tions. One smiles, for instance , at the indirect characterization of Ri­
chard Eberhart as " one of the wrong dead . "
M y second excerpt is from Lyn Hejinian ' s prose poem
" D ormer. "

We drew trees from life , and I determined to draw each leaf, then re­
signed myself to drawing a semblance of " each leaf. " Representation
rather than imitation . " Clip clop " went the horse on the road ; the hen
said "cluck . " A lizard 16.33 centimeters long withdraws into a hole in
the ground . Movement in space is first perceived by its attack character.

As in the Perelman passage , every sentence here is a variation on

a them e . Each shows a way in which representation is standardized ,
unequ al to the world . Neither Perelman ' s or Hejinian ' s poem , by the
way, deals with a single theme throughout . Rather themes seem to oc­
cu r over sentence clusters , and then disappear, perhaps later to be
echoed or recast . In the Hej inian passage one derives pleasure from
the variety of sources from which she draws her instances : child ' s
book , p ainting, scientific measurement, etc . The reader ' s activity lies
 34
Rae Armantrout

in registering the cacophony of these sources , and in perceiving the re·

lations between a sentence and sentences elsewhere in the text . Thus
arrows point back and forth within a fairly lengthy poem . Nothing
here is especially framed to point outside the system .
The third writer I ' d like to mention in this context is Peter
Seaton . His work is quite different from Perelman ' s and Hejinian's,
and I admittedly know and understand it less well . Still I want to in·
elude a passage from " How to Read VI . "

The mind does not need the idea o f activity. The idea by which we dis·
criminate between kinesthetic ideas is sometimes swamped in the vivid
origin of remote existence . As he writes he has no anticipation, as a

thing distinct from his sensation , of either the look or digital feel of the
letters which flow from his pen . The words buzz in his mental ear, but
not his mental eye or hand . Some people he writes were writers too. I
have been asked to write war for the new masses.

In Seaton ' s writing, as distinct from the writers previously men·

tioned , sentence flows into sentence almost imperceptibly. Indeed in
mid-passage Seaton describes a certain sensual deprivation , the in·
ability to visualize the words he ' s w riting. The rather numbing
smoothness of Seaton ' s work is created by his repetition of certain or·

dinary, general t erms such as " idea" in the first part of the quote or
" write" in the latter part . The way he u ses these words tends to block
not only the signification , but also consideration at any point . Thus
the text produces a kind of white noise . It proceeds steadily and auto·
matically, never threatening to derail the reader, or pull him up short.
Suppose a writer wants to make room in her work for silence , for
the experience of cessation ; how is this accomplished?
1 . She may end a line or a poem abruptly, unexpectedly, some·
how short of resolution .
2 . She may create extremely tenuous connections between parts
of a poe m .
3 . She may deliberately create the effect o f inconseq uence .
4. She may make use of self-contr adiction or retractio n.
5 . She may use obvious ellipsis.
 35
Poetic Silence

6 . She m ay use anything which places the existent in perceptible

relation to the non-existent , the absent or outside .
For instance , Williams begins several sections of "] anuary
Morning" with a dash and the word " and . " Here ' s one such :

-and the sun , dipping into the avenues

streaking the tops of
the irregular red houselets,
and
the gay shadows dropping and
dropping.

This uses several of the devices I listed . First , it begins with an

ellipsis , pointing backward and outward to the unsaid . Secondly, this
stanza is in a way inconsequential , that is, Williams has nothing much
to say about these things; he only points to their being. Thirdly the
stanza ends on a note of irresolution , " dropping and dropping. " It
seems bottomless , and points downward and outward toward an un­
known future .
Robert Grenier' s " Fall Winter Family Home , " i n Series, is a
long poem in which each short section is isolated on its own half page .
Connections between the segments, though subtle and tenuous , are
numerous enough to warrant presenting them simply as stanzas of a
long poem, separated by normal size stanza breaks . I nstead Grenier
chose to use shiny expanses of white paper as a presence in the work ,
signifying the finiteness and loneliness of the words. He makes strik­
ing use of the page surface in the passage which read s :

VOLUME
MORNING
light
some
sort of a
futile joyous
W H ITE SUN
 36
Rae Armantrout

" VOLU ME" alone in caps on the top half page makes a kind of
pun by making graphic the confronta tion between being and non-be·
ing which it also mentions. The following segment , " Morning //
light , " seems to contradict the one above , to dematerialize volume by
turning it to light . The opening two lines of the opposite page , " some!
sort of a, " make a modest, tentative approach to expression . The
third line , " futile joyous , " though not exactly an oxymoron, is not too
far from being one , and thus partakes of the silence of the con·
founded . The fourth line , " WHITE SUN , " stands somewhat apart
from its qualifiers , as a simple separate phenomenon- simple enough
to disappear without having to disengage first from a complicated
world . The word white , here , reminds me not so much of sun , which
is generally associated with yellow , as of the glowing whiteness of the
surrounding page .
Larry Eigner also makes significant use of spacing as well as of
line breaks . The following work appeared in This n:

the sunlight
sideways slant grazing
the keyboard
beyond
silent
dust through the air
while the wind sounds !�aves
the vine still
lathing shadows
the black, yellow-eyed cat

.
�
There e several ways a writer could use line break to open up a
silence . Radtcal enj ambments which leave the reader hanging might
be one way. But this is not what Eigner does. His lines, however short
or fragmentary, seem in a way self-contained . Eigner achieves a maxi·
�
mum au onomy for the elements of his poem by minimizing the
.
grammatical connectiOns between, or sometimes even within lines.
For instance , by not adding an apostrophe s to " sunlight " he �ves a
 37
Poetic Silence

measure of independence to the subsequent noun " slant . " Verbs ,

which usually serve t o establish relation , are few here , and ambigu­
ous, often doubling as nouns, like those in the line " while the wind
sounds leaves . " As things in this poem are scattered in unstated rela­
tion to one another, the lines themselves are scattered unpredictably
off the margins . Thus every presence in the poem like the " black , yel­
low-eyed cat " (made especiall y substantial by assonance and em­
phatic rhythm) is a bit surprising as if it steps forward out of nowhere ,
from silence .
The preceding three examples are perhaps the clearest , coming
from the work of writers who almost always include silences within
their text s . But I ' d like to proceed with four examples from the works
of writers who , like most of u s , sometimes do, though in ways perhaps
less obvious .
Another example of silence as a component o f poetry can be
found in Bill Berkson ' s small prose poem " Domino " in This 5:

A mother and son playing Dominoes on the floor in the cool of late au­
tumn afternoon sun , upstairs of the litde country house they live in . It is
very intent, like the eucalyptus. Two cats, male and female, turn and
jell on the patchwork (Vermont) bedspread . This is Northern Califor­
nia. Every ten minutes or so, one of the players shouts out
" Domino ! "

This poem seems poised on some edge-the border I ' d say be­
tween the significant and the inconsequential . And that interests
me- the question of what ' s worth saying and of what can be said . As
a kin d of feat , Berkson holds our attention on things that would not
normall y hold our attention as readers . He does this in some simple
ways , like the unusual choice of the word "jell " to describe cats,
which , app earing at about the center of the poem , helps to make the
scen e set up, become solid and intent as Berkson says it is. Then
the re ' s the rhyme between " so " and " Domino ! " in the last line which
create s a kind of closure . But it is a false closure
in that it encloses
no th ing, only a bit of silen
ce .
 38
Rae Armantrout

A poem of m ine calle d " Compound " (Crawl Out lOur Window n)
also , I think, tries to straddle the fence between statement and non- ·

statement , or consequence and inconsequence .

Flat
destroyers drawn
on haze
beyond Convair ' s low roof,
and bare on-
ramps curling
up :
gray white
congruence near to
the invisible.
While in this
car the round
drumbeats of " Mona"
ftll our chests.

The first sentence describes a military-indu strial landscape in a

generally negative way, using words like " flat , " " bare , " and " gray, "
though there are terms here like " curling up" and " congruence , "
whose positive connotations somewhat undermine a simple reading.
Still when the reader arrives at the second sentence and sees that a

more inner environment is being described , she is likely to expect that

this sentence will make a defin ite contrast of some sort to the one
above . The words " round " and " full " seem , briefly, to fulfill her ex·
pectation . Then the mildly negative connotation of ending with the
" chest " (instead of, say, heart) and even the moan in " Mona" make
themselves heard , and a balance point is reached , a conundrum of
value , which amounts to silence . As Fredric Jameson says, " What
can in the world be resolved only throu gh the intervention of pr axis,
here comes before the purely contemplative mind as logical scandal o r
double-bind , the unthinkable and conceptually paradoxical , that
which cannot be unknotted by the operation of pure thought " (The
Political Unconscious).
 39
Poetic Silence

Steve Benson ' s work sometimes addresses itself to another who is

more than a structuring device , certainly not a rhetorical occasion for
producing the poem you had in mind-but instead is more like the
ever present possibility of contradiction . To illustrate I ' ll quote from a
transcribed performance. " Blindspots . "

You may want to go to bed

You may want to have a
really strong stare-down
You may want to follow every gesture, every
movement
Or you might
define a situation
for instance with
chairs or an activity.
You may feel responsible
How can I tell you there ' s no need to feel responsible?
Thi You may've already named
this being Well,

There's something presumptuous in perhaps saying you have a

choice-you may not s- I mean that may itself
not be
of any benefit

I t ' s as if Benson wants to reserve a place for objection , or to cre­

ate in the space the other might occupy a pivot on which to turn back
and see things from a different perspective . Though Benson makes
room for the listener thus, he doesn ' t trace her outline there . Note the
almost arbitrary variety of things the other in this piece is projected to
want . In this e ssentially empty reserved area, therefore , there is palpa­
ble silen ce .
Even long prose poems can , or course , incorporate silence . The
begin ning of Ron Sill iman ' s book T)'anting is tentative , full of retrac­
tio n as well as major rephrasing.
 40
Rae Armantrout

Not this.
What then?
I started over & over. Not this .
Last week I wrote " the muscles in my palm so sore from halving the
rump roast I cld barely grip the pen . " What then? This morning my lip
is blisterd .
Of about to within which. Again & again I began . The gray light of
day fill s the yellow room in a way wch is somber. Not this. Hot grease
had spilld on the stove top .
Not that either .
. .

I often feel overwhelmed by the l ikelihood of error, my apprehen­

sion of the inexactitude of thou gh t , and the impulse comes to cross out
and start again from scratch , wherever that i s . Silliman m akes this im­
pulse his subject here . And beyond that , by foregrounding thu s the
arbitrary, revisable nature of the text, he suggests to the reader the
radical premise that things might be otherwise , and points to the
realm of unrealized possibility.
The six writers whose u sage of silence I ' ve discu ssed , each in
their own way manage to empty a moment into which questions
then rise . " What then ? " Benson and S illiman u sed self- contradic­
tion and retraction to this effect . Eigner used tenuous connections,
isolating the elements of the poem grammatically and spatially to
produce the silence of self-containment . Berkson and Williams u sed
inconsequence ; Williams u sed ellipsis and abrupt beginning and
conclusion, to m ake us feel the weight of silence , and of the world . If
the purpose of poetry is, as Eigner has said , " to find the weights of
things ," then surely all the great phenomena, including silence,
must find place in this weighing.

Ron Silliman: You have a concept of silence almost as a

state , rather than as being one end of the spectrum o f sound . I ' m
curious a s t o the difference between those two ideas i n your head .
For me , it ' s very much more one end of the spectru m .
Armantrout: And s o you see silence a s more a deferral of
speech .
Tom Mande l: It ' s true that you seem to be sometim es meta·
 41
Poetic Silence

phorizing silence . You say that somebody ' s words seem to come
out of silence , by which you mean that they come out of nothin g .
That seems to b e a rather d i fferen t notion of silence than the one
that is a palp able silence .
Armantrout : There were different concepts of it , I think, in
the tal k . One of them has to do with com ing to a recognizable end
of your own though t , or recognizing that you ' ve t aken something
as far as you can and stan d i n g on the edge where i t has to be some­
thing other than you that m akes the next move , or the next state­
men t , the next sound , so there ' s that break , which is a sort of si­
lence .
Mandel : And you don ' t feel that , say, in Peter Seaton ' s text?
You don ' t feel that phase you ' re calling white noise in Peter
Seaton ' s wri t i ng might be a sort of similar bou ndary i n dicated in
the text? Or do you ?
Armantrout : Well , I fel t funny about including Seaton , be­
cause I ' m not really a great reader of him , and I could very easily
be w rong . Always in this talk I was only t alking about the passages
I was talking about , not the perso n ' s work as a whole . I n the pas­
sage I read , no, I don ' t hear any kind of break that m i ght indicate a
sense of the finiteness of the individual voice .
Carla Harryman: When you read that work , after the first
sentence , I had no idea whether it was your writing or his writing. It
w as the most interesting moment in the talk for me . Al so , it scared
me and so I stopped listenin g . [laughter] At the same time , it was ex­
tremely judgmental , in a way in which it could easily change its
mi nd . The re was this kind of assertion although there were not de­
cl arativ e sentences .
It seems that the way you ' re t alking about silence doesn ' t
w ant to engage j u d gment . You seem t o b e interested i n someplace
w here j ud gment doesn ' t exis t . Whereas in Bob ' s work and Lyn ' s
work and Peter ' s work there was some k i n d o f j ud gment being
made .
Armantrout: I guess that is a polarity that I was making.
An d I don ' t want to come down permanently on the side of non­
j udg ment . The feeling I get after reading a sentence from a prose
 42
Rae Armantrout

poem by Bob or Lyn is the feeling of measuring the truth of the

statement . And usually I find the statements very apt , b u t there is
that sense that they have taken a measure or a judgment o ff the
world , and then I apply my critical faculty to the truth of that state­
ment .
Mandel: But there is a tremendou s amount of j u d gment ,
and therefore statement , often accomplished by silence , by what ' s
left out , i n your work . One of the chief functions o f silence i s the
declaration of j udgment , right ? Silence can be a wall.
Armantrout: Well , that ' s true . I started out by saying all the
different things that I could think of that silence could be and al so
the negative as well as the positive things it could be.
Steve Benson: There ' s the poem w here you describe a spider
and then you say, " I ' m not l ike that ! " The description o f the spider
is these little phrases without capital ization in a short stanza and
then there ' s a drop and it says , capit al I , " I ' m not like that ! " That
seems to come out of a silen ce. I t ' s making a judgment , very im­
mediately. The things you ' re talking abou t using silence seem to
present j udgment more as a process i n which parts or aspects are
isolated and brought out with a certain power and definition.
When you say, " I ' m not like that ! " i t ' s sort of like , B an g ! I t seems
very impulsive .
Larry Eigner: M aybe it ' s not so much a suspension of j u dg­
ment as a su spension of the world ' s way in which you write the
judgment . Because a line break i s a silence , more or less of a pause
in the mind . You can ' t do it too much with your voice , m aybe , but
you can do it in the m ind . I t ' s a pause i n the mind where you go
back to the beginning of the next line , or you just drop a line . If
you have a comma that ' s not as long a sto p . A full stop is a period .
Barrett Watten: There ' s something you seem to identify si­
lence with which is the line break o r the terminat ion of the poem ,
which is actually also being accompl ished in the shifting of
frame
between any unit o f writing. And in all the example s you read
, in
fact , it was really very well done . There was a definite
d isplace­
ment that was very much the same effect that you were
looking for,
only you weren ' t looking for it in that form . And so it
doesn ' t seem
 43
Poetic Silence

like this distinction between the long prose text and the short ellip­
tical poem is really where it ' s at , because the same kind of mental
operation is being done , it ' s j u s t being done formally in a d i fferent
way.
But there are a couple of things on both sides that you didn ' t
bring in . One was the question o f irony. There ' s a u se o f silence in
order to mask inform ation o r mask intention . Like , you ' re only go­
ing to get so much and you fill in the gap s , which im mediately in­
vites somebody to bring their uncertainty into the picture , and it
establishes a power relationship between the ironist and the person
who is wi thou t the total handle on the intentions of the speaker.
Harryman : I t ' s sort o f an institutional structure .
Watten: Withholding of information is an institutional struc­
ture , righ t . But there ' s also a sense of deliberate b reakin g of ac­
knowledged frame s , which I would call irrational i t y, which I think
to some extent i s implied by Peter Seaton ' s use of the form , where
the idea is to irritate or to push back complicity with the fram ing.
Those are two aims that su rround this question of silence . I
think, act u ally, that the forms you were t alking about , the long
prose forms and the short poe m s , are more related .
Harryman : Also, I have to m ake a case for " The hen said
' cluck . ' " When you get t o " The hen said , " you ' ve already
stopped . You have to go back . I t ' s like there ' s a big empty place .
And there ' s a silence , because i t ' s l ike an idiom which is being
made into an assertio n . And so i t seems there are d i ffere nt planes
of silence i n that one sentence .
And , in fact , I was thinking when you were reading Lyn ' s work
that a lot of times I feel the potential for verse line in her prose .
There ' s almost like this decision not to have made this verse , which
gives you a sense of verse at the same time . I t ' s like you ' re reading
two tex ts . That ' s a very powerful spatial relationship that ' s made
t hat way.

Armantrout : I feel like this has some bearin g on what B arry

w as say i n g , and what you were saying, too , I hope . When I read
so me of these prose poem s , as I read one sentence it sets up an ex­
p ectat i on for what the next sentence may be l ike . And then there
 44
Rae Armantrout

always is a relation between the following sentence and the preced­

ing one , but it ' s never quite the relation you 've been led to expect,
i t ' s always something slightly askew . But there ' s never really a mo­
ment where there ' s no expectation , or when the weight o f what ' s
been said j u st s i t s there and y o u don ' t k n o w exactly what t o do with
it.
David Melnick : One of t h e kinds o f silence that you t al ked
about was where you don ' t speak , and there is a great deal o f l an­
guage goi n g on in your head that is waiting to be spoken o r not be
spoke n . And then there is another kind where you think of the
whole world of langu age and find that its horizon might be a total
void . Casteneda has a method that I ' m su re everybody ' s thought o f
in grammar school , which is when you try to think of nothing a
rush of thou ghts comes in . But of course he gets beyond where
most of u s get to , to the point where that rush of the world can it self
go away. And that ' s the peak of his void , which I sometimes see be­
tween the sentences in Ashbery, e specially between the lines in a
poem like " Eu rope . "
Armantrout : I think certain poems can sometimes give me
the brief e ffect of feeling that silence . M aybe it ' s an illu sion .
Mandel : Thinking of silence as Ron characterized it as one
end of the bell curve of language , that seems clearly to be some­
thing that is formally m anipulable as an element in writin g . And
then , on the other hand , if we ' re talking about Heidigger, where si­
lence is a metaphysical screen as l arge as the whole of langu age and
set against it , or is something more like reality, that seems like
someth ing that can be indicated . Like when Wittgenstein says
what we can ' t think about we m u s t remain silent about , and th at
would be an indication . That ' s what I m ean about Peter Seat o n ' s
work . A lot of it has to do with the limit atio n s of an individual ' s
language .
And Bob ' s w ork often accom pl i shes a very similar thing and
can be a little bit like that sile n ce which is another version of reality.
A verb being u sed in place of another verb , a word being u sed in
place of another word , -it is itself, but it also fu nctions as a counter
 45
Poetic Silence

for that other word , and therefore the silence of that , the non-pres­
ence of that . I think that is in Bob ' s work in a way, and maybe it is
in all work insofar as one of the things that is done in writing is se­
lectio n . One of the axes of langu age i s selection , and one of the axes
is combination .
Armantrout : Well , you ' re probably right . [laughter] This is
why I never wanted to give a talk . [ l au ghter] What I wanted to say
is that I like this e ffect of silence . What I did not want to say is that
I can drive a d ividing l ine down the center of literature and put half
the people over here and half the people over there . That is not
really what I wanted to say. [ l au ghs]
Melnick : Tom , I think you ' re withdrawing the distinction
Rae is trying to make . By that definition , Alexander Pope would
be a poet full of silences , because his lines were witty and full of
words that might have been different from what you would have
expected in that place .
Robert Grenier: Ron said that you were more interested in
what he called metaphoric u ses of silence than in the physical ,
structu ral properties one m i ght describe . Along those lines , it
might be possible to say that silences in a work stand for silences in
the world in a way that is more apt or more direct as a representa­
tio nal fu nction than other kinds of represen tational u sage . Do you
think that that ' s an illusion , or that there ' s an actu al silence in the
wo rk in that sense corresponding to those one experiences in the
w orld elsewi se?
Arm antrout: I think that ' s one reason I ' m attracted to si­
len ce . I feel that there ' s a need to represent , as you say, or to indi­
cat e the space of the ineffable , perhaps , in the world . There ' s a
n eed to point to it . Like there ' s a need to point to things . Don ' t ask
me wh eth er it ' s an illusion or not , [ l aughter] but it ' s something I ' m
i nte rest ed in .
Grenier : The difference doesn ' t seem so apparent at fi rst
si ght betw een the silence in the work and other silences as , for ex­
am pl e , between " apple " and an apple, where the difference is so
cle ar.
 46
Rae Armantrout

What do you think then, metaphorically, the uses of silence

have been? Would that simply summarize what you 've said else­
wise? Do you want to do that?
Armantrout : Umm , I think I 'll stand pat . [laughs]
Michael Palmer: It eventually becomes like asking, " But
what about this question of being? " I t ' s a major topic of thought in
this centu ry, both in this country and , strikingly, in France , ever
since Mallarme started spreading space between words and extend­
ing the junctures and having them acquire a kind of metaphysical
weight .
But , as Cage points out , we actually literally have no silen ce,
so it 's immediately metaphoric at any point in our discussion,
whether we ' re talking about it as a junctu ra! function in prosody,
or in the largest sense in which it can be talked abou t . We never get
away from it as metaphor because , strictly speaking, it ain ' t there .
So that it ' s hardly possible to propose that a silence could be literal .
Silliman: Well, having stood o n the floor o f Death Valley on
a windless day, I have a really strong sense of what it is when you
only hear you r body systems functioning . There is that way in
which it ' s always present .
One of the things that ' s interesting about Peter Seaton ' s work
is the way in which , if you can create a work so tonally clear and
affixed that the periodicity of the internal rhythms seems to recede ,
as it does , say, in the music of Steve Reich , there is a very different
experience within that sound of something else clearly present,
which I would identify as silence , althou gh I ' m not sure to what de­
gree I am then metaphorizing silence . But it seems very clearly
possible .
There are a lot of ways it can be played with. Two different ex­
amples from [ Barrett Watten 's] 1-10 would be " Statistic s " and
" Positions, " where the periodicity of the periods is so radically dif­
ferent from the periodicity of the lines. So that you hear this really
manifold structure , which in fact is not the same as what you see on
the page . There seems to be this vast range of possibilities that ' s
re �lly interesting to focus on . I t ' s not to disagree with you , it ' s to
pomt out that Peter Seaton may, in fact , include silence .
 47
Poetic Silence

Armantrout : Well , he may.

I really don ' t want to try to talk about absolute silence in an
ontological way. What I ' m interested in is the experience- For in­
stance , you ' ve been listening to a loud noise , there ' s been a televi­
sion on , a stereo on , a factory goi n g close to you , and suddenly it
stop s . Now that ' s not to say that we now have absolute silence , I
mean there ' re probably some bird s singing and you can maybe
hear your bod y, as Ron said , and there are sounds in the environ­
men t , but you have a rel ative sense of cessation . And you know
how that feel s when that happens to you . Suddenly, everythi n g
looks diffe rent , too . There ' s b e e n this racket , a n d t h e n there isn 't.
 Kit Robinson

SONG

Kit Robinson: I want to look mainly at two aspects of song,

song as such, what it is and what it has become for us, and song as it
informs and provides a basis for writing.
The closer you look at a word like " song , " the less unity it seems
to possess . Its meaning seems to divide into its various uses, which in
turn subdivide endlessly.
The concept of song overlaps variously with notions of sound,
both natural and mechanical , music, speech , identity, tradition-it ' s a
concept which tends to spread rapidly.
We know that so-called primitive poetry is often couched in song ,
and that the early Western classics were first presented vocally to in­
strumental accompaniment .
One obvious advantage of song would be as a mnemonic device.
Its formal properties are well suited to shape ritual or narrative
speech .
Two essential properties of song are continuity and circularity. In
other words the song doesn't stop until it' s over and it always returns
to where it started .
In this way song stands in marked contrast to speech. Speech is
discontinuous and linear.
How song can be used to dress speech is touched on by Clau de
Levi-Strauss in From Honey to Ashes.
48
 49
Song

" If language belongs to the realm of short intervals, it is under­

standable that music , which substitutes its own order for linguistic
confusion , should appear as masked speech, endowed with the twofold
function that is assigned to masks in non-literate societies : the conceal­
ment of the individual wearing the mask , who is at the same time
given a higher significance . . . . A melodic phrase is a metaphor of
speech . "
Then he poses an " Acoustical Code " in which " singing . . . con­
trasts with spoken speech in the same way as the latter contrasts with a
system of signals . "
Music begins as a mimesis of the natural world of sound . Levi­
Strauss identifies various instruments-drums, sticks, flutes , etc . -as
corresponding to certain spirit voices, which in turn are identified
with animal or elemental sounds .
When such instruments are u sed to convey signals they may per­
form a function of naming individual senders for practical purposes,
that is, of establishing identity.
But when they are used for accompaniment for song, the identity
of the individual is submerged in the presence of the mythic speaker.
Music then can provide the frame for a poetic work .
In the Wes t , poetic song undergoes a division in Greece .
In his book The Birth of Tragedy from the Spin"t of Music ( 1 872),
Nietzsche distinguishes two main currents o f Greek poetry, the epic
and the lyric . The epic , represented by Homer, is motivated by the
world of appearances . Its manner is one of calm contemplation of dis­
crete entities, its ethic , self-knowledge and self-control . The lyric , rep­
resented by Archilochus , is motivated by the world of mu sic . Its man­
ner is passionate ; its ethos , dominated by the pronoun " I . "
Nietzsche asks how this seemingly " subjective " poet can have
bee n ranke d equal to Homer by the ancient Greeks , " since to us the
su bje ctive artist is simply the bad artist , since we demand in every art
a t riu mph over subjectivity, deliverance from the self. " H is investiga­
tion of this problem takes him through the notion of Apollonian and
D io ny siac
modes, an opposition central to his ontology.
Th e lyric poet begins in the pain and contradiction of undifferen­
.
ti ated b ein g, which he contrives to reproduce in the form of music .
 50
Kit Robinson

Through the agency of dream image s , his feelings are m ade visibl e.
The mask of the " I , " donned in this phase , is not the poet ' s " self, "
1

which he has already given up during the oceanic musical phase.

"The 'I' thus sounds out of the depth of being; what recent writers on
esthetics speak of as ' subjectivity ' is a mere figment . "
In the beginning there i s flux . Confusion pouring through a
point . It hurts . The mind seeks security in illusion . By m eans of time ,
and space , identity and causality, imagination frames life like a boat
out on the sea . Dreams are a further resting place , wresting particu·
Iars from the ghastly blur. The epic sets out life as clear as day, history
given full light . The lyric poet' s seeming subjectivity is really a report
from turbulence , the primary sound swell of the u ncertain universe.
" There is a need for a whole world of torment in order for the in·
dividual to produce the redemptive vision and sit quietly in his rock·
ing rowboat in mid-sea , absorbed in contemplation . "
Archilochus introduced folk song into literature .
" Folk song is a musical mirror of the cosmos, a primordial mel·
ody casting about for an analogue and finding that analogue eventu·
ally in poetry. Melody gives birth to poetry again and agai n : this is
implied by the strophic form of folk song. "
(Strophe in Greek is " turn , " " twist , " akin to Strobos, " action of
whirling. " )
" In folk poetry we find , moreover, the most intense effort of lan·
guage to imitate the condition of music . Word , image , and idea , in
undergoing the power of music, now seek for a kind of expression that
would parallel it. In this sense we may distin guish two main currents
in the history of Greek verse , according as language is used to imitate
the world of appearance or that of music . "
Nietzsche concludes the discussion with a warning. In music
alone can we experience the annihilation of the individual . The de·
pendence of poetry on music is n ot reversible . Music is independent
of image or concept. In referring to primordial flux, music is prior to
language and resistant to its imitation in language .
I would like to compare Nietzsch e ' s argumen t with an essay e nti·
tied " On Poetry " by the Russian Suprema tist painter Kasimir Ma·
levich .
 51
Song

Malevich begins very much in the spirit of Neitzsche by declar­

ing musical form to be a basic dynamic driving poetic composition .
He also resembles Nietzsche in the grandiose arrogance of his preten­
sions. But in the end he casts aside N ietzsche ' s prohibition against
language attaining to the pure spirituality of music . For Malevich ,
rhythm and tempo are what make the poem go , so much so that im­
ages, and even words, migh t best be dispensed with altogether.
" Rhythm and tempo are inherent in the poet, and for him there
is no grammar, there are no word s , for the poet is told that the spoken
word is a lie ; but I say that words are inherent in thou ght and that
there is something more subtle than thought , something more light
and more flexible . To express this in words is not only false but quite
impossible .
"This ' something' becomes ' She , ' ' Love , ' ' Venu s , ' ' Apollo , '
'the Naiads , ' and so on . Not feathery down , but a heavyweight mat­
tress with all its characteristics .
" Poets surround themselves with objects, connecting them by
rhythm .
"The poems of all poets are like lumps amassed from all manner
of th ings ; they are like small or large pawnshops , where neatly folded
waistcoats , and cushions , carpets , trinkets , rings and silks , petticoats,
and carriages are packed away in rows of drawers, all according to a
known order, law and basis.
"The line may contain a horse , a box , a moon, sideboard , stool ,
frost, chu rch , ham , chime, prostitute, flower, chrysanthemum . If we
illu strate any one line visuall y, we obtain the same absurd row of
fo rms .

" The whole poem consists of distinguishing names , properties ,

qu alities , sensations , tastes, and so forth . ' The bells boomed . ' Terri­
ble, awkward and crude . "
To replace the outmoded , representation-bound poetry, Ma­
levic h prop oses a non-objective poetry based in a religion of the hu­
m an spiri t .
"The church is movement; rhythm and tempo are its founda­
.
tions.
"Th e new , living, moving church will replace the present
 52
Kit Robinson

church, which will become a baggage hall, a railway warehouse .

" I consider the highest moment in the poet' s service of the spirit
to be that of his wordless dialect, when demented words rush from his
mouth, mad words accessible neither to the mind, nor to reason.
" In the poet' s dialect, rhythm and tempo divide the mass of
sound into intervals and make clear the detailed gestures of the body
itself. When the flame within the poet flares up, he stands, raises his
arms, and bends his body, producing that form which to the beholder
will represent the real, new and living church .

" Ule Elye Lel Li Onye Kon Si An

Onon Kori Ri Doasambi Moyena Lezh
Sabuo Oratr Tulozh Loalibi Blyestorye
Tivo Oryenye Alizh

" In this the poet has exhausted his lofty action; he cannot com·
pose these words and no one can imitate them . "
Like Nietzsche , Malevich divides the world into rhythm and ap·
pearance . But for the Suprematist , appearance is simply false . Only
rhythm tells the truth. He concludes by plunging language into the
world of sound.
In rereading William Carlos Williams' Spring and A ll, I discov·
ered that the final prose section is a response to this diatribe of Ma·
levich .
"Writing is likened to music . The object would be it seems to
make poetry a pure art, like music. Painting too. Writing, as with cer·
tain of the modern Russians whose work I have seen, would use un­
oriented sounds in place of conventional words. The poem then would
be completely liberated when there is identity of sound with some ·
thing-perhaps the emotion .
" I do not believe that writing is music. I do not believe writing
would gain in quality or force by seeking to attain to the conditions of
music.
" I think the conditions of music are objects for the action of the
writer' s imagination just as a table or-
 53
Song

"According to my present theme the writer of imagination

would attain closest to the conditions of music not when his words are
disassociated from natural objects and specified meanings but when
they are liberated from the usual quality of that meaning by transposi­
tion into another medium, the imagination . "

The sunlight in a
yellow plaque upon the
varnished floor
is full of song
inflated to
fifty pounds pressure
at the faucet of
June that rings
the triangle of air
pulling at
anemones m
Persephone ' s cow pasture-
When from among
the steel rocks leaps
] . P. M .
who enjoyed
extraordinary privileges
among virginity
to solve the core
of whirling flywheels
by cutting
the Gordian knot
with a Veronese or
perhaps a Rubens-
whose cars are about
the finest on
the market today-
 54
Kit Robinson

And so it comes
to motor cars­
which is the son

leaving off the g

of sunlight and grass­
Impossible

to say, impossible
to underestimate­
wind, earthquakes in

Manchu ria, a
partridge
from dry leaves

-W C . Williams, Spring and All

Song operates from both ends, as motive and object for poetic
composition .
Song raises speech to a synchronic , eternal round , while main·
taining its sound value and duration . Writing fixes language in its spa·
tial dimension, from which emanates the ghost of sound.
Writing may be rhythmically motivated , but also about sound.
Not the sound of speech and not the sound of music, but the lit·
eral fact of sound , of a sound world , in and out of the head , wind
sound , motor sound, thought sound (Is my thinking here sound?),
physical sound as it enters alphabetical language .
There sound encounters resistance in thought .
The image resists . Sound breaks up the image.
I do not want pure , spiritual , non-objective dynamism because I
want events, facts, history to impinge on the writing, as they impinge
on life.
Moreover, I'm even interested in stasis, in static as well as dy·
namic means to bring poetic work into being.
Adorno, in Philosophy ofModern Music, says that Schoenberg' s 1 2·
tone technique destroys musical dynamics by its discontinuity. " O nce
again music subdues time , but no longer by substituting music in it s
perfection for time , but by negating time through the inhibition o f all
 55
Song

musical moments by means of omnipresent construction . . . . Thus

music becomes static . "
My poem " Prelude " in This 1 0 is an example of a constructed
work , presenting a series of verbal units in a predetermined order, in
this case a list of 2 20 words from a basic reading text in descending or­
der of frequency. Development is built in prior to the action of the
poem , s o it is essentially static . The overall shape is determined by the
gradual syntactic shift from relational toward substantive parts of
speech .

The poem begins :

the
of
and
to

a
m

that
IS

Stanzas 54 and 55 read :

didn ' t
eyes
find
going

look
asked
later
knew

The stanzas , or strophes , m ake four-bar equivalents in a kind of

son g stru cture . The inevitable bonding of syntax, perceived variously
by any reader, m akes for the sound of speech , set to the music of the
fours .
Wh ether improvised , or constructed from previou sly generated
 56
Kit Robinson

material , my writing tends often to sound like a sequence of interrup·

tions.
The disjunction of the flow places the writing in and up against
history.
In the first of her Lectures in America, in 1 934, Gertrude Stein
traces the development of English literature from Chaucer to the 20th
century.
According to her capsule summary, literature moved away from
an initial identity of word and sound in Chaucer' s time to an ab·
stracted seeking after explanatory phrases in the late 1 9th century.
She also suggests, as strongly in the form of the lecture as in di·
rect statement , the return of sound values in 20th-century writing.
"You do remember Chaucer, even if you have not read him you
do remember not how it looks but how it sounds, how simply it
sounds as it sounds . . . . That makes a sound that gently sings that
gently sounds but sounds as sounds. It sounds as sounds that is to say
as birds as well as words. "
From the naive, happy marriage of word and sound in Chaucer.
Stein traces a development involving increased discretionary diction,
culminating in the Elizabethans, then the conflict between diction and
thematics, lasting from Milton to Johnson, and the solution of neo·
classical orthodoxy, as it is embodied in the complete sentence . The
Napoleonic Wars marked the last great rise of the British Empire and
turned English literature to its next and final mode , explanation , and
its corollary, sentimental emotion . Literature needed to explain how it
was that England owned everything, even to those whom it owned.
The form suited to this task was the phrase .
"They thought about what they were thinking and if you th ink
about what you are thinking you are not thinking about a whole
thing. If you are explaining, the same thing is true , because if it is a
whole thing it does not need explaining, it merely needs stating. And
then the emotional sentiment that anyone living and owning every·
thing outside needs to express is again something that can only be ex·
pressed by phrases, neither by words nor by sentence s . "
Thus Stein links imperiali sm , sentimen tality, and the phrase .
 57
Song

The ascendency of sentiment and the phrase ends at the time of

the Boer War, with the decline of Empire and the disintegration of
dail y life . The phrase is succeeded as a basic unit by the paragraph .
" Paragraphs are emotional not because they express an emotion
but because they register or limit an emotion . "
In the 20th century English literature gives up the ghost . Litera­
ture moves to America.
English life , being insular, had, until its eventual rupture and de­
cline at the end of the 1 9th century, a regular and self-sufficient quality
of dailiness entirely lacking in America.
In America, " they do not live every day. "
Stein ' s emphasis on disjunction and the paragraph as an emo­
tional unit is well illustrated in the work of another 2 0th-century
writer, the Russian critic and memoirist Viktor Shklovsky, for whom
Sterne ' s Tristram Shandy represented the prototypical novel .
Shklovsky ' s prose narratives, broken by intermittent digressions
and chronological shifts, employ a rapid dissociative method in which
events impinge on the imagination at work.
Of Petersburg during the C ivil War he writes: " And in this
strange daily life , as strong as the sculptured peaks of Gaul, as long as
a bread line , what was most strange of all was that we were equally in­
terested in rolls and life . Everything that remained in the soul seemed
of e qual importance , all things were equal . "
The distance he establishes from events i s forced o n him by pres­
s u re of the events themselves . There is a kind of historical necessity
beh ind the separation .
His memoir, A Sentimentaljoumey, typifies the stylistic congruence
of shattered social life and skewed narrative syntax.
" Life flows in staccato pieces belonging to different systems .
" Only o u r clothes, not the body, join together the disparate mo­
me nts of life .
"C onsciousness illuminates a string o f segments held together
onl y by light , as a projector illuminates a piece of cloud, the sea, a
piece of shore , a forest, paying no heed to ethnographic boundaries. "
For Shklovsky, internal , lyrical rhythm is constantly disturbed by
 58
Kit Robinson

images of the historic epic in which he was an actor. But his insistent
formalism creates an overall musical structure to the prose.
I hear pronounced silences between these short paragraphs. The
interstitial silence is galvanized in two directions, forward, as shift in
subject matter, and back, as ironic understatement, often with tacit
moral implications. So the prose sound has a jerky quality, as in a se­
ries of abrupt melodic lines discretely set off from one another, but re­
peating at extended and unpredictable intervals.
If the paragraph to paragraph shifts are seen as tactical, the use
of refrain is strategic, creating a general structure.
A whole long section from Part 1 concerning the Persian cam­
paign is cut out and repeated at the end of Part 2 , along with addi­
tional documentary material , obviously cut into Shklovsky' s charac­
teristic short paragraph form , so that it reads exactly like his own
writing, which he is quick to point out, thus forming a reprise or re­
turn to the theme to end the work.
Shklovsky, like Williams, writes in opposition to Malevich's
pure, spiritual sound poetry. He calls for " a return to craftsmanship"
and "doesn ' t deny the idea of content of art , but treats the so-called
content as one of the manifestations of form . " The purpose of this at­
tention to technique is not hermetic, specifically, but directed at re­
evaluation of the conditions of life . " Art is fundamentally ironic and
destructive . Its function is to create inequalities, which it does by
means of constrasts . "
Song, a sound as of singing. " The song of metal filled the room."
Song, a succession of unmusical tones or sounds having a pecu liar
or characteristic tune; as, to know the song of shrapnel ; to know a mo ­
tor by its song.
In 1 939, Bertolt Brecht wrote, " Our ear is certainly in course of
being physiologically transformed. Our acoustic environment has
changed immensely. An episode in an American feature film , when
the dancer Astaire tap-danced to the sounds of a machine-room ,
showed the astonishingly close relationship between the new n oises
and the percussive rhythms ofjazz. Jazz signified a broad flow of pop·
ular musical elements into modern music , whatever our commercial-
 59
Song

ized world may have made of it since . Its connection with the freeing
of the Negroes is well known . "
The song of nature has been replaced by the song of the ma­
chine . Look at the Williams poem .

And so it comes
to motor cars­
which is the son
leaving off the g
of sunlight and grass-

The natural fact at the source of song is the internal combustion

,
eng�ne .
Brecht ' s work was written in modified conventional forms :
songs, ballads, sonnets , and , o f course , plays . For him form i s a con-
1
venience , a means of delivering what must be said .
" I n poetry I began with songs to the guitar, sketching out verses
at the same time as the music . B allad form was as old as the hills, and
in my day nobody who took himself at all seriously wrote ballads . �

Subsequently I went over to other, less ancient forms of poetry, but

sometimes I reverted . The song, which descended on this continent af­
ter the First World War as a sort of folksong of the big cities, had al- ·

ready evolved a conventional form by when I began using it . I started

from that point and subsequently transformed it, though elements of
this lazy, vain and emotionally intoxicated form are to be found in my
mass choruses . Then I wrote unrhymed verses with irregular
rhythms . I began , I think , by u sing them in my plays . There are how­
ever some poems dating from about the time of the Devotions for the
Home, the Psalms which I used to sing to the guitar, which tend the
same way. ' '

Read a Brecht Psalm or two . Note how , though B recht claims to

have su ng these to guitar accompaniment, they do not take a conven­
tional song form , are not strophic . They have cadence like the Old
Te stam ent .
"T he German Satires , " written for German Freedom Radio 1
 60
Kit Robinson

had to take a form concise enough to reach an artificially scattered au·

dience and survive interruption U amming) . Regular meter or song
form seemed too self-contained, would slip by the ear. Brecht adopted
the form of direct spontaneous speech.
Song in this century came out of the cities. Also the mountains,
the river valleys, and the plains. But especially the cities . M uch of the
best of it derives from the rhythm and tempo of African music and
speech. Somebody said that American language is black language or
something to that effect.
Then we have tin pan alley. Those song writers were the great
metaphysical poets of the genre and created many wonderful combi·
nations later to occasion the great j azz solos.
What Charlie Parker did to the popular standards of his day,
many of them showtunes from tin pan alley, was to get inside them
and take them apart harmonically, revealing entire skeletal systems in
incredible detail . The classic " How High the Moon" became the
dense solo " Ornithology. " The song structure was illuminated along
the lines of the scales comprised in its chord progressions , at lightning
speed , in the rhythms of passionate , discontinuous, historic speech.
Songs have a way of using and regenerating cliches. By using the
cliche up, by fixing it in musical quotation marks, a soloist wrings the
phrase dry of its false sentiment, returning it to high wit status.
Today, on the radio, song is fast form .
When we're in the song, if it' s a good song, a song with a good
sound, we feel good. It's a kind of instant trance state that lasts for
about three minutes . On the inside there' s continuous present . On
the outside there ' s history.
Levi-Strauss distinguishes music as continuous sound from
speech as discontinuous sound.
Song puts speech into a continuum .
In song, the illusory, fragmentary, discrete and broken thin g.
speech , is embodied in recurrent , formulaic, ritual sound .
On the inside, we ride.
On the outside, there' s history. The pop song measures the per·
sonal by way of the collective experience, through nostalgia and
trends.
 61
Song

Song is the central icon of youth culture . The sound of the song
defmes what is meant by the present. What begins as a revolt against
history (the past) ends as fond memory (golden oldies).
Imagine middle-aged ex-punks waxing nostalgic over " Holiday
in Cambodia" by the Dead Kennedys .
Song is an intermediate step between sound , the purely tempo­
ral , and writing, the mute spatial .
Song is a formula for sound , allowing it to be repeated . The
notes of the song are fixed , as writing ftxes language .
Yet the language of song has no existence without music, which
brin gs it forth . Not until writing does language exist without sound .
Written language preserves the memory of sound through the
agency of song.
Lawrence Sterne : " To write a book is for all the world like hum­
min g a song. "
The relation to history m ay be heard in the song structure .
We live in a time when cultural crosscurrents are bringing into
bein g an array of international pop modes drawn from the old folk
traditions of Africa, Asia, and the Americas.
Songs recorded recently in many styles are semi-strophic . The
lyrics don ' t fall into traditional quatrains, couplets, or any perceptible
stanza form , but extend from line to line for a seemingly arbitrary
number of measures before the refrain . In this sense they approach
the formal dynamic of speech .
Song is interstitial, fills in dead time .
Song is decorative, foregrounds intermittent activity.
Man rides bike down Market Street with headphones plugged
into backb ag. Song can be a drug, an insulator. The record industry
seems to be " sitting on top of the world . "
As song stresses harmony and continuity it refers to eternal
t ruths, i . e . , tradition .
As song creates disjunction and surprise, it calls all values into
question .
I li ke a song with rough edges, an active departure from the
fo rm , instigating thought.
But , songs are sentimental .
 62
Kit Robinson

The blues is a grid . Random street noise, a shout or honk, lays in

to twelve bars as voiced. Song is circular, frames history as variation.
Variation comes into the paragraph as thought displaces writing.
Paragraphs are emotional .
History comes into song, form turning on its round . History
leaps and bounds.

MAC HINERY
reduces
that ' s it
tools
names
go on in
concentration
pen
features
call
a poem
variations
transparency
history
nvers
although they are waiting
I am waiting
dying
of laughter
ffiUSIC

on the radio
white desk top
to eye
and harmonica
across the way
 Bob Perelman

SENSE

Bob Perelman: My basic plan is to read parts of Primer and talk.

I have some points I'd like to bring up, but if I feel I ' m getting too
confused , I may just chuck all ideas of higher meaning and read the
book .
Here ' s something I came across today. Jean Cohen , a French
rhetorician , says that every figu re of speech is " an infraction of one of
the rules which comprise the code . " I don 't think that ' s quite accu­
rate, but there ' s a basic half truth there that all figures of speech are a
crime against the state . Crimes against a mythical clarity. So just to
start there I want to read " Mature Ej aculation . "
I haven ' t done many, but this poem i s a movie poem . The movie
behind this which occasionally surfaces is Horror at Party Beach. I had
just read about it in Robert Smithson' s writings . He ' s ecstatic about it
because it ' s the ultimate D-minus movie . It's so poorly made , it dis­
solves the referent.

MATURE EJACULATION
Monsters and metaphors arose
From human necessity.
Tal k ing about the rhetorical figu res being a crime against the state . I
lllean, what ' s the difference between a monster and a metaphor?
63
 64
Bob Perelman

The period
Ends the sentence by force .

Like the Chomsky joke I mentioned two nights ago, "A language is
a dialect that has an army and a navy. "

"When the l ightning hit the hou se ,

It gave the apparatus a boost ,
And gave me the power,
To turn the page of a book ! "

So, what gives us the energy to make syntactic connections , or even

follow them. The lines are actually from a different horror movie,
"The Brain "-speaking of being in an ivory tower, The Brain is in a
jar. But it gets loose and attacks the world .

Elaine went a little too near the lake ,

And her geiger counter went crazy.

I guess I ' m going to stop and, every time I think of something, I 'm
going to say it. (laughter] I want to really " tie this together in a very
unified way. " (laughter] Remember the passage from Colette I talked
about last night where Gigi is saying make my skirts longer because I
think about my what-do-you-call-it . Maybe she should have said
"geiger counter. " ( laughter] That' s what I hear there . This poem is
really about highschool sex . In the movie she did have a geiger
counter and the monsters were radioactive .

Monst ers spent the next five minutes

Lumbering out of their element . The brush
Feels its way through the light .

I hear a pun: brush is both paintbrush, and bushes.

Jellyfish attacks manikin ,

Loses hand . The trees are old ,
The teens possibly older.
Flaming tissue under strobeligh t .
 65
Sense

They can be killed with sodium

And their radioactive organs give them away.
But drunks staggering through the woods
Never know what hit them . Children
Born of prostitutes in the classics
Were thrown into the Tiber.

The last two lines are from Gildersleeve' s Latin Grammar, which is the
archetypal 1 8 70s codification of Latin grammar as the eternal word of
god . I t ' s like Quintillian defining what is an appropriate figure of
speech and what is not . Licit and illicit sex .

What 's that sound?

A quote from the movie : monsters crashing around in the bushes, but
also : What is this stuff saying?
Cars
Race through falling dusk. An attractive
Surface wound dangles tantalizingly
Down at Fingle's Quarry. Hank Green
Flashes past the Guggenheim
In his MG , looking for sodium .
I t ' s dead on the beach all summer.
Smoke blows across bare alders.
" You remember your highschool chemistry? "

Again , a quote from the movie, and an address to the reader.

Thoughts and limbs move uncertainly.

I j ust fou nd out today that " limbs" is a rhetorical term for clause .

Clues of dreadful happenings

Under the sea by Western Island
Surface and flood the will .
Social life bogs down completely.
A pajama party is an orgy
 66
Bob Perelman

Of inefficient appetite. We look

In the book, but get let off
With a slap on the wrist. A dot
In the center of the map
Speaks for us and hangs useless signs
On trees, rocks, and water.

That was the essence of what I said in the first half of my talk two
nights ago : that there ' s this invisible reified atemporal empire, this
sense of decorum that ' s backed by political power, that tries to define
all language and to make the sticks , the surrounding countryside and
people, useless.

The clock radio interrupts vicarious dreams

To announce our names. Hank and Elaine
Begin to screw. Dr. Garvin will remain
In the hospital a few weeks.
"We have paid our tuition
And have suffered a little ,
But what counts is we are
Accumulating knowledge and results. "

which comes from the vice-president in charge of economic affairs in

China, in an article in Scientific American. So the poem ends on a sober
physical, " real " note, after struggling through this cartoon-like dreck.
It's painful , but we 'll get there finally.

THE C LASSICS

In the beginning, the hand

Writes on water. A river
Swallows its author,
Alive but mostly
Lost to consciousness.
Where's the milk. The infant
Gradually becomes interested
In these resistances.
 67
Sense

That's Piaget ' s theory that intelligence-it ' s preprogrammed obvi­

ously, but-it gets triggered by the fact that you can ' t find the breast
very easily. So the sense behind here is of reader and writer being the
infant, and the milk being meaning. The resistances are the words.

Success is an ideal method.

For itself the sun
Is a prodigy of splendor.
It did not evolve . Naturally,
A person had to intervene.

Again, thinking back to Quintillian ' s tautological definition of clarity.

Clarity is what the words mean . And so when everybody understands
what it' s saying, the words seem perfectly transparent and it all seems
ideal.

Children in stage C succeed.

Emotion is rampant. We blush
At cases 1 and 2 .

Tragedies o f child development . Tracking, etc. Which i s all o f civiliza­

tion, current manifestation of it .

The rules are sacred,

But can be changed.
The moon got bigger
Because we were alive.
The circle rotates carefully.

Th at's Piaget' s example of kid-talk and kid-thought .

The speaker is instructed

To listen to the correct
Measurement of words.

I find that extremely aggressive and authoritarian. And I find it al­

m ost imp ossible to hear. I can say it , but I can ' t hear myself saying it
 68
Bob Perelman

1
because the authoritarianism is so strong. But , on the other hand, it's
telling you to listen to exactly what the words are saying. And yet,
somehow , pleading that that ' s impossible .

Hidden quantities
In what he already knows
Eventually liberate a child
From the immediate present.

" Hidden quantities" going back to " Where's the milk . " I almost
hear "hidden titties. "

The name of Hannibal

Was glorious throughout the world.
All men have hearts of gold .
A particular man has
A particular heart of gold.

Wearing white clothes,

Eating apples and oran ges,
26 mill ion men and women
Talk intimately about sex.

My sense of the connection here is : liberation from the present . And

then, from the past , Hannibal (rhymes with cannibal) , the gene ral
who almost overthrew Rome (rhymes with civilization) . Somehow ,
the initial sense of the combinatorial power of language destroys this
hierarchical frozen empire . And everybody' s very happy.
Kit Robinson: It' s like you can read The Cantos.
Perelman: You can write The Cantos, too . [laughter]
So, "A particular man has I A particular heart of gold. " There ' s
individuality in the midst of generality. To me, that sentence sounds
very silly. ' ' All men have hearts of gold' ' is like something in McGuffy 's
Reader, and then , if you particularize it , you realize it' s problem atic.
Then I go from the particular man to particular phrases: white
clothes, apples and oranges (unequatable things): all the absurd par·
 69
Sense

ticulars of human beings . If you make it into one statement, it blows

up a unitary meaning. It doesn ' t make perfect sense . It doesn 't make
sense , although you can understand it .
" 26 million men and women I Talk intimately about sex . "
That's a headline from The NatioTUJ.l Enquirer. I think there i t said 26
hundred . [laughter] More than a few . . . is too many. [laughter]

Iron nails com plete the statue,

But fail in case 3.

Now it' s like Frankenstein. What is a person? We have to be ham­

mered together by these iron nails of convention and rhetoric . But ,
unfortunately, some people don ' t quite get hammered together.
" Nails" rhymes with " fails . " And that goes back to " Children in
stage C succeed . " The gifted child plays the piano in Paris at age
eight; the other person wets his pants or something. A Laingian sense
here , I guess .

Finally, the hand reaches the mouth.

Finally the person is able to feed himself.

99 % egocentric speech,
By, to , and for itself.

That's Piaget's sense of a six-year-old ' s language. That it ' s all just
br oadcast ing out .

God and the novel

Approximate each other.

I think th at' s a very effective piece of literary criticism [laughter] of

the 20th- century novel . Ulysses, really.

The listener thinks he understands

What the speaker is saying
Even when it is very obscure .
 70
Bob Perelman

That's the other side of the coin of " The speaker is instructed I To lis­
ten to the correct I Measurement of words . "

Reversible thinking can explain

Anything but the mundane
Features of the words
Already pronounced .

That means . . . What does that mean?

Tom Mandel: Yeah, what does that mean?
Perelman: That means you can go back and read into the sen­
tence, like I ' m doing now . But, in fact , when you 're reading the
poem, or hearing it, you get this single sequence of words, which may
have all this meaning behind it, but you also have simply . . .
Robinson: Irreducible.
Perelman: . . . the irreducible brute historical fact of all that
this poem has said , as opposed to me here tonight giving the back­
ground . All that the poem has said has been itself, the words that have
been pronounced . You can explain everything but that . I mean , poli t ­
ical theory can explain everything but history. [laughter]

If the box is too heavy,

Tell it to move.

As I was saying the last two nights in connection with that Bruce An­
drews' article [ " Constitution/Writing, Politics, Language , the Body,"
in L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E , vol . 4] , it ' s optimistic to say that
writing changes the world . Well, I also share that optimism . " If the
box is too heavy" -by box I mean material object you have to move
around in the world , a category, too , pigeonhole , also the sense of cof·
fin . "Tell it to move" is again from Piaget. A child would suggest that
as a method.
Barrett Watten: So there' s a great conflict between pleasure an d
rhetoric. Pleasure is your identification with the nonironic part of
that , but the rhetoric is in fact ironic. They' re completely distinct and
 71
Sense

working in opposite directions . You don 't actually believe, that is,
your rational mind doesn ' t believe that the box is going to move . Your
supere go knows the child' s mind is not going to affect anything, and
you're not going to affect anything by this instruction , which is very
much undercut. So that the actual rhetoric of it is providing some­
thing that is not going to work . And then the hopeful eros is the fact
that you are fascinated and compelled by it and want to write it.
Perelman: Right . But the last word of the poem is " move . " It
wants to end up there . But, sure . I don' t claim that you can move
boxes with words. [laughter]
Okay, here ' s " Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. " The genesis is: it ' s
a direct translation from Shelley ' s poem that Barry Watten and I did.
We each took a 1 0-line stanza and wrote it as a 4-line stanza. And then
I took that and rewrote it and made this . Although I really have to
give Barry credit for the line " See shadow, think thought ! " which is
his improvement of Zukofsky ' s life work. [laughter]

HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY

Each world
Floats through us.
Piney mountains on memory clouds
Visit in starlight, inconstant.

And near the end of the poem it says, " Whatever these words I Now
say. " Word and world : an incredibly obvious pun . " Each word floats
through us. " Then the second stanza commenting on the first :

It's beautiful, art-thought,

But hymns die away, dim
Humming fears cast gloomy
Human rainbows, and why not.

So the fi rst stanza is art-thought , arty images . Here , the sound of

" hymns" contains the " Dim humming fears. " There ' re a lot of
sound ligaments in that stanza.
 72
Bob Perelman

and why not-

Ghost the records,

The sense of memory in the head, the endless tape tracks in the head,
say. Ghost the records? Like the ghost in the machine, almost . The lit·
tle person in the head who will have infinite time to read all those
words? But

Ghost the records, frail charms

We might not get to see .
Stringed instruments
Drive mist over the remains.

Back to hymns dying away. The same conflict as in "The Classics, "
between the history of the human life and the history of the sound.
The sound going forward in time conflicts with the eros of the endless
meaning and combinations that are possible . Jakobson , in Six Lectures
on Sound and Meaning, speaks of language having two axes, the axis of
selection and the axis of combination-it goes forward in time , and
you can say all these endless numbers of words-and those two axes
are part of any phoneme .

In the glorious train of Self

which is a line from Shelley

Self-esteem, like wax

In the messenger' s ears .
Don't be your shadow.

Jungian moralism . Also, wax in the ears : it' s saying to hear without
distortion . The message, not the person ' s ideas .

See shadow, think thought!

Again, the difference between the material and the mental .

 73
Sense

While yet a boy, I sought it out

Through many a listen ing chamber

-Shelley meant rooms, I think , and I mean ears .

Where hands held books.

The birds and bees have poison pens

There ' s my old sense of eros as the snake in the Garden of Eden .

But whatever's alive eventuall y

Wakes up.

So, no matter how poison those pens are, you eventually pick them up
and start scribbling away.

I shrieked and clapped ;

The dead departed .

I called the phonemes

A thousand name s .

I want to mention this idea o f J akobson ' s . He ' s criticizing Saussure ,

who said that language is nothing but a system of differences without
any absolute meanings , that something only has meaning because it
isn ' t something else . So, Saussure says, in German , say, Nacht and
Michie, night and nights , only mean something as an opposition . Ja­
kobson says that it ' s true they contrast , but also that each one desig­
nates something specific in the speake r ' s and l istener' s head .
What doesn ' t mean anything without opposition is the phoneme .
So , he says, a French speaker knows mec and moe, guy and pulley, are
two different word s , even if he doesn ' t know the words themselves . .
" The phoneme , this cardinal element o n which everything in the lin­
guistic system hinge s , stands in contrast to all other parts of lan­
guage . . . . Only the phoneme is a purely differential and contentless
sign . Its sole . . . semiotic content is its dissimilarity from all other
phon emes . "
 74
Bob Perelman

I called the phonemes

A thousand names. Speechless
Thoughts answered each .
But I kept my vow, in dark bondage
To whatever these words
Now say. The day is perfect
When over. There is a lustre
In the sky which cannot be.

The play of meaning over language is the luster, okay? A phoneme

doesn 't mean anything. The luster actually exists, although you can't
pin down meaning physically in the sound .
Robinson: There's no predicate . "There is a lustre I In the sky
which cannot be" . . . blank . But there's no blank . A luster can be.
What you ' re saying is there's no predicate there.
Watten: Not really. Because there 's also a way of saying, "This
can't be. " Like, it's too perfect. There ' s so many chemicals in the sky
that it's purple . How can this be?
Robinson: Is something wrong here?
Perelman: Well , Barry sees it , he ' s told me a number of times,
as a condemnation of American capitalism as seen in the smoggy sun­
sets of Los Angeles.
Ron Silliman: What about going back to this meaningless pho­
neme and your use in the second stanza of all these words where the
last phoneme of the first syllable is m: dim , humming, gloomy, hu­
man, besides rhyming thought and not. Obviously sound organiza­
tion has a function , even if it's not thought . If it doesn' t occur in the
mind, where is it occurring? In the ear, in the spine?
Watten: One of the great issues of this poem is intellect and
sense. Jakobson says that distinctive features are pure structure,
they' re an abstraction from phenomema. And structure is analytical;
it doesn' t exist , as opposed to sound , which is sensate . And it seems to
me that when you call the phonemes a thousand names, you ' re argu­
ing against abstraction. Sense is implicitly the way that you under­
stand things . You're going to wake up through sound , not throu gh
prior analysis.
 75
Sense

Perelman: Also, there ' s something I pointed out the first night,
but I think it slipped by. I talked about Robert Smithson ' s sense that if
you stare at any word long enough, it fragments. You can see any­
thing in it . It's the axis of selection . We all have this file cabinet with a
million cards . We can say anything.
Let me find exactly what I said . Go ahead, Tom . . .
Mandel: The poem is built on repeated contradictions: birds
and bees have poison pens; whatever's alive eventually wakes up ,
where you would think that whatever's alive would have already
woken up; the dead departed , you would think they would have al­
ready gone . It seems like, intellectually, everything is overdetermined .
But there ' s an intuitive or emotional line that goes through the poem .
It' s almost like what you ' re doing with Shelley. The Shelley poem al­
ready exists as an axis of selection. You choose words from this poem .
This poem is a world floating through you onto the page . So there ' s
an overdetermination that's already given, and i t seems like th e task
of the poem is somehow to simplify. And that simplification is in terms
of emotion . But at the same time it's posed as bunch of intellectual
contradictions. So that 's very interesting.
Perelman: Right, that sounds good . I mean, I think it ' s true .
Okay. This is from two nights ago, about rhetoric and time :
"When Smithson speaks of the word splintering into many words, he
says it does that if you stare at it long enough. No times passes and the
mind is free to churn . " It's the axis of selection, not the axis of combi­
nation. " Hearing is something else. Hearing is sensuous , timebound,
easily impressed, easily confused . Making sense- " And I mean that
as a pun . It makes sense , it doesn' t make sense, but , also, our senses. I
suppose that pun doesn' t exist in other languages. " M aking sense" is
prejudiced against the mind , right? It says that the senses make sense ,
and that the mind, by implication, doesn 't. " Making sense always re­
fers to the acoustic level of discourse , and thus to rhetoric, rhetoric as
th e science of (topography of) hearing. "
Think about how you make sense of something. Bernard . . .
Mandel: Noel?
Perelman: No, I was going to say " Bernard King" [pro basket­
ball player] , but I meant " Bertrand Russell . " [laughter] Speaking of
 76
Bob Perelman

the axis of selection ! Bertrand Russell gives an examples of a mean­

ingless sentence: "Procrastination drinks consanguinity. " But, actu- 1

ally, it does make sense if you can think of somebody saying it. Again, I

on the rhetoric level . It would be a Eugene O' Neill sentiment. When

it makes sense then the rhetoric has a specific place on the dial, in this
case very high flown . Consanguinity, i . e . , your brother. And always
in O'Neill there 's the brother who won' t help the other brother. So the
one brother says, "Consanguinity drinks procrastination . " Like:
" Help me now, or you' re no brother of mine. Don't just sit there and 1

drink. " So you make this little scenario, somebody saying it, as op­
posed to the words just existing in space .
Mandel: Which is just to say that a sentence is something that
has use, and that it gets its meaning from where and how it happens.
And that it's a mistake to imagine that words have meaning
inherently.
Perelman: Right.
Thinking about what Barry was saying about the poem ques­
tioning how sense situates in hearing, or how do the intellect and the
senses interface,-This is some old linguistics textbook, Language as a
Human Problem, 1 965 , so it might be quite out of date, but there are
some interesting experiments on how sound is perceived .
r-
It turns out that people can't hear words in isolation very well.
Hearing is not an outside-in phenomenon . It's not that sounds come
from the outside and there ' s a little parade marching in order into the
brain where they get debriefed at Command Central and then we
know what it means. Hearing works , much more than common sen se
would think, from the inside out .
So, they lured subjects into an anechoic chamber. The subjects
were told that they were there for something else . Then they were told
that the tape recorder had broken , and they had to stay in there for 1 5
minutes, and the experimenters got them to chat, and they recorded
it . So it was . . . "conversational speech in acoustically optimal cir­
cumstances from speakers who were unaware that they were being re­
corded . " So it' s really . . . Nature . [laughter]
Then they selected 1 00 samples , about 8 words long each , and
 77
Sense

made recordings of 1 word, 2 words, on up to 8 . Listeners had a very

hard time understanding 1 or 2 words. They almost had to hear the
whole thing to understand it well .
They did another experiment where they inserted clicks into sen­
tences and asked people where they occurred . And it turns out people
couldn ' t hear the actual sound very accurately. They tended to place
the clicks in grammatical phrase boundaries. It' s like we hear in
phrases. So it ' s interesting that, to some extent, sound and meaning
are on two different tracks.
Silliman: So when you read that line in " Hymn to Intellectual
Beauty " : " Whatever's alive I Eventually wakes up, " that ' s not dif­
ferent from "Whatever' s alive eventually I Wakes up, " which is the
way it' s written on the page?
Perelman: That ' s interesting. That 's something else I wanted to
get to . I ' m not saying sound and meaning are two totally different
things. In ordinary circumstances they ' re obviously pretty close . But
you can pull those plies apart a bit. " Whatever's alive eventually"
forces you to construe it in the less obvious way. Like Tom was saying
before about whatever' s alive eventually. In other words, being alive is
something you have to work at .
Mandel: So there 's a natural break and you wanted both.
Perelman : I wanted both. Sound is singular, and I want mean­
ing to be plural, multivalent .
Robinson: Do you think that the sound helps you to get that
multivalent quality in the thought? There was that stanza that Ron
quoted with the phoneme repeated , " Humming . . . "
Perelman: " Dim humming fears. " I want to suggest near cous­
ins and puns all the time . It' s like the ghost of many voices in the sin­
gle sound of the sentence .
These are lyric poems, and I found a great sense of, well, libera­
tion in writing them. I was aiming for a more blunt , simple , time­
bound , physical statement . A lyric is a poem to be sung. That ' s a dif­
ferent mode of reality. There are literally different values for a song,
the notes, right? They sound those values . A lyric does aspire to the
condition of being one with its sound. So:
 78
Bob Perelman

MY ONE VOI C E

At the sound o f my voice

I spoke and, egged on
By the discrepancy, wrote
The rest out as poetry.

Read the books , duets

From nowhere say they speak:
Why not let them . Habitual stares
Leave trees in rearview mirrors .

I came from a neutral point

In space , far from the inside
Of any one head . 0 say can I
Still see the tabula rasa outshining

That rosy dawn on the near side

Of the genetic code . Doubt ,
Thy name is certainty. Generations
Of recordings of the sunrise

Picture the light until the page

Is white and I predict
The present, hearing a future
In the syllables' erasing fade .

Just briefly, there' s the time conflict between w riting and speaking
that I've been talking about. And I ' m voting for the actual fact of the
sound . " Hearing a future I In the syllables' erasing fade . " Although
I complicate it with "erasing, " -though that could apply to tape or
paper. But a condition of sound is its disappearance, unlike words on
the page .
Robinson: If you' re opting for sound , why would you be paying
so much attention to static elements , words on the page, the alphabet?
Isn't there a real conflict?
Perelman: Yeah . Yeah. Yeah . " Hearing a future" : that ' s the
rhetorical gesture in Catullus , Horace , Shakespeare : This verse will
outlive all time; the body in the grave; doesn' t matter, etc . So I ' m say­
ing, no, I ' ll make that gesture, but I ' ll make it inhere in the actual
sound which at the end of the poem is now over.
 79
Sense

OK, next poem . " Book Years . " On the analogy of light years .

BOOK YEARS

A rel igious virgin of unspecific sex

Opens the book again . Great trees
Mass into a risen gloo m . Green
Valleys bathed in blue light lull
A scattered population . The world ends;

A person is born , no sense

Thinking about it forever. I ' m writing
While time stands still.

In direct contradiction to the disap pearance of the spoken sound in the

pnor poe m .

It certainly
Doesn ' t lead to the future . First
In a series of willin g abstractions ,

The body makes history and leaves

No one to clean up after
I t ' s gone. Flesh m i rrors its absence
In solid colors; generations absorb fmite
Amounts of light. Identity is abbreviation .

A religious frenzied realism leaves no·

Place to go, no stone unturned .
An aesthetic pharmacopia of diseases proj ects
Fuzzy slides of a beautiful woman
Living forever in perfect health , dancing

On rocks, acres, dark green world .

She ' s only a figure of speech ,
But the books , the modern l ibrary
Giants, fall beneath her feet . Lives
Accumulate sound like clouds hold water.

Again , at the end there ' s my sense of the actual fact of the sound being
erotic , and a kind of release as rain would be .
One of things I ' m doing in Primer-and , to avoid misunder-
 80
Bob Perelman

standing, I only do this in 6 poems-is to count words in the line.

There's 6 words per line here . And this is one of the poems that has
regular stanzas, so there ' s an artificial regularity imposed on top of
what it's saying. I can explain this now, not that I did it to explain
this. But, again, that meaning and sound are differentiable.
In the few cases where I did count words I would juggle with
what it said to make the lines coherent in and of themselves . I would
like each line to be able to exist by itself. Line 2 : "Opens the book
again. Great trees. " Okay. You open the book-individual fate or
life-and what do you have , great trees. The book of nature, the tree
of life, perhaps. In every case , I would like to have the line be an ex­
tra-grammatical unity, in addition to the grammar of what' s being
said .
That ' s a lot different from Zukofsky' s use, which is where I got it
from . In "A "-22 and 23-he has 5 words per line . But he has so
many hyphenated words. Here's a 5-word line: "Create sky-fires be
roof and . " " Sky-fires" is one word and the line ends in " and . " So
that's a much harder-to-hear distinction he ' s imposing.
Robinson: How is he solving the problem by hyphenating " sky­
fires" if the line ends in " and " ? Why doesn 't he just put the " and "
on the next line?
Perelman: I don't know. It seems like a funny thing to have
done . Each movement is 500 lines long so he does have that con­
straint . But you wouldn ' t think it would . . .
Mandel: " I ' m sure he had his reasons . " [laughter]
Perelman: Here ' s two lines : " Flute feather stridor horse-scam­
per beggar" -which I would think is 6 words- " Clownsage love­
must know dessert desert . "
Robinson: H e wanted a higher ratio o f word per line . H e de­
cided to only have 5 words per line , but he got an extra word in by
hyphenating.
Perelman : He did, sure, but . . . [laughs]
Watten: But he' s also reminding us that he' s translating from
something like Egyptian , where you have some hieroglyphic cluster
which might mean " sky-fire . "
 81
Sense

Unidentified: Doesn 't the 5-word line occur throughout Chi­

nese classical poetry?
Perelman: That ' s right .
Anyway, this is one of the things in Primer. I ' m trying to contrast
rhythms of units of meaning with units of sound .
Robinson: The counting of words in the line is meaning rather
than sound . Sound would work against that break, actually, right? The
syntax is going to want to organize itself differently than counting the
number of words in the line .
Silliman: Would that be different from syllabics?
Perelman: In actual practice , it ' s a lot different than syllabics.
It's a lot different than meter. You ' re not counting syllables, you ' re
not counting stress . You ' re counting meaning units .
Watten: You ' re also counting shapes, so it ' s arbitrary. It's an­
other way of being arbitrary. Syllabics is arbitrary and so is counting
words.
Mandel: But they' re different . Syllabics is a measure and count­
ing words is an enumeration.
Robinson: But it ' s not a heard enumeration because , as you said
earlier, you don ' t hear words, you hear phrase units or whatever.
Perelman : I want , obviously, to dilate the sense of hearing. I
want you to hear the grammar, and that a phrase could end here or it
could go on and connect and therefore change itself. It could trans­
mute itself in actual historical time , as you 're hearing it .
There ' s one poem where it got down to an extremely simple . . .

pun on word counting and sense. " Mind & Body. " Mind ampersand
body. The two biggies. Two things, three words . It starts out with
three words per line , two line stanzas .

MIND & BODY

Bodies of water,
States of mind .

There ' s actually a kind of cross rhythm . It sounds like the most obvi­
ous thing, the mind idling along in neutral, hearing these little phrases
 82
Bob Perelman

and putting them down . But then I liked the chiasmuses . " Bodies" is
on one side of the ' ' of' ' and ' ' mind ' ' is on the other. Body and mind is
sort of a true pair. But water and states? And , again , lakes and per­
ceiving? The body vs. the state? The mind as water?

Alternates state
The case

The verb " state " instead of the nou n . And " The case " presumes to
sum it all up . " The world is all that fits into the suitcase , " as Wittgen­
stein say s . [laughter] So , with mind and body we have really summed
it up. This is it . We have both things taken care of. For those people
who are into athletics , we have the body, and for those people w h o are

into books , we have the mind . Third stanza, back to three words:

With equal force

On either hand.

There ' s the rhyme o f " equal " and " either. " We have two hands, and
they both have equal force . But, actually, it ' s back to the body and
hints of violence . In the last stanza, there ' s a more . . . tragic move­

ment , really.

Schools of thought,
Buckets of blood ,
Muddy roads.

Again, I want to hear a dumb pun on schools of fish , going back to

" Bodies of water. " " Buckets of blood " is my summary of The Refor­
mation, The Crusades, or whatever. You know: today, obviously.
Silliman: The mind acts on body? [laughter]
Perelman: Right. " Buckets of blood , I Muddy road s . " Th at's
the outcome of what had started as this placid dualism .
There ' s more a pattern here than a strict word count . But follow·
ing that pattern out really led to the meaning , in a way that it didn ' t in
" Book Years . "
Let my read " History. " Things happen and have a m ateriality
and a finality that ' s difficult to assimilate . And I wanted to say that
 83
Sense

syntax is, for me, a kind of history. As the sentence goes along, it has a
lot of possibilities, the axis of selection, the conceivable turnings, but it
does have a history and fmally gets said . Like that the line from
"Hymn to Intellectual Beauty " : " in dark bondage // To whatever
the se words I Now say. "
Watten: Duncan McNaughton' s objection to your treatment of
Homer was that it was " History. " You can't say there are multiple
possibilities . It' s come down to us that way.
Robinson: But he meant that it was solid information .
Watten: It's Authority. There ' s absolutely no way around it .

Perelman:
H ISTORY
The sun shines center stage ,
Lights up a material sentence

I mean the buildings, the roads , farms chemicals, etc.

which,
Though visibly complex, is obviously
Not complete. The damage is literal,
One thing no one can argue with.
An endless chain of bodies
Wants to call it home, walking
Along the bases of the buildings.
Having survived the history of ideas
For x number of days does not
M ake us ideal readers. Nor
Are we mentioned in the text .
The dead should have known better.
Shrines cry out for affection ,
The wounds of Freud competing
With Newton's perfect corpse .

That' s one way to look at various industries which spring up: the
Freu d Industry, the Zukofsky Industry. It ' s shn"nes, really. Think of the
affection that ' s lavished on joyce, by Richard Ellmann and by many
 84
Bob Perelman

others for the fact of this single artist . You put all value in there: how
did he butter his toast ; what did he say to the prostitutes he talked with
at 2 a . m . in Paris . We know all this now . Incredible affection . . . m a

vacuum .

Their thought makes total sense

Until we open our mouths.
Private tongues multiply barely
Audible pleasures.

If language is private it ' s not a pleasure .

On the books
The sun stands still , a thing
Of beauty. The stopped shadows
Develop moral overtones and these
Are what gets put into circulation .
Gargoyles and church music are one

Of many false doors . Words

Blame objects for lack of effect .
Dreams echo food an d housing. The air
Turns dark to bright and back,
Sped up in the brain.

Now , a companion piece : history and then the material world :

PHYSICS

The weight of a higher realm

Forms a blank the size of the sky,
Seen from the center of any
Perfect personal sphere .

A long sedimentary journey

Leads from there to here , requiring
Strict separation of the body
From past messages. Land masses

On tv are now wreathed in spirals

Of cloud . These give us our
 85
Sense

Rainy nights in Georgia, white

Christmases. The dreams of nomenclature
Survive the senses' declarations
To populate thin air.
Tuning in China on your fillings
Means another screw tightens
In the pale, persuasive regime
Of appearances. The sun is hot ,
But the god of our brains
Is still a jealous god .
Physically impeccable , the world
Is missing from these equations.
We are the equal signs
Idealizing the remains.
Ron [Silliman] and I had a long correspondence about this poem,
which I was going to read parts of, but I 'll skip. Basically, his com­
plaint was that it was " an argument for symmetry and elegance, " but
he didn ' t know if he was supposed to believe it or not .
Watten: Well , your elegance in this poem is not going to change
anything. It's a celebration of the two sides of the equation not being
equal , but you ' re ascribing a great deal of accuracy to that fact ,
whereas somebody with a much more tendentious interest i n his syn­
thesis would ride right over all these objections.
Perelman: It's a little like Terry Eagleton ' s phrase , " imaginary
resolu tions of real contradictions . " Here , I ' m trying to have enough
m eaning syllable by syllable to show that there is a world, in spite of
the oppression of idealism .
Mandel: The poem is very cold in its relationship to the prob­
lems it poses. It poses this confusion in the realm of appearances in the
form of swirls on a computer map on a TV weather forecast. In other
wo rds, it picks extremely minor examples, which is not necessarily
bad, but certainly lends itself to the feeling that the poet is very much
removed , detached, and quite willing to be a disembodied mentality.
Perelman: I n terms of a poem of the present day, I much prefer
" His tory, " the one before . With the people walking along trying to
get home , trying to have the buildings be home .
 86
Bob Perelman

Robinson: Were you thinking about physics?

Perelman: Yes I was, actually. Physics is this incredible decon­
struction of the material world, ending up in nuclear bombs, as a mat·
ter of fact . I now would want to argue more directly against them.
Mandel: You would want the world to come in in a more ten­
dentious way. It's not really " physically impeccable . "
Perelman: No it's not . Like I said before, " The damage is lit­
eral . "
OK. I want t o end this. I ' ll just read this, without comment.
This goes back to the physical and erotic, the materiality of poetry.

PASTORAL
One person each, out
Into one world, back into many.
The collection , the alphabet. He imitates
Its power, sentiments, antiquity. Scenery
In the form of a dramatic monolog.
She trails out of the present
Both ways, but is sitting
At the table with him . Sprays
Of bay, laurel , and their natural
Interpretations are tacked above them .
Hearts beating. A storm at sea.
Gossip at length , hours
Yoked together, sun shines,
Air presses on their capillaries,
Actions. Desire pronounced and
Punctuated, their minds end
In their senses. Pleasures
Lag across solid bridges.
Time to eat . Light is suffused, revised
Among the letters. Their ears fill
With sounds of the visible world.
Minutes surround them , trees
In the foreground by voice vote.
Their eyes close. It is night .
 Bruce Boone

Writing and An
Anti-Nuclear Politics

Bruce Boone: For gallows humor that comes close to standup

comedy, a favorite of mine is Edward G . Robinson as Fred MacMur­
ray ' s boss in Double Indemnity telling MacMurray, the insurance rep,
all th e ways you can die accidentally. They' re all down there on the ta­
bles , he tells him , in the actuarial statistics. Edward G . Robinson ' s at
his best in scenes like this one , citing chapter and verse, ticking off on
those plump fingers of his the categories of violence of other people .
There ' s death by drowning, he asserts, and death by falling from high
places. There are deaths subdivided by location-by land , at sea, in
the air. And death listed according to the means-bathtub , auto acci­
dent , rope, shock. Each gets into still further subheadings , until at last
you get this picture of a vast battlefield filled with severed limbs,
c rushed extremities, mangled bones . What a comic scene ! But, con­
clude s MacMurray' s boss, suddenly puzzled and in spite of himself
su sp icious now , there are almost no statistics at all on death by falling
fro m a moving train . We enjoy MacMurray' s complete deadpan reac­
ti on to his boss ' s confusion-since the last item mentioned happens to
be th e crime he and Barbara Stanwyck have just successfully carried
out , app arently, against her cranky oil executive husband . Under­
neat h , thou gh, there ' s another aspect of the humor, and that ' s the list

87
 88
Bruce Boone

structure itself. How hysterically odd and funny it is that in the late
capitalist society we live in, even death itself can be inventoried, be
made just another item in our lives, even violent death .
This is my gut level reaction to the prospect of nuclear disaster,
and I somehow want to factor it i n . Nuclear death is a G . E . , chemi·
cals are a Kelvinator, something else is a Kenmore or Amana. Do you
choose chemicals? Well , we can subdivide . There ' s Love C anal for in·
stance , or plastics in the wall molding or asbestos in the old central
heating system you used to have . And in this bleak frame of mind I
give all city telephone poles a very wide berth, knowing as I do about
the PCB ' s in those insulators . This viewpoint can be endlessly de·
pressing and , until challenged by some outside force , can be preventa·
tive of any counter-action .
Is a mindset like this so different when we get to a collective
level? What death is for me personally, the possibility of species extinc·
tion may be for group life , or with more generosity and a solidarity
that ' s comprehensive , what ecological problems might look like for
planetary existence . How glum a prospect it i s ! If global temperature
gets raised a degree and a half, does that mean the predicted b io·
sphere shutdown through a (this time , irreversible) new ice age? So I
read someplace or other. There ' s the freon from spray cans-or is it
refrigerators-wafting slowly up to disintegrate the ozone layer. When
that envelope goes, so goes the story, we get basted in our own jui ces.
Thanksgiving turkeys in the oven of space . There ' s a b igness here
that ' s just too stagge ring, makes itself less available imaginatively. In
this quandary humor often arise s . If it didn ' t , our survival outlook
would probably be less good . True , you can disavow . There are times
when atrocities can ' t be integrated p sychically, I think. Yet the prob·
!ems that trigger this stress are not going to go away. They are going
to have to be faced at last .
In emergencies one of the most interesting forms of entertain·
ment , to m e , exists along the irony-to-sarcasm mode , often helpfully
based as it is on shared cultural codes . One thinks most often o f this
humor as banal and ordinary. Like many other an ugly duc kl ing
that ' s not yet a swan , you take it for granted . But encounter it , and its
ability to brilliantly expose longstanding contradictions may m ake
 89
Writing and an A nti-Nuclear Politics

you gasp and giggle at the same time. Humor like this isn ' t palliative
but feisty. And the more it has to push against social repressiveness,
the more socially obvious its aggressivity will seem . Are faggots dish­
ing nice? Only insincerely. How about when black kids play the
dozens? The violence of yesterday' s classconscious humor in the
Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello, or The Three Stooges can be
easily paralled with Gilda Radner doing Roseanne Rosanna Dana.
The sheer unspeakable rage that ' s bottled up in this humor is testified
to in the figures we easily, sometimes too easily, give to it-side-split­
ting, rib-cracking. Enjoying it , the mouth gapes in a rictus . " Oh ! "
you think and look at your neighbors to see their reaction . Tears of
rage that might possibly mean j oy too . Aren 't these codes, in their sol­
idarity, coming near to a possibility of opposition? Brecht began with
assumptions like these, I think. Similarly our S . F. Mime Troupe .
Then the question comes up (for an antinuke politics or any other)­
but what ' s our constituency here? What if your constituency doesn 't
particularly identify itself as working class, or by and large see itself as
women or gays or minorities either for instance? What if in fact the
first language most of your constituency speaks is the degraded lan­
guage of mass culture? Commodity language may be for many of us
the main instrument of our expression , our native tongue.
Isn ' t most entertainment fake? Look at the laugh tracks on TV
for instance . As a performer, entertainer, or writer you begin with
genuine concerns for the truth factors I ' m describing. But you may
fi nish quite badly. It's hard not to get subverted . Dylan becomes a
Chris tian . Richard Pryor sells out . This tendency in commercial cul­
ture can 't surprise us. The oppositional quality of traditional
avantgarde writing, on the other hand, may make it suddenly more
attractive again . The training you get from working in an avantgarde
trad ition can make you very good in working with ideas, for instance.
A person with this training can often see concepts in things when they
are only implicit, draw them out for a constituency and point them
up , so that they get addressed and people are urged to act. The
strength of popular codes is thought to be opposite, related to enter­
tai nm ent, humor, and so on-alive if anything. It's said to be in touch
wi th peo ple ' s (not necessarily the people' s) emotions and experiences.
 90
Bruce Boone

And if it' s not quite true to say that these two traditions-po pular and
mass art on the one hand and avantgarde, experimentali st art on the
other-don' t ever mix, it is true that most art gets limited to one, not
the other. The examples of Laurie Anderson in high art crossing over
to popular forms, or Jamaican musics like Reggae or Dub going the 1
opposite way for the sake of making conceptual polemics , though
wonderful and promising, are not yet characteristic ; and most art
seems schizophrenically attendant on only a portion of our lives. Two
sets of strengths then, q.nd how to unite them . In a political writing­
or a humane propaganda-wouldn' t you want to deal with ideas sue·
cessfully? I take it for granted you would . Just as to make those ideas
popular-and not cynically but appreciatively so-l take it for
granted you'd want your ideas to be successful as entertainment . Is
this expectation well founded?
I think so . In 1 955 , Richard Aldrich made a slease vehicle called
Kiss Me, Deadly that could be used to illustrate. In the Eisenhower I
years of the ' 50s the " nuclear theme" itself must have been a surprise.
In a less obvious way, though, the fact that the Bomb sequence at the
end goes back retrospectively to interpret earlier material and "politi·
cize" it somehow-perhaps because the attempt is not a very con·
scious one-was probably more surprising. The "pqliticization " thus
takes place at the level of the emotions only, only in our-and the
fllm ' s-feeling life . Critical understanding hardly benefits from this.
Of course the film should be complimented on its wonderful , truly
wonderful sense of popular codes . But so what? In the end it doesn't
mean a damn thing, since it can' t communicate to us what it doesn't
even know itself. But what if-after the fact naturally-we gave it the
conceptual punch that ' s missing here, that makes it flounder? What
if, added to the fllm's lyrical evocation of popular codes , there was a
hardcore layer of rationality, explanation as well? This new Kiss Me,
Deadly would hardly be Robert Aldrich's-it'd be ours , in a larger,
collective sense . And if propaganda, well , we hope it wouldn' t be au·
thoritarian . Just successful . So here ' s the plot of Aldrich' s movie.
which I'll summarize and feel free to comment on , and even distort .
in the interests, I hope, of getting people to start to think about chan g·
ing society.
 91
Writing and an A nti-Nuclear Politics

How does it start? First of all there ' s Mike ' s girl trouble .
Women ! Always a problem for Mike ! They pull guns on him , try to
seduce him-and in their rottenness end up betraying him . In fact the
Aldrich movie pushes your buttons so hard on this subject that you
wonder if it doesn ' t have some buried critical, even protofeminist in­
tentions, though bungled. The opening shots are all violence . Chris­
tina, an escapee from a mental hospital , runs in front of M ike ' s sports
car in the middle of night nearly getting herself kill ed . " Stop ! Stop ! "
She doesn ' t seem to have any clothes on underneath that trenchcoat
she's wearing. Mike lets her into the sports car. The implicit promise
of sex isn ' t delivered. Within a couple of short scenes we ' re to see her
legs dangling lifeless at the edge of hard desk. She ' s been tortured and
murdered . Mike gets off with a beating, but when he wakes up you
can tell he ' s thinking of revenge . C hristina' s last words to him are­
" Remember me. " Life , as portrayed in this movie , is misogynist, vi­
olent. Sex is ambivalent, maybe lethal .
Soon artistic expression and ethnicity/race , we 'll see, will seem
problematic too . Meanwhile there ' s a lot of L.A. material , driving
around in traffic, freeway shots , people manipulating cars with as­
tounding aggressivity, like weapons. L . A . as the city of modernity.
You use-people and things-in this city. Like Mike and Velda do
with each other, only Mike uses Velda more than she does him . Velda
is Mike ' s lover of course, but also a business partner/secretary of
Mike's. Supposedly-according to the police lieutenant in this ftlm­
they play both sides against the other, for added income , in divorce
cases they handle in their private investigation business . When M ike
gets back to his luxury apartment from wherever he' s been , he turns
o n h i s answering machine and looks glumly out in the window at the
bleak grid of traffic. Something's wrong here , he' s thinking-but
what? Our M ike H ammer isn ' t a conscious person . His instinct' s just
to coerce-that ' s why he has the name that he does . Won ' t a hard­
boiled guy like this at least have great sex? Hardly. Leering is better
than fucking is Mike ' s motto . " Look at the goodies, " he says in one
scene when a goodlooking blonde sashays down the sidewalk, and it' s
obviously meant a s a sneer not a come-on . Sometimes you even won­
der if he even likes Velda! Velda and Mike are waiting in Mike ' s
 92
Bruce Boone

apartment , and apparently the modern art is getting to Velda. She feel
uncomfortable and starts vamping Mike . She wraps her arms around ,
his neck, fondles and inveigles, but all with no results. M ike gives her
a tight lipped little smile but won ' t budge . How come? His body lan­
guage says he 's made of steel . Would it be unmanly to reciprocate, we
wonder? Both seem relieved when the doorbell rings. They stare at
each other. Well , I guess we have to break this off, since that ' s the po·
lice lieutenant . And naturally, that' s exactly who it is.
Is it possible that Mike might really like guys? Probably not. The
sign of it is how manipulative Mike ' s relation with Nick, the Greek ,
garage mechanic, is . Nick really likes to get physical with Mike. Va­
va-voom ! says Nick . And there ' re hands all over the place in enthusi·
astic camaraderie . Mike ' s invariable response: how can I use you? So
he asks Nick to take risks for him that result in Nick getting killed. Too
bad for Nick. On the other hand since Nick is small and a foreigner,
it's really hard to take him seriously. He 's dismissed. As in the black
bar scene where there's a great blues song being sung, you know th at
there are definite strengths in ethnicity. Nick's ability to love is shown
as part of his Greekness . On the minus side, this ethnicity is always
presented as a weakness. And it' s not for guys like Mike .
Ethnicity and women are a two-sided coin-but so is art, as we
will soon find out. Mike ' s need for a certain name, address, leads him ,
to the Bunker Hill area in L . A . , where a middle-aged Italian tenor is ·

singing-is it Verdi? His arms outstretched , he' s accompanying him·

self on a record . And in a touch that gets almost cute-there ' s spa·
ghetti cooking on the stove . We get the point . Art and ethnicity go to·
gether, don' t they? Just as we' ve learned that art goes with women.
The dead Christina was a poet, we find out, and the words she left
Mike, " Remember me, " turn out to be the name of a Christina Ro·
setti sonnet . But back to Mike and the tenor. Mike needs information
from the guy, so to show him he' s serious he grabs the guy ' s record off
his record player and smashes it in two across a big-muscled thigh .
That' s to show him he' s not just fooling around . The man bursts in to ,
tears. Art is also weak, we learn . Which is a big problem . I t ' s like the
ladies. You can't help but need and want them , even though they' re
no good . For you anyway.
Is modern art different? Well , it' s closer to Mike-literally. H is
 93
Writing and an A nti-Nuclear Politics

apartment ' s full of it, and modern art gives Mike a sort of dubious
pleasure . I t ' s like the feeling he gets looking out his window at the
L.A. traffic , listening to his answering machine. When the camera
pokes around Mike ' s apartment-nosy, just like we are , for clues
about this man ' s psyche-we see clunky ' 50s type " deco " furniture ,
ugly pictures of Picasso type women , faces distorted with anxiety or
fear, and dangling mobiles , Calder style, that by rights everybody in
the movie should be bumping into , they' re so clumsy and obtrusive .
What's it all mean? we' re asking ourselves now. Don' t worry, soon
the answer is going to be as clear as daylight, a thousand suns as a
matter of fact . But first our hero Mike has to get the address of the
gangsters he ' s been looking for from a homosexual art dealer whose
fear of Mike is played for laughs. Why shouldn ' t he be afraid of M ike,
the little queen ! He nervously swallows some sleeping pills so he won' t
have to b e interrogated b y Mike. M ike finds what he came for-then
heads to M alibu where the gangsters are holed up.
By now we have a pretty good idea what these jerks are up to.
Earlier M ike ' s police lieutenant friend has clued him in . The scene is
very campy noir-two shadowy silhouettes talking to each other, like
interviews with Mafia chieftains who don ' t want to be identified .
"I'm just going to say a few phrases " -here there ' s a pause so the full
effect of the horror will sink in- " and I think you 'll understand . " It 's
so truly monstrous . " Los Alamos . . . . Trinity . . . . the Manhattan pro­
ject. " Huh? Did he say what I thought he said? Yes he did . He said
that. And as I watched this movie at the C astro Theater with a mostly
gay audience some 28 years after it was made, the full horror did
come back to me and remained for some time . They' re talking about
bombs, they' re talking about nuclear testing.
And on account of this fact , the last moments of the film will get
to seem curiously symbolic. It will light up " tilt. " Something so big
w ill be brought in that the ftlm literally will not know how to handle it,
and everything will get distorted , surreal . Sex and women will be re­
veal ed as a principle of evil , for instance . The " object " the gang has
i n its possession is a box of uranium ore , or as it will also be call e d­
Pandora ' s Box . " All the evils of the world are in it, " explains the
gangster chieftain .
I t turns out he ' s a very cultivated person , the criminal master-
 94
Bruce Boone

mind. He collects modern art. That ' s of course in his spare time since
he's also an M . D . , it turns out. But spare time is something this doc­
tor has a lot of, since, when he' s not out hustling uranium to presum­
ably sell to the Reds, his medical practice is limited to discretely push­
ing drug prescriptions to hood friends. He's not a very savory person,
you might say. But at least he' s cultivated .
I 've seen this movie twice and the drama of the last scene re·
mains completely riveting. You know something is really at stake . A
woman who M ike protected turns out to be the mastermind ' s lady­
friend, but she winds up double-crossing him too . She shoots the
gangster boyfriend and, ignoring his dying words, opens the ill·
starred treasure box to see what' s inside . An unearthly light streams
out and, with a gigantic shadow projected on the wall behind, it's
clear she's in hell . Mike in this interval has freed Velda from the other
room where she' s been held hostage and the two of them manage to
stagger to the door. The gangster's moll meantime can't seem to let go
of the lid she ' s raised . It sticks to her hand like phosphorus, she can't
shake it, she starts screaming. The room begins to glow , heat waves
roll up. Then there' s a cut . Running down the beach , Mike and Velda
look back at the place they escaped from . Horrible ! Ballooning out
visibly at the sides , the beachhouse disseminates huge amounts of
light , energy. There ' s a groan from the audience at this point . In the
night sky we notice there are clouds and heat waves slowly forming
themselves from the house . It's a mushroom cloud , we realize . It ' s a
mushroom cloud we ' re seeing.
In my book this ending is wonderful because of its ludicrous gra­
tuity. Right at the end , has it decided to just jettison the realist movie
conventions it ' s been following up to now? Atomic explosions don' t
come from the accidental opening of little uranium ore strongboxes,
and probably you realized that even in 1 95 5 . This means the accent
was put on the explosion itself, and the objectivity of a real mushroom
cloud is something that causes you to account for it-but where? The
explosion discredits the story line , you could say, and recredits social
reality-events in the world outside this theater. In place of Mike
Hammer 's sexy adventure stories, you get-the ban-the bombers, H·
 95
Writing and an A nti-Nuclear Politics.

Bomb development, Nevada testing sites, the Bikini Atoll . And the
botto m-line feeling is, I don' t want to die, I ' m afraid .
Yet the movie clearly has something to say about causes . I
haven ' t mentioned a lot of the violence in the plot-people getting
blown up in cars , knifed and stabbed, pushed downstairs, an old
man, a desk clerk , getting beat up for not taking a bribe, another old
man , the coroner, getting a drawer slammed on his fingers, women
getting thrown away like old minks . How far can you go in valuing
cruelty, appreciating violence? Whatever aggressive satisfactions you
could get here are mixed up with social exploitation. And in the fUm
it's a threat . Violence seems expressive of some huge but unnamed di­
saster that ' s about to overwhelm all of Western society. It ties things
together that otherwise wouldn 't be related-the preoccupation with
"art " and what' s wrong with it, i . e . , modern art, the ethnic preju­
dices and implicit racism , the problematic nature of sex and relations
of men and women, all of it gets related to the nuclear explosion at the
end . The mushroom cloud as the meaning of a society that's turned
against sexuality, other cultures (racism), art , women, and finally-it­
self. Doesn ' t this culture even like life for goodness sake? Look at its
view of sex . A woman opens a forbidden box . Since it ' s filled with
uranium ore , this starts off the end of the world . You guess the moral .
Then this . Who' s the highest thinker in the film? Why the criminal
mastermind . He stands for science-white European science natu­
rally-which rises up from a civilization to destroy that civilization
and the world with it . Great! Do we admire this? Only when, as with
the film Kiss Me, Deadly, we think we 've got nothing else to admire ,
love , lose .
For myself, I think an anti-nuke writer's politics should be
broad , ranging, radical . Stopping the MX is a good start , but what
then? Will it be enough when we go to j ail to stop theater weapons in
Europe? Marches and sit-downs and sit-ins aren ' t enough . What
new, even more threatening scenarios are being developed even now?
Weapons from space? Agricultural chemicals with worldwide cancer
as the ir result? To dismantle disaster scenarios is finally to dismantle
the deep cultural and economic assumptions that produce these see-
 96
Bruce Boone

narios . And that doesn't, I assume , mean saving society-as-we-know­

it . Writers will have a job to do in beginning to say why and how these
changes are to take place. It's a question of altering the way society
works. If serious criticisms from the women 's movement today, from
native Americans, Asians, Latinos and blacks, from gays, from art·
ists, from socialists and communists and others in our society are to
begin to make sense , and the balance of species prospects to swing
back from global extinction to smvival, writers will be a part of this
ongoing movement, I assume . But more effectively, whole-heartedly
than today, I think. I hope .
 Alan Davies

Language/Mind/Writing

Alan Davies : The fact that language as writing and language as

speech are entirely separate is evident in the fact that they contribute
to entirely separate sorts of work . They are separate because they do
not occupy the mind at the same time . A thought in the mind may
unite them , or a thought in the mind may aim to unite them , but they
are not united in thought . Thought is the separation of language as
writ in g from language as speech . Language is not, or never, difficult.
It is the expression of life by life , the excelsior of a moment with the
perpetuation of that moment, without the perpetual intrusion of that
moment . If we follow the line of language into life we find that it en­
counters the body as speech, we find that it encounters the mind as
writing. And it is, solipsisticall y, these encounters which give it its two
defi ni tions . When speech employs writing to make itself manifest, it is
laughable , and when writing employs speech to make itself manifest,
it is an excuse for a stronger gesture of the mind in the direction of life,
thought in the direction of action . The work is in the thought, no mat­
ter w hich exit it chooses or, no matter to which exit it is forced , by the
necessities, to default . There is never any absence of thought , but
there is in writing its excellence, in speech its use , its use with perhaps
an o ccasional perfecting. The distance between writing and speech is
the di stance between the surveyor of the land and the land . If lan­
gu age perpetuates itself in a world it is effortless, if speech or writing
97
 98
Alan Davies

do so, it is in effort, by effort and, in the case of writing, for effort.

There is no reason to externalize either of these facts, or quadrants, or
gestures. Neither is exterior to another. Extemalization is the detri·
ment of language, of mind, of writing. There is something drastic in
the magnitude of our thought of these things , and it is such that it does
not permit them to separate except in thought, wherein they are en·
tirely separate . It is the mind which teaches us where we are wrong in
writing. It is the writing which teaches us wherein the languages are
wrong, wherein a language is wrong. And it is language which, when
an attentive tool , criticizes the obtrusive forms of the mind, and
sharpens it, or them , making it that tool which separates all speech
from thought, all speech from writing, and writing the arbiter of their
graceful resubmissions. Our premise is the separation of the functions
of words in the world . Sometimes they exist in the mouth , sometimes
they exist in the mind, and sometimes they exist on the page . If they
have appeared to be the same in one place and in another, it is because
our minds have been made too weak to reckon changes . And if we
have thought them the same, we have not , by definition , thought.
Thought is the particular differences of its particulars. The equatabil·
ity, in part, of speech and writing, would appear in part because of
their coexistence as two of the most particularly" noticeable among the
.
particulars of thought. Where we have three nouns in the languages
we have three things which we have noticed to be separable, and
where we have thought, soft thought , we notice it in the reduceab ility
of terms to the softened absence of edges, the clinging mortality of
identification . We notice the excellence of a distinction when we recog·
nize the usefulness, within the world, of its separable items . We need
only to know what we think, in order to act , but we know that thi s ar·
tide of intentions, which animates art , would reduce so much of the
world to stopping. The identity of the uses of the language is apparen t
only to those who do not actually use it, those who, for example, speak
without thinking, those who write without thinking, think without
writing, or one person of some sort such as these . There may be a rea·
son to produce the language as a gesture and if there is then that rea·
son is writing, but there can be no reason to reduce the languages to a
language , nor could there be a reason to produce one language in the
 99
Language/Mind/Writing

direction of the forms of another, unless that reason is laziness, or de­

fault. Language is as strong as mind is as strong as writing is as strong
as language . As long as one of these separable functions rem ains sepa­

rate it is as strong as the interior strengths common to the others and

itself, but the imitation of one function of lan guage by another begins
to manifest the unfortunately functioning confusion of one form of
confusion as another.
. . . The language is a special and perfectable thing, special be­
cause we know it, because we know in it , and perfectable because we
come close to it, and , over it, and pass it with the language as that ex­
cellent weapon of lazy self, in the teeth . The language is not sentimen­
tal , nor is it the excelsior of sentiment, when it lives. The language is
the present without qualifiers. The language does not qualify any­
thing until it is forced to by some idiocy within the world . Released to
be itself, that is, being what it would be without that release the need
for which we demand for it by our lazy and insistent ways, being there
separate from stupidity, and articulate about it , the language makes
the nouns live with the verbs, that is all it does, and it does that very
well . When we wish to know something about the language we use it,
and our use of it tells us more than we thought we would be asking,
because our asking is full of the faults, and language is full with the ex­
cellences of its use , that excellence which permits it to be of use . We
too often manage to make the language work because we are inatten­
tive to anything else , to everything, else . But the language is a special
tool , and , one which does not specialize, and its perfection is always
its sol idity within , whichever is most immediate to its own gestures,
and its gestures make us used to it .
We would not say that the mind is the same as or that it is differ­
ent from the language , or a language, or the many languages. Lan­
guages are the evident portions of minds . The mind is the favored lo­
cation of the languages when the languages are preferred to be doing
the ir favored , their best , work. The mind is the site of the language
when it is most perfectably the language , the place where a language
most and most explicitly perfects itself, and you don ' t work in the
min d without breakin g the mind into thoughts , and thought is the ex­
plicitly early action of a language, but the mind will not relent . The
 1 00
A lan Davies

most resilient of factors is the fact of the mind. The mind is the legacy
of the acts of the languages, but it is also, and, incidently, more inter·
estingly, the locus of the languages in labor. The mind is the instruct·
ing within a life . With memory it is the instructions, and with life it is
the simple, temporary, solid, and solitary, construction of the instruc·
tions in the life . The language is the presences of the vocabularies and
the grammars and the mind is the sentences in the sense of the carry·
ing out of the instructions implicit in the presence of the active vocab·
ulary, the acting grammar, and the instrumentation of each by, and in
relation to, each . The mind is the actions in thought of a life , and if
memory is its periphery then in those places the mind is a center, an
activity which, at its best, diminishes into itself, a soft sharp point of
moving focus , without exaggeration , without extension , and if inte·
rior to anything, interior to it only in default. The language does not
ever use the language as a vehicle for trading out of itself. The Ian·
guage is occasionally or perhaps frequently made to do that work, that
sort of work, but by persons living entirely then exterior to the mind,
their own mind . The mind is the focus of life in the world . The Ian·
guage is the light of the mind, the point of its pointed focus in the
world . Mind is that device of perpetual motion the existence of which
death exists to reinforce if not prove . The mind in the pursuit of the
mind, or, mind in pursuit of the mind , these are among the stron gest
urges which fasten upon a life, or upon which any life fastens . . . .

It's n ice to go home after having a job all day and working late
and being very tired , and make something to eat and sit down and in
a couple of hours write four or five sentences. It's great to do that, for
me it' s a wonderful thing to do that . And you can probably sense th at
from the fact that I didn' t mind repeating certain things in sentences
in order to be able to write another sentence of a certain sort, or a cer·
tain kind of feeling.
But also part of giving a lecture is that it doesn't stop the re. It ' s
different from other kinds of writing, and certainly different from giv·
ing a reading of your writing because the world comes to you to be a
part of this dialogue. And it' s a little bit strange because you get to
 1 01
Language/Mind/Writing

shoot your mouth off for a long time , and if you 've written it or you
happen to be able to speak in public well , then you do that at your
best and you feel this ridiculous advantage. So, I ' m not going to ask
you to beat me or anything, or to be put at a disadvantage , but there' s
something about that weight which I think i t i s now your responsibil­
ity to shift to the best of your ability. And I ' m going to remain here
where I was before and be moved by whatever it is you say.
Ron Silliman: I was interested in what I felt to be the two main
nouns of this talk, which were not language , mind , or writing, but ex­
cellence and perfection .
Davies : When you have a certain tool-There happens to be a
p in here on this table, I don't know why, I guess it 's from the flowers.
So one thing that could be done with this pin would be to hold those
three pieces of paper which a florist affixed to ribbons . Alright? Now,
to argue whether that would be a better use for it than to stick these
three pieces of paper to a wall , I wouldn' t know how to answer that. I
think excellence has to do with the perfectability of the pin . Now I re­
alize I ' m using one of the words that you wanted to define in relation
to another. But my feeling is that the greatest value we can receive
from having minds is to continuously not focus like this [ stares at pin] ,
but to continuously go further. So we take this as an example of a pin
and we know something. We see other kinds of pins. These are the
ways that we learn how nouns work, right? or verbs . So we keep go­
ing through-this is a bad example because it's so boring-our
knowledge of the use of pins in language, in literature, in life , we
i magine uses for them, we imagine things to which they metaphori­
cally bear some relationship . So we follow this line of sight, in other
words, right? We don ' t stop . And what I mean by excellence or per­
fectability is following that line of sight in such a way that you encoun­
ter as many obstacles as possible , actually. You don' t try to avoid
them . Excellence would actually be the encountering of very single
ob stacle .
Bob Perelman: In writing, that might tend more toward Ker­
ou ac than your lecture . Every type of obstacle, every type of noun ,
every type of nuance, a big lexicon. Whereas you were extremely nar-
 1 02
Alan Davies

row in what you used . Is there a pole including all sorts of sententious,
gestural, sloppy, etc. , writing? Would that also be a possible extension
of excellence?
Davies: No.
Perelman: That would be encountering a lot of obstacles .
Davies : Well , it would be demonstrating a lot of obstacles and it
would be holding them. That would be like a horizontal plane , if you
let me construct a metaphor. That would be like a horizontal plane full
of obstacles which a person would encounter narratively, say, which is
why Kerouac came to your mind . You encounter these obstacles and
that generates the furtherance of the narrative . And that ' s very much
the way we live our life . But the mind is different .
Tom Mandel: One of the things your talk came to resemble was
a certain kind of, say, medieval or late Platonist metaphysics . Very in·
sistent on the repetition of all of the modalities of relationship between
two universal terms, mind and language , or language and world . And
therefore leaving out certain things that I associate with mind , let's
say for example curiosity, which for me , in the sense of extension of
the mind , seems something quite other than psychology and to need
to be commented on , with respect to the fact that the mind does go on.
And also memory. What is the role of memory? Is a mind different if
it has more memory to address? And if so what is that difference and
how does it come into the fact that you want to treat mind almost to·
tally operationally, or at least as pure activity? How do memory, curi·
osity, eros come in?
Davies: Well, eros and memory are the same thing. [laughter]
And curiosity is just memory playing with itself. (laughter] I think
memory does occupy a very peculiar place in the mind , but it 's like
the sludge of function . Maybe it 's just my own personality, but I don' t
like to go there and spend a lot of time there , in memory. I don ' t thin k
it' s useful .
Mandel: So you' re treating memory, really, very much as psy·
chology. Thus when you think of memory, you think of a person and
his or her personal memories.
Davies: No . . .
Carla Harryman: Does this have something to do with . ? . .
 1 03
Language/Mind/Writing

What did you say about the past in the beginning of your talk?
Davies : I don ' t remember.
Mandel: It was totally imaginary.
Davies : The past is totall y imaginary. I don' t think that the
mind is the seat of memory. Maybe it' s part of the same physical
thing, but in terms of the way it seems to work, I think that memory is
like what the mind does to the body. You remember yourself as a cer­
tain kind of person, you dress in a certain way, you carry yourself in a
certain way, and you make love in a certain way, which relates to what
you said about eros. Or you ' re curious about one thing or another.
Mandel: These are all functions of identity.
Davies: Yeah .
Barrett Watten: One o f the things I ' m interested in i s subject/
predicate relations. A very interesting exercise you can do when
'
you ve constructed a subject/predicate relationship is to reverse it and
put the subj ect in the place of the predicate. And generally what hap­
pens there is you get a very different sense of intentionality, the direc­
tion of the statement completely reverses the whole axis of the person
who's made it .
You seem to have made those functions equivalent. Naming
something and saying something about something seem to be more or
less the same, like The sky is blue/The blue is the sky. It seems like sty­
listically you ' re very careful to maintain this sense of equivalence be­
tween those two possibilities . And what that does is it lines up the
speaker' s position such that there ' s no need for a conditional mode.
You seem to have wiped out conditional language by means of a fan­
tastic discourse , which at the same time assigns an equivalence to all
that possibility, you see what I ' m saying?
Davies : Naming things is incredibly problematic. I don ' t mean
ju st in t erms of the language, or in terms of a particular writing prob­
lem , like to write a novel , or to write a description, or to write some­
thi ng backwards, or anything like that, but in terms of the world . And
so I would deliberately try to avoid naming things. And yet you have
to use words in order to make meaning. And some of them can ' t help
resemblin g names, like the words excellence or purity. And yet you
have to do something in order to try to distribute them more evenly in
 1 04
Alan Davies

relation to each other so that they become like verbs, so that they can
talk to each other, and function without bogging down . It's just name·
call ing otherwise. Really, I don ' t like it .
Beverly Dahlen: Is that a problem peculiar to English? That
sense of the static quality of the noun.
Davies : I don' t know. Are there languages where . . . ?
Dahlen: You want that activity and motion which the noun
seems to exclude or limit . . .
Davies : It stops it .
Mandel: Well, to place a value on operation or on pure activ·
ity-there is a process of nomination that occurs before, because oper·
ations occur on things.
Davies : What makes you think that? [laughter] That ' s a re ally
weird idea.
Mandel: We can talk about activities, and we can evoke
them . . .
Davies: .. .Well , we can actually do them .
Mandel: We can do activities on something. Like you come here
and you ' re going to do your activity on the audience , and then you 're
going to sit up and, as you said , be moved . lii u are going to be moved
by the operation of this audience . And that means there has been a
prior nomination. We know who you are and you know who we are.
Davies : I don ' t accept it, though . If you wake up in the morning
and you say to yourself, looking in the mirror or wherever, " Hi , I'm
Tom Mandel , " . . .
Mandel: . That 's an operation .
. .

Davies: I think that you die . . .

Mandel: . . . I don' t do that . . . [laughter]
Davies : . . and I don' t want that to happen to you . I like you.
.

Mandel: . . I won' t ever do that . [laughter]

.

Davies : Thanks. [laughter]

Watten: What do you think the relation is between the kinds of
language that are in your talk and the kind of language that you use in
a work? Where you ' re involved in much more mutable qualities. Do
you see these terms as prototypical in a much more intentional grarn ·
mar that is leading the other kind of art that you ' re doing, or do you
 1 05
Language/Mind/Writing

see the art as giving you the information that tells you what kind of
position you are taking in language?
Davies: C arts and horses and chickens and eggs .
Watten: Yeah I know but what do you do with the other kinds of
interests that you have, writing interests, say . . .
Davies: Yeah I mean I use nouns .
Watten: No no no, you seem to be after very different kinds of
perceptions in words. And what your mind gets interested in is not so
tautological in other forms of writing.
Davies: I would hope that it is tautological in the sense that the
main thing it does, and what I would hope that it does, and what I
would hope it does almost exclusively, is to demonstrate its use . Not
the way it was used, and not what that use produced . I would hope
that it is tautological in the sense that it isn' t crap .
Really. Like that it' s something there , and I can use this pin , and
give this pin to Carla, and C arla can use this pin .
Watten: There' s a quote from surrealism , " Man proposes and
man disposes . " Do you feel that a lot of your art works have prior
strategies that you ' re proposing and that the work is a disposition of
reality that you propose?
Davies: Well, what do you mean ? Do you mean programmatic
kinds of work? Like , say, Jackson Mac Low's work?
Watten: Almost, then, to enter into what the work is is to deter­
mine it, its use . To define where it is is to have use of it . It seems that
that' s what you ' re saying there is to do.
Davies: Umm hm .
Watten: But you do this in different forms. The question is then
what ' s the value of these various different qualities of language that
occu r.
Davies: Oh, I understand . Well , if you say that the mind is that
w hich writes , then it simply interests me to take this tool that knows
how to do this thing and take it over there and see what it does. And
then take it somewhere else and see if it 's the same mind or a different
mind . . .
Mandel: So is there a hypothesis in entering a given area to see
w hat the mind will do there when it writes?
 1 06
Alan Davies

Davies : You mean is it preceded by a hypothesis?

Mandel: Well , I don ' t want to ask another question in a way that
gets an automatic no . [laughter] I ' m asking whether hypothesis has a

value for you when you ' re going over there , or are you just sort of go·
ing over there? What is over there ? As opposed to just moving away
from where you are, or is there a place over there , and what is the
structure of that ?
Davies : Well , sometimes there ' s a place over there with some·
thing about it that ' s attractive . Like there ' s the corner there with the
bricks and the plant that is kind of attractive . So I might , at a given
moment, having finished what I 've done here , prefer to go over there .
But I ' ve certainly in my own work writt�n things dealing w i t h things
that interest me , things in my life that interest me , sexuality, writing, I
write about the things that interest me . Other times I will j ust go and
do something and just find out what it is.
Silliman: It strikes me that there ' s this presumption in your talk
in your use of the word " mind , " singular. You used the plural many
times , but mostly it was singular, and there seemed to be a very little
accommodation of the difference between minds . There ' s a potential
problem between one person writing a text and another person read·
ing same text and having anything like an experience of the originat·
ing writing mind . It ' s very problematic . We all misunderstand each
other all the time . And actually we ' re pretty well trained here to un·
derstand things . [ lau ghter] You see the problem . I ' m curiou s about
how that works in your work .
Davies : Are you thinking that I assume the value of mind based
on what my mind is like?
Silliman: C an you get outside your mind long enough to imag·
ine other?
Davies : Can I? Sure . Yeah . Constantly. [lau ghs]
Lyn Hejinian: C an you imagine a non-writing mind? You said
that the mind is that which writes.
Davies : I can imagine it .
Hejinian: A pre-literate child , say, or an illiterate m ind .
Davies : Children write .
 1 07
Language/Mind/Writing

Hejinian: At a certain point they do , of course , but . . .

Davies: . . . I don 't by writing, just mean this. [holds up pages]

Mandel: Not just that, but something that has to do with that?
[ laughter]
Davies: Well put the words in my mouth and we 'll get it over
with sooner!
Hejinian: I have a related question which is: Can you conceive
of a mind with or without a body? When Tom asked his initial ques­
tion about memory and curiosity and eros, your response seemed to
relegate mind to a non-bodily function . A neurologist , Penfield , has
written a book called Mind and Brain. The brain is what you can work
with as a physician, and the mind , in his book, is an extremely hokey
mysticism . And at certain points in your talk, the kind of Platonic ide­
alism of the mind as a pure, almost ecclesiastic category, was very
striking. So let me ask the question: Can you conceive of the mind in
the body?
Davies: Sure . [laughter]
Hejinian: How much of a thing is the mind? And how much is it
an ideal state?
Davies: It ' s definitely not an ideal state. I think it ' s a tool that
can be used ideall y. That 's what I meant when I tried to describe or
define excellence . And I think that its use excellently could help pro­
duce a more ideal state , for that mind , for the life of which that mind
is a part , and for people in general in the world . I don 't think that the
mind is something completely isolated . Certainly when I talk about it
in relation to writing, I think I gave that impression . And I think that
I should . It's my intention to do that . I can conceive of the mind in
relation to the body, in relation to life , a life, the world , a world , other
minds, but for me those areas are so fraught with problems-and I
don 't think those problems should be avoided-but I think that their
sol u tion is found in the mind .
Andrew Ross: That 's what you 've been talking about all along,
reall y. You haven 't been talking about the mind, you ' ve been talking
abo ut the body. Setting out various axiomatic meanings by which one
disperses, evades, obliterates, washes out the body. It ' s a total eclipse
 J OB
Alan Davies

of the body. Quite astounding and very frightening in a way. How do

you account for the fact that the body and language grew up together?
One feels after listening to your talk like pinching oneself. [laughter]
Davies : It's dead. You can sit there after the lecture, and feel a
need to pinch yourself, and pinch yourself and you ' re dead . If your
mind isn't in pursuit of your mind, if your thought isn't in pursuit of
your thought , and if your mind isn ' t going beyond this one pinch,
then you might as well be dead .
Ross: Then your mind' s in a state of constant erection .
Davies: Yes it is.
Hejinian: [laughs] What about us girls?
Davies: Girls too .
Fiona Tem pleton: My mind was more constantly repulsed . Sen­
tence by sentence I would remember half of the sentence before , at
most . In order to pay attention to sentence actually going on . And
then I wasn ' t able to pay attention to that sentence because you 'd
have to leave it anyway in order to get to the next one . So what it was
creating in my mind was a state of repulsion , actually alienating my
mind from my mind , rather than giving any value to that above my
body. Which may be largely due to the fact that we are at the disad­
vantage of being listeners, whereas you know what you ' ve written.
But then what you were talking about was the writing and you spoke
it, so that' s a big discrepancy there .
Davies: How could I have helped you avoid that problem?
Templeton: Perhaps by letting us see it before you read it .
Davies : So you ' re saying that the speech, in a way, created a dif-
ficulty. Or the fact o f its being spoken .
Templeton: I kind of doubt it . I think that the same process
would have gone on if I ' d been reading. I would have had to drop
every sentence to pick up the next one . It' s not proper logic .
Davies: I ' m not entirely sure what you mean , Fiona, but , cer­
tainly for me , when I lost it, when I was reading it-I only finis hed it
today so I ' ve never read it over to myself. When I was reading it now
to you people and to myself tonight, when I lost it it was certainl y be­
cause of my body. I guess I know my mind . So I could follow that part
 1 09
Language/Mind/Writing

of it. But nerves, or the need for something, or the need to have the
need for something, would make me lose it.
Templeton: If you say that it ' s problematic, that your body pre­
vents that from happening, then what?
Davies : Then it ' s a good obstacle to encounter.
Mandel: It ' s not fair to ask the talk to have a solution to the
problems which writing the talk raises. It did seem like an intentional
technique to do that, to alienate memory. Repetition of terms, all
linked by the same verb, is, and very very slight modalities, almost
like slow geological shifts from one form of the sentence to another,
does make it very difficult to contain in any very large manner.
I don ' t think that there was an argument that followed. There
was an argument that was certainly intentional all the way through
and very much the same at any given point . And that ' s why I raised
that question of memory, because I wanted to insist on how
there's . . . how there ' s storage . " Is" is the most transparent form of
syntax . It proposes the least, and therefore requires the least storage,
from the front of the sentence to the back . But it does require some­
thing. And once you 've got in there a little bit, then the question is,
what is its function?
And how do you avoid building up icons? The sense I have is
that the ideas build up into icons. There ' s no force inside there that
can restrict the growth of an essentially out of control kind of idealism ,
arou nd any given subject . So, subsequently, when you ' re talking
abou t mind in a proliferation of language cells, each one slightly dif­
ferent, there ' s no real way to stop it . And there 's no real way to argue
back to it . So you get effectively some kind of icon .
Davies: Well , it ' s a tool .
Mandel: Yeah it' s a tool . It ' s a wrench that keeps growing every
time you put it around something.
Davies: Well , if you learn to do something new with it, that
means that perhaps it' s being used well .
M andel: Yeah, but then there 's an operation there called " learn­
in g to do something new , " which is not accounted for in the form or
in the intention of the way you present the mind . It's complete at all
 110
A lan Davies

points. And therefore it can ' t get outside itself. To change is a real
problem . And memory is the agent of change, in my view .
Davies : What would have been an icon? You mean like the idea
of excellence? The word icon . . .
Mandel: You don ' t mind it?
Davies: I hate it ! [laughter] But I ' m not going to spend a lot of
time talking my way out of it or around it, because I really think that
the point I made about the fact that writing is tools at use and it ' s the
demonstration of the use of things is completely different from an
icon . An icon is something that you carry around and you look at it
and it's a name and it ' s a noun and it ' s dead . And that ' s about all I 'll
say. In other words, I ' m arguing very strongly that the things that fdt
like icons felt like that because the repetition in the language sort of
burnished them . And gave them a kind of lusciousness. But , in fact ,
they're not like that.
Perelman: I 'd like to get back to something that Lyn said about
illiterates and kids. You said that they do something like writing. But I
had the sense that when you mentioned " writing" in the talk t here
was a ferocious, judgmental quality throughout which I think is what
some of us are trying to deal with . At all points in your talk, " writ­
ing" was-true to your purpose of not wanting to generalize into
dead areas-nothing more than writin g the talk you were working on
at the moment . So you were simply trying to propel yourself into the
next word or next sentence of the piece . You were constantly trying to
pressurize yourself into writing these difficult , paradoxical sentences.
So that , to me, opens up questions of use . I ' m not sure if this has
any social use , other than self-existence .
Davies: What other social use would you imagine there to be
other than self-existence?
Watten: Well , transformation .
Perelman: That ' s a real big one . A lot of our writing claims th e
social use of making people' s lives better, more possible, more prob­
lematic . . .
Davies: Do you mean the self-existence of a piece of writing?
That isn't what I meant. I meant whatever social use is there than
self-existence .
 111
Language/Mind/Writing

Perelman: I got the sense that the use of this writing was nothing
other than self-existence.
Mandel: It's to create more perfection in the world . To create
and to further the excellence of the world .
Watten: Well, there' s a way that this perfection comes into the
idea of excellence that might not be right . I hear a lot of heavies on the
scene, like So-and-so' s got some sort of problem . It doesn ' t have any
other outcome , you just name it as the problem of So-and-so . There's
this kind of fascistic compartmentalizing of various tautological lan­
guage systems as being " each person " that disallows certain kinds of
transformative intentions that they might have on you , for instance .
So when you say you want to be moved-in another sense maybe not
so much . I always see this judgmental " Let' s put this guy into the box
of his particular language system . " Which is what you ' re doing a little
bit. You ' re creating a proliferation of autonomous self-sufficient lan­
guage systems that we all have , of which you ' re giving the paradigm .
But that often gets t o b e a very fucked judgment o n other people, ac­
tually. There are certainly other vocabularies that don 't need that box­
mg.
Mandel: It seems like a structural problem of literary communi­
ties that they are societies in which there are as many kings . . . It ' s all
authority, and all legitimacy, and all monarchy.
Davies: What is all those things?
Mandel: The world in which writer's minds encounter each
other. The world in which everybody is a monarch , and so . . .
Davies : I ' m not worried about that . That ' s memory. And that ' s
the crap that I ' m trying t o avoid b y getting people t o understand what
I think it means to write . And I think that if I could get people to un­
derstand that and get more people to do it, that there 'd be more clar­
ity and there ' d be less of those fucked-up problems. I don' t give a shit
about all that ! I mean , I ' m involved in it and I have to deal with it and
I try to do it as well as I can as a human being, but I don ' t understand
wh at it has to do with anything.
Mandel: It wasn' t raised as having anything to do with . . .
Davies : . . . what I talked about.
Watten: What idea is being referred to here?
 1 12
A lan Davies

Davies: The question of interactions between people .

Watten: And you don 't think that has to do with the kinds of dis­
course you just set up?
Davies : It does, but in a much more general way.
Watten: But there are systems of naming that refer people to
their own tautological systems that are very close to a bad idea.
Davies : I understand .
Watten: And you 're flirting with it . There ' s a little edge there.
Mandel: So what about the idea of social transformation? Does
it enter into the schema that was being blocked out?
Davies : It has everything to do with what I talked about . And
yet it 's very very hard to explain it . See , when I talked about-and
that 's the reason it seemed like an icon, I tried to do it from absolutely
in the middle of it . I don't go running around , and doing this that and
the other thing, and trying to move this over here and move that over
there and get this person to talk to that person and get this person to
work on that problem or change this or say no here or say yes there.
For me , that ' s not a useful way of operating in the world or helping
other people . That's why I like to constantly point to the kind of work
that can be done at the center. And I think that it ' s unavoidable that it
goes out, like I said in the lecture, to the peripheries of a life and to the
edges of the horizons of the world.
 Beverly Dahlen

A Reading: a Reading

Preface
Freud said self-analysis is impossible , and I agree . Nevertheless,
I have been tempted to try to explicate, according to whatever psy­
choanalytic principles I know, my own text . I don ' t pretend that the
following reading is a psychoanalysis , but it does try to call to the fore
some of the latent associations that are concealed in the writing and to
make whatever sense of them, psychoanalytic or otherwise , is possi­
ble. I have nagging suspicions that parts of this are over-interpreted,
while other parts may be wrongly interpreted or scarcely interpreted
at all . It has been a lesson in the severity of resistance, the hallmark of
repre ssion .
This reading raises a question about the intention of the original
tex t . I am very much given to suppose that we write we know not
what , regardless of conscious intention . Other readings are possible
�n d I do not mean , by offering this, to privilege it as the intended read­
mg .
I want to acknowledge here the contribution of the poet Frances
J affer, whole valuable insights are incorporated in the present version
of th e te xt . I have also to thank Aaron Shurin , one of the co-ordina­
to rs of the "Works and Words " series of readings and talks in San
F ranci sco , where this talk was first presented. Peter Holland, whose
co n trib ution is noted in the paper itself, must be further acknowl-

J JJ
 114
Beverly Dahlen

edged as an editor of Gallery Ubrks, in which the text from A Reading

was published (Gallery Ubrks Five, 1 98 1 ) .
Beverly Dahlen:

from A Reading

believe it that shelter falls, you put up with it. money believes it. time,
just an arbitrary point, I told her. however, it sometimes happens rush­
ing through the night. all is a long dream up and down the land. orchids
at crossfire.

the tin roofs, the train steaming through snow, here and there lights,
some houses near the tracks. some golden window or open door. some·
one just now coming in from the car. then you snake past, clippety clop.

nothing to do with the rain but draw it around you make it last . here for
starters a lace memory/doily/memory. the line over divides. partaking
as a guest . in my native land welcoming figures. how they all do come
out to say. what is homelike becomes unhomelike. one needs a more
complex geography. there, how will you put all that into such little space
eating the miles.

how did me do, pleasing everybody, entering in at the door, a chroma.

dearest dearest . dear oleander, dear Greek word . dear words, things in
which we build houses. dear talking to yourself, he makes it all up. a de·
bating team , an insult delivered sidewise . ho ho little baby Christmas
trees, great big stars shining through the branches of the tallest firs, let's
take that home, in , let's adopt it, let ' s call it Christmas. the little darling
baby sun/son. who gets to play dark.

oh all my dreams, we zip around like wildfire. we travel , we discover

the fallacy of the local body. a body of tears, of furs. one delivers. how
can we bring these things in line , closer to one another, a rift end ing.

a lady on a train whose sister was dying. a lady in pain beneath her ri­
diculous fur hat and overdressed fingers. crusted with bits of shiny glass,
somehow these things. there is a space , he said, beyond words and it is
filled with things. in this case my mother approaches, I will come ou t to
meet you , wearing rubber boots. we walk beside one another near the
steaming train . there are greetings all around, those who embrace one
another. we begin. we leave that place and go home .
 115
A Reading: a Reading

here we are borne lightly across the back of the land . here how they
tromp around down to weed and to witness. one settles in for a spell.
one eyes the fire . there is tucking. there is all that vegetables and meat,
dried prunes, keeping regular hours.

there is a dent of fixture, a bone to spare . there are capsize. a hat, any
hat to walk in the garden in the rain . to go out to fetch the holly. doing
the old thing the fire blazes up.

hear and there we are ready to go to seed. taking a longer course and
moving towards something unknown , how would anyone ever know it
by the shape it is in. there it is. did anyone think it was ugly, strange , did
anyone notice . how we had learned to live with it, these alien things,
death in life , what a mistake . effigy.

January 3, 1 981
Difficult to know at the beginning what " shelter" means: a
house, some protection , anyway something that " falls, " falls apart or
down . " believe it" -an admonition, as if the writer could not or
would not believe that the shelter falls . Then some " you " is said to
"put up with it. " As if the falling shelter were a small annoyance one
tries to overlook and live with . Since the idea of " shelter falls " is
hardly to be taken as a minor irritation , there is already an ironic
stance in the first sentence . Also a literal reading of " put up with it"
yields an opposition to " fall " - so there ' s a comic image just under
the surface : someone is patching it back together even in the act of
falling. Then : " money believes it . " How? Money here must be a me­
tonym , a reference to the entire system of money. The first two sen­
tences might possibly be rendered : " Look, the whole world believes
th at houses fall down and that belief system has generated all kinds of
other systems to take care of these situations-and you seem to have
trou ble believing it-you treat a falling shelter as if it were a minor an­
noyance . M oney, which has so much authority, believes it-why can ' t
you? "
The reference to the great belief system of money generates a ref­
erence to another belief system : time . In the third sentence an " I " en­
ters and is telling some " her" that time is "just an arbitrary point, " as
if trying to belittle its importance . One may not be convinced that the
 116
Beverly Dahlen

writer seriously accepts the proposition. The sentences so far seem to

have an ironic cast and so may this one . Time and money are over·
whelmingly joined in one system ( " time is money" in the capitalist
proverb) and so the defense against both systems is really a single de·
fense, ironic .
Now there is a turning. The writer backtracks (" however" sig·
nals an opposition) and says " it sometimes happens rushing through
the night. " There is a problem for the reader trying to figure out the
antecedent for " it . " But let ' s assume " it " refers to " time " from the
previous sentence-so that time " happens rushing through the
night, " as action , in opposition to the previous notion that it is an
" arbitrary point . " This seems to be a less ironic attitude toward time.
It is as if time had caught up in this rushing, and then the reader dis·
covers a time, i . e . , night . Some kind of night journey is taking place.
Certainly the next sentence involves us in a dream . There is the sense
of opposition again ( "up and down" )-the rising and falling move·
ment evoked in the first lines-but now in reference to " the land . "
Either the writer i s having a "long dream " o r she sees people every·
where in " the land" involved in a dream . It may be that both mean·
ings apply. The first section then ends with a cryptic and rather sinis·
ter and dark comment : "orchids at crossfire . "
Orchids at crossfire . It is an image of violence, of war, perhap s.
Orchids, what are they? Exotic flowers, associated with the rich (no
matter how common they may have become to us) and so perhap s a
further comment on the money system (not only does it provide she!·
ter, it provides such luxuries as orchids if you have enough of it); the
colors of orchids , glowing, almost unreal . But floating above these as·
sociations is the explicit symbolism of orchids as female genitalia (em·
phasized in current feminist iconography by such artists as J udy Ch i·
cago) and that may be the real clue to this dream image : sexu al
violation, woman caught in the " crossfire . " ("Crossfire " also sug·
gests burning cross-the rising dark powers , the extreme right, the
KKK, the anti-Christ . ) What I see in the image is an orchid in the
gunsight, the cross hairs focused on it . This would be from the gu n·
ner' s point of view. So also an identification with the aggressor? as in
 11 7
A Reading: a Reading

Dickin son ' s poem beginning " My Life had stood- a Loaded
Gun- " ?
The next section opens with a n image o f travel, confirming the
earlier sense of a j ourney: a train steams through snow ; tin roofs are
seen in a quick montage . Again , shelter is evoked . There are houses
which seem to offer light and warmth in this wintry place .
The fmal sentence seems to be cast somewhat ironically. Is it per­
haps a defense against the possibility of nostalgia in the first lines? At
any rate, the metaphors (snake and horse) are in such opposition that
this line seems quite odd after the relatively flat descriptive language
of the preceding sentences . And yet " golden window" and "open
door" are more than description . They are loaded images, certainly.
They evoke a nostalgia of a very special kind-the nostalgia for Para­
dise itself (the sealed gates now open, welcoming) . This may be a jus­
tified reading since who glides into the scene? Right . The snake . The
train as snake moves through this landscape as a sign that it is not Par­
adise, it is fallen . But notice that the indefinite " you " is addressed in
this sentence ( " you snake" ) so that the writer sees herself as an aspect
of the serpent and also, perhaps, wants the reader to identify with it.
And "snake " is a verb here , an ongoing action. But the image of the
snake which glides darkly, powerfully, silently, is undercut immedi­
ately by " clippety clop, " the usual onomatopoetic rendering of
horses' hoofbeats. It tries to break the spell of the silence of this sec­
tion . It is as if a silent movie suddenly burst into sound . The sound
restricts the space to the commonplace and guards against the rising
threat of the evocation of a lost Eden . And "clippety clop" is child
lan gu age . So there is an odd comfort in metamorphosing the snake
into horse .
And now, realizing the extent to which the Eden myth informs
the second section , it is possible to read much more into the word
"
fall s " in the very first line . " Shelter falls " foreshadows the allu sions
to Eden and the fall of humankind which take place in section two .
What shelters in the opening of section three is the rain : in con­
trast to the snow of the preceding section . The rain seems benign , not
(as we would ordinarily think) an element we would need shelter.from.
 118
Beverly Dahlen

This rain is being drawn around one , as if it were clothing. There is a

sense that this is pleasurable , a desire to " m ake it last , " to overcome
the ravages of rushing time . There is a joining here with the rain and
so a hinting at the notion of sexual unio n . (But is there also a sense in
which the rain is tears?-in which depression i s comfortable ? We wear
it like clothes . )
" Here for starters" m ight signal a new phase o f the writing. Per·
haps the writer has arrived somewhere after the journey, and is now
speaking of this place . The image which follows is " lace memory/
doily/memory. " J ust as the first section evoked a dream state , and the
second evoked myth, now another state of m ind is named-memory.
" Lace " first appears in connection with the memory itself, as if the
memory were lace . It is as if the object were so present to the inner eye
of memory that it could be touched . " Memory " appears on either
side of the slash bars , enclosing " doily. " It seems to be a way of writ·
ing: Doily, for the moment, has become memory, it is all that is re·
membered, the mind itself has become lace .
And yet , what is joined is also necessarily divided . The sentence
began with the idea of enumeration , of counting separate i tems. And
language itself must proceed word by separate word . The slash bars
are a sign that memory and doily are j o ined but also that they are dis·
tinct .
"The l ine over divides " seems to comment on thi s . The mind
which had been wholly taken up with the memory only a moment be·
fore notices that it i s , in fact , divided from memory, and comm ents
upon the language it had used in the preceding sentence . The slash
bars also seem to have the effect of showing fraction , as if doily and
. . .
memory were wntten � ' a fracuon .
memory . S o t h at memory 1tseIf IS
The lace doily is a b anality and a symbol (to my mind) of de·
graded femininity. The doily parallels , in some way, the orchid of the
earlier section . I t is not a female but a fem ale symbol . (Interesting to
note here that so far in this piece when women enter, they e n ter not as
persons , but as symbols of persons . Why are they so buried und er
symbolism? They are parts , fractions o f themselves . ) Like the orchid, '
the doily is a symbol of a certain economic class . At one time such
items may have been found only in the homes of the wealthy. But
 119
A Reading: a Reading

years after such items go out of style for the upper classes, the lower
classes acquire them . So it' s hard to know whether the sense of degra­
dation has more to do with femininity or with this idea of degraded
culture itself as it passes down the line and becomes more and more
imitative, partial , lifeless.
But where the orchid was presented in terms of an extreme con­
dition (violence) and at a distance , the doily is presented as a part of
the writer' s memory. There seems to be no judgment of the doily in
the terms I 've given here . It is as if the writer could embrace , as least
for the moment, that symbol of false consciousness.
The next sentence is fairly straightforward and seems to confirm
that the writer has indeed come somewhere after a trip and is a guest
in some house . The fifth sentence yields more information . The
writer tells us directly that she is in " my native land . " Is this the land
referred to earlier, the land in a " long dream " ? " Native land , " the
place of birth, may move the reader to guess that the place being vis­
ited is, in fact, the home of her parents . Native land translates to
mother. And it is a return , symbolically, to the womb , that earliest
shelter. So also , I suppose, another evocation of Eden, the Eden be­
fore the fall . And this emerging idea may be a key to this section. If
Paradise is the state of perfect prenatal union with the mother, then
the expulsion is the birth itself, the fall . Since this section opens with
an image of water (rain) being drawn around one in a pleasurable
way, i . e . , an evocation of the watery and pleasant life within the
womb, we may be justified in reading this section as a birth myth, an­
other variant of the myth of Paradise .
Notice that the " fi gures" at the end of the sentence are hazy and
in disti nct . They are simply "welcoming figures. " Could they be ver­
sion s of those figures who welcome us into the world at birth? In the
next se ntence, they are said to " come out " and " to say. " And there
the s� ntence ends. Why? Is what they say not important? Is it simply
meani ngless chit-chat? In this passage, alienation alternates with its
opposite , the sense of pleasurable union .
The next sentence seems to confirm this: " what is homelike be­
comes unhomelike . " This refers to Freud ' s essay "The Uncanny " in
which he discusses why we sometimes feel utterly estranged in sur-
 120
Beverly Dahlen

roundings that are perfectly familiar. In dreams, for example , we may

enter a familiar house, and yet it seems terrifyingly strange . Freud's
analysis reveals, of course , the act of repression that has occurred in
relation to this place , a place which is symbolic of the mother, the
mother's womb and genitalia with which, in fact , we were at one time
perfectly familiar. The forbidden place , so desirable, takes on a dark
and terrifying aspect .
This sentence, therefore , is a further unfolding of what we have
seen to be the basic themes so far. Dreams, myth, memory all have
been evoked . Now, we have a reference to an analysis of the meaning
of some of these interrelated psychic events . The writer seems to be
saying that there is a kind of analytic intelligence also in operation
here that is conscious of a way in which these events can be inter·
preted . " One needs a more complex geography " may be an amplifi·
cation of this. This use of "one" as the first person provides a little
distance, some perspective on these events . The writer seems to step
out of the picture for a moment , as we feel we do when we want to ex·
ercise judgment , rationality. And so she says she " needs a more com·
plex geography " ; not simply the land involved in sleep and dream
and myth, nor the participation in some ritual re-enactment of birth,
nor the anxious longing for home . Geography (the study of the land)
comes to take the place of the earlier word " land" with all its vague·
ness and overtones of myth and legend . Is this " complex geography"
a metaphor of mind itself?
The concluding sentence of this section , however, is cast as rather
an anxious question to herself: " there , how will you put all that into
such little space . " In other words, how will you deal with the com·
plexity? The space itself seems to restrict the possibility.
And, finally, there is the image of " eating the miles, " which is
probably derived from the Dickinson poem beginning " I like to see it
lap the Miles- /And lick the Valleys up- " But the animate train here
is not seen humorously from a distance as it is in that poem . Rather,
the writer identifies with the train and , as train, she eats the space
through which she travels. But more must be consumed than one pos·
sibly is able to eat comfortably. The " little space" (inside the body)
cannot hold such large space, so many miles.
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A Reading: a Reading

If the train in which one travels becomes an undifferentiated part

of one's own body, we might read this as another evocation of the
child in the prenatal condition . The train , then , would be another
symbol of the mother. But the train has already turned up as snake
( also an aspect of the writer) , so the train is phallic as well as womb­
like . And references to eating must also (always) evoke the possible
sense of copulation and conception . There seems, to an extraordinary
degree, to be an overwhelming (and overwhelmingly condensed) set
of magical (in Freud ' s sense) thoughts going on in this sentence . She
is a baby about to be born (from a machine, which is both a womb
and a phall u s simultaneously) and is also being impregnated (magi­
cally) by eating. It would seem that the primary anxiety (differentia­
tion and division) is affirmed by denial here: she denies that women
have no penises; she denies the difference between organic beings, hu­
man or animal , and machines, she denies that children cannot be con­
ceived by eating.
This sentence may also be read as another comment on the act of
writing. " Space " could translate to " page . " Then, the sentence be­
comes another anxious question : how will you adequately convey
these experiences in " such little space " as the paper provides?
Now there is a break, which I see as a necessary silence after that
ove rwhelming condensation , the huge effort that went into the last
sentence . And the fourth section stands alone as a single sentence .
Again , the pattern of irony after anxiety asserts itself. " How did me
do" is an ironic use of child-language, a knowing misusage . " Me "
(the objective case) replaces " I . " Is the writer trying t o escape objec­
tivi ty, the sense that something is done to her, that she is the passive
object? By misusing " me " she seems to try to render these categories
invalid . And yet, the " me " call s attention to itself precisely because it
is mi sused so that, again, she affirms what she denies .
The next part of the sentence renders a judgment . She has asked
herself: how did I do? i . e . , as a visitor (probably) in a childhood
home . And she is able to report that she pleased everybody " entering
in at the door, a chroma. " another image of birth? Certainly one
mi ght suspect so, after all that has turned up far in the piece. The
Word " chroma" is unexpected . It is defined as : " That aspect of color
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Beverly Dahlen

in the Munsell color system by which a sample appears to differ from

a gray of the same lightness or brightness. Chroma corresponds to sat·
uration of the perceived color. "
So the sentence seems to be saying: I pleased everybody coming
into the house (into the world at birth) in a bright and colorful way.
Wearing bright clothes? As opposed to wearing the rain? And I notice,
too , that it is an image of the traditional role of the woman as a pleas·
ing visual object . She seems to give herself credit for playing that role
well. But the irony that began the sentence casts its light over the
whole and so we must think she plays the part with a certain ironic de·
tachment.
"Chroma" also ties the sentence to the latent meaning of birth
through an insistent association to chromosome . So, I pleased every·
one at my birth by entering the world as a product of the chromo·
somes of my parents .
Now there is another silence before section five begins with
" dearest dearest. " One might guess that there had been a sense of
awe in the contemplation of one ' s own birth , that the awe provoked
the silence and that the immediate response with the return of speech
would be to one' s mother. And yet what follows does not seem to be
addressed to a mother. What is named in the next sentence as " dear"
is "oleander. " It may be that the evocation of 'the mother as the
" dearest dearest " is so heightened that one must immediately displace
the emotion onto another object associated with her. But even that ob­
ject will not contain the affect which has been aroused, and " olean·
der" becomes " dear Greek word . " (Here the writer is mistaken . Ole·
ander is derived from medieval Latin . ) There is a diminishing, a
displacement of affect onto objects that are more and more distant
from the mother. And the " dearest " has become merely the " dear. "
It seems to me to be a demonstration of the activity of sublimation.
We displace erotic feelings further and further afield in an effort to re·
direct that energy into meaningful social activity. So that here " dear"
finally comes to rest with language itself. ' ' Dear words, ' ' she says,
" things in which we build houses. " Now we have come full circle
back to the falling shelter of the beginning. And words, which she calls
 1 23
A Reading: a Reading

"things, " will build or rebuild the shelter. Notice that she does not say
"things with which . " She is not proposing to build a house with words
but in them . As if one crawled into something (the womb?) and built a
house? And notice, also, that this passage again denies what it affirms.
Just as she seems to move outward from the mother and birth imag­
ery (to deny the power of the mother) she finds language and makes a
kind of double womb of words .
In the next sentence , " dear talking to yourself. . . , " the writer
seems to recognize the solipsism involved . But still she calls the activ­
ity " d ear. " Or the " dear" referred to may be an actual other and the
writer observes this other talking to himself or herself. This would rec­
ognize sublimation as a general condition (which it is) in which all cul­
tural institutions are a form of " talking to yourself, " and bear the
traces of redirected erotic energy ; we recognize, however dimly, our
alienated selves in them .
This sentence ends: "he makes it all up . " Here I am struck by
the use of the masculine pronoun. It has not appeared before . We
can 't know whether a specific male is referred to . Or does the writer
refer to herself, some imagined masculine other who is an aspect of
herself? This " he " is inventing something, pretending, imagining­
lying? Making up a story? To the extent that this section seems to be a
demo nstration of sublimation , then " he " is singled out as a partici­
pant. He makes up a world out of a sense of loss just as we all do. He
talks to himself, and so do I . Here I am reading the sentence as if
"yourself ' were a swing word, referring both to the writer as another
and to an actual second person, the "he" who appears immediately
after.
Since the writer is evidently visiting in the home of her parents,
might this " he " be the father? Certainly the presence of a mother has
been evoked a number of times. If " he " is the father, then the sen­
tence may be a further comment on her birth, acknowledging his gen­
erative power: " it " would be the penis erect ("up") in what might be
a child ' s rendering of that act: " make it (go) up . " Here is also a sug­
gested pun on the common expression " make it" or "making it . " But
thi s is also " talking to oneself, " the word embodied, or the body as
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Beverly Dahlen

word(s). And the chroma (chromosomes), what is that but words, the
information which creates (makes up) a new human being, or any
new organism?
In the next sentence a debating team is mentioned . It might fol­
low that in talking to oneself one takes one side and then another. Or,
if "he" is the writer's father, we may have a comment on the relation
between these two. It is very different from the relationship with the
mother. Father and daughter are "a debating team . " They proceed
with the analytical faculties rather than the affective. But perhaps the
writer is merely the observer here, and the two sides of the team m ay
be the father and mother. They are a team , certainly. And at the mo­
ment of her conception (following the latent reference in the preceding
sentence) "debated, " in a sense, her future , the outcome , the issue.
"An insult delivered sidewise" finishes the sentence . " Deliv­
ered" now becomes a loaded word . " Delivered" is what babies are at
birth . So the debate may be a reference to the birth itself, in which
case she is the " insult" (to her mother' s body) in what must have
been a difficult birth (" delivered sidewise " )-in opposition to the
previous "pleasing everybody. " But it may be that the debating team
consists of father and mother in opposition to herself. She insults them
in ways that are intentionally veiled , " sidewise . " But it is not clear
who delivers the insult to whom in this display of the aggressive , even
sadistic, use of language . Perhaps they all insult one another in more
or less veiled ways.
We have come rather far in this section from the "dearest dear­
est" which began it . The sense of nostalgia has been dispersed , words
have entered to take the place of lost objects (the mother' s body as
shelter), and with words the · (necessarily) aggressive componen t of
language: opposition, argument and insult . The opposition becomes
most pronounced when "he" (probably the father) enters .
The beginning of the next sentence seems to try to disperse the
sense of debate and insult. "ho ho, " she writes, in a parody of deep
laughter. And then : "little baby Christmas trees . " So her lau ghter
parodies the false laughter of the department store (made up) Santa.
And "little baby Christmas trees" is almost a compendium of all the
themes that have arisen in this writing. In addition to the theme of
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A Reading: a Reading

birth, the nativity of Christ is now alluded to by the evocation of the

symbol " tree . " But the phallic tree is a baby tree. Perhaps her conten­
tion with the father underlies the comic-ironic tone. Phallic power is
belittled by its presentation as a helpless baby; this would be another
insult delivered sidewise. The tone here parallels the other instances of
irony : references to mythology, to cultural belief systems, are pre­
sented ambivalently or mockingly. The irony seems protective as well
as destructive . It affirms what it denies, attacks what it defends, in an
effort to escape rendering judgment .
But there is a bitterness close to condemnation in the final sen­
tences of this section . The Christ myth cannot sustain her. She is, after
all , a daughter and this myth celebrates the birth of a son. In a device
that recall s memory/doily, son and sun are written sun/son . The son is
a fraction of the sun , a part of it, and so identified with the long patri­

archal tradition of sun gods. In this myth, " who , " she asks, " gets to
play dark. " The implicit answer is that she herself has been cast in the
role of "dark. " She is the whole of darkness , darkness personified, as
the son had been a personification of a fraction of the sun . But this is a
play. Child ' s play? The play of our lives as drama? This cosmic play
( as a " divine comedy") which is " made up" ? And there is a sugges­
tion that the roles are alterable. She may identify deeply with the role
of " dark" for the moment, but to the extent that she sees it as a role
she is free of it, able to play some other role. There is also a suggestion
that the role is not utterly loathsome to her in that one "gets to play " ­
as i f that were the very role one desired . B u t perhaps the question is
more general , asking whether the culture' s assignment of roles is inev­
itable. Must it always be that someone (person , group) is obliged to
play " dark " to another' s "light " ?
Section six opens with ' ' oh al l m y dreams . . . ' ' There seems t o be
a recognition that it is impossible to fulfill the deepest wishes of

dream s. But the sentence finishes: " we zip around like wildfire . " The
thought of unfulfill ed dreams gives rise to the thought of the journey
agai n . But here the travel is rendered by the image of " wildfire , " fire
ou t of control , fire in its destructive aspect . But " zip" makes light of
it , as any onomatopoetic rendering is likely to evoke humor or the
ple asant sense of naivete . To paraphrase : Dreams fail, so we get busy,
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Beverly Dahlen

active, we run around , we take a trip . But the sentence judges this ac­
tivity by comparing it to destructive fire . It occurs to me that this fire
is akin to the crossfire of section one . So this is fire of the most malig­
nant sort. It is anti-Christ, or the destructive contradiction of the
myth of redemption . And the sound of " zip" ties this sentence to the
earlier onomatopoeia of " clippety-clop"-the very sentence in which
the snake appeared . Is this not the sound of the snake itself? And cer·
tainly the snake is associated with fire, with the fires of hell , the fire of
sexual passion . Finally, I notice that the pronoun here is " we , " as if
the writer implicated not only herself but the whole society in these ac·
tivities and judgments.
The next sentence begins with the same "we , " but what follows
would seem to be a justification of travel in that "we discover the fal­
lacy of the local body. " Here the writer has been reading Love 's Body
by Norman 0 . Brown. The relevant passage occurs on page 1 54
(Vintage edition): " The fallacy in the false body is Whitehead' s Fal­
lacy of Simple Location ; which is the notion that ' material can be said
to be here in space and here in time, or here in space-time, in a perfectly
definite sense . . . . ' . . . Whitehead says the reality is . . . events (not
things) , which are prehensive unifications . . . not simply here, or there,
but a gathering of here and there (subject and object) into a unity. " By
reference to this section , the writer seems to have discovered a solu­
tion to the problem of here and there (words which appear so frequently
in this text) , of division and separation .
The next sentence , however, seems to contradict the discovery of
the " fallacy of the local body. " Here, the writer evokes the very materi­
ality (in the sense of limitation) of the body as opposed to the poss ible
metaphysical or spiritualizing tendencies which might be read into the
Brown/Whitehead text . Tears seem to me to be a peculiarly human
attribute , while furs suggest the atavistic, even animalistic, body. An d
so the thought of birth, again (and , inevitably, death: the limits of an y
individual body) and the line of ancestors back to the very origins of
life . The "one delivers" which follows seems to belong in this line of
thought. Lives are delivered, one by one , over and over, into the
world . But the " one" may also suggest her own birth (her mother was
"one") and/or the birth of Christ , since this is the Christmas season .
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A Reading: a Reading

The passage ends with a question : " how can we bring these things in
line, closer to one another, a rift ending. " She asks for the reconcilia­
tion of the oppositions, a way to realize the unities that are pro­
pounded in the Brown/Whitehead passage . She wants to close some
"rift , " (the arguments of the preceding passage?) to bring " things in
line. " It is almost as if she would impose a conformity. She seems to
want to affirm the " fallacy of the local body" but she is bewildered by
the contradictions which that idea represents.
Section seven seems to begin a kind of straightforward narrative .
The setting is the train again, and we are told of ' ' a lady . . . whose sis­
ter was dying. " Her story seems to have been foreshadowed earlier in
the line "a body of tears, of furs. " Now we see her more fully, in all
her materiality, and she is another embodiment of contradictions. She
i s all surface , all appearance, and the writer judges her harshly. Her
fur hat is " ridiculous, " her fingers are " overdressed, " " crusted with
bits of shiny glass. " C ertainly she is another image of the degraded fe­
male, of destructive sublimation ; she imitates wealth and her attempt
is absurd . But there are two kinds of materiality here: her outward ap­
pearance (which is a pathetic "play " on wealth) and her inner condi­
tion ("in pain " ) . What is most apparent is least real; what is authentic
is the underlying event . She exemplifies the " fallacy of the local
body. "
Her story drifts off at the end of sentence three with " somehow
these things . " " Things" is a recurring word here , which first ap­
peared in reference to words themselves (" things in which we build
houses") . Words were the materialization of the mother (" material "
and "mother " in fact spring from the same root) . Thus the writer
" materializes" the event, the story of the lady, makes " words" of it,
and also comments on the lady' s obvious obsession with things.
" Somehow these things" are in opposition to life, a cheap substitute .
This contrasts with the writer's own sense of things, and implies the
questi on : am I any better off than she , I who make things of words,
she who tries to make a life of things?
The next sentence comments further on the mystery of things .
Agai n, another text is relevant here . The writer had been reading a
letter from the poet Peter Holland quoting an essay called " Things
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Beverly Dahlen

and Words" by the psychoanalyst Joel Kovel ; " [There is] a space
within experience whose circumference is describable in verbal terms
but whose inmost regions lack any form of known registration . . . "
Holland continues: " This space is fill e d with things (in the case of the
patient analyzed, bugs, money and a stain on a wall) . "
This passage taken together with the Brown/Whitehead passage
seems to discover, or confirm , that space where the outer is inner,
where "things" reside beyond words: the very things themselves and
not the words which signify them. I f, as Kovel writes, " thing experi­
ence is constituted out of what is unnamable at that particular mo­
ment , " then her effort must be to confoun d the distinctions between
things and words, to draw from the unnamable the name which will
serve as thing. So that: "in this case [ echoing Peter Holland ' s ' in the
case of the patient' ] my mother approaches . " She is now the case,
_ _

the analysand , and her mother approaches in a reversal . Was it n ot

she who approached her mother, who traveled to the mother? Does
this reversal al so signify birth? I leave my mother would be a reversed
reading, following Freud's analysis of a dream in which a child walks
into the water. This dream, read backwards, signifies the child 's birth:
it leaves the water. Finally, it is important to note that this is the first
appearance of the word " mother, " though her presence has been
evoked throughout .
What occurs next in this sentence must be read in the light of an­
other text . " I will come out to meet you " is quoted from Pound's
" The River-Merchant ' s Wife . " The closing lines read :

If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

In context these lines are full of pathos . The young wife (in
whose persona the poem is written) writes to her absent husband . Her
letter contains a great deal of foreboding imagery: she is afraid that h e
has met with some mishap on his journey, she pretends that all is well.
expects his arrival , and offers to come to meet him .
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A Reading: a Reading

But here the context of " I will come out to meet you " is not wife
to husband but mother to daughter. It echoes and amplifies the "how
they all do come out to say" of section three. The mother is one of the
"welcoming figures . " But the Pound poem necessarily influences the
meaning here . Does the daughter identify with the absent husband of
the poem? In that case the mother would be the wife/lover in a meet­
ing that would deny the possibility, so strongly hinted at in the poem ,
that the husband is dead . In this reading, the daughter' s fantasy ac­
complishes the following: not only is she her mother's husband (the
usual Oedipal fantasy), she has also returned from the dead . But, of
course , overcoming death is the intent of the Oedipal project .
In a variant of this reading the daughter may identify with the
mother, or rather with the mother' s fantasy of the child as lover, or the
child as the mother' s (absent) phallus . If the daughter becomes the
mother in fantasy, then the daughter is able to participate narcissisti­
cally in the event . She (as the mother) comes out to meet herself, as it
were, experiencing all the joy of reunion with a long absent beloved .
Read simply as another instance of birth imagery, the child may
fantasize her birth as meeting her mother: I will come out (of your
womb) to meet you , i . e . , to be another, a second person to you . We
will know each other as separate individuals . And there is, in the
Pound poem, a suggestion of birth in the line: " If you are coming
down through the narrows of the river Kiang . . . '' (The river is the
narrow and dangerous birth canal through which the child must tra­
vel .) This is the very line , perhaps, that makes the close of the poem so
poignant . The image of birth is suggested even as the wife suffers the
growing conviction that her husband is dead .
" I will come out to meet you , " then, fantasizes a solution to the
probl em of death , it is the " ending" of the " rift, " it is what there is in
the " space beyond words . " And it happens in the context of a section
that began with the story of the lady " whose sister was dying. "
There is more in this sentence , however. The mother approaches
"we aring rubber boots . " How odd this is, how commonplace, even
hom ely, after all that had been evoked by what preceded it . But it fol­
lows a pattern that has already been established . Fantasy gives way,
over and over, to humor, to irony, to observation of details from the
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Beverly Dahlen

concrete objective world . The mother wears rubber boots on a rainy

day. This is a detail at the boundary again ; it establishes a limit to the
fantastic thoughts which had been evoked .
(And yet , it is possible also to read this as a continuation of the
fantasy of a phallic mother: rubber boots suggests rubbers-contra·
ceptives. )
The remainder o f this section sketches i n some detail the story of
the meeting at the train . The mother is contrasted with the lady who
had been so absurdly overdressed . Finally, there is the meeting itself
and "we begin . " Is it perhaps another allusion to birth?
The opening of the eighth section recalls " the land " of earlier
sections: " . . . we are borne lightly across the back of the land . " This
seems to be associated with the (Amerindian?) aphorism that enjoins
"living on the land so lightly you leave no mark when you go . " But
here there must be some faint irony, since the land cannot be said to
have been unmarked by our civilization . The irony seems to take
firmer hold in what follows . "Tromp around" is the very antithesis of
"borne lightly. " But who are the " they" of the sentence? The par·
ents? They go " down to weed " (a garden presumably) and " to wit·
ness . " Witness what? Witnessing is more than simply seeing: it is tes·
timony, usually associated with law, but also with religion . Prophets
and visionaries witness and testify to the truth (what they suppose to
be a higher law) of their moral convictions or the revelations vouch·
safed to them in signs or dreams. Since the parents go down to weed
(in a garden which is not Eden but which recalls it) perhaps " witness"
should be read as another evocation of Biblical mythology and tradi·
tion . But the writer takes a rather mocking stance towards this . The
extreme contrast between " weed" and " witness" suggests that higher
must be a sublimated derivative of lower: Freud' s "displacement
from below upwards . " Finally, " they go down to weed" marks an in·
evit able return to the " lower" law; it is a comment on the mortality of
her parents. They will die and become weeds no matter what their re·
ligious convictions .
The ironic attitude towards life in her parents' house continues
in the next section . The use of ' ' one ' ' is (as usual) a sign of her detach·
ment. She " settles in for a spell"-for a time , but also for a spell as
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A Reading: a Reading

bewitchment . She has woven a magic spell finally, at the level of

words , words by which we " spell" it out. And yet she keeps an ironic
eye cast on this spell , aware that it is illusory.
She recounts the details of the life as this "one " : "the fire " (not
the earlier wildfire , but the domestic fire on the hearth) , " tucking"
(bein g tucked into bed at night) . There is wholesome food , regular
hours. She knowingly plays the role of the passive child . This regres­
sion deepens with the suggestion of the concern about regular bowel
movements that is a feature of so many American households: "dried
prunes" is followed by "keeping regular hours . " Time is associated
here with excrement as it had been associated with money earlier. The
equation " time = money" recalls Freud' s famous " money = shit . " Is
there a tripartite equation here to the effect that time = money = shit?
This would be another insult delivered sidewise, a further comment
on the veiled content of regressive , sublimated fantasies.
After this indulgence in passivity the next section begins rather
cryptically : " there is a dent of fixture . . . " What can this mean? Can
it refer to her teeth (dental) , fiXed in place, which are able to " dent"
the food? Or does fiXture refer to her parents' home which is such a
fiXture in her life , on which her fantasies have been fiXed, in which the
routines have been fiXed (regular hours)? Does this very fiXedness
now begin to wear on her, to "dent " her? After "dent of fixture "
there is a " a bone to spare . " As if the feast had now diminished to a
si n gle bone (bone of contention?). Some reversal has begun again in
this section . The opacity of the language seems to signal this .
Does " dent of fiXture" refer t o the parents' dental fiXtures? If
they lack teeth they are deprived of those instruments of aggression
(they are castrated) and so are less fearsome, powerful, authoritative .
But this must also be a reminder of their mortality and so mortality in
general . A dent to one ' s own narcissism. And the bone, that empty
jawbone when the teeth are gone-somehow there is an image of
gnawing toothlessly on bones. Some terrible image of their depriva­
tion but also, I suppose, a satisfaction? An aggression against them? If
so , no wonder it is so veiled by the language .
Following this " there are capsize . " Clearly, she recognizes the
reversal now. The boat has gone over. And yet, the pun in " capsize"
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11everfy l)ahlen

(the size of the cap) rights her (writes her) in the next sentence. "A
hat , " she says, " any hat " (any size hat) " to walk in the garden in the
rain . " She is not drowning after all . She will simply go and walk in
the garden (that garden which is not Eden, but which is) in the rain.
And now the rain itself will not do as clothing; she wants protection
from it: a hat .
But this sudden immersion: is it retribution for the guilty
thoughts which had preceded it? and at the same time another image
of birth? Read backwards as before, it would be a sudden, violent
coming out of the water. Now of course one needs a hat, some protec­
tion from the rain, these thoughts (a rain of thoughts in the head?) of
the violence of birth, of the passion (compounded equally of love and
murderous rage and guilt) felt for the parents, protection from the re­
minders of the extremes of life, from the watery element, the image of
which links ideas of birth and death indissolubly.
In the next section the reason for the walk in the garden is given:
"to go out to fetch the holly. " Again, here is a reminder of the Chris t­
mas season and its ritual events. Holly symbolizes Christ' s passion
and death, but also , because it is an evergreen , is an emblem of eter­
nal life. So here is another linking of birth and death, now framed in
terms of the sublimated fantasies of religion. The traditional Christian
imagery which surfaces so frequently in this writing (and which is so
frequently ironic) may also be read into the immersion which p re­
ceded . It may have been a kind of ironic baptism, an unintended or
accidental rebirth.
The fire which " blazes up" in the next sentence seems to be a re­
sponse to "doing the old thing" : re-enacting the rituals, materializing
them. And since " thing" has come to mean "word , " words them ­
selves (the old story) feed this fire , are a part of the materialized event.
This section might be seen to draw on images in extreme opp osi­
tion (water, fire), to draw life and death into a continuity, that joining
of opposites which the ambiguity of so much of the imagery im pli es .
This may be an attempt to materialize a body (at least at the le vel of
thought and language) which is not the " local body. "
The final section begins with a pun on "hear" which calls on the
sense of hearing that is associated with space (here) and time (th at is,
 1 33
A Reading : a Reading

here and now-or now hear this) . Does she mean here, in the time of
this writing? The action of the sentence is both here and there . Here
now but there in memory. It moves around . It travels. And it is also
heard. It suggests the same rapidity of movement evoked in " we zip
around like wildfire , " a sentence which also depended on sound for its
effect.
The sentence continues: " we are ready to go to seed. " Here is an
evocation of winter again, in that crops go to seed. But the season of
death reserves in itself the seeds of life . And human beings must also
go to seed . People become " seedy" we say, when we sense some de­
struction at work in them . Perhaps this is another reference to the par­
ents, going to seed as they had gone earlier to weed . And whatever
seed they become in death must be metaphoric, the seed they have left
behind in the person of their child who must then fulfill the promise of
continuity.
The burden of this sentence seems to be felt rather sharply in
what follows : " taking a longer course and moving towards something
unknown , how would anyone ever know it by the shape it is in. " It
occurs to me that this is a comment on the writing itself. The writing
has become a journey, but unlike the literal trip of which it is a meta­
phor, it took a " longer course " and moved towards an unknown des­
tination. She realized the journey only in the act of writing it, materi­
al izing it . But there is an anxious question at the end : "how would
anyone ever know it by the shape it is in. " That is, the writing is not
in any recognizable shape , so how can anyone read it, know it, see
what it says. She fears she has failed to render the experience formally,
to embody it adequately. And it is this very body of work which must
fulfill the promise of seed in the preceding sentence.
But, in whatever shape it may be , " there it is, " and then she
asks: "did anyone think it was ugly, strange, did anyone notice. "
Here the apprehension seems to alternate between being seen and
j udged ugly and strange, and not being seen at all . At another level
this m ust also refer to the female genitalia : it recollects the line "what
was homelike has become unhomelike . "
Then : " how we had learned to live with it, these alien things,
death in life . " Here she seems to reveal her sense of all the writing has
 134
Bez,erly Dahlen

encompassed : the contradictions, the reversals, the layers of meanin g,

that we had learned to live with that, that complex geography. That
death in life is the ordinary state of affairs, that everything is strange,
alien-this isn ' t only in the writing. Alienation is a general condition
of human life. That is what we must all learn to live with, put up with.
Her judgment then is : " what a mistake . " Is life itself a mistake? Or
only the condition of human life, or her own life? It's hard to know
how general or specific this judgment is. But the final word (a one
word sentence) is " effigy. " An imitation . "A painted or sculptured
representation of a person . . . . A crude image or dummy fashioned in
the likeness of a person , often as an expression of hatred for him . "
This recalls the hollow men of the Eliot poem and so perhaps means to
render a similar judgment of contemporary civilization . But it is also a
judgment of this writing itself, betraying the anxiety that the writing is
a mistake, an effigy, a crude image of life . And it seems specificall y to
judge those attempts, so often noted throughout this piece , to make
things of words, to render adequately the material of her life .
 C arla Harrym an

The Middle

Carla Harryman: I have a text to read. When I came up with

" The Middle " as a title , I didn 't know why I chose it . I think it has to
do with jane Austen , whom I never refer to in the text . But she had a
sense of balance in all matters, and the middle is contained in this bal­
ance . For me , that' s not particularly true : the middle is in between
two extremes, and I keep going back and forth. Actually, if I could
just run down the middle of the road and no cars would hit me, I ' d be
really happy.
To begin with, I 'll read a little of Jane Austen :

' But now really, do not you think Udolpho the nicest book in the
world? '
'The nicest ,-by which I suppose you mean the neatest . That must
depend upon the binding. '
' Henry, ' said Miss Tilney, 'you are very impertinent . . . . '
' I am sure , ' cried Catherine, ' I did not mean to say anything wrong;
but it is a nice book, and why should not I call it so? '
'Very true , ' said Henry, ' and this is a very nice day, and we are tak­
ing a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh! it is a
very nice word indeed! -it does for everything . . . . Every commenda­
tion on every subject is comprised in that one word. '
'While , in fact , ' cried his sister, ' it ought only to be applied to you ,
without any commendation at all . You are more nice than wise . Come,
135
 136
Carla Harryman

M iss Morland , let us leave him to meditate over our faults in the utmost
propriety of diction , while we praise Udolpho in whatever terms we like
best . It is a most interesting work . You are fond of that kind of reading?'
' To say the truth, I do not much like any other . . . . I can read poetry
and plays, and things of that sort , and do not dislike travels. But h istory,
real solemn history, I cannot be interested in . . . . I read it a little as a

duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary m e . The
quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page ; the
men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all-it is very
tiresome : and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull , for a great
deal of it must be invention .
' The speeches , that are put into the heroes ' mouths, their thoughts
and designs-the chief of all this must be invention , and invent ion is
what delights me in other books . '
-Northanger Abbey

Now I ' ll read the text.

Note: there are a few direct quotations embedded in this text that
may not be obviou s to the reader. For this reason , I would like to ac·
knowledge Kathy Acker, Ludwig Wittgenstein , J ane B owles,
Georges Bataille, and Georges Perec. All other seeming instances of
imitation and mistranslation were probably intended.

Who limits herself to " All I can say. All I c an say" gives herself over to
a kind of conservatism.

This oblique judgment or observation is mystifying to me. But it is

very much p art o f what interests me.

Characterizing the middle where what ' s enlarged (subjective) and

what ' s reduced (external) by speaking gather.

It was after m idnight . There wasn ' t any moonlight that I could see bu t
lots of light inside . I was there . You were permanent . It seemed like
there was about to be a dance . It was all very agitated . The street
 137
The Middle

seemed loaded down . We couldn 't hold each other up. No pre-planned
program . It wasn 't exactly like that . It was more like a space we didn't
notice . " Do you like this? " " I don 't know , I like everything about
you . " What's enough? We were oversensitized. I tried to hit you in the
stomach. You tried to block me . Neither one of us missed, although nei­
ther one of us was precise . It was contact through angling. Then the
train ride. We felt like we needed more . Once you get food and sleep
and so on . It's a fire nobody wants to put out. Not wanting to be dirty
or clean but someplace in the middle . I don 't scrounge around for any­
thing anyway. I hate mythology. There' s location and attention and ten­
sion . What about the humans popping out of any animated thing one
notices? I talk to anybody who will listen . An animal with lockjaw at­
tached to the pant leg. I had to stop being so careful. Amnesia. The ho­
tel, yes, the blue room . I bit someone on the leg. He acted like he was
the Talmud, something unfamiliar and totally eerie . He waved good­
bye. I sat up. There is, I believe , a way to regain consciousness. You
have to move around as if you were part of something else.

THE MIDDLE

978. You look at a face and say " I wonder what's going on behind that
face? " -But you don 't have to say that . The external does not have to
be seen as a facade behind which the mental powers are at work.

Var. : " But you don 't have to think that way. And if someone talks to me
quite obviously holding nothing back then I ' m not even tempted to
think that way. "
-Ludwig Wittgenstein

PREFACE

Like everybody else, I have had forebodings and experienced misfor­

tune but the two evaded each other, so that nothing followed the fore­
boding, and the misfortune struck me unannounced.
-Sigmund Freud
 138
Carla Harryman

There are always forebodings in a tragedy, usually experienced

by both audience and characters. The relationship of foreboding to
misfortune is a kind of recipe that structures response . But only in
special cases does foreboding lead to misfortune . Foreboding is an ex­
perience of fate that arises out of (or with) an interpretation of the de­
tails of a present event which is cast onto time .
The misfortune that strikes unannounced makes a temporary
shape . The day, the life takes a shape, changes shape at that time, for
all time, and continues its mutations .
But Freud had a basically tragic sense of man , invented an elabo­
rate determinism , an interior cosmology of fate .
When I used the quote from Freud in my play La Quotidienne, I
had been thinking of it in terms of: 1 ) Suspense is both permanent and
nonexistent. 2) C artoons : a squiggle runs away from a square and
gets run over by a boulder. 3) What comes next (the misfortune for
example) is not determined by what precedes it (the cause of the fore­
boding) . 4) Misfortune is obscure and unknowable unless presently
upon us.
"A suspiciously simple sense of life , " writes Greeley, " is that it
is, in any one man , conclusive . Oh, for him-of course ; but for this
world I wonder . . . . " It seems to me like common sense to wonder.
But I don ' t want to stop at common sense . Though I do not propound
a tragic view, I often foresee an end . Then two of them, etc .

This, said Daisy, is some fate. In fact , it could be just like any fate and
that is exactly the problem with it.
The best story, said Walt, is about someone's life from the beginning
to the end .
What are you talking about?
Biography.
Only, I think, said Daisy, if the life is long. Let 's go someplace where
I can hear what you 're saying.
Do you have something in mind?
That is not the point , said Daisy. There is always the possibility of in­
venting a new system of education .
If, said Walt, something gets too large, one stops seeing the details ,
and I believe now is a perfect example of what I 'm talking about.
 139
The Middle

A BRIEF H ISTORY

I will give anything to do art . But I must be more specific: What is

language? The discovery of the urban peripheries has so far been essen­
tially visual-I ' m thinking of Marcel Duchamp's rationality or autism
and Sheeler' s social-realism that is discontinuity that is seeing without
psychology. Wittgenstein seems to understand language as function
therefore without psychology (by psychology, I mean the Freudian
model of mentality); but by depending on a model of intentionality, he
incorporates dualism. If I understand language in this manner; by say­
ing something, then whatever I say means some other things because
one event can only be equivalent only to itself, (the Law of Identity).
What is real is both real and unreal. The main controversy in the art
world these days is money.
-Kathy Acker

History without time. If the past is buried it doesn ' t exist .

No depth . Meditation on depth: a wall covered with spots and I
occupy myself by seeing faces in it, but not so that I can study the nat­
ure of an aspect but because I find those shapes interesting and be­
cause of the destiny that leads me from one to the next .
More and more , aspects dawn, others fade away and sometimes
I ' stare blindly' at the wall .
The inside : do I care? Do I care more than I reflect? Do I love
madly? Get as deep as possible. The more focus, the more the narra­
tive breaks, the more memories fade : the least meaning.
The least meaning is privacy. A source of endless comfort, like
the family. A violation of privacy occurs when she gives a public
speech on her private thoughts . The speech is intended to mean some­
thing to one other person who would like to reorganize her own men­
tal life. It is not what she wore to the bed , which was a portrayal of an
an gel occupying all of history, but how it felt to be wearing a new
thing, alone in her own room, that was meaningful . She would ex­
plain what it meant to take possession of one ' s property by describing
the silk on her skin as something that lured her into oblivion .
I might be observing two faces which do not change : suddenly a
likeness lights up in them. I call this experience the dawning of an as­
pect.
 140
Carla Harryman

Its causes are of interest to psychologists, but not to me . Opening

Pandora' s Box neutralizes the power of the box . Everything is open to
interpretation . The interpretation is in relation to the structure of the
world it occupies . (Very telling. ) Without depth , Freud is artifice . The
icons decorating the psyche are scrapped for meaning. Meaning i s
bought to relieve pressure . The pressure comes from the outside, but
it is the inside that has a price . (Now we ' re fucking: I don 't have any
finesse I ' m all over you like a raging blonde leopard and I want to go
more raging I want to go snarling and poisoning and teasing eek eek,
curl around your hind leg pee , that twig over there , I want the specific
piss shuddering of the specific cock. I want, help me . I need your
help . ) Every invention is consumed by a larger structure .
What's quotidian has no depth . Not just what you had for break­
fast with bon vivant fatalism in relation to structure, it ' s an end in it­
self. A world of equivalents. It is a guy. His name is Karmanalis, or
something like that: Karawo? Krawasch? Karacouve? In brief, Kara­
truc. In any case , a little banal name , a name that says something,
that is not easily forgotten .
Life is a dream. Wherever I go, or I might say, where I was
taken , for it is difficult to determine what transpired to cause a shift in
plans (did they change because I accepted the change? I was passive
or asleep, or I gave myself up to blank inevitableness with such enthu­
siasm that it appeared that I was the one determining the next event­
the effect of such a false appearance is, after all , a style of accepting
fate), opacity and mystery surrounded me on all sides. I would have
thought the earth was flat had we been in that country. But I live in
the New World. And am proof to the contrary. I didn 't know that ob­
jects have histories . I thought they had an instant being, and that they
either were or were not intended for my use . History, separated with­
out my knowledge from creation, existed only in the first person . All
the ages that preceded my present age- l 0 , 1 1 , 1 2 -were dwarfed ob­
jects seen from the distance of 1 3 . I was 1 3 . Equally, I was myself. I
had one thing in common with the world : unimaginable creation . So I
assumed that the places things had were the places they had had and
were always to keep . Only I was an accident among them . The people
in my universe had no interest in my future as far as I knew , since
they would be here with or without me . C onsequently I assumed a
 141
The Middle

blase attitude , so that I could hold in reserve some hidden choice, a se­
cret I could not name and would not name so as not to destroy its
value in the face of all the permanent stuff.
An image of a world without character.
Models of behavior pass in a parade. The most interesting ones
use the most finesse in staying in their places.

Inez: Well , if you don 't feel like you 've got much personality yourself it's
an easy way to do . You just pick the right model and you watch
how they act . I never modeled myself after anyone, but there were
two or three who modeled after me. And they weren 't even rela­
tives-just ordinary girls, it 's an easy way to do.

So, this is how we come by style and decoration . I have not lost at
musical chairs these many years. C an I imitate these little competitors
without being one?
My syntax, being inherent to myself, lacks character. I have no
identity. I have learned to fabricate an identity by imitating someone
else . Since I am often forced to write in the nude, I often fantasize
wearing beautiful clothes. In this way, I never suffer from abuse , since
my characterlessness is not perceived .
Now that I am dressed , I can be sexual . What I like sexually is
what outside the realm of sex disgusts me. I . e . , there is social nature
and there is scientific nature . We discover a hemisphere, we find sod­
omy in it .
Stasis is the flip side of degradation . One must have a sexual
identity. So she imitates the degradation in daily life . One ' s relation­
ship to sex is literal or metaphorical . Now where is the beloved?

" Maigret went over for a while to cool his forehead against the
windowpane , then walked into the office next door, grabbed the bot­
tle, and drank from it the equivalent of three or four singles. When he
came back, he had assumed the heavy gait of Guillaume Serre and his
ob stinate glare . "
 1 42
Carla Harryman

His mask is the mask of the person ' s mask he ' s trying to crack.

Every day I face the same white picket fence .

Because nothing is happening these days, no weather, no fight­
ing, mornings and nights, I had thought to begin my account with a
little fable or narration . But I have been intercepted en route by a
question , attempting to trap in flight that which forms a narration.
What does it mean to all ow oneself this indulgence? The indulgence of
a little story? (Meanwhile we have gone down in defeat, and my ac­
count has entered history. )
The story will seem to have a great bearing on the present . One
feels its weight since it is intended to shed light on what is yet to come
about .
I can ' t help recalling the time I was expounding o n the history of
a matchbook to my neighbors . We must have been six or seven years
of age then, so of course very wise in regards the things of the world. I
had found the matchbook on a rock on the shore of the nearby lake
and all the matches were soggy. On its cover was a small map of the
world, wrapped around front and back . Various major cities were
placed on this map, with dots to mark them . Lisbon , Madrid , Istan­
bul. Tehran , Tashkent, Bombay. Tashkent had a checkmark next to it.
My first claim was that the matchbox was placed there deliberately for
me to find . It had been meant for me. And that since it was a hot dry
day and the person who left it for me was careful and wanted to pro­
tect local nature from fire, had dipped it in the lake. At this point the
story is intercepted by a question. Maybe some guy went swimmin g
and forgot to take them out of his trunks, so he just left them there af­
ter. Well , I say, he would have thrown the matches in the lake . And be­
sides, who would ever leave such a secret matchbook behind? And be­
sides it wasn ' t even a man . It was a woman , and women don ' t have
pockets in their bathing suits. The matchbook was there to tell m e that
I wasn ' t really born in Orange , California, I was born in Tashkent.
That my mother wasn 't my real mother. That the person who left the
matches was my mother. It would be impossible for me to find her, so
I was supposed to stay with my substitute mother until further notice .
Also, she dipped it in the lake, because she knew that way no grown­
up would take it .
 1 43
The Middle

The story leads me to recall others of an almost identical n ature .

The recollection was prompted by the globe in my room that always
sits nearby. But is this really a memory? In fac t , it is total fabrication.

Lionel: I didn ' t say I wouldn ' t be, or I may end up religious, without
leading anybody at all . But wherever I end up, I ' m getting out
of here . I ' ve made up my m ind , this place is a fake .
Molly: These oyster shells are real and so is the turtle . He just hasn ' t
got his own head and feet. They ' re wooden .

(I can ' t y e t lift myself above the mass o f appearances . )

Whatever I say means some other things. What I say means more than
what I ' m thinking. What I ' m saying is less t rue than what I mean .
She says , " They say the world is flat , " but she does n ' t think about
who they is, nor does she know. Mystery surrounds u s and much is
opaque . One event can only be equivalent to itself What is real is both real and
unreal.

Molly: She had a shadow.

Lionel: Who?
Molly: My mother.
Lionel: Oh . . .
(He deals his cards out more rapidly, becoming deeply absorbed
in his game . )
Molly: I t used t o come and pass over her whole life and make i t dark . It
didn ' t come very often , but when it did she used to go down­
stairs and drink fizzy water.

Psychology is fate and fate is blocked. Separated from the charac­

ter. C ausality is dimmed . The style develops from blockages . The
character' s leaping over the vat of ignorance shapes the statement in
an un predictable fashion , because n o one knows what will be on the
other side o f that .

(Interlude)

Sometimes it seems that people are children living in cave s . The most
awesome as well as appealing to live in are those with ice stuck to the
walls and tops . The ice droops down so that in places one needs to bend
 1 44
Carla Harryman

under it . There is so much ice that the fire does not melt the cave , and a
child can be comfortable here , wrap herself up by the fire , in blankets,
and wait for the next snowfall . When our family moved into the cave ,
we had to create positions for each member. Mom guarded the cave
hole . She sat on the sled. She brought her bandana so her ears wouldn't
get cold. Dad carried wood in from the outside . We were afraid his back
might become permanently bent under the loads he carried , but he
straightened out once the wood had been broken into our fire pot. My
brother, who had fallen through ice, shivered by the fire and danced up
and down on his soggy shoes. When I got bored I tied and untied my
ice skates. Sometimes Mom would play a trumpet from her position at
the mouth of the cave, her sheet music propped up on the edge of the
sled. If any of us tried to discover what key she played in , she would
stick the horn 's nozzle right in front of the sheet music so that no one
could see the key signature. She kept the flutes and other horns lined up
beside her. She said we could use any of them we wanted , which was
terrific, except we could never discover the key she played in and for us
the notes came out thin in the cold. So most of the time we just listened
or warmed the instruments at the fire. We handed them to Mom who
exchanged what she had in her hands for the one freshly heated . Most
of the time she just played the trumpet, and we were grateful, it was the
loudest and least eerie of the instruments.

As she goes about her day to day, she doesn ' t care about the end.
She lives with what ' s around her and not by some big fate to be held
up, compared to her modus operandi . C inderella loved luxury as
would any dreamy floor scrubber. Exotics love evil, without families,
on the fringe , with minds , and adventurers. Nature is luxury. Mean­
ing is evil .
A DAY BOOK . Without days. Or hours. But reduced aspects.
Inward man takes sun ' s location for his own . But

Even to get here, I find myself moving letters and other accumulations
out of the way, and to have this one sheet of paper, again move paper
clips, and again letters out of the way. But why not. One lives as much
in that detritus as some other possibility.

At home he is alone in trivia, almost singularly clear in the midst

 1 45
The Middle

of these little sums. Or alternatively one could be in the midst of com­

pany and its proliferations.

Blabbermounth
by Larry Eigner
Hello. 0 I was just telling Hap when you came in that an uncle of mine
was down here a week ago today and said we ought to go over Cuba
with 1 200 jets. What you think that would do, eh?
Which uncle was that?
Uncle Ike . We should go over Cuba with 1 200 jets. So I said, are we
such gods? As long as Battista was in Cuba just a playground with boys
running around with guitars but when Castro got hold right away the
up-and-at-come American Press scrambled down and so forth. So
things went from bad to worse . Then we got to talking about society be­
ing wasteful , we 're going all ways to Sunday, the disc-jockey 24 hours
all the time on the radio, and the newspapers eating up the woods and
forests. He said he was only glad we had it to waste, that's all , and I
said , what are we , gods? So I said it again. You see, once it's joke , but a
thousand times it 's not funny. And then Kennedy such a good Catholic,
shooting the moon instead of going after the population problem , and
even the sun .
Did you ever read the Tempest? It was on the radio last night .

Imitation : from day to day one holds oneself accountable . The

writer matches up with what' s going on . The blabbermouth uses rov­
i ng points of view at large in the world to represent his view, which is
the same as many others. Eigner records the proliferation of words,
adding to it in his record . Whereas for C reeley, the daily proliferation
arouses an argument to simplify:

Like John Cage ' s saying, why not a motel , and what else does one
need-and surely for those who live primarily in their own condition,
almost a skin not to abstract from nor could one be, the place of the
body is the place one lives in , and the mind follows and makes do.

Where ' one' lives produces a series of conceits: house , body,

tni n d . So no matter how reduced the aspect there is a potential for
 146
Carla Harryman

clutter. Conceits might be what' s given to us, with pressure. Pressure

to accept what ' s unacceptable .
" Must be literal fact of so-called objects is unacceptable , " says
G reeley.
Greeley: inside the mind.
Mayer: inside the family. I .e . , Bernadette Mayer' s MID- WIN
TER DAY

Even though we live

Neither in a tribe nor a community nor near a grandfather
But in these rude , private and ignorant separate houses
Where love is like fame and fame is more like sin
And for love to be so tricky for a family is just asking for it,
Something about mothers
A list
I need to go to the health food store
To get a bottle of milk and a piece of Laughing Grasshopper tofu

This poem about daily life is an expression of the acceptance o f

that life . The challenge of the poem and the life is time , to rush
through a day in a day. The world of obj ects is tackled by the mother;
it is almost celebratory of there being no conflict from outside the fam·
ily and friend world of the poem (or such conflicts seem very far
away) . So many events tangled up with people and things, then,
make up the day.

What an associative way to live this is, dreams of hearts beating like
sudden mountain peaks I can see in my chest like other breasts then in
one vertiginous moment I can forget all but the reunions and your orig·
inal face, two shirts each under overall s over tights under shoes, then
one sweater, outer suits with legs or leggings, mittens attached, hats and
overshoes. Everybody wanting something or nothing to be done to
them, then one of the shoes falls off again .

COMMENTARY:
DAYS
One word is next
To another, an excess
 147
The Middle

Of localism , solidarity, and

Vive Ia difference shouted
Down crowded column inches.
Each voice singled out
By ages of technique.
In fact you don't
Life a life one
Day at a time.
Some days you skip,
Come back to them
Later, others never occur.
These occasions are not
Even up for grabs,
Cause no comment .
-Bob Perelman

Human nature determines what is capricious.

-Ludwig Wittgerzstein

C HAPTER 2

Determinism
"The problem with Brill is, he' s dragging the pieces behind him
in a straight line . He' s leaving evidence, a dirty little trail anybody
could destroy. "
Our heroine had an abhorrence of sticking to the subject . There
were so many compelling subjects . If one thing suggested another it
was th e other thing she would pursue , for she couldn 't draw a line and
felt the following of lines to be too confining a game . Also, to go back
and forth between two players was not enough . The table must take at
least four. The best thing of all being when the conversation took an
exhilarating tum in an incomprehensible area that was suggestive
enou gh for anybody to pick up the ball and run. A subject beat into
the groun d was dead , and she wanted the illusion of everything living
fore ver, each thing named being slightly buoyant like the arms and
legs of newborns floating in air.

In 1 846 it was the doctrine that human action is not free but de-
 148
Carla Harryman

termined by motives. In 1 876 it was the doctrine that everything that

happens is determined by a necessary chain of causation . (Difference
between Balzac & Zola?)
According to Freud, for example , the polymorphous perverse
meant that a child or a woman could be seduced into committing per­
verse sex acts by a man and enjoy them . She could be " misled into all
sorts of transgressions, " because she had not yet built up her dams of
shame (something common among the lower classes according to F.),
the building up, or the not building up , being what determined the
outcome of the man ' s advances.
C auses are hidden . A world with cause hides the cause .
Assuming a mask. Things, anything, may appear to be arbi·
trary, senseless, lacking in cause. But the Ford ' s fender is not slightly
crushed on the left , just to the side of the tail pipe for no reason . But it
seems to lack cause , since we have been standing here , by it , in the
new car lot , talking for an hour or so, and surely the mechanic who
was here with us would have noticed this flaw . Then we piece together
the story of each witness, until, in this fiction , we have determined the
cause . Or the Ford dealer, lacking in curiosity and in no sense caught
up in a story other than his own , which is as far as he is concerned for
him to determine , any other story being more trouble than it is worth.
this Ford dealer who feels that such small mysteries are deadening
(and I am in complete agreement on this point) prefers to call in the
body service to repair the little dents without further speculation . I . e . ,
a cause might b e totall y useless .
7 . If he comes I ' ll tell him . . . is a resolution, a promise. If it is not
to be a false promise it must not rest on the certainty that he won ' t
come . It is neither a material nor a formal implication .
To induce literature: someone is having a problem making a de­
cision whether or not to communicate something to someone . An ex­
terior event will cue her as to what to do . If he does not come , she will
never relax again . If he does come, she will tell him that she loves him.
Or: if he comes, that means he loves her and thus this knowled ge will
enable her to tell him , or make it appropriate for her to tell him that
she loves him.
If she were able to communicate what she must tell him to some·
 1 49
The Middle

one else then there would be more than one solution to her problem .
This is why it must be that she is speaking to herself.
Probably the circumstances surrounding her thoughts are much
heavier. Will X tell her lover that she lied to him about her wealth and
also that her father will kill him if they ever meet clandestinely again?
She has been lying to him, and now that their adventurous romance
has turned to relentless love she feels terrible remorse from her little
deceits that have over time become all-encompassing problems: " We
certainly, among us all , must be a match for that little lady. Sooner or
later every girl who is in love does something rash which betrays her
secret; we will talk it over this evening. " Everyone is conspiring to
turn her inside out , to catch her in her mask.
When our heroine is thinking to herself " If he comes I ' ll tell . . . "
we understand how much this is all in fun , all a structuring device, for
we use the same devices in order neither to die from nor to give away
our secrets. The wringing of the hands is something one tries to pre­
vent at all costs since this betrays the private thought . It is the silent
means, the thinking about the problem , the thought exposed to one­
self alone, that is in cahoots with the future .
29. " Now you mention it: I think he'll come . " " Now I think
you 're right : he will come . " " No, I ' m convinced : he will come . " One
can think up a characteristic context for all such expressions.
The concept ' dissimulation' serves practical aims, therefore not
all behavior can be dissimulation in all circumstances.
In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, an error (i. e . , forgetting, or
calling Ann Sally, etc . ) is a kind of dazzling ornament, something
sticking out like a sore thumb for the analyst to behold, then lance . (I
guess this mixed metaphor has come about because doctors often
seem to think of some obvious aberration which is easy to attack as
' be au
tiful , beautiful . ' ) These little human errors have causes, hidden
meanings , as do murders . (The murder was not perfect, a murderer
always gives herself away, she can't help it. )
254. But isn ' t the concept such that for any behavior, etc . , one
can imagine (construct) a larger context in which even this behavior
Would be dissimulating behavior? Isn ' t this, for example, the basis for
the problem of any detective story?
 150
Carla Harryman

To be wearing a
mask is a wonderful
Thing. Who wants to strip
down? Naked I
Am cold. And can
not talk. Today
I am more interesting
in incognito. Thin
Veil you address
my name through . View

The horse, the

house I mean , that, too .

Dear Mom ,
Brill ' s story is that he ' s fi guring out why he uses the
made-up word ' Cardillac . ' This leads him into memories of his past
that explain the made-up word . The memories have to do with feeling
ashamed and wanting acknowledgement . But in his written account
we are watching his story drag its evidence behind him in the dust.
What is determining the side-trips I go on as I observe his procedure
of narration and all the unaccountable details? The details which he
doesn' t bother to consider in pursuit of his objective?
Two things especially bothered me about his story. One is his
apology for disclosing his ' intimate personality' and the other is his
use of the words ' intimate personality. ' Brill states something to the ef·
feet that he is writing about his personal life because it is necessary at
this time in history for analysts to do so in order to make their theories
available to the reading audience , other professionals, etc. He also
says that people who say they have read Freud often ask him , Brill, for
details about Freud ' s personal life . Since Freud's personal life is splat·
tered across the pages of his books, Brill complains that the person has
not read Freud or has read Freud badly.
Brill must have been suffering from some great exasperation . I
don't think he likes his patients very much . I bet his patients find hirn
too aloof and they are asking him about Freud to stir up someth in g of
 151
The Middle

mutual interest in order to create a bond . Also , people forget things ,

e specially around people who make them nervous, like doctors .
And now to light on that little ocean of ' intimate personality' he
was so apologetic in exposing. He doesn 't even know what personality

is. He thinks his insecurity is his personality, his little nagging doubts .
How could anything formless be personality? Anxieties are part of
history, but history isn ' t personality.
See you at 3 : 00 next Thursday by the rotunda.
(The individual , by assimilating the thing he handles can still
subordinate himself to a finite order which rivets him within an im­
mensity. If he then tries to reduce this immensity to scientific laws
[which place an equal sign between the world and finite things] , he is
only equal to his object if he rivets himself to an order which crushes
him [which denies him-which denies that which differs in him from
the finite and subordinate thing] . There is only one means in his
power to escape from these various limitations-the destruction of a
being similar to ourselves . . . . The violence experienced by our fellow
human beings is concealed from the order of finite, ultimately useless
things . It returns them to immensity. )

PART 2 : REDUCED

B ook 1 : Not a story, but an incident . She looked out the window
and saw a thief walloping a clarinetist. A thief? How did she know?
An en emy. The clarinetist? A friend. Someone she would never see
again .
Not a fortuitous beginning. I 've got to think this over. 2 1 8 .
" Seve
ral shadows together result i n light . " This idea could already
look like a fiendish perversion of truth.
Some boys had designs on the bashed keys of the instrument left
in the street. The smallest child ' s mother was complaining about her
chirop ractor.
"The very masterpiece of philosophy would be to develop the
mean s Providence employs to arrive at the ends she designs for man,
and fro m this construction to deduce some rules of conduct acquaint­
in this
g wretched two-footed individual with the manner wherein he
 152
Carla Harryman

must proceed along life ' s thorny way, forewarned of the strange ca·
prices of that fatality they denominate by twenty different titles, and
all unavailingly, for it has not yet been scanned nor defined , " said the
Marquis.
"Well , I don ' t know , " says the mother. " It is already 7 : 30 and I
have to put him to bed . "
"Oh, please mom . "
"You don' t even know what we're talking about . "
" I do too. "

Book 2 : Someone treats the picture as a working drawing and

reads from what it represents .
The place curves around , it spirals and collects and draws us to·
gether as spirals do when we are watching their formation . The pin·
nacle is surrounded by water. This is where we have to stand as the
waters gather. It is said that this place has existed back to the old days
We dance and speak in spontaneous poetry.
Why is this happening? I hope no one notices me . If I act like
everybody else no one will notice me . I will pretend to be primitive, to
experience primitiveness . (Primitive is of course a completely false
conception . ) " Nouveau , Nouveau , Nou-veau . " What does it mean.
someone foreign asks me . It means meat I say. Everybody then enters
meat . Except this bearer of false names. And where will she go?
For even her sandwiches will fall into the loose dirt (as I have just
seen, I think) . Like a light flipping off the shadows, skewing the use of
any of her efforts. Yes, when everything flipped over, judges and
churches, there could be no stings but faithless stings, no faith but
stingless empires, empires too large to sting. She gathers the griev·
ances to her but changes their meanings , now when words fall on her,
knowing what she knows, seeing what she sees, talking from her
mouth . And truly it little matters what she says, this, this, or that or
any other thing.

You just pick the right model and you watch how they act. I never mod·
eled myself after anyone, but there were two or three who modeled after
me. And they weren' t even relatives-
 153
The Middle

Book 3 : And what have I accomplished with all this? In explain­

ing the concept I have substituted the use for the picture.
I am folding the picture. It is a sheet . There is not one meaning
or finding. I say to myself Freud is wrong. I dust the crusty top of the
nightstand , which I have been spilling drinks on since childhood . The
chipped pink lamp with the stained and tasseled shade , almost a rem­
nant of childhood , in my fantastic knowledge of it grows out of the
nightstand .
By fantastic I suppose I mean that something that has lived past
its expiration date grows into another being-in one's desire to see it
gone one invents extraneous attributes to explain its longevity and to
transform it into a superior object . An object not confined to the repe­
tition of seeing it , the idle thought and silent rages I have shed upon it .
Something that makes a sham of my unspoken thoughts by the invisi­
ble power I bestow on it.
By sheet , I mean words . For all of this is a lie . And if you watch
the feathers of my duster closely, you will see that they do not collect
dust because they are made of plastic . A sham duster used by an un­
substantial hand . By unsubstantial I mean nonexistent. And now I
close the drawer of the nightstand I have never touched and turn off
the lamp by whose light I have never seen and climb into the bed in a
room I have never occupied .

Sandy Berrigan: You said the murderer was "her. " I would like
to k now some murderers who are " she , " beside Lizzie Borden.
Harryman: I was thinking in terms of the detective novel genre
and there are many murderers who are " she. "
Berrigan: I always think of the murderer as being "he . "
Harryman: I always try to identify with every subject. So every­
body turned into " she . " Also, it does make the pronoun more visible .
It ' s less assumed .
Bob Perelman: I get the impression from fitting the several
pieces of your talk together that you ' re working against a unitary
com monsense meaning for cultural and physical things in daily life .
B ut someone like J ane Austen seems to espouse a very commonsense
 1 54
Carla Harryman

view. So, do you sometimes want to write in a more simple , unitary

style?
Harryman: I share with jane Austen a concern for how people
understand each other. But it ' s a different world we live in . I mean,
my world is huge, and her world isn't, in my own imagination of it.
Her world is confined and determined and very specific. My world is
unapproachable and enormous . Whenever I see boundaries I don 't
believe them .
Perelman: It' s funny that in her small , closed world there is an
impersonal acceptance of boundaries, and in your huge world the per·
son of the writer gets much more foregrounded , -you , or if not you,
then whichever personae you' re dealing with . There 's a strong ges·
tural element in all your sentences .
Harryman: Writers ' gestural elements interest m e deeply.
Steve Benson: It seems like you veer around a lot, and if I visu ·
alize this road with all these cars on it, going in contradictory direc·
tions, then veering in the middle ground between extremes is a way of
trying to live very actively in a circumstance where conventions and
patterns are in conflict, and are therefore dangerous. Your writing ac·
tually presents not only a map, but an act of negotiation .
Beverly Dahlen: What do you value most in Austen' s work?
Harryman: The first thing that came into my head was that
when I read a paragraph by her I think I know exactly what she
means and then I realize that I don't. And that every time I read her I
have a completely different response. So that gives me a sense of the
very articulated response she had to what she was living in .
Lyn Hejinian: What strikes me is how isolated each of the char·
acters is from each other because of their own idiosyncratic psycholog·
ical conventions and the social conventions that each of them acts out.
In Sense and Sensibility, even the sisters who have parallel love disasters
can't actually talk to each other about it, and they can't talk to the
men in question about it . They' re both physically carrying on these
activities in front of each other, but they can ' t even mention them , it's
all taboo. As a result, they are wildly extreme , even though they are so
bound . Somewhat the way that the different elements in "The M id·
dle" seem very extreme . I think the idea that Jane Austen is in the
middle is an illusion .
 1 55
The Middle

Harryman: Well , yes and no. Her moral values exist in the mid­
dle, and she very firmly asserts them . Those are undeniable .
Dahlen: That ' s the ideal of the novel .
Harryman : Yes , right. She has a kind of transformed earthly so­
cial Platonism that she [laughs] has an idea of.
Eileen Corder: Tonight it seemed that you would have a pas­
sage that seemed very artificial, and then you would have a passage
that was what people commonly accept as ordinary speech . Do you
see yourself doing that?
Harryman: I think what seemed like ordinary speech was prob­
ably my writing . I was making artifice out of somebody else' s writing
to respond to my reading of it . It's a dynamic between me and other
texts. I want to put different language usages next to one another.
One thing about having a distinct personality-! mean, I don ' t
want me t o b e synonymous with it, I want t o look a t it.
Dahlen: What did you just say?
Harryman: I don' t want to get locked into my work, so that I
believe my life is my work.
Berrigan: So you were using language as a mask.
Harryman : A mask is an exteriorization . And there' s a differ­
ence between interior and exterior-you can ' t exactly have the inte­
rior of somebody. But the more you can exteriorize the interior the
more you can have a relationship.
Barrett Watten: There ' s also a sense in which the relationship
between doctor and patient in Freud becomes as literary as jane Aus­
ten 's social life . Somebody spoke at 80 Langton last Friday who had a
series of photographs, and he was intending a Freudian interpretation .
And one way to get this nailed down for all time was to juxtapose the
photographs that were in an associational series with subtexts from
Freud, certain landmarks in his thinking about how to think about as­
sociation, right? Not too complex a rhyme . So here was Freud' s work
completely abstracted out of the situation in which someone was being
treat ed, or cured , or transformed , or made wonderful, whatever . . .
and I felt such dis-ease with the literalness of his presentation .
Harryman: I think of Freud as both static and inventive . When
I re ad The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, I thought the man had an in­
credible imagination. But the cycles it would go through in leading
 156
Carla Harryman

someone to a realization become fixed . That ' s where I find his deter·
minism scary, because its use seems to be in endless permutations of
limits that a person can impose on another person .
Dahlen: Is that scarier than the kinds of limits that are in Aus·
ten? Maybe it has to do with the different world views that Austen and
Freud represent in the paper you read, although there are many other
contrasts that could be made . The comic world view of Austen, fi.
nally, and I think what you identify as the tragic world view of Freud,
with the fatedness and the determined . . . act or whatever. What about
that kind of contrast?
Harryman: I see them in two different scales. I respond to Aus·
ten more in a literary sense. But Freud is the person , in my world.
who has influenced the thinking, the vocabulary, and the limits of
speech of the people of my class and my culture , so that I have a dis·
tanced historical perspective of Austen . Freud is much closer up.
Perelman: Freud wanted to build an overall explanatory sys·
tern , which would have to change work to work . But in his short-term
method with any sentence of a patient he had this kabbalistic tradition
of being able to transform any given into something else . An orthodox
Freudian might want to push it all back into a coherent deadend sys·
tern . But , as a writer, all you need to get onto a new path is that o ne
term, which Freud endlessly supplies. It ' s liberating, if you don't
bother to add it up.
Harryman : Right, but a lot of times it' s really hard not to add it
up. Especially in his later work.
Perelman: But to get it back to you . You have a sentence some·
thing like " I don ' t say what I mean , " which again is very interesting
for a reader. It ' s like Ron [Silliman] ' s " Not this, " in 1)"anting. You
have the sentence in front of you , plus you ' re invited to imagine
something else .
Harryman: Asserting that is a reaction against the cruciality of
saying only what you mean .
 Barrett Watten

Olson in Language : Part II

Barrett Watten: I was not going to prepare anything written ,

but after spending yesterday listening to a lot of Olson tapes I hadn' t
heard before , and some that I had, I decided t o write this out . I n lis­
tening to the tapes , I was hoping to find exemplary passages in which
"instantaneous sound is the arbiter of the possible, " to summon up
"the linguistic imprint left by Olson ' s work. " But the " imprint of
sound" turns out not to be so simply a question of language but ar­
rives immediately at the question of form in the poem . A number of
the Ma.ximus Poems use radical shifts in modes of statement as the basis
of the sound, and I would like to add that value of Olson ' s work to the
questions I discussed earlier in an essay in Poeticsjouma/ 1 , where I ar­
gued some of the more negative aspects of Olson' s interest in " unin­
terrupted statement, " particularly as it occurred in Olson ' s Berkeley
reading in 1 965 . The radical shifts of voice in Olson ' s earlier poems
work in a different way than the more digressive and leveling modes
of statement Olson arrived at later, which have an ultimate value in
the physical being, the body, of the poet . I am interested in the psy­
c holo gy of Olson ' s form at both ends of its spectrum , but the one I
deal with in the following is perhaps the more usefully problematic .
The question is first of all form , specifically the shifts of modality
i n Olson ' s poetry that drew me to it before I had any inkling of what it
was about. I think of some of the early Ma.ximus Poems, and " The
157
 158
Barrett J#:ztten

Kingfishers, " as exemplary poems in wh i ch an argument between

discrete materials and different voices determines the form of the
poem . That would be the " good" Olson , and the " bad " Olson 1
identified in the article in Poetics Journal as ending in a kind of "unin·
terrupted statement" that was both aesthetically static and politically
irresponsible . In either case the motivation of the shifted mode of ad­
dress goes beyond the specific values of the materials and voices. The
question of form is only of interest in terms of its total meaning.
The question of the meaning of Olson ' s form might be eluci­
dated by the recently published newspaper photograph of Daniel Or­
tega [central figure in the Sandinista government of Nicaragua] and
the Pope. In the Pope we have a metaphor for the condition of Man,
while in Ortega there is an image of practical work, the decision and
necessity to take control of the situation at hand-that an " actual
earth of value" can be constructed , even in the face of opposition from
the Pope . I think also of the Russian Central Committee, 1 9 1 7 , in the
image of a bunch of graduate students taking control of the vacated
throne . But in Nicaragua the Pope' s visit was a kind of symbolic re­
turn, and it was enough to create real problems for the government­
stirring up in the depths of the populace the resonances of a metaphor,
i . e . , religious feeling. Ortega now appears , in the photo, as presump­
tive , self-assertive-what can one man be in the face of this metaphor
of " Man " ? Suddenly Ortega is the ironist , almost , casting his fragile
singularity in the face of two millenia of metaphor.
What then is depth, and how do we know it? How do we know
the world on the other side of the Pope? We would not know it only by
observing an endless succession of Popes , and how is one to be con ­
vinced by Ortega and the value of unalienated work?
This is the question of any representation-in the world or in the
poem-how deep does it go? Can a representation of " man " con nect
at the basis of being in all men? Is meaning in Olson the accumulation
of all the " inner inherences" of his life as a poet , such that every word
produced by the poet is given exactly that depth? The sum of his ef­
forts forming an indication of an eternal present, all references mak·
ing a labyrinth that existed only in him? C an we always give Olson ' s
literary production the depth of this accumulation , and infer in h is
 1 59
Olson in Language: Part II

work an accumulation that stands as its judgment of the world? Is this

judgment in every word?
Behind every word in Olson is the body-a resonance of accu­
mulated language , literary and of the world . Is, then , Olson ' s " mean­
ing" the body, and how necessary is this metaphor for all bodies , that
is, for the condition of " man " ? The body is a depth behind the word ,
perhaps, but is the body its meaning? Carla Harryman ' s use of Witt­
genstein's psychology in her discussion of the writer's location m
everyday life relies on his criticism of this notion of depth :

978. You look at a face and say "I wonder what ' s going on behind that
face? " -But you don 't have to say that. The external does not have to
be seen as a facade behind which the mental powers are at work.
Var. : " But you don 't have to think that way. And if someone talks to me
quite obviously holding nothing back then I ' m not even tempted to
think that way. " -Last Writings on The Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 1 .

Wittgenstein ' s skepticism won 't allow the meaning behind the repre­
sentation to carry any weight . What can be said about the depths be­
hind Olson 's references? Here I am Daniel Ortega, and Olson is the
Pope. We don ' t know the inside of the body, its depth, through any rep­
resentat ion . The body does not translate, and neither does it translate
the world .
To investigate the depths behind Olson ' s references, one could
be gin with the principal of them , Maxim us of Tyre, the figure for the
" I , Maximus" of the poem , the large man , according to Aristotle the
more endowed with virtue by virtue of physical size . The figure of
Maximus is a mask that motivates the initial departures of the poem,
eventu ally dissolving into the person of Olson himself. But what about
the " real" Maximus? Is there a congruence between this recognition
and the total form of the poem, or is the historical figure, the name
" Maximus, " merely appropriated for the poem ' s use? Looking for
the works of Maxim us of Tyre in the library does not particularly illu­
mi nate this question of the figure of " man " in the work, but But­
terick ' s Guide corroborates the initial sense that the reference in this
case does not completely inhere in the total form of the poem :
 1 60
Barrett f.#ztten

The writings of Maxim us of Tyre were translated by Thomas Taylor,

the first translator of Plato into English . . . . Taylor writes in his Pref·
ace . . . :
Of Maximus, the author of the Following Dissertations, nothing
more is known , than that he was by birth a Tyrian ; that he
lived . . . for the most part in Greece ; that he cultivated philosophy,
and principally that of Plato ; and that he was one of those sophists
who . . . united philosophy with the study of rhetoric . . . .
There is no evidence that Olson 's knowledge or interest in the historical
figure of Maximus extended much beyond these sources. Maxim us is
as much a proposition , at the start of the poems, as anything literal or
referential . . . .
[Olson : J I ' m not at all impressed that there ' s necessarily any mor�
Gloucester, Massachusetts in any meaningful sense than the crea·
ture which is me or whom he originally was intended as, which was
Maximus of Tyre , a second-century dialectician . . . . And he
mostly wandered around the Mediterranean world, from the cen·
ter, the old capital of Tyre, talking about one thing-Homer's Od­
yssey. I don ' t have much more impression of him than that . I ' ve
tried to read his Dialethi and found them not as interesting as I ex·
pected . . . .

But later Olson says:

Why I chose to use Maxim us of Tyre as the figure of speech , figure of

the speech, is that I regard Gloucester as the final movement of the
earth's people , the great migratory thing . . . . And I of course use it as a
bridge back to Venice and back from Venice to Tyre . . . .

And Butterick goes on to quote Olson ' s view of Maximus as

the advantage of a single human figure. . . .

But not like Daniel Ortega. Maximus of Tyre dissolves in Olson ' s
body; it is not that body that translates the world .
If Maxim us of Tyre is a literary, historical reference , there is an·
other level of reference in the Maximus Poems to a pure producti on of
 1 61
Olson in Language: Part II

the body-that is, dreams and their ability to make a figure for the
poem . Take, for example , this passage from " Letter 22 , " which alter­
nates from dream production to writing in the waking state. The pas­
sage opens with an open parenthesis :

(She lost her finger.

And the problem was,
at the celebration ,
where to seat the
stranger:
Goomeranian ,
his name was .
And he wore
a big smile

This is followed , revealingly, with : " Satie , enough . . . . "

If Maxim us of Tyre and of Gloucester is a kind of composite fig­
ure, in this dream Goomeranian is possibly a composite word-at the
very least made up from " goo" + " goober" + "pomeranian, " so
that here Olson appears as an Armenian baby-dog-peanut , a little
one , but very enthusiastic, jumping into its mother' s lap like the
stranger she had surrendered her finger to, etc . That is, the baby-dog­
peanut appears to give the finger back to the she who took it away
from him . This is so obviously literary that Olson ' s inclusion of the
dream in the poem must be an attempt to dissolve the content of the
anxiety (from its "literary, " i . e . , psychoanalytical , as well as its " ac­
tual, " source) by making it perform in the poem (where we will en­
counter Goomeranian , formally, moving back and forth or jumping
up and down) . Rather than leading back to the body of the poet, i . e . ,
to its mother (Olson ' s mother) , the dream is literary and becomes a
device in the poem . Later, the device dissolves in Olson' s body as it
becomes a metaphor for the work, thereby returning to its sources.
And certainly Olson could not get out of his mother, or had no wish
to : at the Berkeley Poetry Conference , that watershed of his poetic
mo tiv ati ons, he is quoted :
 1 62
Barrett Ufztten

The world is not differentiable . Caesar's dream is true. It 's your

mother, like , that ' s all . And you ' re the father if you are .

For Olson, and by extension, a big if The subterranean pa ss a ges of

incorporated references don't seem to change the prospects for that if.
But I want to talk about form in the poem as the figure of D aniel Or·
tega, not the Pope . I imagine a Nicaraguan landscape freed of mario!·
atry ( " Mother M ary, meek and mild . . . " ) , just rocks and rill s . At
night the people dream freely in a landscape under the night sky, etc.,
and the next morning they get up and go to work, transported by
busses.
I want to talk about form in the poem . The world is differentia·
ble . The references do not necessarily connect , there are no subterra·
nean passages, and the body as metaphor dissolves into literary fact.
The postmodern " eternal time" dissolved with Olson ; the authority
of his eternal time was eclipsed. What we are left with is " the clear air
of the mountain of things " (that taken from a Chinese definition of
the rewards of literary work) , which we have in one form in But·
terick' s literal compendium-and in another as the form of the poem,
the motivation of that poem . Dream participates as a literary device in
its best use in Olson-again , quoting from " Letter 2 2 " :

(I swung the car to the left , confronted

as I was by the whole hill-front
a loading platform , the lip of it
staring at me , grinning,
you might say,
five feet off
the ground
And made it. It was only after
that the car gave nie
trouble .
For there is a limit
to what a car
will do.
 1 63
Olson in Language: Part II

This is followed immediately by " Letter 2 3 , " the lynch pin of the first
Maximus poems, which begins: "The facts are . . . , " a gesture Olson
made several times in the poem, here set off by the dream . The shift
from an utterly subjective mode of statement motivates the form of
the poem on to the historical materials of " Letter 23 . "
It is this kind of shift-which drives the poem-that I heard in it­
self before I could comprehend much else that was happening in the
work . "I didn ' t have the references, " but I sensed the values of the
form . I could translate the shift of voices in " The Kingfishers" into
my own literary work . Only later did the central argument of the
poem appear to be motivated in terms of the metaphor of the body, an
all-over poetics grounded in subterranean passages of reference, fi­
nally ending in physical presence as a primary value for the whole.
That shift of mode, in the rhectoric of the poem, is simultane­
ously a judgment of the value of the materials-the rendering of a
present out of historical time. Olson is clear that his attack on history
and culture is going to proceed through jo77TIIll means:

Put an end to nation, put an end to culture , put an end to divisions of all
sorts. And to do this you have to put establishment out of business. It's
just a structure of establishment. And my own reason for being, like I
said, on the left side and being so hung up on form is that I feel that to­
day, as much as action , the invention , not the invention, but the discovery
of formal structural means is as legitimate as-ir for me the form of
action . The radical of action lies in finding out how organized things are
genuine, are initial. ("Causal Mythology, " in Muthologos, val . 1 . )

This attack by " radical formal means" extends to the construction of

the poem :

One wants narrative today to . . . strike like a piece of wood on a skin o f a

drum or to . . . be plucked like a string of any instrument. One does not
want narrative to be anything but instantaneous in this sense . . . . In
other words, the problem , the exciting thing about poetry in our cen­
tury is that you can get image and narrative both to wed each other
again, so that you can get both extension and intensivity bound to­
gether. ( BBC Interview, " in Muthologos, val . 2 . )
"
 1 64
Barrett Uiztten

In my article in Poeticsjoumal, I go on to criticize Olson' s " instantane·

ous narrative" as it actually occurred in his poem :
I

Olson is building an irmzgo mundi in his poem, but it is one in which the
impression of the image comes from stopping narrative at a moment in
time . While this seizing of narrative has a great advantage in terms o! I
I
motivation in the poem , it is also extremely unstable . A condition ol '
Olson 's image is its immediate mutation in time , and Olson ' s poem;
duly record that fact . The devices of narrative , which in Formalist terms
create the " time of expectation " in a literary work , fall instantly bad
on themselves, creating an impression both of impatience, the desire to
get on with it, and of stasis-the argument is exhausted at the prec ise
point of the image . For example:
the Wall
to arise from the River, the Diorite Stone
to be lopped off the Left Shoulder
(" The Politics of Style, " Poetics Joumal ll

In that article I was concentrating more on the state that Olson

had achieved by the time of the Berkeley Poetry Conference, at which
point, at least during his reading, his body had reincorporated his ref·
erences. Olson ' s poetic project lost objectivity, lost any other that
would give value to his form , and became increasingly, in the late
Maximus Poems, obscurantist and leveling through the mediation of a
metaphorized body that became the value of the references and the ir
connections.
I would instead like to point to the successes of Olson 's m ethod,
where " narrative is instantaneous" and " extension and intensivi·
ty"are bound together. Consider "Maximus, to Gloucester I Letter 1 5 , '.
in which there is the mutual motivation of a story (that of the voy a ge
of the " Putnam , " rhyming with the "objective " approach, the histor·
ical method) ; a digressive essay on poetics (in response to a letter frorn
Paul Blackburn , who is not named) ; a lyric poem (not Olson ' s bu t
john Smith's, possibly the first American poem , now incorpo rated
into Olson' s epic) ; and a stretch of quick-cut confusion to indicat e the
cultural present as a hodge-podge ("Quattrocento-by-the-Beach " to
 1 65
Olson in Language: Part II

"CBS"); all to be tagged in a pronouncement: "(o Po-ets, you I

should getta I job . "
Now imagine the form here to be the body of the mother, and the
poet, i . e . , Maxim us as Goomeranian , thinking the materials of his­
tory and literature within it. There is clearly an advantage in not imag­
ining any depth ; the motivation of the content on the surface, and its
shifts, are adequate to a reading of the work. But what is the value of
this depth? Does the body translate into the form of the poem , or is
the world being translated by the body? Rather than submitting to
psychology, one could propose a rejection of the body as a final term.
Where Olson allows for the possibility of a return, Bob Perelman is
summary about the fate of those who do : "They lost " ("The He­
roes, " This 1 2) . References are toward the world, not to the body of
the poet who is consumed by their metaphorical " inherence . " In
fending off the body' s metaphorical claims, the poet gains control of
the world that is submitted to him. That is a labor that is endlessly pro­
ductive .
 Ron Sillim an

Spicer's Language

Ron Silliman: Eighteen years after his death , the poetry of jack
Spicer seems to have survived quite well . H is writing is more widely
and sympathetically read today than ever before . But not necessarily
more wisely. There remains around Spicer's work an aura of mystery,
of asserted or felt relevance which , in the same instant, serves to buffer
a reader from further (or, at least , other) use of the writing.
The reasons for this are many. While Spicer' s insistence that he
did not "like his life written down" is integral to his entire project as a
poet , the effect of this is less one of focusing attention on the writing­
as-such, than of inserting into the place of the writer's life a ce rtain
narcissistic absence . This same absent presence also lies at the heart of
the silence held by some Eastern religious figures, such as Mehe r
Baba or Baghwan Rajneesh , and is similarly inscribed within more
Western and secular phenomena, such as baseball ' s Steve Carlton ' s
refusal to talk to reporters or the Lone Ranger' s mask. Always it is the
absence that empowers the presence , a contradiction of overdeterm i­
nation that yields (in the eyes of a believer or an engaged reader) a vi­
sion of absolute Other, capital 0, that powerful energy more typical ly
associated with the inhuman forces of nature .
The degree to which Spicer intended such a figure of romance is
problematic. Nonetheless, the position of an " invisible life" con sp ires

1 66
 167
Spicer's Language

with a series of external events, some of which Spicer had no control

over, to render such a result inevitable . One for which he could be
held responsible was his public image as bar-hound and bad-boy of
the San Francisco poetry scene , a scene in which he was a (if not the)
central figure . Another event external to the writing itself was his
death at the early age of forty. Soon after, his two final, and most ma­
ture, collection s , Language and Book qf Magazine Verse, were posthu­
mously published , reinforcing the code of an absent presence . After
these went out of print , it was virtually impossible to find an autho­
rized edition of a book by Jack Spicer for years , elevating (or reduc­
ing) him to the status of myth .
I am going to largely stay away from myth, focusing instead di­
rectly on the poetry and Spicer's own comments thereon. I have two
questions. What is it within those works which, by virtue of its contin­
uing relevance , either fuels the legend or at the least permits it? And
what, absent the legend, is there of value in the books?
I want to note that I have been no less under the sway of a Spicer
legend than any other reader. With the exception of the poetry of Bar­
rett Watten , I have quoted, borrowed , appropriated, expropriated,
done takes on, paraphrased, parodied or otherwise stolen more sen­
tence s, lines, bits or tones from the work of jack Spicer, often uncriti­
cally, than from any other source .
The mythic model is surprisingly linear. The writing is read as
beco ming increasingly more intense , book to book, poem to poem ,
until finally, in the tenth poem " for Downbeat, " addressing Alle n Gins­
berg, it reiterates a fmal cry of despair, " People are starving, " before
van ish ing altogether, part will-o-the-wisp, part burning bush, part
Ch eshire cat: poof. As if Spicer knew all along that it was his writing
that was sucking him toward an inevitable destruction , an attraction
he was unable to reject . According to this reading, Spicer is pulled
knowi ngly into the maelstrom of language . " My vocabulary did this
to me, " Robin Blaser cites as his next-to-last words.
Death is a maj or figure in Language, but not in the later Book qf
Magazine Verse. This alone should alert a reader to be wary of any
tnodel of increasing intensification , for it directly contradicts the cen-
 1 68
Ron Silliman

tral (if unspoken) premise of that model . Spicer was not , to use the
words of one of his Magic Workshop students, Jack Gilbert , a ' ' helot
to the baptist hegemony of death. "
In fact, a major consequence of the superimposition of a mythic
reading onto the work of J ack Spicer is to render two very different
books, Language and Magazine Verse, into a sort of diptych . I want in­
stead to propose a reading which accentuates their dissimilarities.
On the surface, the books share important features. Each is a
unified work constructed from seven shorter series of poems, a model
of the book as a closed form Spicer had been developing for at least
eight years, a virtual duplication of the structure of the immediately
preceding The Holy Grail. Whereas each of the seven sections of Grail,
however, were composed of seven poems, an almost Baudelairean
sense of structural symmetry, the sections in both Language and Maga­
zine Verse vary considerably in the number of poems (from two to six­
teen) . The cover of the first edition of each book suggests a parall el
conception . The pale green cover of Language is in fact a representa­
tion of the linguistics journal of that name altered with a large red
scrawl indicating the name of the book of poems, the author and pub­
lisher. The deep brown cover of Magazine Verse is a carefully exec uted
parody of the cover of Poetry, the Chicago magazine , which, edited by
Henry Rago and still benefitting from its long relationship with Ezra
Pound, exercised a far greater centralizing influence on American po­
etics in the early ' 60s than any journal today.
But the seven-part structure and imitation magazine covers are
only surface features . The book Language has virtually nothing to do
with the magazine, beyond the coincidence of Spicer having coau­
thored, in the issue whose cover is reproduced , an article on "Correla­
tion methods of comparing idiolects in a transition area, " apparently
the one professional publication of his career as an academic lin gu ist.
In sharp contrast, most , if not all , of the sections in Magazine Verse do
relate more or less directly to the publications which they were ost ensi­
bly written " for. " It is not simply that the governing figure of the
poems " for The St. Louis Sporting News " is baseball , nor that theologi ­
cal questions dominate the poems " for" the then Catholic academ ic
quarterly, Ramparts, but when in the third of the poems " for Poetry Chi­
cago, " Spicer writes " I n the far, fat Vietnamese jungles no thing
 1 69
Spicer 's Language

grows , " many mid- '60s readers could have been expected to recog­
nize that line' s sardonic contrast, a sort of negation, to "The greens of
the Ganges delta foliate , " the first line of the first ofjohn Berryman ' s
four " Dream Songs" t o appear i n the 50th-anniversary double issue
of Poetry.
This level of reference in Magazine Verse to periodicals as thor­
oughly dissimilar as The Nation, Downbeat and Tish is radically unlike
the experience of the book Language. Although it contains fifteen more
poems than Magazine T-erse, the concerns of Language are so thoroughly
intertwined from beginning to end that the resulting air of closure
borders on the claustrophobic .
Consider the opening section, "Thing Language, " the longest
sequence in either book. Certainly nothing like its title is going to be
found in the index to something like Ducrot and Todorov' s Encyclope­
dic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language. In fact , the title very ably dem­
onstrates both the major strategy of Spicer' s poetic practice as a whole
and of Language in particular. For lack of a better term , I am going to
call the strategy " overdetermination . " But rather than give it a strict
Lacanian or Althusserian definition, I want to use it to simply indicate
an effect Spicer achieves through a number of different devices : the
failure (or refusal) of an idea or image to add up (or reduce down) to a
single entity. Overdetermination is the essential Spicerz'an dfect. No logos, this
implies, can be said to exist which does not, within itself contain con­
tradiction, negation or some effacing otherness . This obviously relates
back to the concept of an absent presence , the notion that you can
have your cake and have (always, already) eaten it too; though, from
either perspective , one is left hungry.
Here , Spicer achieves this effect by yolking together two nouns,
th ing and language, into an adjective: noun relation . Furthermore , the
range of connotations surrounding each of these nouns significantly
fails to overlap . The result is not quite an oxymoron , which would be
too simple . The use of the nominative thing in the place of an adjective
is more in line with the abominations of Leviticus, that thing and lan­
guage shall not lie down together. As any linguist would know, things
are not signs. They are not , in a linguistic sense , significant. Nor, con­
versely, are signs things. Signs have no positive reference ; they mean ,
by the mselves, nothing , but are defined solely by their differences
 1 70
Ron Silliman

within a larger total system . Yet both the universe of things and the
system of language are total dimensions of reality. An inarticulate uni­
verse of all that is real versus a system of articulation which , as a
whole, can communicate nothing, and which serves to isolate the indi­
vidual, both from the universe and from others . This is a vision of lan­
guage , of subjectivity, as total oppression . That is the fundamental
premise of the book Language. Later, it will be the thrust of Spicer's
dying words, "My vocabulary did this to me . "
The first poem in " Thing Language" extends the tension of the
sequence' s name :

This ocean , humiliating in its disguises

Tougher than anything.
No one listens to poetry. The ocean
Does not mean to be listened to . A drop
Or crash of water. It means
Nothing.
It
Is bread and butter
Pepper and salt. The death
That young men hope for. Aimlessly
It pounds the shore . White and aimless signals. No
One listens to poetry.

I take it as no accident that the first word of the first poem in Language
is " This . " The assertion of presence is language ' s most fundamen tal
claim on subjectivity, at once both referential and illusory. "Th is
ocean, " a term that Spicer' s friends and closest readers would recog­
nize as charged from usages in his earlier writings . In Language and
even in Magazine Verse, the ocean stands as a primary figure of the nat­
ural world , pure inhuman absolute force. I t ' s worth noting another,
earlier instance of its use . In " For Harvey" in Admonitions, a 1 958 se­
quence, the ocean appears as a mid-line parenthetical break at a
highly charged moment in what may be Spicer' s sharpest assau lt on
the indulgences of projectivism:

When you break a line nothing

Becomes better.
 1 71
Spicer 's Language

There is no new (unless you are humming

Old Uncle Tom ' s Cabin) there is no new
Measure .
You breathe the same and Rimbaud
Would never even look at you .
Break
Your poem
Like you would cut a grapefruit
Make
It go to sleep for you
And each line (There is no Pacific Ocean) And make each line
Cut itself. Like seaweed thrown
Against the pier.

This case of a presence denied, contradicted further outside the paren­

thesis by the continuation of the water schema in the seaweed and
pier, occurring as it does without apparent cause in the middle of an­
other discourse , is one of the first clear examples of Spicer's use of
overdetermination as a writing strategy. And , by its disjunctive con­
textualization, antithetical in its nature to the associational method of
collage technique, this is also a foretelling, one of the dozens if not
hundreds in Spicer's work, of what later will come to be called a " new
se ntence . "
"This ocean , humiliating in its disguises. " To whom , or what? And
what disguises? Spicer here combines terms whose connotative sche­
mata do not overlap . " Humiliating in its disguises" could easily pos­
se ss a commonplace, if pointedly emotional, content given the appro­
priate context. A context which is deliberately withheld from the
reader by "This ocean . " Yet any sense of "humiliating in its dis­
guises" being an instance of language derived from another source is
mu ted by the sexually neutral pronoun " its, " consistent as that can be
with an ocean .
" Tougher than anything" asserts absoluteness of force . While
this may subtly reiterate the claim of presence found in "This ocean, "
a more powerful dynamic lies in its sheer extremism . Furthermore,
"Tougher than anything" can be understood in a variety of ways, de­
pe nding on whether the ultimate referent is Mount St . Helens,
Krazy-glu or Bette Davis. Here, the physical force of a vast mass of
 1 72
Ron Silliman

water is heavily conditioned by the anthropomorphism which lud

the earlier "humiliating in its disguises. " It is not simply that the
ural universe is powerful, it is also (and perhaps more importar
mean .
" No one listens to poetry. " The internal tensions within the
sentence, significant as they are, pale in comparison to those bern
sentences . As with the parenthetical " There is no Pacific Oce.
from the poem " For H arvey" in Admonitions, the disjunctive natur
this sudden leap thoroughly anticipates the essential feature of
more recent " new sentence . "
This is a substantially different use o f disjunction, of di.ffereru
self, from the strategies and devices which American and British
etry developed during the modernist period , following (more or
consciously) the models of collage and montage from the visual <
Consider, for example , the opening of Ezra Pound ' s 84th Canto

8th October:
si tuit li dolh elh plor
Angold lt9VT)KE
tuit lo pro, tuit lo bes
Angold lt9VT)KE

" an ' doan you think he chop an ' change all the time
stubborn az a mule , sah, stubborn as a MULE,
got th' eastern idea about money"
Thus Senator Bankhead
"am sure I don ' t know what a man like you
would find to do here "
said Senator Borah
Thus the solons, in Washington,
on the executive, and on the country, a . d . 1 939

ye spotted Iambe
that is both blacke and white
is yeven to us for the eyes' delight

and now Richardson , Roy Richardson ,

says h e i s different
will I mention his name?
 1 73
Spicer 's Language

and Demattia is checking out.

White, Fazzio, Bedell , benedicti
Sarnone, two Washingtons (dark) J and M
Bassier, Starcher, H . Crowder and
no soldier he although his name is Slaughter
this day October the whateverth Mr. Coxey
aged 9 1 has mentioned bonds and their
interest
apparently as a basis of issue
and Mr Sine Lewis has not
and Bartok has left us
and Mr Beard in his admirable condensation
(Mr Chas. Beard) has given one line to the currency
at about page 426 "The Young Republic "
We will be about as popular as Mr John Adams
and less widely perused
and the he leopard lay on his back playing with straw
•

in sheer boredom ,
(Memoirs of the Roman zoo)
in sheer boredom

In these lines Pound shifts scene, at least with regard to time and
place , on six occasions. He also uses three languages, not to mention
his folksy attempt at a southern accent, and mixes together a range of
themes and topics. Yet the overall result, the sum of all these disjunc­
tive features, is remarkably seamless.
The reasons for this are many. In only one of the six instances
does the shift occur within a stanza. Each scene is at least three lines
long, establishing a sense of atmosphere and internal rhythm . More
importantly, these units proceed thematically toward an overall unity
which in no way calls the existence of that unification into question .
This text willingly submits to what I have elsewhere called the tyranny
of the whole. Presented as two passages from a diary, we move from
Pou nd' s mourning of the death of Angold , to a memory of his prewar
tri p to Washington , a snatch of verse in a mode of English no longer
spoke n , the departure of still more friends, this time from the prison
camp at Pisa, a commentary on the failure of history to understand
 1 74
Ron Silliman

economics (at least as Pound imagines himself to understand it) lead­

ing to his own cynical conclusion as to the future use of his own writ­
ing, followed by the image of a caged panther, idle in the Roman zoo,
playing, as is Pound , with straw.
The entire passage is essentially constructed into one prosody
that is far more in-built than it at first might seem . Beyond using lines
of similar length and meter, Pound suppresses a sense of the sentence
as unit by eliminating all but one terminal punctuation mark, while
using " and " to create the least disruptive flow possible from one topic
or scene to the next . Seven different lines begin with " and , " three of
them at the boundary between two images or scenes. " Thus " starts
two other lines. Finall y, the entire passage is replete with the interre­
lated mechanisms of parallel construction, repetition and rhyme .
Necessary to the reader ' s experience of any semantic shift, any
shaping of meaning, is perceptibility. Collage technique, as repre­
sented by Pound, uses disjunction, or, perhaps more accurately, the
conjunction of dissimilars, in order to free the structuring of the poem
from the traditional demands imposed by narrative and/or exposition,
but does this in a manner (or a series of manners) which minimizes
the perceptibility of these breaks. In this passage from C anto 84,
Pound alters time , place , language and ostensible contents , while
minimizing the perceptibility of these differences by causing the sub­
units of the piece to share common participants at the level of sound,
syntax and theme .
This shouldn' t be a surprise . As I attempted to articulate in
" Migratory Meaning, " central to a theory of the device-which I see as a
prerequisite for any serious version of a modern poetics-would be

a description of what occurs, both on the page and within the reader,
within the infinitesimal space of a semantic shift in relation to the Parsi­
mony Principle , restated here for its broadest application :
Whenever it is possible to integrate two separate elements into a
single larger element by imagining them as sharing a common
participant, the mind will do so.
( " Migratory Meaning, " Poetics Joumal 2)

In contrasting these passages of Spicer's and Pound ' s I am not

 1 75
Spicer 's Language

proposing a binary model , red-light/green-light, for the semantic

shift , but rather suggesting a continuum composed in all cases of a
complex set of elements .
I f the gap between sentences in

This ocean , humiliating in its disguises

Tougher than anything.
No one listens to poetry.

is not an example of collage technique , it is because Spicer' s use of the

components of this disj unctive moment differ radically from those of
that earlier device . And not because one " connects" while the other
doesn ' t . Both , in fact , do, but at different levels and to different ends .
Pound ' s device is, l iterally, based on montage : its major shifts are
ostensibly visual . Its effect is one of a fragmented surface , under
which lies a continuous and seamless deep structure . Even though the
passage represents a very depressed moment in the life of a defeated
old man , Pound ' s ultimate position i s clear: u nderneath , it all co­
heres. But in S p icer' s piece , coherence and cohesion lie at the surface ,
masking-while-revealing a deeper chaos below .
Spicer' s poem is composed in one stanza, written in what are os­
tensibly sentences , with a presentation of surface conventionality that
extends to the capitalization of the letters at the lefthand margi n . Yet
we have already seen the amount of tension which is set up in the first
line by the irreducibility of the subject and its modifying clause to any
si ngle , simple envisionment . Secondly, the leap to the second sentence
is made bifore a verb occurs in the first. I n being suppressed, this verb
( " is " ?) becomes yet another moment of an absent presence . Worse
still , there are no less than five positions in the sentence which it could
hav e taken , so that its absence ( i . e . , its presence) is not perceived at a
sin gle point , but i nstead floats freely, a syntactic equivalent of anxiety.
Far more jolti n g to the reader, however, is that the two sentences , to a
degree that is nowhere possible in the Pound passage , appear to come
from entirely different discourses.
There are two or perhaps three ways to take the second sentence
in the light of the first . One is to read it as an intensely emotional asso­
ci ation , founded on the powerlessness of the individual poem con-
 1 76
Ron Silliman

trasted against the vast pure force of nature . The second is to read it as
a metacomment on the actual process we , the reader, are engaged in,
reminding us in a somewhat Brechtian fashion that we are in fact in
front of a poem , a machine made of words, and not "This ocean . "
Should this second reading b e accepted, poetry and not the ocean be­
comes the subject of the piece . The very absoluteness of the assertion
" No one listens to poetry" can be argued to reinforce either interpre­
tation. The negative declaration can be viewed as the element which
insinuates emotion per se into the association and contrast . Or it can
be viewed as necessary to shock the reader out of the referential illu­
sion of presence, " This ocean . "
A third feasible interpretation would be a synthesis of these two,
although this would seem to be a very difficult reading to sustain : the
emotionalism of the first version, signalling as it does involvement,
stands in contradiction to the alienation, distance and cynicism of the
second . There is, however, an important element which is shared be­
tween the schema of connotations surrounding the term " humiliat­
ing" in the first sentence and the negative declaration , a sort of put­
down , in the second . In each instance what is expressed is the
existence of a power relation in which one term or party is meant to
feel a sense of worthlessness . Yet this shared participant, precisely be­
cause in the first sentence it fails to specify an object (such as poetry),
does not reinforce the first associational reading. The sense which it
conveys, instead , is of a unity between the sentences at some level not
yet articulated . What is thus foregrounded is therefore both the syn­
thetic, contradictory third reading and an awareness of the untenable
nature of this contradiction . Here , a dramatic tension has been estab­
lished, not at the level of plot , but between possible readings.
The third sentence , " The ocean I Does not mean to be listen ed
to, " finally yolks the terms of the first two into an explicit relation.
Yet , in a way which is far more subtle (less perceptible) than in the
leap from the first to the second sentence , this third one also subverts
any attempt at a straightforward interpretative reading. We have been
told that " No one listens to poetry, " not that poetry means to be lis­
tened to. The distinction is significant-by denying that the oce an
means to be listened to, the opposition established between ocean an d
 1 77
Spicer 's Language

poetry in the two previous sentences, heavily reinforced here by the

reiteration of a word from each, requires a reading in which the ab­
sent term poetry does possess just this intentionality. Anthropomor­
phised without representation, poetry, which " No one listens to, " is a
figure of impotence , the opposite of " Tougher than anything. " This
polarity is strengthened by the fact that the ocean occurs as a noun
only in the syntactic position of the subject, whereas poetry, the noun,
is in both of its appearances the object within a prepositional phrase in
the predicate position of a sentence whose subject is " No one. "
This sentence also reflects two important characteristics of Spi­
cer's writing. It proceeds by negation , that is, by the registration of a
difference . At its best , his work can be dizzying precisely because a
reader has such a difficult time keeping in mind which term has initi­
ated a sequence of such negations. With nearly twenty years of hind­
sight, of course , it is easy to see how that particular device not only
serves Spicer' s general critique of presence , but also follows from his
training in linguistics .
The second characteristic is more problematic, in that it appears
to call into question some tenets of both linguistics and at least that
tradition of literary theory which extends from the criticism of Viktor
Shklovsky and the Russian Formalists. Linguistics has traditionally
distinguished between its own domain and that of psychology. Thus
the question of the integration of morphemes into the syntax of a com­
plete sentence is considered to be of an entirely different order than
that of the integration of individual sentences into a paragraph, chap­
ter or book, let alone into such higher order abstractions as character,
scene, pacing or mood. There are, of course, significant exceptions to
th is ge neral distinction, notably the French psychoanalyst jacques La­
can , the Italian semiotician Ferruccio Rossi-Landi and the Russian
sociolinguist Valentin Volosinov, but this difference is in fact an im­
por tant element in the maverick reputation of each . The elaboration
of the Parsimony Principle within a general theory of the ideal reader
by li nguists Charles Fillmore and Paul Kay represents a far more typi­
cal i n stance of linguists attempting to account for, above the level of the
individual sentence, events which, if they occurred within the sen­
tence, would have been characterized as "linguistic. " For the Russian
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Ron Silliman

Formalists, a primary aspect of literary devices which produce the so­

called semantic shift , the essential aesthetic effect in writing, is percepti­
bility. The entire thrust of ostranenie, the Formalist concept of making
something " strange" (a conception with obvious parallels to such di­
verse poetics as Pound' s " make it new " and Brecht' s alienation ef­
fect) , is to render the strange thing perceptible .
With Spicer, however, it is not unusual for there to be devices
which, from the standpoint of linguistics, are so minute that their im­
pact is perceptible only in the aggregate, a composite which , by virtue
of its overdetermination and self-contradiction, is so complicated as to
defy a clear sense on the part of the reader-or at least a reader who is
not willing to submit the text to the kind of microscopic analysis which
I ' m imposing here-as to why the poem feels so intense, so upsetting,
so intuitive, so irrational . This minuteness of device is an essential in­
gredient in the opacity, or mystery of Spicer' s poetry. The reader feels
the semantic shifting between the non-human subject, " This ocean "
and the anthropomorphised range of connotations surrounding " hu­
miliating, " just as he or she feels the gap between the first two senten­
ces. But the polarization between the subject (present) (active)
" ocean" and the object (absent) (acted upon) " poetry, " or the shared
participant of manipulative power between " humiliating" and the
form of the negative declarative sentence , or the transformation of in­
tentionality implicit in the shift from " listens" to " Does not mean to
be listened to, " is far less likely to be perceived , especially under the
conditions by which most poetry is consumed, once over rapidly at a
single sitting or in the fleeting durations of a public reading . Spicer ' s
devices presume a continuum between the linguistic and the psychological
or, at the least, the absolute penetration of each domain by the other, a
penetration which would render any distinction between the two the
petty mark of a turf fight between professional castes .
Spicer' s work also suggests that a radical differentiation needs to
be made between device and effect. A device , insofar as it can be said
to be " a thing, " is capable of being described . It is as material as any
set of vocal or graphic signifiers. An effect, however, a term analo­
gous to " signified " in linguistics or " envisionment " in the theo ry of
ideal readers, can be an aggregate of numerous devices operatin g at
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Spicer 's Language

very different levels of perceptibility. An effect, being an aggregate,

can therefore be overdetermined (i.e . , self-contradictory, ambiguous,

opaque or "natural " ) . A device, not being an aggregate, cannot .

This would explain how certain devices can yield very different
effects. For example , the problem of how the use of variable capitali­
zation and enj ambment , two fairly tangible devices, can help the po­
etry of Judy Grahn to appear as " artless plainspeaking, " when in the
work of Charles Bernstein they are the self-conscious scars of a bour­
geois " high art " commitment to difficulty. Even in tandem, these de­
vices produce their effects only in conjunction with others . This makes
sense if, and only if, the linguistic and the psychological are conceived
of as a continuum, interpenetrable domains which meet at the point of
a complete thought .
The play between minute device and overdetermined effect con­
tinues through this poem . The fourth sentence , "A drop I Or crash of
water, " goes beyond its apparent exemplification of "oceanness . "
"Or, " foregrounded as the first word of a line , is a conjunction ex­
pressing disjunction, the syntactic and semantic functions standing in
absolute opposition . By itself, the distinction would be trivial. Here,
however, it acquires the status of a device. It is not just that this con­
tradiction of function parallels the opposition between ocean and po­
etry, between meaning and intention . The internal oppositionality of
the word " Or" itself reduplicates the very anti-logic which underlies
virtu ally every other device of the poem . Meaning in this work is neg­
ative not simply in the sense of being differential : meaning is nega­
tion. There shall be no diction without contradiction.
The terms brought into relation by this disjunct conjunction are
not equivalent . The contrast which is obvious is their scale, but more
cruci al is the fact that a " drop" is as easily apt to be an index of quan­
tity as it is of sound . (Consider the alternate word "drip. ") The re­
verse is not even remotely possible for " crash . " The two terms are in­
com mensurate. Spicer reinforces this contrast not merely through an
opposition of consonants (e . g. , the closed p of "drop" against the sh of
" crash "), nor even through placing one on either side of the line
break, but most dramatically through the use of the prepositional
Phrase " of water. " Perhaps it could be argued that the phrase is made
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Ron Silliman

necessary by the grammatical incompleteness of the sentence com­

bined with the b road referential possibilities (vagueness) of " crash. "
But " drop " and " crash " combine syntactically with this phrase at
very different distances, a d istinction which is heightened by the use of
the line break .
None of these devices is unusual . What is rare is the degree to
which such devices come into play simultaneously, plus the fact that
they are organized around a fundamentally linguistic perceptio n : that
a statement of such surface symmetry as ' ' A drop I Or crash of wa­
ter" can in fact be buil t upon, and convey, imbalance and opposition.
Consider how radically different these same words would read if
" Or " appeared prior to the line break. That simple revision would
gut many, if not most , of the dynamics of this string.
This also reveals the degree to which Spicer' s use of the line
break is semanti c , as distinct from prosodic or projective . Spicer, un­
like many of his generation , demonstrates little concern with the use
of the text to con struct a credible facsimile of speech . In fact , one has
to go back to William C arlos William s ' Spn'ng & A ll to find a use of the
l ine break as devoted to nuances of meaning.
Given the stance toward meaning, or perhaps I should say agaimt
it, which Spicer takes both in this poem and throughout his last two
books, his focus on the semantic function of the line break amounts to
a n ihilist ' s assaul t on j ust this dimensio n , a sort of structural super­
irony. This stance is evident in the use of the device within the nex t
sentence , " It means I Nothing. " As I 've noted elsewhere , position
within a free verse line weights individual words differently (not un­
like the quite different quanta of power one finds in the seemingly
identical squares of a chessboard). The position which receives the
greatest emphasi s is the final word of the l ine , followed closely by the
word at the lefthand margi n . If there is a caesura, these dynam ics are
typically reduplicated with a lower order of emphasis, the word be fore
the caesura bei n g somewhat stronger than the fi rst word after. Th is
ordination is of course subj ect to considerable variation , dependin g on
"
what other devices happen to be in play. With " It means I Noth in g,
Spicer appears to be rubbing the reader' s nose in his negative vision:
" means" and " Nothing" could hardly be positioned for gre ater
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Spicer 's Language

stress. More interesting, however, is the emphasis accorded the first

word, " It . " The word occurs after a caesura placed disproportion­
ately to the right in the line, the period between the fifth and sixth of
the line' s seven syllables . Both the de-centered caesura and the fact
that the previous word, " water, " a noun whose only hard consonant
is buried in its middle, is the one two-syllable word in the entire line ,
expand the emphasis focused on " It . " This is reinforced by a princi­
ple of poetics which I'll propose here , that any significant deviation or
reversal of the ordinary dynamics of reading, even at the level of the
semantic and prosodic emphases on either side of a caesura, is per­
ceived by a reader as an increase in stress . " It means I Nothing" is a
sentence in which each word is accorded great weight.
Why this should be so seems at first obvious. Like " No one lis­
tens to poetry, " the declarative structure of this sentence presents syn­
tax, if not language itself, at its most tangibly oppressive, admitting
no possibility of difference or doubt. This is how it is. All the control
and power of meaning reside with the speaker. Naked in their manip­
ulations, declarative sentences can reveal the degree to which all lan­
guage use represents a struggle. Like sex, language is about power.
Power over production and consumption of meaning. Spicer makes
use of the reader' s capacity to respond to just this power relation
within this supposed act of "direct communication " as the dimension
thro ugh which to deny meaning itself.
The laying on of devices within this sentence does not stop here.
The individual words, " it , " " means, " " Nothing, " are virtually ge­
neric ciphers, devoid of any connotation outside of context . Like
" means, " " Nothing" is at best a logical construct, an abstraction , a
nou n the two parts of which are a denial of presence: no thing. The
three words of this sentence function like concentric rings of thwarted
referentiality: no wonder Spicer, in the Vancouver lecture which has
been used by many critics as the major statement of his poetics, speaks
so much of " the outside. " If language is conceived of as a medium, a
model that Spicer often turns to in his figure of the poet as radio, it is a
medium in the sense of a membrane , as capable of blocking the real as
i t is of letting it in .
Which is why the meaning of the word " It " so crucial that Spicer
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Ron Silliman

utilizes prosody to maximize emphasis. What does " It " refer to? The
pronoun here is an anaphor, the one point in the sentence capable of
admitting exterior content , of establishing context. Anaphor is a
Greek term, meaning " carrying back, " with two distinct applications
in literature. One , derived from linguistics, identifies terms which re­
fer the reader or listener to prior antecedents for their context and
meaning. The other, derived from rhetoric , identifies the use of repeti­
tion which is characteristic of parallel construction . The subjects in
my last two sentences, " One " and " The other, " both refer anaphori­
cally back to " distinct applications in literature . " It is difficult to think
of a device which does more to activate the Parsimony Principle and
insinuate an aura of cohesion and continuity between sentences than
these twin types of anaphor. The word " I t , " here , and in the poem
overall, is endowed with both modes of anaphor. No other word is as
critical to the construction of the whole than " It . "
" It " means nothing. Or, to choose a more modest precision, the
content of " It" is skewed , indeterminate , off-balance , irreducible.
And then, in a dramatic reversal : " It I Is bread and butter I Pepper
and salt . "
This most " normal" o f sentences functions precisely through the
incommensurability of that status within this context . Raised onto a
line all its own, the reiterated subject " I t " and parallel syntactic struc­
ture, two features of the second mode of anaphor, assert unfettered
presence and nourishment exactly at the point where what should be
anticipated is meaninglessness, absence, nothingness, denial .
By virtue of anaphor, contradiction and its elevation/isolation on
the seventh line , " It " has become overdetermined . The four item s
which follow " is , " while themselves possible within the norms of
American grammar, further accent this. The false equivalences of
parallel syntax are again mirrored in the fact that the relationsh ips of
bread to butter and salt to pepper are not , after all, identical .
In "The death I That young men hope for, " as with " A drop I
Or crash of water, ' ' lack of a main verb or predicate forces an ana ·
phoric attachment back to the previous sentence . Taken as a displaced
predicate , however, its contradiction with the twin figures of suste·
nance is obvious. To say that " It " here stands for, or refers to , the
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Spicer 's Language

ocean, or whatever in turn the ocean might serve as a metaphor or ci­

pher for, would trivialize the reading process. What stands revealed is
the degree to which the process of the production and consumption of
language is built upon sleights-of-hand, the card tricks of syntax . It is
not simply a matter of culture versus nature , of reasoned intelligence
overwhelmed by a nonrational material universe , an Other. Here the
rational itself would be seen as irrational , while still attempting to
comprehend the arational rationally. The rational is irrational .
" Aimlessly I It pounds the shore . " The next sentence returns
the reader finally to the figure of the ocean , but uses position to lend
the word " It , " again capitalized, much greater stress than is given to
" shore . " What " pounds the shore" is as much It-ness, that which
" means nothing , " as it is any body of water. The nihilistic component
here is provided even greater emphasis in the word ' ' aimlessly. ' '
Named and yet anonymous, " it , " this no-thing, a figure of nourish­
ment and object of desire, equatable with death , composed solely of
contradiction, present only in absence , is outside any possible spec­
trum of intentionality.
The next sentence, " White and aimless signals, " is only the sec­
ond to occur entirely on one line . Unlike the initial " No one listens to
poetry, " no point within this sentence occurs at either end of the line,
making it be the only one essentially without internal stress. Once
again we find terms of very different nature on either side of a con­
junction, and the whole is the third instance of what appears to be a
displaced predicate in a period ofjust six sentences, a reiteration of de­
vice that helps the poem seem to "hang together. " The word " aim­
le ss" reasserts this sentence 's attachment to the previous one, while
"signals" refers back to the schema of messages " to be listened to, " of
intentionality. That this schema should contradict " aimless" and so
mu ch else in the poem ought no longer to surprise a reader. (Only in
the foll owing poem , " Sporting Life , " will it become apparent that the
term here is helping to set up one of the major figures in Language, the
poet as radio, as an otherwise empty medium gunked up with static. )
The word " White , " however, i s a unique moment i n this text. It
is the only index of color, of sight. Certainly anyone who has lived in
Stinson Beach or San Francisco can associate this hue with the Pacific.
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Ron Silliman

Yet what is remarkable about this adjective of the senses is its thematic
lack of necessity. It neither builds upon , nor contradicts, anything. It
enters here as from another discourse , which is precisely its function:
to remind the reader that the poem is an enclosure . One cannot speak
of that which lies outside until it comes in . But one must be aware that
the universe of the poem, perhaps even that of language itself, can
never equal the universe of the real . A universe in which of course the
unreal might play a critical part .
The final sentence, repeating the second ( " No one listens to po·
etry " ) , ties the package of the poem up with a rhetorical bow . The
reader is returned to the initial question : what is the subject of this
poem? An expository logic would lead to one conclusion , that it 's the
ocean, the schema raised as the subject of the first sentence , and reit­
erated throughout . In contrast, the term " poetry " never fall s into the
grammatical position of a subject . Further, both of its appearances
come in syntacticall y identical structures, the apparent opposite of a
theme which is " developed. " There is, however, a more readcrly
logic, one which reduplicates at the level of subject the same weighting
of words that we fmd within the unit of the line : the last takes prece­
dence over the first. By this logic, " poetry" would be the subject and
" This ocean" a metaphor of a very special type . For one thing, the
position of " poetry" remains utterly static throughout the text. For
another, "This ocean , " if it is to be a metaphor, is constituted n o t by
equation, but by negation and contradiction. Does this then mean
that everything which is predicated on that curious term " It" is not the
case with poetry? That poetry means something? But that it is not
"bread and butter I Pepper and salt " ? That it is not " The death I
That young men hope for " ? That , somehow , poetry " pounds the
shore " with intentionality, or else doesn 't pound it at all? Th at its
" signals" aren' t white, or else aren ' t signals? If, through some convo­
luted process of metaphor negated, this text is to be taken as an indi­
rect , or even perverse, affirmation of poetry, two sentences remain.
utterly declarative , to insist on the falsity of this reading: " No I One
listens to poetry. " It is also possible to see in that longest of line b reaks
that echo of a comma ( " No , one listens to . . . " ) : simultaneous nega ·
tion and affirmation .
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Spicer 's Language

Spicer sees to it that no hint of ocean is reflected in this final sen­

tence, precisely as the topic of poetry is absent from the first. Each
time " poetry" enters, it does so as from another discourse, an erup­
tion , an interruption . Furthermore, the repeated sentence, a bald as­
sertion of closure , of completedness, is recast into line form differently
on its second occurrence , so as to emphasize the negative and make
the word " One" as anonymous and inhuman as " It . "
" It I Means nothing. " The sentence is not only literal, but also
self-referential . The poem will not reduce itself to an essay in verse,
nor to a metaphoric affirmation of poetry, nor even to its opposite .
"Aimlessly I It pounds the shore , " an example only of itself. On re­
reading, virtually every declarative sentences must be taken in two
contradictory, and never-resolving ways. And the four other sentences
are each grammatically incomplete, ambivalent as to their subject- or
predicate-ness.
This internal density, this intensity, is sustained throughout Lan­
guage to a degree not matched by any of Spicer's other books. As I said
earlier, the structural premise of Book of Magazine Verse, organizing
works ostensibly into the modes of seven different publications, serves
to disperse this totalizing energy. Why, if Spicer's writing is such an
articulate recognition of what others have called the "logocentric fal­
lacy, " of the discontinuities and lacunae in ostensibly rational dis­
cou rse , of an unbridgeable cleavage between the system of language
and that other (nonlinguistic) universe which exists, to use Spicer' s
term , " outside , " why would the most powerful exemplification come
in the text that mo:x:imizes unity and internal connectedness? Why not,
for example, go in exactly the opposite direction and write fragments
whose dishesion would be their essential commitment to form?
Precisely because the point at which this vision becomes percepti­
bl e is the moment of, in the most literal sense, contradiction . The unity
of the volume Language is not one of agreement . It proceeds instead
throu gh negation, reversal and overdetermination . Its points are
made between sentences as often as within them. Increasing the density
of contradiction , flooding the text with a surfeit of incommensurable
meanings, Spicer is able to bring forward a content which might lie
outsi de of the possibilities of communicative discourse . What distin-
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Ron Silliman

guishes Language from Spicer' s other works is exactly its higher order
of internal contradiction.
"The rational is irrational " is only a small part of this content,
which I shall choose to leave without a name . To suggest , for example,
that a fuller description of this content could be had by taking each of
the major terms of Spicer' s discourse and performing on them the
same sort of ( anti)logical operations as I have to the " rational " would,
ironically, only serve to subsume this content once again into that
same dominating system of ostensible reason, continuous presence,
predictable cause and effect.
Spicer' s own word for this content is the " outside , " that which
" invades" the poet and " dictates" the poem . The poet, in a sense
more parapsychological than metaphoric , is simply a medium . Matu·
rity for a poet, according to his first Vancouver lecture,

comes when you get some idea that there is a difference between you
and the outside of you which is writing poetry . . . then you start seeing
whether you can clear your mind away-from the things which are you,
the things that you want , and everything else-the poem then , and for a
poem sometimes it 's a twelve-hour struggle to get a ten-line poem , not
changing a single word of it as you 're writing, but just as it goes along­
trying to distinguish between you and the poem-the absolute distinc­
tion between the outside and the inside-and here the analogy of the
medium comes in, which Yeats started out, and which Cocteau in his
Orphee- both the play and picture-used a car radio for, but which is es·
sentially the same thing. But essentially you are something which is be­
ing transmitted into. (Caterpillar 12)

Spicer chose his terms from a discourse which was available to

him : the esoteric doctrines, tarot , parapsychology, theosophy and the
like . Speaking of another term which he used interchangeably with
" the outside, " " Martians, " Spicer stated:

Please don't get me wrong. Martian is just a word for X. I am not say·
ing that the little green men are coming in saucers . . . going into my
bedroom and helping me to write poetry, and they ain 't.
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Spicer 's Language

That which lies outside of cognitive capacity cannot be spoken of

through cognitive capacity, Noam Chomsky once wrote. Or, to recall
the last sentence of Wittgenstein' s Tractatus, " What we cannot speak
about we must pass over in silence . " It was Spicer' s task and accom­
plishment as a poet to cause this dimension to become perceptible,
however fleetingly, to the reader. This could not have been, and was
not, achieved through the enunciation of a constructed doctrine . In­
deed, one does not find it stated in the poems, so much as between the
statements in the poems, with their all over displacements, negations
and reversals.
A basic component of Spicer' s work is the serial poem where the
book itself is the unit of composition to which all other elements ulti­
mately refer. As articulated in his work, the serial poem is considera­
bl y different from the open-ended modernist epic which extends from
the model of Pound' s Cantos. It is not merely a question of the serial
poem ' s shorter size , but of closure and discreteness. The serial poem
maximizes the internal unities of the book, while in the same moment
emphasizing the distinctness of the individual parts. Each work within
a serial poem will bear its own scar of closure, while always also dis­

placing at least a part of its subject, its range of reference , outside of

the individual text . This superstructure must be set up in such a fash­
ion as to avoid any totalizing instant in which, as often happens both
in naive narrative and expository forms, the subject " snaps" into an
osten sible clarity. (Even a poem which announces that "This is a
poem about the death of John F. Kennedy, " like the eighth poem in
"Thing Language, " does so only by reversing the reader's expecta­
tions, and after using an already coded term like " signals" to displace
the reader's attention outside itself. ) From After Lorca onward, Spicer
found in the serial poem a form particularly suited for the expression
of an absent content.
There is another shift which becomes visible first in After Lorca es­
sen tial to the articulation of Spicer's position: composition in sentences.
Even as it is emerging, however, this does not become the dominant
unit u ntil the third section of The Heads of the Town, "A Textbook of
Poet ry. "
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Ron Silliman

In the middle section , " A Fake Novel about the Life of Arthur
Rim baud , " Spicer is composing primarily in prose for the first time,
although one heavily conditioned by the history of the French prose
poem and cast, with a playfulness that recalls the experimental fiction
of William Carlos Williams, into a mock narrative format .

The dead are not alive. That is what this unattractive prose wants to
stamp out. Once you see an end to it, you believe that the dead are
alive.

A paragraph such as this stops just short of creating the kind of contra·
dieting, overdetermined , self-cancelling meanings that are to be found
in Language and Magazine Verse. What nonetheless has emerged here is
an understanding that such surfeits of overmeaning arise most clearly
when the semantic and logical functions are foregrounded , the tradi­
tional role of prose .
Notice , for example , the degree to which the concerns which will
dominate Language are articulated in Chapter VI of Book III , " The
Dead Letter Officer, " a work which in every other feature could have
been composed by Max J acob :

Inside every Rimbaud was a ready-made dead-letter officer. Who

really mailed the letter? Who stole the signs?
The signs of his youth and his poetry. The way he looked at thin gs as
if they were the last things to be alive .
The robes of his office are vague and noble. He has a hat that he
wears on his head . His arms are attached to his shoulders.
Our contempt for him is general and is echoed even in the house of
the dead . Blood would not appease his ghost which stays in us afte r we
are in the house of the dead. He is in every corpse , in every human life.
He writes poems, pitches baseballs, fails us whenever we have a
nerve to need him . Button-moulder too, he grows in us like the river of
years.

The dead-letter officer serves the same function elsewhere ascribed to

Martians or the outside , an absent present, an inherent contrad iction .
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Spicer's Language

Yet the existence of this phenomenon is confined here within a narra­

tive figure. His contradictions are narrative . When, in the final sen­
tence, Spicer brings in what appears to be material from another dis­
course, that device he will use to such great effect later, it is tacked
onto the word "he" and fails to catalyze the reversal of perception ,
which is, in Language and Magazine Verse, the mark of the outside , the
absent present , the content of the poem .
In ' ' A Textbook of Poetry, ' ' however, Spicer frees himself of the
weight of narrative by utilizing the same strategy employed by Wil­
liams in Spring & All, the pseudo-expository essay. And while " A Text­
book" has more of the structure of argumentation than does Lan­
guage-breaking the logic of exposition is one of the major advantages
of dividing that text into seven shorter sections-it moves much closer
to the possibilities of that later work, achieving a writing that Rim­
baud might have dreamed of, but certainly never Jacob:

Built of solid glass. The temple out there in the weeds and C alifornia
wildflowers. Out of position . A place where we worship words .

See through into like it is not possible with flesh only by beginning
not to be a human being. Only by beginning not to be a soul .

A sole worshipper. And the flesh is important as it rubs into itself

your soleness. Or C alifornia. A division of where one is.

Where one is is in a temple that sometimes makes us forget that we

are in it. Where we are is in a sentence .

Where we are this is idiocy. Where we are a block of solid glass blocks
us from all we have dreamed of. But this is not where we are to meet
them .

Spicer's position here and in his final books seems virtually iden­
tical, even to the figure of the poet as medium, to that taken by Rim­
baud in the letter to Georges lzambard of May 1 3th, 1 87 1 :

I have realized that I am a poet . I t ' s not my doing at all . I t ' s wrong to
say : I think . Better to say : I am thought . Pardon the pun .
I is somebody else . S o what if a piece o f wood discovers it ' s a vio­
lin . . .
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Ron Silliman

Only in turning fully to prose is Spicer finally capable of con­

fronting the coexistence of absence within presence in his work, an ab­
sence which is so often covered over or hidden in verse through its
mimicry of voice or song. From "A Textbook of Poetry" to the end of
Magazine Verse, Spicer will be the first truly sentence-centered poet in
the American language.
This would not mean , however, that he would work only in para­
graph form . In fact , it would mean the opposite . With the exception
of the few doggerel or ballad-style pieces in his later work, the rela­
tionship between line and sentence is transformed . The sentence is
now the unit of composition and the line , which is nothing more than
a line break and the possibility of caesura, locates stress within the sen­
tence . More accurately, it serves to posit stress at places within the
syntactic chain that most often twist, or even contradict , the apparent
denotative meaning. Thus, in the first poem of Language, the break in
the last sentence, " No I One listens to poetry, " foreground the ano­
nymity in the word " One . " The dead-letter officer is palpably at
home here . One need not cast that ghost into a narrative figure in or­
der to experience its (absent) presence .
Spicer, through his line breaks, through his suppressed verbs (as
in " A drop I Or crash of water, " setting strings as they do ambiva­
between subject and predicate) , and through his numerous insertions
of sentences apparently taken out of other discourses, proto-new sen­
tences we might call them , achieves this turn to prose only through its
destabilization. It is precisely in those nooks and crannies, gaps and
lacunae that the outside, whatever it is, is permitted finally to speak.
This, I think, answers in part the two questions I posed at the
start of the talk. In addition to an unfortunate romanticization of his
(now absent) life, the elevation of his person to the status of myth , and
the attachment of his ideas to this year's intellectual fad , Spicer' s wo rk
anticipates many of the developments in poetry over the past eighteen
years with a degree of efficiency and mastery that suggests it will con­
tain lessons and useful directions for other poets for years to come .
This is not to suggest that jack Spicer was the first-I hesitate to
use this term-language poet, nor even to suggest that his anti cipa·
tion of such a writing should be ranked hierarchically against si m il ar
 191
Spicer 's Language

contributions made by Stein , Greeley, Zukofsky, Kerouac , Olson or

Eigner. In fact , Spicer, both as poet and linguist , rather aggressively
disputed the valorization of language within the process of the poem .
"Words are , " he said in Vancouver,

things which j ust happen to be in your head instead of someone else ' s
head . . . . The words are counters and the whole structure of language
is essentially a counter. It ' s an obstruction to what the poem wants to
do .

Or, earlier in the same talk :

C reeley talks about poems following the dictation of language . It

seems to me that ' s nonsense-language is part of the furniture of the
room . Language isn ' t anything of itself-it ' s something which is in the
mind of the host, the parasite that the poem is invading-five languages
j ust m akes the room structure more d ifficult and also possibly, more us­
able . It certainly doesn ' t have anything to do with any mystique of En­
glish or anything else . . . . I prefer more the unknown .

The unknown . That which lies beyond cognitive capacity. That which
to attempt to speak of, and here Spicer' s occasional forays into the vo­
cabul ary of esoteric traditions seem not to work to his advantage , is
apt to sound mystical , but i s , or should be, exactly not . For it is per­
ceptible betwee n sentence s , in the surfeit of incommensurable mean­
ings, in the twists and gaps of syntax and logic. The last sentence of
Wittgenstein ' s Tractatus, as Spicer could have told us, is wrong. What
we cannot speak about should not be passed over in silence. For it re­
mai ns to be show n .
 Fanny Howe

Artobiography

Fanny Howe: Cambridge , Mass . , in the forties and fifties, was

ordinary in dimension outside of Harvard Yard . Elms, maples, tuli ps,
cardinals , berries, nuts, one shoestore, Woolworth ' s and other small
shops, all measurable to the lowliest person . The turmoils, inside the
Yard , were intellectual and political . The impact of McCarthyism , the
Alger Hiss case and the Cold War reverberated in classrooms and
around dinner tables and in the courts . From my earliest years , the
association of socialism with righteousness and justice was unavoid­
able . Taking the victim ' s part was daily fare . My mother, like many
others, put some hope in Stalin ; giving up on Russia was a long, slow
process. My father was accused of being " pink " by McCarthy him­
self. Near Harvard , the Kremlin on the Charles, I was raised . And
though the weathers of New England were contained there , as i n a
glass house, a sense of a fragile security hung over childhood.
During the war, my sister and I lived with our mother in a small
apartment while she taught drama at Radcliffe College . My father
was gone for nearly five years; then we lived in two houses, the last
until he died . It was a large brown shingled house on a pastoral hill
running parallel to Brattle Street. At the back of the house lay my
mother' s garden-three oblong beds tossing tiny varicolored heads,
Irish in design , the tall and the small bedded together, spring, summer
and fall, and visitors were made to see the garden before they could
settle down inside .
1 92
 1 93
Artobiography

Inside the house was sunny here and gloomy there , rather
shabby in spite of various antique imports from China, and oil por­
traits. Prints of the Liffey were hung beside the profiles of Josiah
Quincy and family. Protestant Boston and Protestant Dublin seemed
quite compatible in their visions. Like the line of the poet Edmond
Jabes, each side m ade the statement : " You call fall i ng an exile . Hence
you survive . "
My father ' s study-a dim book-walled room-was the compos­
ite of all these conflicting cultural passages . There were law books of
his, a large Victorian collection of my mother's, including Thackery,
Trollope , Mrs. Gaskell, the Brontes; and , too, poetry, plays, dictio­
naries and histories . There was no door on this room , and a fireplace
which was never lit .
My father ' s father lived until he died upstairs in our house. My
mother made him and his attending nurse-whom we called Mother
Time, she was so old herself-trays of food which were shipped up­
stairs to him . Far from a pariah, however, he had trails of gentlemen
callers who would , literally, call to him and him to them , out of deaf­
ness and sherry, and after school every day my sisters and I had to pop
in and visit him . He was old enough to remember the ashes from Kra­
katoa falling on the laundry in his garden .
Downstairs it was the theater on the one hand, the law on the
other; my parents' professions were not an easy mix. Our house was
rocking with writers , poets, and actors rehearsing plays for the Poets
Th eater, while my father hid in the gloom of his study, reading Oliver
Wendell Homes. He didn't like theater or theater people, and once
left a play by W S . Merwin early, saying, " I never thought that can­
nib alism could be boring. "
Politics, through the forties and on , into McCarthy and Civil
Rights, was the one subject at table which transcended the genuine
te nsions underlying my parents' lives. Politics subverted , diverted the
turgi d life of the emotions. Political thought was a respectable plea­
sure. A nd thought in general was the gate to freedom , a kind of Eros
visiti ng the invisible. No one believed in God, except me and my
grand father who slept with his Maker through the services in Trinity
C hu rch.
 194
Fanny Howe

The issues at table were, nonetheless , theological in dimension .

My father worried about justice-really worried about it-and dis­
liked inequality, economic and personal . He was a strict Constitution­
alist, who wondered why people went on living and what life was
worth . And while he did the dishes every night , he threw out his ideas
about morality in terse phrases, often punning. Wit was the only hint
of the libertine adventures in his mind .
It was my mother' s lashing Irish tongue that built the bridge
over their troubled waters . Jokes bound them together, and she suf­
fered, being sensuous otherwise and not all subjective . When I was
still a boy, it was my father ' s feet I followed , doggedly, with his dogs.
He was not literary, the way my mother and older sisters were . They
were born readers, devouring and discussing books, daily, while 1
wore a holster and gun and lashed my bike with whips made of wil­
lows, and failed to lock the form of a word to the image of the same on
the page .
However, certain influences were unavoidable . My older sister
and I were read to at night , by our father. He would perch on the end
of the bed, his glasses halfway down his nose , and, soldierly stiff, he'd
read from Oliver Twist and Great Expectations with amazing delight . The
performer in him , which must have made him a great teacher, shot
out from the shadows and he was lost in the 1 9th century' s gloom and
humors.
I was lost too-but in yawns of boredom-a boredom so great, I
couldn 't read Dickens for twenty years .
My mother' s influence in that realm was much more to my lik­
ing. She had reams of poems on the tip of her tongue-Yeats, Tenny·
son , Keats, Shelley-passages which would slip, easily, into conversa·
tion . A copy of A Child's Garden of Verses floated about the house as far
back as I can remember, and when I returned to it thirty years later, I
found I knew it by heart.
My mother also directed us in plays with children of frien ds of
hers . " A Midsummer' s Night Dream" was performed in the livin g·
room of a Cambridge house . I was Puck and my sister was Titan ia
and a boy known for his genius at ice hockey played Bottom. My rec·
 1 95
Artobiography

lection of that experience is that I ruined it by getting the giggles and

generally playing the fool .
The Poets Theater was a central preoccupation of mine from the
ages of fourteen to seventeen . And I hope someone, some day, will
write a solid history of that amazing constellation. Not me. My
mother was one of the founders, so I have placed the experience at her
en d of the table . But while I 've left most of it there, with her, I do re­
member the atmosphere generated by the personalities involved, and
what was, to be truthful, seductive and silly at the time, now has the
glow of grace.
Trails of young poets, playwrights, and actors ran through our
doors and slept in our basement, over a period of ten years. While I
did my homework, or observed from the stairs, they chose and re­
hearsed plays with screams and giggles. Their youth-many of them
were still students at Harvard-is what makes the enterprise, and its
occasional real success, astonishing in retrospect.
The theater itself was located in Harvard Square, on a tiny side
street , up a flight of stairs, in a small room seating sixty. A stone sink
dripped in the rear by the door, and the stage stared at the chairs,
from the other end of the room . Behind that, convenient rear stairs
led back down onto the street. The costume room was two doors
down in the basement studio of an old and beatific painter. His can­
vase s were engulfed in crinolines, pirate suits, make-up kits, and
shoes . I don ' t know why he let it happen . But often at night you 'd see
cannibals and kings running through the rain or snow to M r.
Pankhurst' s studio .
I ' m still sure that most of the plays were awful . The place was
pure camp. Why, therefore, it was supported , attended, and contin­
ued by Cambridge academics, I don't know. The occasional gem­
"The Voice of Shem , " say, or " Under Milkwood"-must have
brou ght them back as an audience of sponsors. Plays by Merwin,
Wilbur, Yeats, John Ashbery, Frank O' Hara, V R. Lang, Edward
Gorey-all varied wildly in quality; yet the professors took their
chances.
Backstage was, for me, where the central artery system was lo-
 1 96
Fanny Howe

cated ; and, too, during rehearsals when everyone lounged about, be­
ing mean about everyone else . I took tiny parts-shaking like a leaf­
in some of the plays, and got only one review , which stated : " Fanny
Howe played the part of a child and acted like one . " Much more suit·
ably, I acted as ticket-taker and usher on many a night .
Everything entertaining happened before the curtain rose, and
after it went down . The actors, directors , writers , lighting people, cus·
tamers, etc. , all came together, shouting their way to order. All this
was , of course, running simultaneous to the rise of the Beatniks, and
was surely an offshoot of that rise; but it was a happy one , where the
sweat was mixed with powder and paint , and the rebellion was all aes·
thetic.
One Sunday afternoon , in the late fifties, a black tunnel of smoke
spilled across Cambridge . The Poets Theater burned to the ground,
including invaluable tapes and scripts. It was not a phoenix in es·
sence-why, I don ' t know-but it didn't rise again from its ashes. Not
there .
We had a long line of writers in my family, a fact which only un·
dermined the act of writing for me . Rather than making it a legiti·
mate approach to the real world, the sense of it being the real world
created an approach , by thought and act , away from it. I was bad,
and filled with contempt for whatever was openly honored at home.
Resolutely, then , I stuck to Little Lulu and Modern Romance,
until , by chance , two passions took root in me , and I couldn ' t resist.
As I was being kicked around the school , on my way to being kicked
out entirely, I landed in two classes-French and Latin-where I was
happy. Languages were foreign to home, and so I decided to be good
at them ; and was . Seven years of Latin made Virgil, in the original,
my first love as a poet . Then, after I was kicked out of school, my sis·
ter gave me a copy of Oscar Williams' anthology of world poetry, and
I saw poetry, or, as it seemed poetry saw me, and leaped up to say
hello . It liked me . And I liked it . Partly because it was so short, I have
to admit.
This way I became, against all attempts to escape family history,
a logophiliac . Needless to say, I hid this love for a long time . Verlaine,
Baudelaire, Valery, Apollinaire-they were my secret joys -j o y s
made possible by an atmosphere of failure as student and as a boy. I
 197
Artobiography

found myself becoming relentlessly female at the same time that I in­
dulged myself in these foreign tongues and poems.
The language of the other-the sound of what is only half-under­
stood, always out of context, not mine-that disjointedness fit exactly
with the earlier disjointedness of my inability and unwillingness to
match the form of the word with the image in print. As Shakespeare
wrote , " Perspectives, which when rightly gazed upon show nothing
but confusion , eyed awry, distinguish form . "
This-what you might call Mystification-became a hidden
credo of mine . And the luxury of thinking, the one truly permissible
pleasure at home , was truly mystified by foreign words on the page .
The anonymous heave of the French and Roman citizens who com­
posed these words was of no interest , or use , to me . I had, as Jabe s
said of himself, " eyes only for what I did not see and what, I knew,
would soon dazzle me. " The paradigm , which I had despised in En­
glish, to the point where I still don't know what a predicate is , was the
essence of code , of hiddenness, in Latin and French . I wanted to crack
it.
Valery, speaking of a piece of visual art, wrote that " artistic ob­
servation can attain an almost mystical depth . The objects on which it
fall s lose their names . " This loss of the name , and knowledge only of
its echo, was what gripped me then , as if direct knowledge was a sin :
too much exposure of those secretive, erotic word games running
through my household . My home , and even the outer environment of
Cambridge, had protected me from everything but the mind and the
mouth, and I was discovering neither of these organs can be con­
trolled very effectively.
I had to leave home , travel far, to be as free as thought was lead­
ing me to believe I was . First I went to a summer program to become
fluent in French ; then to France itself. At the time I was tempted both
by the rigors of C atholicism and by the vengefulness of Bolshevism .
Their images were my father's but more extreme : truth and justice
made radical by hope . Praying nightly, since I could speak, I saw no
div is ion between Isaiah's suffering servant, who runs before and be­
hind , sowing mercy and justice , and what should happen out on the
streets . Heaven , to me, was immanent .
And in Paris, turned inside out by the sensations of Frenchness,
 1 98
Fanny Howe

baked into walls and bread, and everywhere in mundane, anonymous

speech, I was lonely and found that pure subjectivity-the goal of all
thought-was the most secure path to freedom . But I had to justify
the writing of prose , for multiple reasons I 've tried to evoke here. Re­
bellion against my family made it all but impossible as an act . Unless,
of course, the prose itself was rebellious . Or, more precisely, the sub­
ject of the prose .
And , paradoxically, I could only legitimize a writerly existence, I
soon found out, by harking back to those candle-lit dinners at home.
Politics and prose : this coupling came to me for two reasons . One was
the influence of my father-the man in my life , its moral force . His
public role as a C ivil Rights activist took him to Mississippi and Rox­
bury where he was known as " little poison " for his small size and po­
tent judgments. And the other reason for my political associations
with prose was my belief that the hands on the typewriter keys should
be dirty. Life before art . Camus, Sartre, deBeauvoir-their combined
politics and prose justified what, for me , was otherwise a contemptible
pastime . The life of the mind as the only really permissible pleasure
was home' s negative lesson , and now under attack .
From Paris I returned to Boston only in order to get to California
post haste. I was enrolled at Stanford as a disgrace . My grades and
school record were too shady for even the two-year colleges on the
East Coast . But the West accepted me . And I was drawn there , also,
by a longing for the new, the exotic landscape , the dazzle of the
strange .
Stanford was hardly-then as now-a center for Beatnik, or rad·
ical activity; though it was certainly, by osmosis, and on the fringes,
susceptible to their influence. It was to that rough edge I naturally in·
dined . And I began to move, comfortably, in a circle of Marxists with
guitars and motorcycles , and to go to San Francisco whenever possi·
ble . My literary studies included Yvor Winters on Moby Dick, Frank
O'Connor on the short story-both brilliant and unforgettable ; one
destructive poetry workshop; and one rather lively fiction workshop
with Malcolm Cowley sensibly seated with his earphone turned off.
while the students read and talked . He concluded his year at Stanford
 1 99
Artobiography

with a public address in which he stated that no great American writer

would come out of a fiction workshop .
Most of the classes I took in the two and half years I lasted were
in history, American and European . The real way I spent my time
was getting washed down the steps of C ity Hall, protesting capital
punishment, talking Civil Rights, attending black-listing sessions in
the courthouse , and going to North Beach readings and lofts.
The effect of all this-between the years of seventeen and nine­
teen-was overwhelming. I was, of course , living from the inside out
those days, without any sense that it was A Life I was living, a con­
struct with an outside to it , too . I didn 't take notes, draw sociological
conclusions, or pretend to understand, historically, any of the aes­
thetic and social movements outside of the subj ective experience of a
lingering adolescence . I pretended I came from nowhere , free of
charge, with no debts to history, through birth, race, or economics. I
had no idea I was a product .
In 1 959 and ' 60 , Kerouac was king. But other enormous men,
like Kesey, Patchen and Spicer, whose fleeting shadows I had already
encountered in the Poets Theater, seemed only normal in their dimen­
sions. They were the normal dimensions, this is, of adolescence-rep­
resenting, as they did , freedom, rebellion, love of art, mobility, and
revenge . There seemed nothing else valid to be , if you were young,
disenfranchised in your chosen way, and intellectual in those years .
Jazz and poetry : those were the two Sunday occupations of a Stanford
sophomore who had aesthetic ambitions. There were sinister shades,
however-poverty, illness, and the slow dissolution of acquaintances,
by drugs and mental anguish, into madness .
It was a man ' s world , even out there on the edges beyond con­
vention . It was men who broke themselves at the margin . It was the
me n who were loud and famous. The women I knew then shuffied
bare foot at perhaps a farther edge-the edge where anonymity either
creates subversion or self-annihilation . They were shadows within
sh adows. I knew this only at the level where knowledge is so taken for
gran ted , its function is defunct .
When my best friend, a young woman my age, was killed on a
 200
Fanny Howe

motorcycle, I let those dark parts cover me over completely. I dropped

out of Stanford and eloped with a microbiologist , years older then my­
self, and moved to Berkeley. There , in the cozy confines of our apart­
ment, I tried to ward off the spirits of despair and terror, which I see
engraved in the names of that generation , and which make " Howl"
the essential poem of that time .
I tried to keep self-knowledge at bay, through love and marriage
and work. I had a job as a bookkeeper in Richmond for a couple of
years, and finally wrote my first pulpy paperback , Wist Coast Nurse.
These were stupid attempts to be normal , professional , cute-acts
which occur when the world looks empty of advice , wisdom , logic and
hope . It was also, obviously, an act of rebellion .
But there is a way in which subversion and mystification become
joined forces, allies in the spirit ' s way against an oppressive state . You
see it most clearly in the condition of slavery, where communication is
coded , and escape is systematized through the reading of Scripture.
An earthly paradise is conjured through the poetics of language and
song-one which cannot be violated , because it doesn ' t in fact exist,
and everyone knows it .
Paradoxically, until you know this paradise doesn 't exist, you
can ' t make it exist . That period of pre-recognition is full of fraud and
terror. I didn 't even begin to emerge from there for four years, when I
found myself in Reno . This move was accompanied by a salvific acci­
dent .
By chance, when I was 2 2 , I wrote a letter to Edward Dahlberg
after reading his book Because I Was Flesh. This correspondence was to
continue over a span of seven years and culminate abruptly and furi­
ously. The letters he sent me were very similar to most of his published
letters, except, as he said himself, he had never before attempted to in­
struct a young woman . This at-the-time young woman had never
sought instruction before from anyone and took it, when it came, with
a surprising lack of suspicion.
I carried his letters on my person , on buses, to jobs, movies,
everywhere, devouring them over and over again . I was quickly co n·
scious that I was in the presence of a sexist and racist tyrant . But th is
 201
Artobiography

awareness did not deter me from perceiving, in his aesthetic credo , an

important truth which I was privileged to receive personally.
Though he would try to prove to me, towards the end, the con­
nection between life and art-that is, I must love him , if I loved his
work-was a covenant of a peculiar sort , he failed at that. What he
succeeded , instead , in transmitting was a certain message about the
sanctity of literature . His precept-that it is better to misunderstand a
good book than to understand a bad one-made it clear to me that my
native inclination to re-read , rather than peruse new works of litera­
ture, was legitimate . His list of good books was short and eccentric,
including Theophrastes ' Inquiry Into Plants and Pater's Marius The Epi­
curian; but I read each one and responded , to him , with total misun­
derstanding. For this I was chided , and even abused verbally by him .
So much for precepts. He set a goal which was literally impossible to
achieve . The idea was that , as with fools and maniacs , reaching to the
farthest extreme meant you were bound to pass truth on the way .
His own style, an atavistic vernacular, was the end result of a
seven-year self-imposed " silence , " during which time he immersed
himself reading the classics, Scripture , and studies of the same. He
was after what might be called a truth-language, and by the time he
sat down to write the story of his youth, he had transformed the banal­
ity of personal experience into an odyssey of epic proportions by im­
mersing remembrance in baths of classical reference. The result was a
a prose approaching the poetic depth Moby Dick. Why bother with less
than this? was the question thrown up by the prose . And Dahlberg's
answer was, if you do bother with less, you are not just a bad writer,
you are defiling the sacred .
Why I had the need or desire for such a harsh instructor, I don 't
know . He pointed away from every possible comfort to be gained
from writing-from fame, fortune, or the comfort of doing what
com es naturally. The negative power of that path is that it transforms
absence into presence . Neglect becomes affirmation ; poverty becomes
ri ghteousness. The system of minus had already caught my attention ,
but after this excruciating correspondenc e, there was no turning back.
What has struck me in particular is Dahlberg's insistence that
 202
Fanny Howe

the company of books you keep is as crucial as the company of friends.

One must be very careful, in other words, to seek the highest level of
dialogue-morally and aesthetically-between yourself and what you
read . That was one lesson . Another had to do with the language of
imagination.
Imagination , as a voluntary mental act, is not to be used for fun,
so to speak; not for an invention which is, as he would put it, cold­
blooded in its distance from the hot and lacerating truth about the nat­
ure of living here . For Dahlberg the heat and the pulse involved in the
imagination ' s pursuit of resurrection are breathed through the classics
and through Scripture . Living close to these makes the bones of the
past come alive .
Dahlberg's prose was my first conscious encounter with a lin­
guistic morality. He once wrote, " Style is the absolute limit of man's
character and bad writing shows a lack of love . ' ' For him , bad writing
is a symptom of moral torpor, an effete will , dishonest energy, fraud.
And bad writing is identifiable simply by not being instantly recogniz­
able as good . Mediocrity can pass for goodness until the real thing en­
ters and seemingly anyone , who is paying attention, can tell the differ­
ence at once .
This encounter with Dahlberg made sense of what had been
good to me before already ; and laid a beam acmss the stacks of li­
braries and bookstores which I would thereafter follow . What I saw
lighted was a certain kind of writing which, Virginia Woolf wrote , has
an aura. I can ' t very well describe it. But it is much as he described it :
a writing which, i n consciously pursuing the truth , does not forget the
life of the body, either through a kind of fasting in words, or by a feast­
ing in words. A lukewarm prose or poetry is just what gods and read·
ers spit out .
My chance correspondence with Dahlberg, then , laid bare the
sacred and difficult path through a literature too gummed up with
idolatry. It still draws me forward, as the place I am happiest : that is,
re-reading and misunderstanding endlessly_ the same people : St.
Teresa of Avila, Tolstoi, Simone Wei!, the Old and New Testaments,
Rilke, The Gnostic Gospels , Shakespeare, St . Augustine , Karl
Rahner, Walter Benj amin , Hans Jonas, Gershon Scholem , Langston
 203
Artobiography

Hughes, Samuel Beckett, the Brontes, Melville, Keats, Dickinson ,

Hopkins, Baudelaire , Rimbaud, Jabes, Bonnefoy, Flannery O 'Con­
nor, Richard Wright , Zora Hurston , and a few others, none of whom
are on Dahlberg' s original list to me .
What Dahlberg left me was the necessity for rigor, and the
knowledge that writing was a thorny path to insight . I still had to go
by one thornier yet, when I had to write for money. The fact is, I had
been raised as a mental weed in a poor man ' s greenhouse. There was
no security outside of those glass walls of childhood in Cambridge .
TI-ansplantation was my problem . Finding the right climate and soil
was up to me alone , and my instincts were too far-placed from my
brain to insure a crafty game plan . No money comfortably followed
my bank route from city to city. I was like everyone else with whom I
had NOT grown up . And so I must take the vow of poverty, which
Dahlberg recommended , and make it seem like a choice when it
wasn ' t . I was awful at making money, being unable to connect labor
with returns, and for some time bounced around from one rude job to
another, writing pulp to tide me over.
After J#st Coat Nurse and a trip to Reno, I ended up in New York
where I wrote the stories in my book Forty Ulhacks, and simultaneously
wrote another couple of pulp books for money-East Coast Nurse and ,
soon after, Vietnam Nurse. The latter was proposed to me by an editor
at Avon Books, where I worked as a reader; he only wanted the title;
the content was up to me. The subject of the book was not the nurse ,
as it turned out, . but two Vietcong friends of hers. These three books
were written under the pseudonym Della Field . I never mentioned
them to Dahlberg.
I was always, also, writing poems; it made me uneasy. On the
one hand, anything so pleasurable, so sensuous, so insane must be a
vice. On the other hand publicly poetry was considered the height of
virtue. That is, in Cambridge and everywhere else, a person declared
him or herself a poet with the insinuation that this was a good thing to
be. A pure thing. No dirt or commerce attached to its production . I
didn' t like that, especially because I was partially convinced this was
tru e, and what, if I were totally convinced, would I do with my dirty
hands?
 204
Fanny Howe

They had to keep working, on and on and on . When the nurse

books were done , and I was back in Boston and was publishing, at
last, my first books through Houghton Miffiin , I thought I would
never have to write for money again . As it turned out, I wrote a p i ece
of Gothic trash for a thousand dollars within a year, when I was broke;
and now, ten years later, am writing books for teenagers at five thou­
sand dollars a throw.
I am grateful to be able to sort out , here , what all this means.
The books themselves go right back to my love of Little Lulu and
Modern Romance ; in that sense, they go back to some original anger,
but also pleasure . There is something comforting about telling a story.
And , especially, telling a story to an audience which asks only that it
do what a story is meant to do : organize recognizable trouble and
make a moral out of it . This is a craftperson ' s job; the material is hu­
man life . Storytelling, of this kind , springs from an anonymous vo ice:
the mundane gossip of those whose lives are forgotten, when they're
not exploitable.
This is on the positive side . There is however, a more sinister
level , which I have experienced and want to pass on . What happens is
this:
You sell your imagination for food on the table , so to speak, and
you are required to make your imagination fit a certain formula, a
formula which answers a given expectation . And in the process you
learn contempt for the craft because, as all labor based on a formula,
limited to a need , and perfonned for reasons of survival , the work be­
comes hateful and hate-filled . And this is how you infiltrate the text­
with your sense of injury, a political conscience .
The book itself, as you are writing it , from your imagination, is
your boss , your oppressor, and you , the other who is longing for free­
dom from the task, attack this figure from within . There is your plea­
sure in it : subversion ! Again ! You create the authority, the necessit y of
the book' s existence , in order to make a living; and you end up rebel­
ling against your own maker, made by yourself. This is what writi ng
for money becomes, and means; and this is why story-telling fre­
quently has oppression as its subject . The genre novel and the short
story share this obsession with the underdog's dilemma; Chekov and
 205
Artobiography

Raymond Chandler are here allies . " The lonely voice " was the name
Frank O ' Connor gave to this mysterious persona who haunts the
short story.
All I ever wanted , in a physical sense , was to stay hom e , fool
with children , think, read and write poems . This should have made
me the ideal Victori an wife , if I had married the ideal Victorian hus­
band . I didn ' t . Instead , the father of my children was from another
race , religion and cultural perspective than my own . My union with
him , as it turned out , refined my need to reconcile the political and
imaginative in a way no other experience could have. Not easy. But
my mother-in-law , who lived with u s , made it essential. She was the
first woman I had ever met who lived alone happily and whose soli­
tude , as in the lives of those whose vocation is religious , allowed her to
give her time over to others, completely and freely. Through her par­
ticular influence , then, and my marriage , I began to climb into the
arms of the C atholic Church, and to see the absolute connection be­
tween active politics and the gospels.
I t is said , by a priest I know , that when the Holy Spirit claims
you , it moves through extraordinary and often p ainful weavings in or­
der to let you do its work . If action is prayer to the same extent that
prayer is act io n , then the individual comes to reconcile herself with
the spirit ' s longing for the Messianic age . Faith is invisible , and so
there are no earthly rewards, so to speak , for its particular movement .
The only reward , paradoxically, is sacrifice .
The same law seems to operate , at a grimmer level , in the physi­
cal world, where any given reward entails a specific sacrifice. What I
have lost , in using fiction as a device for making a living, is love and
respect for the form . I c an ' t read a novel anymore without returning
to my early and rather panicky sense of disjointedness. Faith in its
meani ng escapes me; and there seems no honorable reason for its ex­
istence . Thi s , to me, is a significant loss , for which I take full responsi­
b ili ty.
Poetry, meantime, remains inviolate in its poverty, and my love
for it intimidates me and lowers my abilities to develop a fixed aes­
thetic. I ' m at its mercy, really, and while I strain for synthesis in lan­
guage and thoughts, I ' m not an abstract enough thinker to be able to
 206
Fanny Howe

explain why and when it works. It seems, rather that words come
through me, and, as with every act of voluntary transformation in
life , it is only up to me to be prepared . I listen and wait . And that 's it.
The massive amount of revision I put the words through is only a way
of absolving them from the taint of having passed through me at at all .
I want to abolish the personal, or hurl it to the furthest point ; and pol­
ish the impersonal , until its dazzle unfocuses a complete clarity, as
with everything good .
This " mystification , " this " aura" or " dazzle " is not a maskin g
process, but a musical one, in process . Let the words write the words,
all the time with the attention of the ears . If everything is working,
revelation will follow obedience; and witnessing will follow attentive­
ness . And you will take the victim ' s part , the only valid side to be on.
This process, which gives me much pleasure , continues to fill me
with certain infantile guilt, because it has a compulsive quality, and
shows that I didn ' t successfully beat the genetic set-up. As I sit com­
posing this in New England , I can see that every original conflict re­
mains in place , exactly where it was born. The strain for synthesis lies
there , at heart, in the divergent paths of politics and imagination, fa­
ther and mother, physics and metaphysics .
 Michael Palmer

Autobiography, Memory and

Mechanisms of Concealment
(Part 1 or One Part)

Michael Palmer: Possibly to begin : dinner at Michael David­

son ' s Berkeley apartment with Robert Duncan in 1 97 1 . I mentioned
the difficulty I was having writing, that is, inventing, an autobio­
graphical note for my first book with Black Sparrow Press, Blakes 's
Newton. A special delivery letter had arrived from the publisher early
that morning urging me to finally send the note along with a photo­
graph so that the book could go to press . So the question who I had
been or was going to claim to be, alongside a poet 's face , apparently
mine, on final page of book that same poet had apparently written .
Cloned as a chance by-product of the Manhattan Project in the early
fortie s? Born in Tierra del Fuego under still mysterious circumstances
to the mistress of the British Vice-Consul? Dago alto saxophonist
from Boston? (Novelists are great at this-they all seem to have
worked on lobster boats . ) How in fact to fill a space approximately
two by three inches-with words-in such a way that at the end that
sp ace would appear to a reader perfectly blank, or as the French can ' t
stop themselves from saying, white? Or maybe to take the special de­
livery letter as a message not to publish the book at all, given my inev­
itable doubts that it and its so-called author had attained anything like
" ide ntity. " Who in fact had written the book? Some sense of a person
207
 208
Michael Palmer

in his late twenties , 5 ' 1 1 1h " , 1 60 lbs . , clean-shaven . Identifying

marks would include barely visible scar over left eyebrow and one on
left index finger caught in bathroom door of hotel apartment (room
1 1 08) at age two . Mother had rushed to doctor's office , child in arms,
holding the virtually severed fingertip in place . Ensuing successful op­
eration leaves the finger fully functional if slightly deformed . Minor
atrophy of left calf muscle due to congenital lower-back condition.
I . e . , characteristic micro-asymmetries:

I paced up and down my room from early morning until twilight . The
window was open, it was a warm day. The noises of the narrow street
beat in uninterruptedly. By now I knew every trifle in the room from
having looked at it in the course of my pacing up and down . My eyes
had travelled over every wall. I had pursued the pattern of the rug to its
last convolution , noted every mark of age it bore . My fingers had
spanned the table across the middle many times. I had already bared
my teeth repeatedly at the picture of the landlady ' s dead husband.
Uune 2 5 , 1 9 1 4)

He was assigned exercises by the osteopath and told that he could ex­
pect increasing discomfort over time, confirmed by the twinges I feel
in lower back, buttocks and thighs as I ' m writing this fifteen years
later. A third scar toward the center of the forehead resulting from fall
while chasing wire-haired terrier through neighbor' s enclosed garden
down the street from the hotel at age four. Surprisingly little pain . My
own oddly calm assumption that I was dying, given that I couldn' t see
through the torrent of blood pouring from the wound . Pervasive scent
of ether, nuns in white habits and so on . Constant voice in back­
ground mysteriously repeating, " I s it critical , is it critical?"
On hearing of the problem , Duncan offered to compose the bio­
graphical note himself. I accepted and he immediately wrote the fol­
lowing:

I think Michael Palmer was delivered two blocks astray in 1 943 because
he was aborted at our address two months before . Now he has arrived I
think a long way from the Rhinelander Apartments in Greenwich V ii-
 209
A utobiography, Memory and Mechanisms of Concealment

!age with a poetry addressed to occupant to refund the Indians for the
Manhattan sell .

The next day I sent it (special delivery, memory tells me, as a return
gesture) to John Martin at Black Sparrow with instructions to use it as
the biographical note . In fact when the book appeared Robert' s note
had been placed below the photograph and above it was the following:

Michael Palmer was born in New York City in 1 943 . He was educated
at Harvard University and now lives and works in San Francisco.

So . So a decision had been made, if not by the writer whose identity

was at issue, to reimpose order and offer an outline of the " real "
facts. A person had been born , raised , educated certainly, had lived
somewhere and moved somewhere else and presumably there were
additional " real " facts that could be supplied to responsible parties
upon inquiry. The reader was to be relieved of any puzzlement or un­
ease generated by Robert' s note . Something responsible was going
on : the writer came from a place writers come from , had gone to a
place writers often go to (his experience could be said to span a conti­
nent) , and he had the imprimatur of an institution known for its sobri­
ety in literary matters . The " added " note (for so now Robert ' s must
appear, as subsequent to the real in the eye's natural passage down
the page) could be effectively contextualized as metaphoric speech
which, if somehow " real " in itself, could not be taken as answerable
to or standing for the other " real" which in this case was the set of
events and circumstances that go to make up a life. The following
from Satie ' s Memoirs of an Amnesiac speaks, it seems to me, to similar
ex pectations and assumptions :

(Part 2 , "The Day of a Musician")

An artist ought to regulate his life .
Here i s the exact time-table of m y daily life:
Get up: at 7 : 1 8 a . m . ; inspired from 1 0 : 23 to 1 1 : 47. I lunch at 1 2 : 1 1
p . m . and leave the table at 1 2 : 14.
A healthy tum on the horse to the end of my grounds: from I : 1 9 to
2 : 53 . More inspiration : from 3 : 1 2 to 4:07.
 21 0
Michael Palmer

Various occupations ( fencing, reflections, napping, visits, contempla·

tion , dexterity, swimming, etc . . . . ): from 4 : 2 1 to 6 : 4 7 .
Dinner i s served a t 7 : 1 6 and ends a t 7 : 20 . Then symphonic readings
(out loud): from 8 : 08 to 9 : 5 9 .
Going to be d takes place regularly a t 1 0 : 3 7 . Once a week I awake
with a start at 3 : 1 9 a . m . (Tuesdays) .
I sleep with one eye closed ; my sleep is deep . My bed is round with a
hole to put my head through . Hourly a servant takes my temperature
and gives me another.
For a long time I have subscribed to a fashion magazine . I -wear a
white cap, white socks, and a white vest .
My doctor has always told me to smoke . To this advice he adds:
" Smoke , my friend : if it weren 't for that , another would be smoking in
your place. "

So possibly t o begin : much of the complexity in both writing au­

tobiography and discussing it derives from the obvious fact that (leav­
ing aside the convention of William Holden ' s posthumous narrator in
Sunset Boulevard) you are also continuing to experience a life , spilling
coffee, walking around , accumulating lists of things to do next (that
must be done next) , thus anticipating still further experience at least to
some degree continuous with , even deriving from , present experi­
ence , and thus to a great degree 'linear. ' Ultimately·there is a definition
that occurs as Gregory Bateson argues " by relation , " in fact a story,
defining that form as a " knot or complex of that species of connected­
ness which we call relevance " where " any A is relevant to any B if both
A and B are parts or components of the same ' story. ' " The complica·
tion being that while the story is being told the story is going on -at
least something is going on-possibly the story of the story, though in
fact the story is manifestly other than the sequence of events that
through selection and organization go to make up the story. Is the
" life " then not the story? Are we in an area like that regressus ad infini­
tum Wittgenstein suggests with the question, " If ' red ' is the name of a
color, then what is the name of the word ' red ' : ' ? Actually we do con·
front a dilemma not unlike that of language philosophers, forced to
discuss language by means of language, which has led the less opti·
 21 1
A utobiography, Memo ry and Mechanisms of Concealment

mistic advocates to invoke an indeterminacy principle for such opera­

tions .

The schizophrenic young man was thin like many people in such men­
tal states. Moreover he seemed in effect malnourished . As a result of his
very sedentary life , almost that of an invalid (which from many points
of view he was) , he had very poor musculature and was very weak, that
weakness being perhaps an important agency of the great fear which his
wide-open eyes reflected : fear of nature as well as of his fellow creatures,
fear of death as well as in some sense of life . His face and in particular
his mouth seemed contorted most of the time by a mixture of sadness
and pain , the m outh being moreover quite small and the comers of the
lips turned downward .

This is my translation of the opening passage of Le Schizo et Les Lan­

gues, written in French by an American , Louis Wolfson. Gill e s De­
leuze compares Wolfson ' s procedures to those adopted by Raymond
Roussel. Wolfson desc ribes himself as both " student of schizophrenic
languages , " and " schizophrenic student. " He writes in French from
a necessary rejection of the mother-tongue. That is, unable literally to
endure the words of his mother without enormous pain , he must learn
a variety of other languages (French, German , Hebrew and Russian)
in order to convert English words as rapidly as possible into foreign
words of a similar sound as well as meaning. Like Roussel he must
se arch out elaborate homeomorphic equivalents. So the work , his
schi zophrenic me.moir, consists of a complex chain of linguistic dis­
placem ents, transformations and concealments. What is there (or
what there is) can only emerge by passing into a medium where as
su ch it is not . In writing as in his life he must hide from himself what
is bein g spoken and spoken of, in order first to hear and then apotro­
paically to name it himself. And variously he names himself, " le jeune
homme schizophn�nique , " " 1 ' aliene , " " l ' etudiant schizophrenique , "
"le schizophrene , " " Ie jeune homme m alade mentalement , " " le psy­
chotique , " " le schizo, " and so on insistently, as if to establish a single
ide ntity among the multiple nominations which substitute for the ab­
se nt first-person- as if to make sameness out of difference and deny
 212
Michael Palmer

the alienating or differentiating procedure itself. The effort is para·

doxically directed toward a return to a single , unitary language , a pre·
lapsarian concordance between word and thing, or language and ex·
perience . In opposition to the text itself, it represents a denial of
translation, of the multiplicity of dialects among individuals as well as
language groups. So in the book he tells of his bewilderment as a child
at the notion of Chinese as the language spoken by the greatest num­
ber of people when in fact the language is subdivided into a multiplic­
ity of mutually indecipherable dialects.

Toward evening I walked over t o th e window and sat down on th e low

sill . Then, for the first time not moving restlessly about, I happened
calmly to glance into the interior of the room and at the ceiling. An d fi­
nally, fmally, u nless I were mistaken, this room which I had so violently
upset began to stir. The tremor began at the edge of the thinly plastered
white ceiling. Little pieces of plaster broke off and with a distinct thud
fell here and there , as if at random , to the floor. I held out my hand and
some plaster fell into it too; in my excitement I threw it over my head
into the street without troubling to turn around. The cracks in the ceil·
ing made no pattern yet , but it was already possible somehow to imag·
ine one. But I put these games aside when a bluish violet began to mix
with the white ; it spread straight out from the center of the ceiling,
which itself remained white , even radiantly white , where the shabby
electric lamp was stuck. Wave after wave of the color-or was it light ?­
spread out toward the now darkening edges. One no longer paid an y at·
tention to the plaster that was falling away as if under the pressure of a
skillfully applied tool . Yellow and golden-yellow colors now penetrated
the violet from the side . But the ceiling did not really take on these dif­
ferent hues; the colors merely made it somewhat transparent; things
striving to break through seemed to be hovering above it, already one
could almost see the outlines of a movement there , an arm was thrust
out, a silver sword swung to and fro . It was meant for me , there was no
doubt of that; a vision intended for my liberation was being prepared.
Oune 25, 1914)

It is interesting to compare Wolfson ' s self-designations with the

studied neutrality of those found in The Education of Henry Adams, also
 213
A utobiography, Memory and Mechanisms of Concealment

written in the third-person . As Adams states near the beginning, " life
was double, " and the self s double is presented as "the child , " " the
boy, " " the boy Henry, " " the rather slow boy, " "young Adams, "
"the young man, " " the private secretary, " "Adams' son" [sic] , " the
newcomer, " " the Assistant Professor, " even-when meeting Kip­
ling-" the American " , but most often Adams is simply "he , " pro­
posed with the muted Brahmin irony that sets the tone of the work.
This " other" Adams is cast afloat among the forces of velocity and
change the narrator Adams attempts to quantify by analytic observa­
tion . " He " is proposed as an ephemeral particle (" His identity, if one
could call a bundle of disconnected memories an identity, seemed to
remain; but his life was once more broken into separate pieces . . . ").
At the same time the implicit " I " is unitary and reflective, at rest and
distanced, the convention of the omniscient narrator (here the irony is
also conscious) brought to bear upon the manifestations of self. The
sum of the two is the full faculty of memory the " spider-mind" ac­
quires. This memory is synthetic, as Adams notes, and results in a
"life" consisting in great part of omissions (the exclusion of Adams'
wife from the memoir being the most notorious) . Of Adams we learn
a great deal (in terms of quantifiable events) but also surprisingly lit­
tle . " He" functions most often as an absence , since the pronominal
shift empties the subject of self or possibly 'myself. ' The studied neu­
trali ty is in its own way as violent or extreme in its alienation as Wolf­
son 's, and in rereading The Education for this talk I found myself (I
fmd myself) substituting the designations of Wolfson ' s persona for
tho se of Adams ' , " le jeune homme schizophrenique, " "l'aliene, " etc.

The horrible spells lately, innumerable, almost without interruption .

Walks, nights, days, incapable of anything but pain. Qune 1 2 , 1 923)

The confession form occurs when there is an apparent refusal of

displacement from the first-person , when the "I" is everywhere
p resent to reveal itself not in the semi-darkness of the confessional
booth but in the full light the act of reading elicits . I want to look
b riefly at a couple of books which in somewhat different ways offer
 21 4
Michael Palmer

themselves as works of this kind, Augustine' s Corifessions and Hedy

Lamarr' s Ecstasy and Me.
What first interests me about the Augustine is his concentration on
phenomena such as memory, time and discourse , that is, those ele·
mental mechanisms and conventions which shape the text itself and
are most often taken for granted , as if the categories so named were in
fact given, in other words, understood and beyond question , wher­
ever " understood " and " beyond question " are, insanely, paired (this
could lead to an endless digression on, for example , the language of
warfare-Vietnam would serve-or of the financial pages of our daily
newspaper) .
Augustine begins the Confessions with an invocation of god and a
mediation on " presence-absence" as god ' s nature, a "transcendant
presence" which will influence the manner of address and prayer. The
concealedness and omnipresence of god as Logos, god' s being as both
active and at rest bring to mind pre-Socratic speculation on the nature
of being and the word . Augustine' s underlying assumption through­
out the work is the inadequacy of words (as opposed to the Word) not
only in approaching the sacred but also in attempting to describe hu­
man events and human emotions. " Fear, " " pleasure , " " pity, " etc. ,
are concepts supposedly " understood by all " and as such veil those
emotions which they pretend to represent . In moving to examine the
central mechanism of the book, Augustine finds that memory is as il­
lusive as experience . What is remembered? What is a mental image?
What is the image of an image? What is memory as distinct from
mind? How does one " search one' s memory" ? What is it to remem­
ber forgetfulness:

I can mention forgetfulness and recognize what the word means, but
how can I recognize the thing itself unless I remember it? I am not
speaking of the sound of the word but of the thing which it signifies. If l
had forgotten the thing itself, I should be utterly unable to reco gnize
what the sound implied. When I remember memory, my memory is
present to itself by its own power; but when I remember forgetfulness,
two things are present, memory, by which I remember it, and forgetful­
ness, which is what I remember. Yet what is forgetfulness but the ab·
 215
A utobiography, Memory and Mechanisms of Concealment

sence of memory? When it is present I cannot remember. Then how

can it be present i n such a way that I can remember it? . . . etc .
(Book X. 1 6)

The anxiety expressed by the self-interrogation is similar to that of

both Wittgenstein and Saussure (and of course the Confessions were a
favorite text of Wittgenstein) . Book XI contains a parall el questioning
of the nature of time , in particular of d uration vs. present time . How
does time exist? How do past and future exist if time can only be
measured in passing? His conclusion i s that they exist by being
present through word s . The past is present through words grounded
in memory ; and when we " foresee" the future we are actually seeing
present signs of future events . The three times then might be de­
scribed as 1 ) a p resent of past things , 2) a present of present things and
3) a present of future things . He concludes , " Some such different
times do exist in the mind , but nowhere else that I can see . . . . It is in
my own mind then that I measure time . I must not all ow my mind to
insist that time is someth ing objective . ' ' This may derive from Plato ' s
notion o f time i n the TiTTUJ£US o r a neo-Platonic version o f same . Plato
states, ' ' For we say of time that it was and shall be, but on a true reck­
oning we should only say is, reserving was and shall be for the process
of change in time . . . . " Both memory and time , then , are grounded
in the present and its language . Events recalled are present acts, are
events in language but in a language which by its nature resists the ac­
tivity of revelation and naming even as it is spoken . The present, the
prese nce of the speaker, both is and is not , and finally Augustine la­
me nts , " If only men ' s m inds could be seized and held still . " Augus­
tin e investigates both the subject-object relationship in discourse and
the structu ral relationships that constitute the linguistic sign in order to
reveal what he is doing, to confess the nature of his activity . It is also to
co n fess the identity of self as memory , a ' ' storehouse of the images of
material things . ' ' And finally it is to confess the mediated and media­
tional character of all speech . Memory has no memory of the Logos
and no being of its own. The relationship between signifier and signi­
fied must be reconstituted at each moment of the act of telling, in a
 21 6
Michael Palmer

constant state of uncertainty. From one point of view this is in fact

Augustine' s confession-that of the concealedness of language, even
that of confessional revelation .
In The Circular Gates I published a poem entitled " The End of the
Ice Age and Its Witnesses" :

Yesterday your fever returned

It was near the middle of July
and we went to see the red King
Then I took out the net
together with the red bird
and put it down
on the bank of the river. Could the
flat milling stone and a
subsistence on seeds be originally
an American invention? We
cuddled on the seat of the car
until she said desperately
I was never unhappier;
then I told them that we wished to
continue our journey
because we were not reaching our destination
at all . But the creatures of this island
were very kind. The sky

was a deep green , without clouds

since the rain had been falling regularly
onto the lowest branch of a tamarack
where we hung by our knees. Considering
the look of the trees
we were somewhere in Canada
or the Northeast : flat, blue-green needles
0 . 8 to 1 .3 inches long
 21 7
A utobiography, Memory and Mechanisms of Concealment

that yellow in the fall; ovoid cones,

bark thin, scaly and
gray to reddish brown. The soil
is moist and spongy
under the car. E
is white like fog, and A dark,
cycles at some future time
to tell about-
the white tents in the primer
and the kind of flower that trembles easily-
Nothing of the sort is known
or probable on this side of the ocean
nor is there any early record of tents
On a given evening for example
they ' re playing cards
at the bottom of a swamp or pond; the Tartar
deserts light up; by the stairways
and armchairs of the rocks a
small world, pale and flat
" is coming to understand itself '

The poem draws upon a range of sources including Carl Sauer, Amos
Tutuola's The Palm- Wine Drinkard, various poems and letters of Rim­
baud, Trees of North America and Hedy Lamarr' s Ecstasy and Me. The
passage from Miss Lamarr's book reads:

. . . We got sandwiches and drove to a glen which is beautifully sur­

rounded by trees and leads to the MGM backlot.
" You made it big, " Marcia said. " You must be very happy. " She ate
her sandwich with big bites, while I just nibbled at mine. I had no appe­
tite.
" I was never unhappier, " I said, for the first time putting it into
words.
 218
Michael Palmer

She was amazed.

I explained what had been happening. I could see she didn 't under­
stand . She said plaintively, " I 'll never be a big star. I 'll always be a
nothing. Two hundred dollars a week with overtime will be the limit.
' Marry a rich actor, ' my mother tells me. I ' m ready but where is he?
They just want to get into my pants. After a lay they can 't wait to get
away. Men are so cruel. "
She was right-in a way, men are . . . etc . . . .
She looked at me. " You 're so beautiful , " she said . " That's why you
are a star. And-:I hope you 're not offended-you 're so cold , so un­
touchable. "
" No I ' m not , " I intenupted. Then gently I held her face in both
hands and sympathetically kissed her. Her reaction was strange. She be­
gan to cry. I kissed her tears as if she were a child.
" I need love so desperately, " she moaned . "And all I can get is sex.
Oh, I hate men . "
Then she hugged m e tightly. "Will you be kind to me and just care a
l ittle, please? "
"Yes, " I told her, " I will . " . . . etc . . . .
We cuddled on the seat of the car until she said desperately, " I need
you . " Her hand went under my dress and all over me and I let her do
what she wanted to and all my frustrations and hate left me . This was
always the solution to my ill s . When I came b ack to reality I realized we
were both sobbing . . . etc. . . . [They drive back to the studio]
I thought of her often . It's murder for a girl to have too much need.

Dynamite stuff-but what stuff? What are we being told? Obviously

that Hedy got it on with a starlet on a lunch break between takes of an
MGM musical being directed by Gene Kelly. And the sensational,
confessional aspect of the memoir has to do with the fact that a) there
were many many random couplings, b) a fair number of these were
with women, and c) there was a lot of heartache . Now many of u s
qualify on all three counts but might not think to find an audience for
these revelations, not a wide audience in any case, wider than say a
circle interested in local literary gossip . Augustine of course is also in­
volved with confession of sexual activity tied to a dynamic of spiritual
struggle and self-understanding, and it is interesting to examine the
 21 9
A utobiography, Memo ry and Mechanisms of Concealment

convoluted intensity of his language in attempting to come to terms

with this persistent aspect of his emotional make-up. With Hedy it ' s
revelation because o f the identity o f the speaker. She i s famou s , the
object of many private fantasies, and has led a public life constructed
by studio p. r. agents and interspersed with sensational headlines . She
is a love-goddess. Love-goddesses are a) radically unobtainable , since
they exist only on the screen and in large , guarded retreats in Beverly
Hill s , and b) never definitely never hardly ever bisexual , even when
their attraction is blatantly epicene (the book appears in 1 966 and this
mythology has certainly evolved since-popular mythologies don ' t
remain stable) . S o what i s she telling? She i s telling u s that love-god­
desses are often disturbingly attainable , regardless of the pedestal con­
structed to reinforce a stereotype of enthronement and desexualiza­
tion ; and that love-goddesses may be polymorphous perverse . What is
she not telling? Anything. Once this is done there is nothing left. The
language of her work as is usually (but not always) the case derives
from soap-opera and is a refusal of identity, that is of the layerings that
constitute identity or presence. It is a refusal to tell (though I don ' t
know i f it ' s a willing refusal). A s i s true i n most and possibly all styles
of autobiography, the " I " functions as the most elaborate of shifters ,
and this complexity can be u sed or not , recognized or not. (There are
at the very least two ways of hearing Rimbaud ' s "Je est un autre. " )
Darwin for example uses the first-person t o project a persona o f dis­
tinct modesty. I n a sense it justifies itself by its resistance to self-pro­
motion. The question naturally arises, " How close to that other ' I '
doi ng the writing, a central figure of nineteenth- and twentieth-cen­
tu ry science , is this proj ection ? " Given the recent proliferation of
wo rks on the Darwin-Wallace controversy, it appears to be a question
that will continue to resist resolution. Darwin ' s autobiographical
memoir of course is not confessional at all. It reveals no intimate facts
of his life and actually offers very little autobiographical detail. There
is an interesting passage on the quality of his memory that may be
meant to account for the shape of the work :

My memory is extensive , yet hazy : it suffices to make me cautious by

vaguely telling me that I have observed or read something opposed to
 220
Michael Palmer

the conclusion which I am drawing, or on the other hand in favour of it;

and after a time I can generally recollect where to search for my author­
ity. So poor in one sense is my memory, that I have never been able to
remember for more than a few days a single date or a line of poetry.

Interestingly he portrays his memory as of the intuitive, random vari­

ety popularly associated with poetic memory, rather than the scientific
kind which (theoretical physics aside) we tend rightly or wrongly to
imagine as precise , instant and comprehensive within a given range o f
information . But to return for a moment to Hedy and confession . It is
interesting that often the more elaborate the claims to confession be­
come , the more intricate the question of concealedness gro w s the -

very claim itself (whether in popular autobiography or Jean-Jacques

Rousseau or Michel Leiris) lends a suspect intentionality to the speak­
ing " I " and a teleological motive to the narrative . Often what is told
is other than what it seems is being told or what is being claimed to be
told. What for example is Rousseau revealing when he reveals that he
used to reveal himself to schoolgirls? What is DeQuincy not telling us
that the manner of his writing and the gaps within the narrative tell?
Here we are back at subject matter and Alan Bernheimer' s talk of a
few weeks ago. And I ' m still trying to return to Hedy for a moment
and the resistance of her language to identity. I think here the opening
passage of Laura Riding' s The Telling may be useful :

There is something to be told about us for the telling of which we all

wait . In our unwilling ignorance we hurry to listen to stories of old hu­
man life , new human life , fancied human life, avid of something to
while away the time of unanswered curiosity. We know we are explain­
able, and not explained. Many of the lesser things concerning us have
been told, but the greater things have not been told ; and nothing can fill
their place . Whatever we learn of what is not ourselves, but ours to
know, being of our universal world, will likewise leave the emptiness an
emptiness. Until the missing story of ourselves is told , nothing besides
told can suffice us: we shall go on quietly craving it.

Before I am sure what she is saying about telling I am sure that she is
engaging language at an intimate point of resistance and that this in
 221
A utobiography, Memory and Mechanisms of Concealment

itself is-telling. So there is a necessity involved which we evade and

to which we return or to which we are returned, in anticipation of an
impossible telling.
I do in fact enjoy the one-dimensionality of pop autobiography
(maybe it possesses that quality of blankness I was after for the auto­
biographical note) . In any case it has a specific linguistic coloration
which in "The End of the Ice Age" I was trying to use along with
other language colors to make a kind of false autobiographical collage
that might turn out to be quote true. I was also interested in so to
speak eliminating the seams so that one thing might flow into another,
Hedy for example into the visionary mode of Rimbaud into the tale­
telling of Amos Tutuola and so on . (Remembering now, I think in the
back of my mind also was at least the feel of that 'voyage of the soul '
as a poetic form found for example in the Ch 'u Tz 'u songs of the third
century B. C. which themselves developed out of earlier shamanistic
chants and songs and which we acquire through Dante among many
others, kabbalistic literature , and more recently the voyage imaginaire of
French symbolism . ) I suppose too I was bringing forward the mecha­
nisms of displacement that inhere in language, though for me to say
this may well be a kind of first-person deception. Now I think I was
doing that ; then I think I was writing.
There is for me an interesting parallel with Bob Perelman ' s very
carefully titled "An Autobiography" which makes use of Stendhal ' s
Vze de Henri Brulard, Shackleton ' s memoirs and Mozart' s letters, that is
three lives in three kinds of writing. The result is a complex and ironic
document. For example near the beginning, " But rest assured , dear
Papa, that these are my very own sentiments and have not been bor­
rowed from anyone . " The irony there is of course double since the
work is in a literal sense borrowed, yet what it stands for-what it be­
comes-is not borrowed at all, but is a singular act of aesthetic iden­
tity, an act of disclosure that speaks quite clearly of the intent of the
speaker who is not speaking, or who is speaking only through the
speech of others. Could he even be said to speak by the fact of his con­
cealedness? The work makes explicit the otherness of the " I " in auto­
biographical writing, its distance in time and proximity as an inven­
tion . (Dostoievski justifies autobiographical writing as a deliberate form
 222
Michael Palmer

of address to this " other" or " brother. ") A further implication and
further irony then seems to be that we as readers or borrowers of these
voices are no more distant from them than their inventors are . The
voices are in a sense as much ours as theirs . The " I felt . . . , " or "I
thought . . . , " of autobiography (like language itself if we follow the
Saussurean model) proceeds by and is perceptible only through differ­
ence . ( ' Difference' here of course incurs identity, sameness, similarity,
rhyme , as functions of differentiation . ) Were there no change of per­
ceptual consciousness over time the writer would have no language to
portray experience and there would be no life to tell . And there would
be no memory. Even tribal memory which is built upon and rein­
forces an ideal of stasis generates change through transmission , that
is, through an energy-order exchange. Philip Morrison makes the
point in " On Broken Symmetries" that in the physical world you
" pay in energy for order. " Symmetries are made manifest to varying de­
grees in the physical world (for example among crystals as well as sub­
atomic particles), but they are never carried out to perfection . Perfect
symmetry could only occur at absolute zero temperature , with no ran­
domness, but at true zero the rate of formation would be zero and
nothing would happen . So there is always difference , gradation , vari­
ation by which we perceive . The I- I symmetry of autobiography man­
ifests varying degrees of brokenness and the work is realized within
that fracture . And-as in the physical world-it is time (finite dura­
tion of events; infinite extension of random possibility) that guaran­
tees those disturbances and variations in which we are immersed.
The question of " real time " in autobiographical writing is as
many-sided as the questions of persona and memory. In one obvious
respect real time is the moment of the writing ( " I felt pain " becomes
" I remember I felt pain " becomes " I am remembering that I felt
pain" becomes " I am writing remembering feeling pain " becomes
what-some approximation of the (William) Jamesian 'conscious'
perhaps. ) And once done it is no longer in ' real time' which may then
pass over to the territory of reader as receiver of this more and more
complexly encoded representation . Time only is, as Plato puts it, bu t
if so, when? A small , golden-winged insect really is crawling ac ross
 223
A utobiography, Memory and Mechanisms of Concealment

this page , has just fallen off the edge of the writing tablet, is lying up­
side-down on the oak table, legs flailing as I write this but not now as I
type it and not now as I speak it to you next Thursday at a time
agreed upon . (It ' s Saturday night and I 've just returned from seeing
Carla Harryman' s play. At the play Barrett Watten gave me a copy of
his new book . I open to the first page and read, " Admit that your
studies are over. Limit yourself to your memoirs . Identity is only nat­
ural . Now become the person in your life . Start writing autobiogra­
phy. ") Or my notebook entry of June 2 1 st :

The question i n m y Langton St. talk: i f I ' m not writing this now am I
saying this now-am I at all remembering-etc . . . . And what of what I
conceal here (and now). E . g. , of what I did today (tomorrow) that I
would not like some or all present to know-or if I wanted them to
know all of what I did today (yesterday, tomorrow) what is it by that
that I actually want them to suppose they know 'of me' : that I am puri­
fied by confession? that I have nothing to hide? that all I or anyone does
is of interest? that someone else did it hidden inside by skin?

Various types of nervousness. I think noises can no longer disturb me ,

though to be sure I am not doing any work now . Of course, the deeper
one digs one 's pit, the quieter it becomes, the less fearful one becomes,
the quieter it becomes . (Oct. 6, 1 9 1 5)

And my own notes again, from May 1 9th of this year:

Yeats' The Trembling of the fiil as in essence a succession of portraits and

observations, aesthetic and spiritualist theory . . . resulting in an analysis
of an attitude of mind within his circle. All ' intimate' events absent and
yet a sense of the intimate presence of the poet (as he wishes to be
present).
Equivalent possibly to his notion of the lyric as "abstract and imme­
diate " ? Like Darwin and Adams he makes use of the trope of self-ef­
facement that is part, paradoxically, of the projection of self, an ap­
proach common enough to autobiographical writing to be extremely
difficult to recall to its sincerity.
 224
Michael Palmer

Stanley Cavell in Must Uf Mean What Uf Say speaks of how philosophy

has always employed dogmatics against the possibility of intellectual
competition , and confession against dogmatics:

Inaccessible to the dogmatics of philosophical criticism , Wittgenstein

chose confession and recast his dialogue . It contains what serious con·
fessions must: the full acknowledgement of temptation ( " I want to
say . . . " ; "I feel like saying . . . " ; " Here the urge is strong . . . ") and a
willingness to correct and give them up . . . . (The voice of temptation
and the voice of correctness are antagonists in Wittgenstein 's dialogue . )
In confessing you d o not explain o r justify, but describe how i t i s with
you . And confession , unlike dogma, is not to be believed but tested , and
accepted or rejected.

(I seem to have left ' time ' behind , but maybe that ' s the nature of talk­
ing this way. ) So a body of work is offered as confessional from which
the conventional data of experience are rigorously excluded. It is inter­
esting with Cavell to think of Wittgenstein ' s work as a project of self­
knowledge and confession devoid of the recollections and information
normall y associated with such a task. Having noted Wittgenstein s ·

admiration for Augustine , we can also see how their projects are com­
parable, how both concentrate on discussion of the means of such dis­
cussion, leading to elaborate-but in a sense revealed-methods (rit­
uals?) of evasion and ellipsis . (Wittgenstein ' s acts of displacement for
example as he discusses the nature of concealment in ordinary lan­
guage, the gap between saying and meaning. ) I am reminded of the
hermetic intensity of Roland Barthes ' essay in autobiography, Barthes
sur Barthes, " par lui-meme , " as the French put it , or " by himself ' the
pun might read in translation , because it is a singular document of
isolated and isolating self-examination, and an explicit recognition of
the nature of such enclosed discourse . I can only think of a few texts
which so emphasize the radical alterity of the speaker (Kafka's jour­
nals have this effect) , to the point where definition occurs frequently
through Greek-derived neologisms, words constructed " par lui­
meme , ' ' to disclose themselves only by means of a concentrated her­
meneutical effort on the part of the reader. Only occasionally does he
 225
A utobiography, Memo ry and Mechanisms of Concealment

break the pattern to catalogue that which he feels is "of no importance

to anyone, " and suddenly he sounds suspiciously like a writer of the
so-calle d New York School :

I like: salad, cinnamon , cheese, pimento, marzipan, the smell of new­

cut hay . . . , roses, peonies, lavender, champagne, loosely held political
convictions, Glenn Gould , too-cold beer, flat pill o ws, toast, Havana ci­
gars, Handel , slow walks, pears, white peaches, cherries, colors,
watches, all kinds of writing pens, desserts, unrefined salt, realistic nov­
els, the piano , coffee, Pollock, Twombly, all romantic music, Sartre,
Brecht, Verne, Fourier, Eisenstein, trains, Medoc wine , having change,
Bouvard et Pecuchet, walking in sandals on the lanes of southwest France,
the bend of the Adour seen from Dr. L's house, the Marx Brothers, the
mountains at seven in the morning leaving Salamanca, etc.

I don 't like: white Pomeranians, women in slacks, geraniums, strawber­

ries, the harpsichord, Miro, tautologies, animated cartoons, Arthur
Rubinstein, vill as, the afternoon , Satie, Bartok, Vivaldi, telephoning,
children 's choruses, Chopin 's concertos, Burgundian branles and Ren­
aissance dances, the organ, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, his trumpets
and kettledrums, the politico-sexual, scenes, initiatives, fidelity, sponta­
neity, evenings with people I don't know, etc .

The work represents a resistance to such permission even as it por­

trays it. Such remarks are contextualised as trivial (lesser knowledge)
and only in that way does Barthes feel free to insert them :

I like, I don 't like: this is of no importance to anyone; this, apparently, has
no meaning. And yet all this means: my bor!J> is not the same as yours.

And so the 'bodily' is returned to the analytically distanced mode­

yet is offered all the same-much as Hedy Lamarr offers herself and a
conventionally framed apology at the same moment . It's an erotic tac­
tic we have all one way or another probably been party to, ecstasy­
ec- stasis-and me, I didn 't know it was loaded .
But we do know it's loaded or hope it is or at least once was or
was at least once. I am after all talking, the tongue and jaws moving,
 226
Michael Palmer

the uvula oscillating at a certain rate to determine the pitch . I am after

all sitting here silently writing and so on, neither there nor here after
all but at a given moment . . . .
In discussing shifters, Emile Benveniste asks :

. . . what then is the reality to which I or :Miu refers? It is solely a ' reality
of discourse, ' and this is a very strange thing. I cannot be defined except
in terms of 'location , ' not in terms of objects as a nominal sign is. I sig·
nifies ' the person who is uttering the present instance of discourse con·
taining I. ' This instance is unique by defi nition and has validity only in
its uniqueness. If l perceive two successive instances of discourse con·
taining I, uttered in the same voice , nothing guarantees to me that one
of them is not a reported discourse, a quotation in which I could be im·
puted to another.

Now this isn ' t news to poets and isn ' t even news to Aristotle , Quintil·
lian or Dionysius of Halicarnassus when they speculate on the com·
munication triad in narrative and rhetoric . And poets and writers of
fiction have always tended to play with such possibilities of structural
ambiguity, to conceal the source (sources) of ' voice ' among a range of
possible identities. This is partly because poets are not-never have
been-quite sure who was doing the talking. I am looking now (a!·
most now) at a medieval woodcut of a poetscribe bent over his desk
with a small , winged creature whispering into his ear (as Hermes was
called The Whisperer in bearing poetic-usually erotic-messages).
As Blake tells us in the op� ning stanzas, a small fairy sat down on his
table and dictated Europe to him . Or his letter to Thomas Butts on the
writing of Milton, ' ' I have written this poem from immediate Dicta·
tion, twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time, without Pre·
meditation & even sometimes against my Will . . . . " Such complica·
tions of the plot , among others, reinforce the notion of poetry (I mean
' poetic speech , ' not just verse) as hermetic and undisclosed even in its
high vatic-prophetic mode , that is, even when as with Blake it is
meant as both revealed and revelatory. And it seems fairly obviou s
.
that this is the case, that poetry does participate to greater or lesser de·
gree in a dialectic of concealment and revelation, and that the qu al ity
of information it can contain derives in great measure from its play
 227
Autobiography, Memory and Mechanisms of Concealment

within this dynamic . All speech of course , even ' transparent ' scientific
and logical discourse , participates to some extent . But what matters
here in relation to the subject of this talk is the insistence of such ele­
ments-shifters, tenses , ' real time , ' etc . , in poetry, poetic speech , par­
ticularly its most concentrated forms . This often results in a radical
agrammaticality (by no means limited to its most obvious current
manifestation s ; a Shakespeare sonnet could equally serve as a model ) .
Regarding this, i n The Semiotics of Poetry M ichel Rifaterre observes that
" the arbitrariness of language conventions seems to diminish as the
text becomes more deviant and ungrammatical , rather than the other
way around . " Poetry seems often a talking to self as well as other as
well as self as other, a simultaneity that recognizes the elusive multi­
plicity of what is called ' identity. ' It is heuristic , that is, a procedure of
discovery within which identity may appear as negative or in nega­
tive . An obvious result is that autobiographical material locates itself
differently and memory functions differently than in l inear narrative .
(I 'm not denying that a great deal of poetry is narrative and more or
less discursive . ) By foregrounding the inherent complexities and com­
plex possibilities of discourse , poetic speech often becomes paradoxi­
call y more direct in its presentation than apparently simpler forms of
writing; the evasions , displacements, recurrences , etc . , stand as an
imm ediate part of the message . I have been describing how autobio­
graphi cal and confessional modes (those that name their function as
one of disclosure) tend often to increase concealedness by masking or
disregarding certa,in elements of discourse . By contrast, in proposing
a different relationship to experience , time , memory, as well as the act
of co mposition, the apparently hidden nature of much poetic lan­
guage may inform both recognition and presence . Put another way,
what is taken as a sign of openness-conv entional narrative order­
may stand for concealment , and what are understood generally as
signs of withholding o r evasion-ellipsi s , periphrasis , etc . -may from
another point of view stand for disclosure . Some of the ways such ma­
terial locates in poetry is the subject of the second part of this talk, if
there is ever to be a second part , but I want to mention as a recent in­
st ance of what I am referring to Lyn Hej inian ' s My Life, where auto­
bio graphical material organizes itself according to a melos or melodic
 228
Michael Palmer

procedure . Given the limited usefulness of such categories , it seems to

me an amazing transformation of narrative into an extended lyric
mode, resulting in an altered relationship to the apparent ' data' o!
personal experience . Time undergoes reversals and returns, and syn·
tax is explicitly equated with ' story' such that each sentence " has to be
the whole story " within the story of the whole. In the introduction to
Mind and Nature from which I quoted at the beginning of this talk,
Bateson says, " In truth , the right way to begin to think about the pat·
tern which connects is to think of it as primanly (whatever that means)
a dance of interacting parts and only secondarily pegged down by var·
ious sorts of physical limits and by those limits which organisms char·
acteristically impose . " In relation to this I think also of Proust ' s at·
tempt to transmute not memory but remembering into experience.
And a day or two after receiving My Life, David Bromige ' s My Poetry
arrived-two possessives in one week. I'll finish with the opening sec·
tion of Rimbaud ' s A Season in Hell as translated by Paul Schmidt :

Once, if my memory serves me well , my life was a banquet where

every heart revealed itself, where every wine flowed .
One evening I took Beauty in my arms-and I thought her bitter­
and I insulted her.
I steeled myself against justice .
I fled . 0 witches , 0 misery, 0 hate , my treasure was left in your
care . . . .
I have withered within me all human hope . With the silent leap of a
sullen beast, I have downed and strangled every joy.
I have called for executioners; I want to perish chewing on their gun
butts. I have called for plagues, to suffocate in sand and blood. Unhap·
piness has been my god. I have lain down in the mud and dried myself
off in the crime-infested air. I have played the fool to the point of mad·
ness.
And springtime brought me the frightful laugh of an idiot.
Now recently, when I found myself ready to croak! I thought to seek
the key to the banquet of old, where I m ight find an appetite again.
That key is C harity. (This idea proves I was dreaming! )
 229
Autobiography, Memory and Mechanisms of Concealment

" You will stay a hyena, etc . . . . " shouts the demon who once
crowned me with such pretty poppies. " Seek death with all your de­
sires, and all selfishness, and all the Seven Deadly Sins. "
Ah, I 've taken too much of that : still , dear Satan, don't look so
annoyed , I beg you ! And while waiting for a few belated cowardices,
since you value in a writer all lack of descriptive or didactic flair, I pass
you these few foul pages from the diary of a Damned Soul.
 Robert Grenier

LANGUAGE I SITE I WORLD

(An excerpt from the second of four talks presented in the series
" Language/Site/World " at Intersection in San Francisco in Novem­
ber-December, 1 982 ; here rather more cross section of exchange than
shape of RG ' s thought on this particular evening, 1 1 /29/82 , or in the
series , projected as a whole . -RG)
* * * * *

David Bromige: No blackberries left here . . . [laughter]

Robert Grenier: So . . . last week we had to do with , a . . . an at-
tempt to define a situation in which the imagination is . . . engaged
with materials of writing in some way that, a, becomes very . . . evoca-
tive with that . . . situation . . . a . . . then/so, that was like a run of pieces
that had to do with that first . . . a . . . sort of ' site ' , if you call it a site
. . . you start writing in relation to . . . writing materials, & there was a
little . . . history of that , given as possibility . . . & , so . . . what I thou ght
to do tonight was-& this is not, literally, chronology, because it didn' t
develop this way, but j ust . . . to take this as a . . . way you could
think . . . think ahead , a-tonight I want to take something which
looks like pretty much of another situation . . . which is, some kind of
engagement, a-& I don ' t know if it ' s a ' mimetic ' one . . . but it' s, a,
it' s an engagement of sorts-between language process & . . . that else-
wise . . . in such a way that the reading of the poem , a . . . includes the
world, in some way . . . which doesn't, a, which is the result, in part-
230
 231
Language/Site/World

in part, & that ' s the opting out , that I don ' t know . . . what that is-of
some . . . thing that the language process itself does , a , when you ' re
looking at it . . . so if, actually, any kind of examination of, just so­
me . . . imaginary situation of an engagement between words & lan­
guage mind , or . . . something like that stuff last week . . . is a ' fiction ' I
is a situation , too-& I don ' t think I ever had that . . . a . . . although
there might have been some times when it seemed . . . pretty clo-
se . . . when you ' ve got a . . . you get a, it does seem like just to be,
a . . . the language , in the head-so , anyway, but much of the time , &
the actual interest involved, is what , a, that situation can include , in
terms of some . . . a . . . presence of mind , a . . . engaged with . . . these
various kinds of enactments in . . . in the world elsewise . . . & this may
be an ill u sion . . . this may be illu sion . . .
Bob Perelman : Bob , are there , are there . . .
Bromige : Would that be wrong?
Grenier: Oh , I don ' t know , but . . .
Anselm Hollo : Buddhist brothers would say, " I t ' s all an illu­
sion . . . "

Grenier: All an illu sion . . . this, a . . .

Hollo: " . . . so don ' t worry about i t , eh ! " . . . ha-ha!
Grenier: All that stuff that has to do with/about the imagination
shadowing forth things , like the opaque projector (AH : Ha-ha! )
. . . proj ecting . . . ' copies o f something else ' . . .
Hollo: Ha-ha-ha! . . . " opaque , " too . . . ha-ha-ha ! . . . ah . . .
Grenier: I s the opaque projector a ' symbol of the imagina-
tion ' . . . or a . . . 'a representation of language ' s . . . ' ?
Perelman: I . . . I didn ' t quite understand . . . one thing you were
t h at [ A H l a u gh s ] sort o f . . . ' ce n t ral part ' abou t
s ay i n g ,
[laughter] . . . words & the language m ind , & that also becomes,
a . . . situation in the world? . . . what would be an example, in some
other writer, of some , you know , place where that really happens , for
you , some . . .
Grenier: Oh , no , really . . . it ' s not a demonstration , but . . .
Perelman : . . . not in your work , but, somebody else ' s (RG:
No ! ) . . . where that had been really happening . . . [ sound of giggling]
Grenier: This is a long, long discussion , & I have engaged with
 232
Robert Grenier

that . . . in part . . . as a teacher for a number of years (BP: Ok) . I ' m . .

just going t o try t o think about m y stuff, because ' I 've never d one
it' . . . [laughter] . . . & try to use it as an example of this stuff . so, . .

a . . . this part of the thing, as last week, is to take poems from this
' book ' , work, box of cards, Sentences . . &/& . . . look at them & talk
.

about them . . . because , a, I feel I have to give you-I don 't even
want to . . . talk about them in that way, but-I 'd like to go ahead ,
now , & turn on my [laughs] projector . . . but , a . . . let ' s see . . . oh, I
should say that, a , I don ' t-we ' ll see how this goes tonight, & h ow
long it takes, but , a-I , a . . . I ' ve constructed a ' third'/even another
category, a . . . which would involve some , a, more . . . I ' m not sure
what that . . . some other, a-is it simply a more active interaction of
the two? -some place where the , a . . . fact that the poem is invented, a ,
is, as . . . obvious & active as , a, some other, a . . . attempt , to . . t o , to
.

engage with something, so that , even though the piece might be pre-
senting something that , a . . . ' was happening' -hopefully, in some
way-it would still be , a . . . something that was ' made up' , in
the . . . a, a . . . evident/evidently . . . & that ' s a whole other category, so
I think I want to try that . . . after this , & that ' s probably next
week . . . it ' s . . . would put off the reading of this more recent beach
stuff until the last Monday . . . ?
Hollo: Good . . . good . . .

Grenier: I thought to start by reading, a, this . . . piece from

Barthes' Writing Degree Zero . . to establish , like , the more . . . ' imagina-
.

tive ' . . . & then , to construct these two, different , sort of, conditions­
the imagination , a/&, on one side , & then this other pole of, a . . . the,
that ' other' , on the other side-& I want to read some stuff of Heideg­
ger's, on that . . . in j u st a little , in some little bit-& so bounce the se
off these poles-I mean , this is , a very, a . . . I don ' t know what im­
pelled him to make this statement , but it seems, a, in many ways,
quite inspired , a . . . as an invocation of something, a . . .

In classical speech, connections lead the word on , and at once carry it

towards a meaning which is an ever-deferred project; in modern poetry,
connections are only an extension of the word , it is the Word which is
' the dwelling place ' , it is rooted like a fons et ongo . . .
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Language/Site/World

. . . what 's that?

Voices: . . . it' s a . . . " fountain of ' . . . " fountain of knowl­
edge" . . .
Hollo: . . . " origin" . . .
Grenier: . . " origin " ? . . . " rooted like a fountain of origin"
.

[laughter]
Hollo: And a horse . . . (Jim Hartz: And/or . . . )
Grenier: (reads)

. . . in the prosody of functions, which are perceived but unreal. Here,

connections only fascinate , and it is the Word which gratifies and fulfills
like the sudden revelation of a truth . To say that this truth is of a poetic
order is merely to say that the Word in poetry can never be untrue , be­
cause it is a whole; it shines with an infinite freedom . . .

. . . this is really, urn . . . ' French ' . . . [laughter]

. . . it shines with an infinite freedom and prepares to radiate towards in­

numerable uncertain and possible connections . . .

. . . this begins to sound . . . like, ' discourse ' (AH: True) . . .

. . . Fixed connections being abolished [clapping] , the word is left only

(AH: Wait a minute ! ) with a vertical project . . .

Bromige: You ' re out of the running, Madam . . . [AH laughs]

Carla Harryman: Wait, when were the " fixed connections . . . -

abolished" ?
Hollo: ' He ' s found dead ! ' . . . ha-ha-ha [laughter]
Grenier: I love this . . . stuff today !
Harryman : But wait, wait . . . what the [laughter] [a medley]
Grenier: Wait a minute !

. . . Fixed connections being abolished, the word is left only with a verti­
cal project, it is like a monolith, or a pillar which plunges into a totality
of meanings, reflexes and recollections: it is a sign which stands. The
poetic word is here an act without immediate past, without environ-
 234
Robert Grenier

ment , and which holds forth only the dense shadow of reflexes from all
sources which are associated with it . . .

. . . this might be right ! [laughter]

. . . Thus under each Word in modern poetry . . .

. . . well, I ' ll skip . ah , whew!

. .

Harryman: C ould you read the first sentence again, about the
classical sentence?
Grenier: Page 47 . . . yes , I ' ll read that one sentence . . .

In classical speech , connections lead the word on, and at once carry it
towards a meaning which is an ever-deferred project . . .

. . . you see, it ' s like some kind of. . . idea of a . . . horizontal & vertical
. . . axis . . . but that ' s so l ovely & rom antic , the , a . . . word
" stands" . . . like a . . . like a . . . yah . . . but [laughter]
Voice: It's hard . . .
Steve Benson: Sounds like the " monolith" . . . [laughter]
Grenier: [reads]

. . . The bursting upon us of the poetic word then institutes an absolute

object; Nature becomes a succession of verticalities, of objects, suddenly
standing erect, and fille d with all their possibilities [laughter] : one of
these can be only a landmark in an unfulfille d, and thereby terrible,
world. These unrelated objects-words adorned with all the violence of
their irruption, the vibration of which , though wholly mechanical,
strangely affects the next word, only to die out immediately-these po­
etic words exclude men : there is no humanism of modern poetry. This
erect discourse is full of terror, that is to say, it relates man not to other
men , but to the most inhuman images in Nature : heaven, hell , holi­
ness, childhood, madness, pure matter, etc . . . . At such a point, it is
hardly possible to speak of a poetic mode of writing, for this is a lan­
guage in which a v iolent drive towards autonomy destroys any ethical
scope . The verbal gesture here aims at modifying Nature, it is the ap­
proach of a demiurge; it is not an attitude of the conscience but an act of
 235
Language/Site/U&rld

coercion . Such, at least, is the language of those modem poets who

carry their intention to the limit, and assume Poetry not as a spiritual
exercise , a state of the soul or a placing of oneself in a situation , but as
the splendour and freshness of a dream language . . .

. . . that' s reall y great . . . I think that's . . . I think the imagination is re-

ally, really interesting . . . but . . . a . . .
Bromige: Do you think of examples of that when you read that
stufl? . . . like when you 're at home, in the kitchen , when you read
it? . . . in order to understand it, so to speak, you think . . . you try to
think of examples?
Grenier: Yah , a . . . let me turn on the machine . . . [laughter]
Hollo: He tries not to! . . . Mallarme . . . is the example . . .
Ron Silliman: But David, he's literally talking about Rene Char
there . . .
Bromige: Yah? (AH: Mallarme, Mallarme . . . )
Silliman: It's everything from [missing word] to the present, but
Rene Char is the one name he brings up.
Grenier: Well , ok . . . ' turn on the machine' !
Voices: Ahh! . . .
Grenier: I want to, try to, indicate what I'm talking about by
trying to demonstrate some . . . sense of how some things in my work,
later on, seem to involve more than, simply this, lovely . . . a . . . sort of
vertical project . . . a . . . so, this was the recapitulation of last
week . . . the, a-I don' t know if you can see it-this machine seems a
little brighter than last week' s . . .
Hollo: Can we get those rear lights down a little more? . . . good
. . . good . . .
Grenier: This one , to me, was one of the ones I really remem­
ber, as having first felt like . . . the imagination was free to, a . . . engage
with words as a condition & a situation . . . this was written in a
kitchen , that was repainted, from an old cellar . . . hole . . . & the walls
were painted white & the floors were painted orange . . . & I think that
helped me, at the time-there wasn ' t anything going on-& so , a, I
went in there one [ AH laughs] . . . let me try to read it , just because
it's kind of dim . . .
 236
Robert Grenier

WINTRY

German
Magnus massive
Dagny Dagny calling
call me call me
lazy prairie icy
streams, nicely
nicely nicely nicely Norwegians
veil I, well I
veil I , veil I
snowy veil I
veil I don't know
oh veil I , oh well, I
well I don 't know
oh , veil, I don't know
Ah yah
ah, yah
Ja
a sod hut

. . . you see, it was the last part of this poem that was interesting to
me . . . I was really . . . I was . . .
Hollo: That was back through time . . .
Grenier: The " sod hut " was generated out of those previous
sounds, you know, that ' s what it was . . . (AH: Yah) . . . you can make
" a sod hut " out of that . . . p rogression . . . I don' t know where " sod"
came from . . .
Lyn Hejinian: "ja " . . .

Grenier: Oh , it sounds like "ja " ?

Voice: Yah . . .
Hollo: It ' s got a to- . . . it' s got a totally historical association ,
man . . . we all know that, don ' t we?
Grenier: Well , it looks like that now . . . you see, this is why this is
a bridge, to me . . . that it looks like it' s really ' about what it' s talkin g
about ' . . . (AH: Urn hmm) . . . I mean , it looks like this is the way
somebody is really talking, or something like that . . . so , & it ' s also,
 23 7
Language!Site/Uflrld

it's sort of like a story, so . . . I was thinking, wow, the imagination is

really . . . fun . . . &/a . . . you could make things, a-I think that ' s what
Williams meant . . . in that other passage I was reading last week, from
Spring and All . . . the importance of the imagination, to the writer-
you can make things, out of words . . .
Silliman: Ten years ago , Bob, when I first heard you read this,
you said that you weren ' t at all sure about that last line . . . [RG
laughs] . . . like somehow it was like ' making things up' . . .
Grenier: Oh . . . yah . . . I still think it 's making things up . . . I
mean, that ' s what ' s the . . . trouble with it, you know . . .
Hollo: No, no trouble . . . ha-ha!
Benson: It seems that the last line is an attempt to let the imagi­
nation, as opposed to [missing words?] . . . make some relationship to
this . . .
Grenier: Yah . . . anything, yah . . . it was just various things of its
own generation of its own, out of itself . . . the imagination has its lim-
its . . .
Benson: What are its limits?
Grenier: Its limits are . . . oh . . . it doesn't have any limits?
Benson: I ' m asking you that dumb question ! [laughs]
Grenier: It doesn ' t have any limits , as far as I can see . . . I don 't
think we've seen the end of it . . . that whole thing about ' enacting its
will on the world ' . . . isn 't that ' terrific ' ? . . . wow . . .
Perelman: Everything else in the poem is so . . . closely associa-
tional, with each other, & with itself. . . & the " sod hut " really
is . . . other . . .
Hejinian: No, I think the opposite !
Hollo: But Norwegian immigrants, man . . . when they first get
there . . .
Perelman : I know, I know . . .
Hollo: So that ' s close . . .
Bromige: But you get there in different ways . . .
Harryman: The " sod hut " is the place . . .
Hollo: I know . . & that 's why it ' s interesting . . . it comes m
.

there , it ' s sort of a punch line . . . [ RG laughs]

Perelman: I mean , it 's of a different order of. . . it ' s of a different
order than the " veil I , well I " . . .
 238
Robert Grenier

Hollo: And "ja " & " hut" sort of . . . rhyme . . . one is open & the
other one-ptschieuw ! - " hut " !
Perelman: Well , ok, it ' s like a . . . punch line , it ' s true , it ' s very
much of a conclusion & a, sort of. . . separating out from the . . . proc-
ess of the . . . sound play . . . from the rest of it . . .
Hollo: Yah , it introduces two new notes . . . tump-tump !
Hejinian: The note that didn ' t get introduced is "ja" . . . like
you say, " oh veil ' & " oh well" , but when you come to the "yah " &
"ja" . . .
Voices: . . . " yah " . . . "ja" . . . 'jaw' . . . ' yaww ' . .
.

Hollo: Scandinavian languages! . . . [laughter] [babble]

Grenier: I hope that this . . . this stuff would do that , you know
. . . if it does generate any kind of . . . a . . .
Bromige: Well , it ' s two ways of saying, ' I don ' t know ' & it ' s two
ways of saying, ' yes' . . . (AH : Uh-huh . . . so?) [laughter]
Sill iman: Bob . . . both " sod " & " hut" are words that . . . really
end heavily . . . with a very hard sound , & the only word in the entire
thing, before that , that has that same characteristic, is "don ' t "
. . . right? . . . which is like connected u p with grammar, i n a very dif-
ferent way . . . " a sod hut " . . . that ' s like . . .
Grenier: There was a " d " . . .
Silliman: . . . a drum roll . . .
Grenier: . . . there was a " d " up in the beginning, too . . . that ' s
sort of autobiography, too . . . that was m y aunt ' s name . . . well , but ,
the place where I saw that , a, as an example , would be Will i ams'
" chickens " . . . in the end of the " The Red Wheelbarrow "
. . . a . . . which , a, to me, makes the word " chickens " . . . just about
projects them into the world . . . just about makes it . . . &/a . . . what-
ever it does, it makes something . . . (AH : Urn hmm) . . . so , a . . . that
poem , really seems to be . . . it's not a photograph at all , it ' s a . . . it's
like this generation of the word "chickens" , out of the . . . out of these,
a, previous elements . . . & , it just about does it, so it ' s quite exciting,
but , a . . . a . . . I don ' t think it ' s . . . up to snuff, or something . . .
Hollo: What does " German . . . Magnus" come from?
Grenier: Oh . . . ' big' ?
Hollo: Yah , I know . . . I think it was Magnus . . . Albertus . . . me­
dieval . . .
 239
Language/Site/World

Grenier: Oh, back there . . . I don ' t know . . . could be . . .

Hollo : . . . Magnus . . . ' massive ' . . .
Grenier: See , I only really know English , & a little bit of Ger­
man . . .
Silli man: I 've always had this image of ' Daddy' as being
huge . . .
Voice: Vas . . . huge?
Silliman : . . . ' Daddy' was huge . . . [laughter]
Grenier: Well , Iemme , a. . . I really feel that , a . . . we
should . . . I ' ll just go on here , & see how far I get . . . this is like a verti­
. . . I thought this was a structural/vertical , a . . .

yah gee
yah gee
yah gee
yah gee
yah gee
yah gee
yah gee
yah gee

. . . axis , or something, & you could . . . move through it, like that ,
so . . . it means more to me, a, what i t ' s doing as material . . . words
moving . . . a little across , but mostly down . . . so . . . it was written in a
state of enthusiasm . . . [laughter]
Hollo: I keep thinking of the Yage . . the Yage Letters . . .
.

Grenier: This is supposed to be . . . this is more recapitulation . . .

actualities materialize

. . . this was a ' theme statement ' that still . . . sits there . . . so that ' s
what this, what tonight ' s i s supposed t o b e . . . ' abou t ' . . . but , from the
other side of it [ AH laughs] . . . not from this thing of just making it
u p . . . but since these don ' t really make up anything, they don ' t count
. . . a . . . as even making an image, so they . . . reduce to . . . a, just this
kin d of horizontal motion . . . which is, like , made of letters . . . mak-
in g . . . words out of . . . the same number of letters, & so on . . .
Hej inian: When you said " the other side of it , " do you mean
 240
Robert Grenier

that, that the words . . . ' m aterialize actualities ' ? . . . or do you think
that the world materializes words?
Grenier: The other side of it would be that the world material­
izes words . . . that ' s the , that' s a . . . I ' m going to try to go back & forth
across that, a . . . leave that possibility, a-whether the imagination , a,
makes up what you ' re looking at, or whether the . . . a . . . words are , in
some way or other, an . . . acknowledgement of something else . . . as
well-open, because I think that ' s still the issue . . & . . . gee . . . this
.

one is just . . .

restless moving to the right

. . . " restless moving to the right" . . . mostly a structural . . . event . . .

Perelman: No wait , now wait, umm . . . [laughter]
Grenier: Lem me do about a . . . two minute run . . . & then,
a . . . I 'll be all done . . .
Voice : Ever rightward . . .
Perelman: That ' s just . . . reading, huh? . . . is that reading about
reading?
Grenier: Yah , this is the situation . . .
Perelman: And that last one was reading about reading?
Grenier: Oh . . . I thought it was more like the way the words
were moving (BP: Yah, right) . . . so , it' s ' about itself , in that way . . .

she can tell me that she

can tell me that
she can tell me that she
can tell me that
she can tell me that she
can tell me that
she can tell me that she
can tell me that
she can tell me that she
can tell me that
she can tell me that she
can tell me that

. . . it' s , a . . . although this one , you know , from the other side , would
 241
Language/Site/World

look pretty much like it might actually be . . . a ' mirror image' of what
was happening (AH: Oh, yeah) . . . except that nothing moves 'down ' ,
like that, in . . . i n experience . . .
Perelman: This is like , " As the World Turns" . . .
Grenier: Yah, that happens to me a lot . . . so, ok . . . (AH : Abso-
lutely ! ) [RS laughs] . . . now . . . now I want to try to introduce, into the
discussion . . . these other things, that, to me . . . seem like they al-
so . . . do something else . . . although they should still be interesting,
a. . .

rain drops the first of many

. . . I mean , they . . . do something else, because they were interesting

structurally . . . & because that , a, that kind of form . . . would have
something to do with some other . . . a . . . activity . . . a . . . so that you
could actually, a , write . . . write fairly simple sentences
[laughs] . . . that sort of went from left to right . . . & the words con­
tained letters . . . a . . . & they were measured , in various ways-like
how long they were & how many letters they were-& their sounds
were heard , & that ' s what you were interested in , but you could . . . be
looking around , at the same time that you were , a . . . (AH : U m
hmm) . . . that that interest was activated , &/a . . . there would be
some . . . a . . . I ' m not . . . it' s not a correspondence, it 's like a . . . some ,
a . . . place where the . . . where the structure of the language shares,
a . . . occasion, in some way, with something else . . . & that 's really re-
markable . . . & I don ' t think it' s the same thing as the opaque projec-
tor [laughs] . . .
Silliman: This has a real interesting sense of time . . . like, those
are like raindrops, right? . . . very sort of present to you right now, just
like the words on the page . . . then " the first of many" is like , sort of
like, opening up (AH : Yah) . . . in this kind of way that's complete-
l y . . . you know . . . everything's possible . . .
Grenier: It was raining . . . or starting to rain [RS laughs] . . .
Hollo: The human animal looking at rain . . . through the
words . . .
Grenier: [laughs] Ok!
Hejinian: You can also read it that the rain is dropping the first
 242
Robert Grenier

of many . . . something-or-others . . . the rain is dropping the first of

many 'leaves" . . . or the rain is dropping the first of many . . .
Grenier: Yah , it' s a very heavy, a . . .
Hollo: Rain is a great fighter . . .
Grenier: . . . it ' s a very heavy rainfall . . .
Hollo: . . . it ' drops' the first of many . . . [laughter]
Perelman: What it' s dropping, though . . :
Grenier: This is great, tonight!
Perelman: . . . what it' s dropping . . . is the first of many . . .
Hejinian: Drops!
Perelman: . . . the first of many drops . . . that ' s right . . . "drops"
is like a noun & a verb, there . . .
Harryman: Yeah . . . " rain drops the first of many " . . .
Perelman: . . . almost like a . . . miniature Finnegans J#zke or
something . . . no, seriously, it goes around in a circle . . . ' rain drops
the first of many raindrops' . . .
Hollo: Ummm . . . goes right around . . .
Perelman: . . . except the second time , it ' s raining harder, be­
cause it ' s ' raindrops' ! [laughter]
Hejinian: No , he ' s right . . .
Grenier: So . . . one way to look at it , ' from the subject side '-&
this is really ' from the subject side ' -is to think that, this is like,
a . . . this is, language of the senses . . . the word patterns, a, function as
another sense . . . of a . . . & cognition , as of . . . what ' s going on, you
know . . . just sort of, look up, one day . . . & , a . . . at the same time as
your words are moving, a, you ' re looking . . . you ' re looking & listen­
ing to these things . . . & so, it looks like it 's ' another sense ' . . . but th at
would presume to locate it-& this may be where it is, you know-a,
in the imagination . . . & so that, a, you could only get, a, what it was
already, really . . . tuned for, in a way . . . because, obviously, words are
words, & they' re not anything but words . . . so, you ' re gonna get
. . . an image of the structure . . maybe . . .
Laura Moriarty: When you say, " image of the structure " . . . do
you mean [missing word] . . . are you talking about . . .
Grenier: It would be sort of like a cate- . . . what 's that . . . Kant­
ian , a . . . category thing, where the language pattern is one of the
scans, that you have as a-& that ' s been very attractive to me , as a
 243
Language/Site/World

thesis about what the words do , & they . . . it ' s helped , a-this was
really fun , at the time , I mean , this was the other . . . thing . . . besides
that the words were interesting, they could also . . . a . . . have
this . . . other thing going on . . .
Hollo: I think it also relates to . . . like , ancient tradition , in a
funny way . . . you know . . . to the Greek AnthologJ�, to, a . . . to haiku , &
senryu . . . &all those . . . tiny, final forms . . .
Grenier: How would I never know them? . . . I ' ve never seen a
translation of haiku , for example , that I could relate to . . .
Hollo: ' Haiku ' , forget it . . . senryu , yes . . R . H . Blythe , the
.

[missing word] anthology . . . yah . . .

Grenier: I dunno . . . I ' m sympathetic with the . . . with the ' the­
'
ory of that & . . . the first volume of Blythe ' s Haiku was a . . .
Hollo: ' Haiku ' , forget it . . . they just, they come out ' pretty ' in
English . . .
Grenier: No , the idea is interesting . . .
Hollo: But the senryu , the demotic haiku-the down-home
haiku-which are like the blues , or something, in Japanese . . . they
come out very different, they come out like this . . . a lot , actually . . .
Grenier: So , this is a little lo.ter . . . & it 's raining, it ' s rai n i ng
harder, you know . . .

if rain it ' s raining

Hollo : Oooh . . . this is French . . . ' s i pluie il pleu t '

[laughter] . . . i t would be a little different i n French [laughs) . . . you
couldn ' t get that " ing" in French . . .
Grenier: Well , it ' s . . . to me , it ' s the " it ' s " that ' s interesting
(AH : Yah, I know) . . . & curiously enough , the " i t ' s " doesn ' t have
any real locus (AH : " it ' s " . . . " it ' s " . . . ), I mean it doesn ' t have any
. . . any . . . sense atall , besides the sort of. . . sound pattern , in there
. . . well/so . . . that ' s a . . . formal . . . work , too . . .
Bromige: I t ' s like : if a, then the . . . (AH: Uh-huh)
Grenier: I f a, then . . . [laughs)
Silliman: No, i t ' s like : if a, then a . . .
Hollo: It do , is doing . . .
Bromige: If b, then a . . .
 244
Robert Grenier

Benson: " it ' s " doesn' t mean " rain " !

Perelman: " it ' s " . . . supposed to be , sort of, the locus of the
rain , in the rain . . .
Grenier: It's the rain, you know . . . 'it' is the rain . . . "it's" is
" rain " . . .
Perelman: It is raining . . . [laughter]
Grenier: " it ' s " is the hermetic . . . device , like they say . . .
Perelman: I mean , it ' s like they say in graduate school , it's a
' copulative ' , right? . . . when it' s . . . it ' s connecting these two things
that are . . . different . . .
Grenier: Let me try to spell out my ' idea' . . . because I feel that
. . . I ' ve not given an adequate statement of. . . of its . . .
Hollo: Audience is a little more active tonight, Bob . . .

Grenier: I ' m happy for that . . . so, here ' s another one . . .

stepping through the water to the rocks

. . . 1 thought, a, that was really, a . . . sort of ' pointless' , a . . . &

yet . . . at the same time , I really thought, wow . . . this is like , simply,
a . . . has this kind of engagement with, a, the motion of the body mov-
ing . . . across a stream , you know . . . (AH : Ah) . . . toward . . . ' the
other side ' , maybe . . . it' s a little vague, in the beginning, because you
don' t see the bottom , a . . .
Hollo: There ' s a little hit, where we tend to reverse it, from . . .
that . . . where it says, to ' stepping through the rocks to the water'
. . . you know, cause that is, maybe , more common experience, actu­
ally . . .
Perelman: Is this the split second as the foot enters the stream
before it hits the rock under the water? (AH : Ha-ha ! )
Grenier: O h . . . i t could b e that literal . . .
Harryman: Stepping on the rocks at the bottom . . . [laughs]
Grenier: In some way or other, this seemed to be a little pedes-
trian at the time . . . it seemed to be a little less ' thrilling' , &I
a . . . a . . . it seemed to be a little obvious, in many ways . . .
Hollo: It's a human act, too . . .
Silliman: Did you have a real strong sense about prepositions &
nouns . . . when you were writing this piece?
 245
Languages/Site/J#Jrld

Grenier: Oh , yeah, the prepositions, especially . . . were very lit­

eral , & you could . . . prepositions, a . . . you could visualize, you could
enact, as operations . . . a, so . . .
Silliman: Their operations are very much like verbs, right?
Grenier: Yah . . . they' re reall y, they' re real ' connectives' . . . they,
a . . . they go to their objects . . . really . . . directly . . . although, it can go
through . . . various constructions . . . those are really, yah, they ' re
more ' verbal ' than probably any other, a-is that true? . . . yah-arti­
cles have a little snap . . .
Voice: You said you were going to spell out your idea . . . ?
Grenier: Yah , a . . . well I thought that this was, a . . . more literal ,
a . . . in some way, than that other, sort of, a . . . ' fancy poem ' about
Norwegians, you know . . . which seemed , a, kind of indulgent, to me
. . . but you could, a . . .
Hejinian: Why?
Grenier: Because , a . . .
Hejinian: Because it was longer?
Grenier: Because this other thing just came along & was more
interesting actually . . . this is all
* * • * *
 Alan Bemheimer

Subject Matter

Alan Bernheimer:
A debate covering a wide area. Unsurpassed in his own branch . Expenses
beyond my compass. In every department of human activity. Belongs to
the domain of philosophy. distinguished in many fields ; is beyond the field
of vision. In the whole gamut of crime. Stick to your last. Unconscious of
his limits. Casuistry is not my line. A very unsuitable locale. Talking be­
side the point. It is not our province to inquire. Comes within the purview
of the act. Constantly straying from the question. Outside the range of
practical politics. Operating within a narrow radius. In the whole realm of
Medicine. Don't travel outside the record . Such evidence is precluded by
our reference. In the region of metaphysics . Any note in the lower regis­
ter. A scene of confusion. Find scope for one ' s powers ; limit the scope of
the inquiry. Useful in his own sphere. Wanders from the subject. Get to
the end of one's tether. Has chosen an ill defined theme. (H. W Fowler)

• * *

A field is a space proper to something, property to , property, of a

bull seeing red if that is what you are wearing. Red is a property of
color that makes sense . Sense is what you make of the world . The
word is your oyster, which has an r in it. The English have a silent r,
which they pronounce dee. " Divinity with the small crystals is veddy
smooth and velvety on the palate . " " Oh God , I could be bounded in
a nutshell and count myself the king of infinite space, were it not that I

246
 24 7
Subject Matter

have bad dreams. " Good English, Shakespeare. Bad about what?
What is this about?
What is about? About is a preposition . It takes a noun . It takes a
noun to know one. It takes a pronoun to pronounce one . But a prepo­
sition comes first . It puts a noun in an abstract relation-time, posi­
tion , direction , possession-with some other word . But time, posi­
tion, direction , and possession don 't say much about about. It must be
very abstract . It has a little of position . The field is about the bull .
Also, the bull is about the field somewhere. Be exact .
The object of the preposition is to boss the noun. The boss is the
subject . The subject is . . . the subject. In plain sight, at this level .
* * *

Soft ball , medium soft ball, medium firm ball , firm ball, hard ball , solid
ball , real hard, very hard, hardens, threads, soft crack, crack, crackles,
cracks and hops, hairs , spins hairs, strings, snaps, breaks, and brittle .

The subject is candy making. The subject matter is sugar syrup,

sugar in solution that crystallizes in different ways, takes different
forms as it cools, depending how it has been treated-how hot it has
been cooked . When a small portion of the syrup is dropped into ice
water, it takes these forms .
Syrup cooked t o the soft ball stage is used for fondant , fudge, and
penuchi . Syrup cooked to a firmer ball is used for caramel . Still
firmer, and it is used for popcorn balls, nougat , divinity, and some taf­
fies. Hard but not brittle, for butterscotch and taffies. Hard crack
stage with separate threads, for brittles and glaces.
This subject matter has been treated very scientifically in Experi­
mental Cookery, by Belle Lowe . It is a highly quantified, empirical cui­
sine . The chapter on eggs has an analysis of angel cakes with plates of
cross sections showing the different textures resulting from folding the
flour with forty, sixty, and eighty strokes, and from beating the egg
whites to varying degrees. Another plate shows the " standing-up
quality of yolk and white of a fresh and a deteriorated egg. "
Two longhorn Cheddar cheeses, a youngster of six days and vet-
 248
A lan Bernheimer

eran of 82 days, are subjected to the rarebit test for 50 day s . The
young one consisten tly provides miserable rarebits .
Another interesting tidbit typical o f the book concerns the steril­
izing properties of silver. " Less silver than is ordinarily transferred to
food from silverware is required to sterilize drinking water. "
Wherever there is subject matter, there is someone paying atten·
tion to it , there is a treatment of or attitude towards it . Food is one ex­
ample we love to eat .

Mr. Barbee and I had a glass of amontillado , and then Mrs. Barbee
brought out three bowls of terrapin stew , Southern style , so hot it was

bubbling. The three of u s sat dow n , and while we ate , Mrs. Barbee
gave me a list of the things in the stew. She said it contained the meat,
hearts , and livers of two d iamondbacks k illed early that day, eight yolks
of hard-boiled e ggs that had been pounded up and passed through a

sieve , a half pound of yellow country butter, two pints of thi�k cream , a

little flour, a pinch of salt , a dash of nutmeg, and a glass and a half of
amontillado. The meat came off the terrapins' tiny bones with a touch
of the spoon, and it tasted like delicate baby m ushrooms. I had a second
and a third helping. The day was clear and cool , and sitting there,
drinking dry sherry and eating terrapin , I looked at the scarlet leaves on

the sweet gums and swamp maples on the riverbank, and at the sand­
pipers running stiff-legged on the sand, and at the people sitting in the
sun on the decks of the yachts anchored in the Skidaway, and I decided
that I was about as happy as a human can be in this day and time.

This man has a less scientific attitude . He doesn' t try to be food,

but he is having his subj ect and eating i t , too .
This passage comes from " The Same a s M onkey Glands, " a

piece by Joseph Mitchell , who was a New York C ity newspaper re·
porter and for many years a New lVrker magazine fact writer.
Science writing and journalism represent one extreme in the
range of roles that subj ect m atter can play in writing : the primary
role. Pulitzer Prizes in j ournalism are not awarded for good senten­
ces . The sentences fend for themselves. Given a resemblance to Eng·
l ish and a straightforward display, the idea is that the facts will speak
for themselves . The art is to get people to divulge them , then sell them
i n the form o f newspapers .
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Subject Matter

Pentagon gets its wires crossed

A SOVIET AIR-RAID SCARE
Military officials increased the alert
status of strategic nuclear bombers
and missiles briefly early Tuesday
when a computer problem caused a
false alarm indicating a multiple
Soviet m issile attack, the Pentagon
said today.

No surprise a burp in the system indicates attack . The system is

designed to indicate attack. C ircuits make no distinction in kind be­
tween Space Invaders and the real world . Burglar alarms go off on
any corner. Nor is this great investigative reporting. As far as we
know, this is the story pretty much as it was volunteered to the press.
The lead paragraph strips down to " Officials increased alert when
problem caused alarm . " The writing is quite restrained . The word
war isn ' t used in the whole story. The headline sells the paper. You
learn practically nothing in the rest of the story about what actually
happened (nothing happened) . It is mostly reassurances . It is not
flashy writin g . I t ' s quite impersonal. Did a person actually write it?
The other end of the range of roles subject matter plays in writ­
ing would be the subject matter as an occasion for, say, style or compo­
sition .

In the year on moment . Dew was a sight . In deed . In need . Of smell. It

was not of the morning. Everywhere . More . It was all hours. Any­
where . Where sweat ran . Lovely. Despised . Anyhow . Where eyes
looked out from glasses . The nose . Bridge . Unnecessary. Over the river.
Pools . Where sight swam .

Did a person write this? Yes . Arlene Zekowski, a proponent of

" open structure language , " who , together with her husband Stanley
B e rne , teaches at the University of Eastern New Mexico . They pro­
pose that all of some 300 elements of grammar and rules which now
b u rden written English be dropped , except for the comma and the
period . She writes with periods, and he writes with commas .
There is a lot of unfenced range between these extremes , but for
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Alan Bernheimer

the moment let's back up to Aristode, for whom poetry was " repre·
sentation of life . " Subject matter was not a problem : " Now it is not
right to break up the traditional stories, I mean , for instance Clytaem­
nestra being killed by Orestes and Eriphyle by Alcmaeon , but the
poet must show invention and make a skillful use of tradition . "
Classical tragedians had a given subj ect matter that worked to·
ward given ends.

S ince the poet must by " representation " produce the pleasure which
comes from feeling pity and fear, obviously this quality must be ern·
bodied in the incidents . . . brother kills brother, or son father, or mother
son, or son mother-either kills or intends to kill , or does something of
the kind.

That ' s it, for tragedy at least. Tragedy is not a current form.
These things happen to your neighbors. They don ' t happen in your
writing. They do happen in the writing of Charles Reznikoff, with a
numbing, industrial , carefree regularity.
As for epics, Aristode reduces them to essence plus episodes.

The story o f the Odyssey is quite short . A man i s for many years away
from home and his footsteps are dogged by Poseidon and he is all alone.
Moreover, affairs at horne are in such a state that his estate is being
wasted by suitors and a plot laid against his son, but after being storm·
tossed he arrives himself, reveals who he is, and attacks them , with the
result that he is saved and destroys his enemies. That is the essence, the
rest is episodes .

In a sense, the subj ect matter is episode .

* * *

There is a distinction to draw, and then to dissolve . The subject

is the field in view . Dissolve to: subject matter is the material out of
which a thing is formed; material for discourse· or expression in Ian·
guage ; facts or ideas constituting material for speech or written com·
position . These definitions get less concrete, more figurative, as the
distance increases between subject and matter. The subject or theme
 251
Subject Matter

of a written composition . " The subject matters are slowly and pa­
tiently enumerated, without disclosing the purpose of the speaker, un­
til he reaches the end of his sentence" (Kinglake) .
There is a distinct aversion to naming words or language as the
primary matter operated upon, an insistence on something of interest ,
an idea or at least a fact that is being talked about.

Words are in the public domain . Everyone has a license . As

Auden says:

Writers, poets especially, have an odd relation to the public because

their medium , language, is not, like the paint of the painter or the notes
of the composer, reserved for their use but is the common property of
the linguistic group to which they belong. Lots of people are will i ng to
admit that they don't understand painting or music, but very few in­
deed who have been to school and learned to read advertisements will
admit that they don't understand English.

Analogies with other arts, though always suspect, . are inevitable.

The subject matter of a Balinese dance I saw a few weeks ago would
seem to be the vocabulary of gestures. Only children need to keep in
mind that the dance represents a bee in a garden to stay interested.
The question of art and its content is carefully dissected by Vik­
tor Shklovsky, the Russian formalist critic .

There are two attitudes toward art.

One is to view the work of art as a window on the world.
Through words and images, these artists want to express what lies
beyond words and images. Artists of this type deserve to be called trans­
lators.
The other type of attitude is to view art as a world of independently
existing things.
Words, and the relationships between words, thoughts and the
irony of thoughts, their divergence-these are the content of art. Art, if
it can be compared to a window at all, is only a sketched window.
Complex works of art are usually the result of combinations and
interactions between works previously existing, simpler and, in particu­
lar, smaller in scope . . . .
In the primitive novel, the hero is a vehicle for connecting the
 252
Alan Bernheimer

parts. When works are undergoing change , interest shifts to the connec­
tive tissue.
Psychological motivation and the verisimilitude of situation change
began to arouse more interest than the success of the component parts.
Then appeared the psychological novel and drama, as well as the psy­
chological perception of old dramas and novels.
That happened , in all probability, because by then the "compo­
nents" . . . had worn out.
At the next stage in art , psychological motivation wears out . . . .
Finall y, all contrasts are exhausted. Then one choice remains-to
shift to the components, to sever the connections, which have become
scar tissue .

Shklovsky' s arguments echo Aristotle ' s reduction of the epic to

episodes. (For a discussion of components coming to the foreground
in current poetry, see Ron Silliman ' s " The New Sentence " Hills 6/7 . )
Subject runs into form a t a n elementary level , where matter
equals words. " What do you read, my lord ? " " Words, words,
words, " says Hamlet . " What is the matter? " asks Polonius . Some­
thing on his mind.
Take a story- " Aerial Ways " by Boris Pasternak. The first half,
ostensibly, is about the kidnapping of a child in the pre-revolutionary
Russian countryside . But really it is a story of the sky, where most of
the action occurs .

When the enormous lilac-colored cloud appeared at the end of the road,
silencing the grasshoppers which were chirping sultrily in the long grass,
and while the drums in the camp sighed and died away, the earth grew
dark, and there was no life in the world . . . .
The cloud threw a glance at the baked and undistinguished stubble
earth which lay scattered over the horizon . Gently the cloud reared up­
wards . The stubble earth extended far away, beyond the camp . The
cloud fell on its forelegs, and smoothly crossing the road, noiselessly
crawled along the fourth railway line of the shunting. The bushes un­
covered their heads and moved with the whole bank behind them . They
flowed backwards, greeting the cloud. She did not answer them .

Fifteen years later, after the revolution, change in the world is

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Subject Matter

played off ironically against constancy in people, and the great dis­
tancing, on a celestial scale , amplifies the irony. But the sky remains
the dominant character.

There were aerial ways. And on them every day, like a train, came the
rectilinear thoughts of a Liebknecht , a Lenin, a few other minds of the
same greatness. They were paths set on a level, able and powerful
enough to cross any frontier, whatever its name. One of these lines,
opened during the war, preserved its former strategical height and ow­
ing to the nature of the frontiers through which they traced it, obtruded
themselves upon the builders of these frontiers . This ancient military
line, intersecting the frontiers of Poland and later of Germany on its
own plane and in its own time-here, at the very beginning, manifestly
escaped from the understanding mediocrity and the endurance of medi­
ocrity. It passed above the courtyard , which remained shy of the far­
sightedness of its destination and its oppressive size, just as a suburb
runs helter-skelter away from the railways and fears them. This was the
sky of the Third International.

I fall for the sky myself. It's so empty. Mysterious and other­
worldly, it can be invested with whatever you need .
What you need is to be fascinated .

• * •

The best of travel writing typically gets down to itself as subject .

Thoreau, in one of his quaintly superior moods when speaking of trav­

el, said, " It is not worth while going round the world to count the cats
in Zanzibar. " In nearly every book of travel this is proved to be true.
They show it was not worth while, seeing it was either to shoot cats or to
count degrees of latitude . . . . Consider Arctic travel. I have read long
rows of books on that, but recall few emotional moments. The finest
passage in any book of Arctic travel is in Warburton Pikes' " Barren
Grounds, " where he quotes what the Indian said to the missionary who
had been speaking of heaven. The Indian asked, "And is it like the land
of the Musk-ox in summer, when the mist is on the lakes, and the loon
cries very often ? "
You feel a t once that the country the Indian saw around him would
 254
Alan Bemheimer

easily be missed by us, even when in the midst of it . For taking the bear­
ings of such a land, the sextant, and the miles already travelled, would
not be factors to help much. Now the Indian knew nothing of artificial
horizons and the aids to discovering where they are which strangers use.
But in summer the mists of his lakes were but the vapour of his mus­
ings, the penumbra of the unfathomed deeps of his mind whereon he
paddled his own canoe; and when the wild-fowl called, it was his mem­
ory heard; it was his thought become vocal then while he dreamed on. I
myself learned that the treasures found in travel , the chance rewards of
travel which make it worth while, cannot be accounted beforehand, and
seldom are matters a listener would care to hear about afterwards : for
they have no substance . They are no matter. They are untranslatable
from their time and place; and like the man who unwittingly lies down
to sleep on the tumulus where little people dance on midsummer night,
and dreams that in the place where man has never been his pockets
were filled with fairy gold, waking to find pebbles there instead, so the
traveller cannot prove the dreams he had , showing us only pebbles
when he tries. Such fair things cannot be taken from the magic mo­
ment . They are but fUmy, high in the ceiling of your thoughts then , rosy
and sunlit by the chance of the light , transitory, melting as you watch.
You come down to your lead again. These occasions are not on your
itinerary. They are like the Indian 's lakes in summer. They have no
names . They cannot be found on the best maps. Not you nor any other
will ever discover them again . Nor do they fill the hunger which sent
you travelling; they are not provender for notebooks . They do not come
to accord with your mood, but they come unaware to compel , and it is
your own adverse and darkling atoms that are changed, at once dancing
in accord with the rare incidence of that unreasonable and transcendent
moment of your world , the rhythm of which you feel, as you would the
beat of drums.
(H. M . Tomlinson , The Sea and the jungle)

The locales travel writing depends on take second place , if it is

any good , and especially in the memory of it, to the disturbance the
writer causes in them , or they cause in him . Surprise is around the
comer, but not the kind you expect , as Christopher Isherwood discov­
ers in his book of South American travel , The Condor and the Cows.
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SubJect Matter

That is the irony of travel . You spend your boyhood dreaming of a

magic , impossible distant day when you will cross the Equator, when
your eyes will behold Quito. And then , in the slow prosaic process of
life, that day undramatically dawns-and finds you sleepy, hun gry and
dull . The Equator i s just another valley ; you aren ' t sure which and you
don ' t much care . Quito is just another railroad station , with fuss about
baggage and taxis and tips. And the only comforting reality, amidst all
this picturesque noisy strangeness, is to find a clean pension run by
Czech refugees and sit down in a cozy Central European parlor to a
lunch of well-cooked Wiener Schnitzel .

Travel highlights the attitudes of the traveller. In William C arlos

Williams ' s �yage to Pagany, the hero gets angry in Florence not with
matter, but with style .

He had always been somewhat irritated by the Renaissance anyhow.

The crudeness of the material they used , the size , the coarseness even ,
he ate up with joy-but the touch of the delicate fingers bit into him like
an acid. -God damn their impertinence , he cried aloud, to appease his
own dullness and sorrow . It is too soft , nouveau riche: with their petty imi­
tations of the Assyrian , the Egyptian and the Greek; soft and harsh ,
brutal and sweet . He found it lying, offen sive , this unhappy American
with nothin g but the offense of New York in his mind to give him stabil­
ity.

He is easily egged , this American abroad , out of his element and ,

incidentally, on the rebound from an affair on the Riviera.
" The man has spent his life rejecting the accepted sense of
things , " says Wallace Stevens of Williams. " In that , most of all , his
romantic temperament appears . "
The accepted sense of things is fertile ground for the social critic ,
an d the major premise for comment . It comes in for perhaps its most
se vere lambasting in Flaubert ' s last (uncompleted ) book, Bouvard and
Pecuclu:t, which plows through subject matter, per se , on a panoramic
sc ale . Every field of human endeavor is treated , as the two elderly petit
bo urgeois title characters , Parisian copy clerks, retire to the countryside
to gether on a tidy inheritance . The two botch every attempt at rural
 256
Alan Bernheimer

pursuits-which they approach through books in preference to their

new neighbors' personal knowledge-their garden ; their farm ; their
distillery, which explodes, leading them to study chemistry ; then med­
icine , its origins in palaeontology; geology ; the creation , leading to
feuds with the local doctor and the priest for interference in their prac­
tices. They take up history, defer to literature , which leads to politics,
educational experiments, sexual passions-all disasters; and finally
turning from the m aterial world : spiritism , mesmerism , necromancy,
metaphysics, despair, a suicide pact , renewed religious faith . At every
turn they are stymied by contradictions inherent in conventional wis­
dom .
"They want to know why things are , and by infinite regress they
enlarge the distance between what they are studying at any given mo­
ment and their ability to cope with the problems of daily life , " accord­
ing to Alfred Krailsheimer, translator and critic.
A companion piece to the unfinished novel is the Dictionary of Re­
ceived Ideas-a satire on a closed circle of attitudes .
Under the heading Bachelors is found , " All selfish and immoral.
Should be taxed . Doomed to a lonely old age . " Under Debauchery,
" C ause of all the diseases from which bachelors suffer. "
Cliches are prescribed for behavior. " Thirteen . Avoid being thir­
teen at a table; it brings bad luck . The sceptics should not fail to joke:
' What ' s the difference? I ' ll eat enough for two ! ' Or again, if there are
ladies present, ask if any is pregnant . "
" Homo . Say : 'Ecce homo! ' on the arrival of any person you are
expecting. "
* * *

Most of us probably first encountered the word subject in school,

where it meant a demarcated area of study. Subjects aren ' t taught in
school today, where skill s are emphasized instead : reading skills, math
skill s . History, geography, science, and current affairs-the subjects
we studied in grade school-are gone . Reading is taught, at least in
one system , by a program of graduated stories generated around suc­
ceedingly more advanced groups of vocabulary words. The reading
skill s aren ' t put to use in any defined or structurally elaborated areas.
 257
Subject Matter

There is no demonstration that the skills might be useful in the study

of something else . Reading is just reading, to all appearances an end
in itself. Math , despite being presented perhaps as the more utilitarian
of the two, always seemed like a pure system . Number was the subject
of arithmetic, and word problems were always a mess, hateful for the
task of translation involved , cluttering up the abstractions with diffi­
culties from everyday life . But if reading was also an exercise in ab­
stract thinking, it was nice to have subjects to think about.
* * *

Moving away from the intensely attitudinal (Flaubert), I want to

touch on some other kinds of roles subject matter can play.
For me, Raymond Chandler writes about prose . He writes about
similes (of the more self-conscious and exotic breed) . He writes about
rhythms of grammar in sentences, and of sentences in paragraphs.
That is the information for me: how the prose works . The technique is
my pleasure. Incidentally, there is a rather romantic hero , who walks
as straight a line as he can through episodes of social aberrance on the
part of others. There is a phenomenal and peculiarly American city
setting, caught in a vital period of its late adolescence. And then there
is the detail , the very specific nouns and adjectives that form the reser­
voir of the prose. That ' s my pleasure, too .

The motor of the gray Plymouth throbbed under her voice and the rain
pounded above it. The violet light at the top of Bullock's green-tinged
tower was far above us, serene and withdrawn from the dark, dripping
city. Her black-gloved hand reached out and I put the bills in it. She
bent over to count them under the dim light of the dash. A bag clicked
open, clicked shut. She let a spent breath die on her lips. She leaned to­
wards me.

This tersely built, prepositionally tense paragraph occurs at the

ante-climax of C handler's first novel , The Big Sleep, as far from a who­
dunnit as any of his books. But there are questions the plot wants an­
swers for, and a big one is about to be delivered. The liquid polysyl­
lables of the fi rst two sentences give way to the one-man-one-vote
necklace of monosyllables in the last five.
 258
A lan Bernheimer

The opening paragraph lets you know what kind of character

this Philip Marlowe (the hero) is:

It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun
not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I
was wearing my power-blue suit, with dark blue shirt , tie and display
handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on
them . I was neat , clean, shaved and sober, and I didn 't care who knew
it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be . I was
calling on four m illion dollars.

Those clocks wouldn ' t give you the time of day. The tone is highly
moral . Chandler has written that he sees M arlowe as the American
mind, and I would add : what ' s best about it.
For the rest, I don' t read crime writing much because the writing
just isn ' t there , crime notwithstanding.
A poet who seems to me to occupy a similar position in relation
to his subject matter as Chandler is Merrill Gilfillan . The attention to
physical detail is a little less exquisite, but all the richer in its import,
existing in a world not limited even to the galaxy of peculiarities in
Southern C alifornia.

KHAN
Principles of Beauty Relative to the Human Head.
Red dust over the henna warehouse for one .
The air smells like a pleasant hatband,
the light is right for this particular rendezvous ,
a friend o n the way with a deck o f cards
from the carpeting of an u nlucky man found resting
on the outskirts of Pompeii that day, propped
on his bedroll, strenuously acquired. We will dicker
through ski masks in back rooms of the big mu �eums
when there on the sparkling cafe sidewalk, there You are ,
surprisingly dapper in midspeech ropy with expletive
and aluminum granaries, hair pitched back
in a carnival star. Down around the knees informs me
you are terrible , but I am not afraid, I am in touch
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Subject Matter

with my predecessors to the extent that wherever I am

I discover them in an acoustical way
under overhanging foliage during the lulls. Tut.
We were crouched, we were spread, we were gypped
into landscape. First the Firth of Forth. Then home
with something on the radio, high ridges disappearing
to meet in the North. Not for long!

To a large degree, the way he gets at his subjects is through the

persona, some kind of traveller, adventurer, but on the job, with per­
haps post card photographer as a front, or spice importer. "Good old
Bulgaria she paid me cash I when I sent her the plans for a seaside
country " ( " Mercator") . It sounds like a man of the world, in touch
with the ultra-violet and infra-red ranges of commerce .

. . . An old job
at the Rose Cooperative . The job, the only one
I ever died for-Roses and spending money!
So crystalline I shot from vice-exchequer
to front-line driver in less than a week and drew
the long-stem barrio route, where when they bought
you know they 'd be fed to the children cold ,
approached like artichokes, but sweeter.
The rose truck .
That was politics in bloom
wheeling up to the high curbs in a drizzle,
firing a bandaged 1 2 gauge in the air.
("A Vision ")

The preference for driver over executive is something Marlowe

would agree with. You get a cross between Chandler and and Ker­
ouac plus generational leap . The subject is the life, led in the head of
this guy who ' s on the line.

PENNSYLVANIA DIARY
Monday night, 1 0 o'clock.
Well, tomorrow we attack Gettysburg.
 260
Alan Bernheimer

The attitude towards subject here has to do with the wryness of the
idea of summoning up big hunk of history by tiny moment (two
lines! ) and the dramatic irony of it all corning down on a word that is
barely a part of speech : " Well . "
Extracting and naming subject matter of specific works or writers
isn ' t what I ' m after as much as seeing what use the subject may be in
the problem of writing. A recent prose piece by Gilftllan called " Rev·
eree " takes the form of reminiscences of a midwestern youth , but
treehouses recur as the object of search and photography is the proj·
ect-a taste for a specialized , rural, arborial architecture that sparks
other memories. Here the idea for a subject makes the writing pos·
sible, forms the enthusiasm for it.
Persona leads to other writers, such as Ted Berrigan, who said
his recently published selected poems, So Going Around Cities, is " The
Story So Far" with " a character named I " as " speaker, hearer, nota·
ter, perceiver, even judge . ' ' Persona also leads to one of Berrigan ' s fa·
vorite writers, A. J . Liebling.
Liebling was a journalist and critic of journalism whose favorite
subj ects were eating, war, boxing,. the press, and oddity. But all of his
stories are told with an I in one of the roles Berrigan lists. Not surpris·
ingly, exaggeration is one of the principle devices used by this larger·
than-life writer.

The Proust Madeldne phenomenon is now as firmly established in folk·

lore as Newton' s apple or Watt's steam kettle. The man ate a tea his·
cuit, the taste evoked memories, he wrote a book. This is capable of ex·
pression by the formula TMB , for Taste .,. Memory .,. Book. Some
time ago , when I began to read a book called The Food of France, by
Waverly Root, I had an inverse experience : BMT, for Book .,. Mem·
ory .,. Taste. Happily, the tastes that The Food of France re-created for
me-small birds, stewed rabbit, stuffed tripe, Cote Rotie, and Tavel­
were more robust than that of the madeldne, which Larousse defines as
" a light cake made with sugar, flour, lemon juice , brandy, and eggs. "
(The quantity of brandy in a madeldne would not furnish a gnat with an
alcohol rub . )

Liebling was a great feeder, his excesses i n prose exceeded only

by those at table.
 261
Subject Matter

Narrative seems allied at some level with getting at subjects

through attitudinal personae , even if only the vestiges of narrative re­
main, as in Berrigan or Gilfillan, and the connective tissue Shklovsky
talks about has become the occasion for synaptic torquing.
Another kind of attack on a subject is the meditative, rumina­
tive, speculative. As examples I ' m thinking of Brillat-Savarin' s Physi­
ology of Taste, Max Picard' s The J#rld of Silence, and Francis Ponge' s
Soap.
Brillat-Savarin was the eighteenth-century French appeals court
judge who codified in one book the body of information and style that
we think of as classical French cuisine-not so much recipes as a
highly civilized attitude toward food and eating. He was more a deli­
cate than a great feeder like Liebling, or the Rabelaisian Grimod de la
Reyniere, who spent eight years compiling the Almanack of Gourmands,
and whose enthusiasm drove him once to exclaim, "I would eat my
own father with such a sauce . " No, Brillat-Savarin is more sober, and
of a finer tone, heralding the supremacy of man in matters of taste , as
illustrated by gourmets who " distinguish by its superior flavor the
thigh on which a partridge leans while sleeping. "
The subjects of meditation range from the senses, taste, appetite
to specific foods, theory of frying, thirst, the pleasures of the table , di­
gestion, repose, sleep, corpulence, exhaustion, Parisian restaurants
and keepers, and gastronomical mythology. His style is philosophi­
cally analytical, ranging from the aphoristic to the speculative and the
discursive: "The discovery of a new dish is more beneficial to human­
ity than the discovery of a star. . . .
" A dinner which ends without cheese is like a beautiful woman
with only one eye . "
He discourses on the discovery of ozmazome, " that pre­
eminently sapid part of meat, " and treats fish to a philosophical re­
flection .
This i s a kind o f treatment o f subject that covers the field . The
UVrld of Silence is covered by Max Picard , in his book of that name .
Briefly, he proposes silence as a basic positive phenomenon-not the
absence of sound . He then relates it to the origins of speech , truth,
ge sture, ego, knowledge , history, love , time, nature , poetry, and
more . The writing is hypnotically repetitive , and its persuasive effect
 262
A lan Bernheimer

is heuristic, the result of an accumulated substantiation . After a time,

it works on you , despite Picard ' s highly Christian lament for a lost
world . Basicall y, in this fallen world , things are just too noisy for him.
An earlier book of his is meditations on another subject , The Hu·
man Face. There, the same method seems not to work as well , and I
think the fault is with the subject matter, which isn 't empty in the
same way, but rather is less abstract , less capable of being created by
his insistence .
The third of these exhaustive treatments is Soap by Francis
Ponge . It's literally about soap. It also is quite repetitive :

There is much to say about soap . Precisely everything that it tells about
itself until the complete disappearance, the exhaustion of the subject.
This is precisely the object suited to me.

Fourteen pages later :

There i s much t o say about soap. Precisely everything that i t tells about
itself, when one chafes it with water in a certain way. It also looks as if it
had much to say. May it say it, then . With volubility, with enthusiasm.
Until the disapperance by exhaustion of its own theme . When it has fin·
ished saying it, it no longer is. The longer it is in saying it, the more it
can say it at len gth , the more slowly it melts, the better quality it is.

Here , the subject is reduced to object . There is very sharp focus,

but not of a scientific nature . The subject is turned over and over in
writing as it, the object, is in its own use . So there is this equation or
parallel, grossly visible but slippery all the same , between the thing
and the process, where the boundary line between subject and tech­
nique is seen dissolving, or the two terms of metaphor approaching
unity.
To re-erect the metaphor, take the two apart again . They seem
more comfortable as a duality than a unity. If the form or technique is
the mechanism by which the mind takes it exercise , then the subject
matter is the weight . And the opposite of Ponge is Raymond Roussel,
who used elaborate compositional methods to arrive at the most. bi­
zarre subject matter, attended by a hermeneutic rationale .
 263
Subject Matter

Locus Salus, a singular novel, is comprised of a tour through the

park of a villa outside Paris, during which the host , a wealthy bachelor
scientist , shows and explains to his guests an array of fascinating and
puzzling exhibits involving mechanisms and surprising effects that are
the fruit of his discoveries . A large diamond-shaped aquarium is the
setting, for example , for a number of tableaux performed by trained
sea horses, a hairless cat , bottle imps, and a disembodied face .
First the phenomena are described. Then we get two levels of ex­
planation: the technical (more elaborate in its fictive science than jules
Verne) followed by the narrative significance (usually even more intri­
cate and based on one or more levels of history and fiction) . All this is
inside the book .
Outside the work are the complexes of puns and word associa­
tions that generated incidents for which Roussel had then to invent
contexts and explanations .
This may be the case of most extreme elaborateness for a writer
getting at his subject , and the point where the technique for doing so
has become the book, a chinese box of subjects , where events nest
within other events that they are about , and techniques of composi­
tion are the subject of the book, insofar as the elucidation of events in
it involves a layered regression of explanations, occasions.
Retreating for the moment from the artifactitious world, let ' s
look a t the natural palpable world, which , under Western eyes a t least,
is thought to undergo the least transformation when objectively ob­
served and described . A corollary might be, "As science makes prog­
ress in any subject area, poetry recedes from it, " according to John
Henry Newman, a nineteenth-century English theologian and author.
But this may not be so .
First, take Gilbert White, an eighteenth-century English natural­
i st who was vicar of Selbourne, a Hampshire village. For fifteen years
he kept a naturalist ' s journal , providing 1 0 , 000 undigested daily rec­
ords of temperature ; wind ; weather, first appearance of birds, insects,
an d flowering plants ; harvest progress; and the like; not to mention
scant personal glimpses of neighborhood travel or visits from relatives .
You can use the journals like a Western country I Ching for random in­
formation which is internally coherent and structured by daily clivi-
 264
Alan Bernheimer

sions, annual cycles, as well as other less regular natural patterns.

From 1 7 7 7 :

Sept. 7. Swallows & house-martins dip much i n ponds. Vast Northern

Aurora.
Sept. 9. Fern-owls haunt Mrs. Snooke 's orchard in autumn . . . .
Sept. 1 7. The sky this evening, being what they call a mackerel sky, was
most beautiful, & much admired in many parts of the country. . . .

Oct. 3 What becomes of those massy clouds that often incumber the at·
mosphere in the day, & yet disappear in the evening. Do they melt
down into dew? . . .
Oct. 25 Hogs are put-up in their fatting pens. The hanging woods are
beautifully tinged .
Oct. 30. Gluts of rain, much thunder. . . .
Nov. 3. Sea-gulls, winter-mews, haunt the fallows . Beetles flie .

The language is very terse and apt . I t is a thousand times more

interesting than reading the phone book . Its subject is the natural
world . As subject matter itself, there is a degree to which the fineness
of the divisions, the level of detail , blurs somewhat to become fancy­
and you seem to have stepped into A Midsummer Night 's Dream.
In fairness to Newman , naturalists may be the scientists who
most closely approach literary technique in their work: observation,
organization , and translation of events into words.
William Bartram was a colonial Philadelphian . His Travels (and
those of his father John before him) provide us with a detailed view of
the C arolinas, Georgia, and Florida in lush , primeval state .
But Bartram is best known in literary circles for having provided
the raw material for C oleridge ' s imagery in " Kubla Khan" and to
some degree for "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. " For his depic­
tion of Alph, the sacred river, Coleridge drew from Bartram's descrip­
tion of Salt Springs near Florida' s Lake George :

. . . a creek of four or five feet depth of water, and nearly twenty yards
over, which meanders six m iles through green meadows, . . . and directly
opposite to the mouth or outlet to the creek, is a continual and amazing
ebullition , where the waters are thrown up in such abundance and
 265
Subject Matter

amazing force, as to jet and swell up two or three feet above the com­
mon surface : white sand and small particles of shells are thrown up with
the waters, near to the top, when they diverge from the center, subside
with the expanding flood , and gently sink again, forming a large rim or
funnel round the aperture or mouth of the fountain .

Transformed , and transposed to Xanadu:

A n d from t h i s chasm , with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth i n fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momentarily was forced:
Amid whose swi ft half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher ' s flail :
And ' m id these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, . . .

Wordsworth and C hateaubriand are also indebted to Bartram for raw

material.
Newman ' s idea of poetry retreating as the cold light of science
enters a field has less to do with poetry as it is written than with a mys­
tic al beauty, some quality of a lost world , for which there is a yearning
like Picard ' s :

But the real poet starts i n possession o f th e object , and goes in search of
the words, not vice versa. Today the poet ' s word goes to all words. It
can combine with many things, attract many things to itself; seems
more than it really is. In fact the word seem s to be as it were sent out to
catch other words. And so it comes about that the writer today presents
far more than he actually possesses himself. H is person is less than what
he writes; he is not identical with his work.

What Picard laments seems like a great relief today. Our work can be
be tter than we are .
Literatu re is renewed, often as not , through the acquisition of
new areas of subject matter. Shklovsky saw literature annexing the
 266
A lan Bernheimer

nonaesthetic periphery-in his case literary theory-as subject matter

for creative prose .
Science is as good a tool as any for opening new fields .
What happens to the raw subject matter, whether it is in the form
of observations and thoughts by the writer, or already in the form of
writing by someone else , is commonly that it goes into a notebook,
where Coleridge, for example, copied passages of Bartram . In note·
books the subject matter is digested . For me , it is separated there from
its context and given a new haphazard one in the chronology of my
interests. It is objectified or defamiliarized to the point that when I see
it again, if it is fragmentary enough , I may not even remember what
its original meaning was . In any case, there it seems to get charged, in
the sense of acquiring not only import, but a specificity, even a polar·
ity in relation to surrounding material as my eye runs over pages from
time to time, so that utterly disparate terms or concepts can grow to·
gether to a point where I see a new meaning.
A good test question on subject matter is what book, besides a
notebook, do you take to the desert island . A good answer is " a good
dictionary rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable , "
for, as Auden continues , " a dictionary i s absolutely passive an d may
be legitimately read in an infinite number of ways . "
A s for the notebook, its cousin in city clothes-and another use
for half-digested subject matter-is the commonplace book , a collec·
tion of quotations , found writings, assembled preferably by one
reader, one sensibility (otherwise you get The Book of Lists) . A good
one is Au den ' s A Certain J#Jrld. In the foreword he admits it is a kind
of autobiography, and quotes Chesterton :
There is at the back of every artist' s mind something like a pattern or a
type of architecture . The original quality in any man of imagination is
imagery. It is a thing like the landscape of his dreams; the sort of world
he would like to make or i n which he would wish to wander; the strange
flora and fauna of his own secret planet ; the sort of thing he likes to
think about. This general atmosphere, and pattern or structure of
growth, governs all his creations, however varied.

On the subject of writing, Auden himself says:

 267
SubJect Matter

Most of what I know about the writing of poetry . . I discovered long

.

before I took an interest in poetry itself.

Between the ages of six and twelve I spent a great many of my
waking hours in the fabrication of a private secondary sacred world, the
basic elements of which were (a) a limestone landscape . . . and (b) an in­
dustry-lead mining . . . .
I learned certain principles which I was later to apply to all artistic
fabrication . Firstly, whatever other elements it may include, the initial
impulse to create a secondary world is a feeling of awe aroused by en­
counters , in the primary world , with sacred beings or events . Though
every work of art is a secondary world, such a world cannot be con­
structed ex nihilo, but is a selection and recombination of the contents of
the primary world. Even the purest poem . . . is made of words, which
are not the poet ' s private property. . . .

In these term s , when a writer comes across, in the world , ele­

ments or inhabitants of his secondary world , he repatriates them by
putting them in his notebook.
M y subjects seem to me to be my stock characters . But why are
some subjects difficult, if not impossible to use? It seems that writing
that has a lot of surface activity does not handle subjects like sex and
death well . I don ' t think it is because we don ' t like to think about
them . We think about them all the time . But what is it about these
stron g subjects that is better accommodated by a strong presence of
persona ( Berrigan) or narrative (Burroughs)? Are any subjects im­
moral in themselves, regardless of treatment ? Or is subject more an
individual concern , as for Auden , who says , " For every writer, there
are certain subj ects which , because of defects in his character and his
talent , he should never touch " ?
"What i s a poet ' s subject? I t is his sense o f the world . For him it
is inevitable and inexhaustible, " says Steven s . " For each man . . . cer­
tai n subjects are congenital . " And (paraphrasing) the poet manifests
his personality, temperament, manner of thinking and feeling, by his
choice of subject. Stevens believes this choice is a vital factor in poetry
and art. But how much choice is involved if it is congenital and " pen­
etrates the amelioration of education and experiences of life " ?
 268
A lan Bernheimer

Love is not a subject unless the writer of the song is in love . . . .

A man 's sense of the world may be only his own or it may be the
sense of many people. Whatever it is it involves his fate. It may involve
only his own or it may involve that of many people. The measure of the
poet is the measure of his sense of the world and of the extent to which it
involves the senses of other people . . . .

Of course, perception of the world is one of the principal subjects of

Stevens' s poetry.
Here is a subjective selection of Stevens' s " Adagia, " notations
he made over years , which form something of a commonplace book of
aesthetic aphorisms :

Poetry and materia poetica are interchangeable terms.

Consider: I. That the whole world is material for poetry ; II. That there
is not a specifically poetic material.
It is the explanations of things that we make to ourselves that disclose
our character: The subjects of one 's poems are the symbols of one's
self or of one of one' s selves.
Money is a kind of poetry.
The world is the only thing fit to think about.
Aristotle is a skeleton .
Bringing out the music of the eccentic sounds of words is no different in
principle from bringing out their form and its eccentricities (Cum­
mings) : language as the material of poetry not its mere medium or
instrument.
A change of style is a change of subject.
Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world.
What is meant by interest? Is it a form of liking?

The choice of subject matter gives focus to perception, j ust as vi­

sion gives meaning to subject matter. What I ' ve had in mind here is a
kind of commonplace book on the subject of subject matter, composed
of much that comprises my subj ect matter.
Stevens again, writing about Williams :

If a m an writes a little every day, . . . it may be that h e is . . . practicing in

order to get at his subject. If his subject is, say, a sense, a mood, an inte-
 269
Subject Matter

gration, and if his representation is faint or obscure, and if he practices

in order to overcome his faintness or obscurity, what he really does is to
bring, or try to bring, his subject into that degree of focus at which he
sees it, for a moment, as it is and at which he is able to represent it in
exact definition .
 Lyn Hejinian

The Rejection of Closure

Lyn Hejinian: I want today to discuss two areas of conflict or

struggle . One is between the impulse toward closure, whether defen­
sive or comprehensive , on the one hand and the equal impulse toward
an open-ended response to what ' s perceived as the " world " on the
other. Another struggle is that between form , or the " constructive
principle " on the one hand and " material " on the other. These two
areas of struggle are not parallel . Form cannot be equated with clo­
sure , nor can raw material be equated with the open. I want to say
that at the outset and most emphatically, in order to prevent any mis­
understanding.
My use of the terms " open text " and " closed text , " or closure , is
not intended to establish categories . I have no interest in, and in fact
would find it repugnant , to divide all literature in two.
For the sake of clarity, we can say that a closed text is one in
which all the elements of the work are directed toward a single reading
of the work. Each element confirms that reading and delivers the text
from any lurking ambiguity.
There are virtues to the closed text-it may, for example , be
soothing (I am thinking here of Gertrude Stein ' s observation about
detective novels) and it may have immense emotional power-as, for
example, in the novels of Charles Dickens , which achieve an intense
and even monumental emotional power because all the devices avail-
2 70
 271
The Rejection of Closure

able to the writer are pointed in one direction ; the reader simply can­
not remain impervious to all that harmony. Detective novels satisfy
our nostalgia, our yearning to review what we already know or have
so often seen . We witness the non-stop solving of crimes in those de­
tails, since the familiarity and abundance of detail is what ultimately
subdues the unpredictable and dangerous-i. e . , crime. Detail in de­
tective novels is socializing-crime, or criminal potential, is elimi­
nated at the end of the book not by clues, which are only some few de­
tails, but by the lawn sprinklers, and macrame wall hangings, and
automobile interiors, and barbecue implements , and street addresses,
and tumblers of Scotch, and the fake Americana furniture with calico
trim-an interminable quotidian ballistics.
My title , "The Rejection of Closure , " sounds judgmental ,
which is a little misleading-though only a little-since I am a happy
reader of detective novels and an admiring, a very admiring, reader
of Charles Dickens' novels.
Nevertheless, whatever the pleasures, in a fundamental way clo­
sure is a fiction-one of the amenities that fantasy or falsehood pro­
vides .
What then is the fundamental necessity for openness? Or, rather,
what is there in language itself that compels and implements the rejec­
tion of closure?
I perceive the world as vast and overwhelming; each moment
stands under an enormous vertical and horizontal pressure of infor­
mation, potent with ambiguity, meaning-full, unfixed, and certainly
incomplete. What saves this from becoming a vast undifferentiated
mass of data and situation is one's ability to make distinctions. Each
written text may act as a distinction, may be a distinction . The experi­
ence of feeling overwhelmed by undifferentiated material is like claus­
trophobia. One feels panicky, closed in . The open text is one which
both acknowledges the vastness of the world and is formally differenti­
ating. It is the form that opens it, in that case .
There are three areas that lead directly from this statement. The
first is a run-down of formal devices, obvious when encountered , that
serve to open a text. The second is a brief discussion of differentiating
features in language (from Saussure) and semantic disclosure in texts
 2 72
Lyn Hejinian

(from Umberto Eco) . The third is a discussion of the psychological or

spiritual condition that is caused by the conflict between open and
closed as we with our language encounter the world .
It is not hard to discover devices-structural devices-that m ay
serve to open a poetic text . I say " may serve " because it very much
depends on other elements in the work and by all means on the inten­
tion of the writer. As Umberto Eco says, the open text is " a field of
oriented possibilties" (my emphasis) .
Thus, for example , in a poem , the fragment , while it may serve
as a suggestive shard, indicative of all that hasn ' t been said but has
now been forever lost (along with so much else , even whole l ives ,
whole civilizations , etc . - i . e . , the Sapphic fragment) , the fragment
may instead indicate that the statement is absolutely complete , that
nothing more need be said , the sign of complete satisfaction , if not of
self-satisfaction .
Taking that into account , however, there are a number of devices
that might be components of an open text , and without being exhaus­
tive let me just make a few comments about some of them .
One set of devices has to do with arrangement and , particularly,
rearrangement within a work . The open text, by definition, is open to
the world and particularly to the reader. It invites participation , re­
jects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy,
the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies.
It speaks for writing that is generative rather than directive . Reader
and w riter engage in a collaboration from which ideas and meanings
are permitted to evolve . The writer relinquishes total control and chal­
lenges authority as a principle and control as a motive . The open text
often emphasizes or foregrounds process, either the process of the
original composition or of subsequent compositions by readers, and
thus resists the cultural tendencies that seek to identify and fix mate­
rial , tum it into a product; that is, it resists reduction and commodifi­
cation .

. . . it is really a question of another economy which diverts the linearity

of a project , undermines the target-objective of a desire , explodes the
 273
The Rejection of Closure

polarization of desire on only one pleasure, and disconcerts fidelity to

only one discourse.
- Luce lri garay, New French Feminisms

" Field work , " where words and lines are distributed irregularly
on the page , such as Robert Grenier ' s poster/map entitled " C am­
bridge M ' ass" and B ruce Andrews' " Love Song 4 1 , " which was also
originally published as a poster, are obvious examples of works in
which the order of the reading is not imposed in advance . Any read­
ing of these works is an improvisation . One progresses through the
work not on straight lines but in curves , swirls, and across intersec-
ti�s .
�
Another kind of arrangement and rearrangement device is repe- /
tition-as in my book My Life, where certain phrases recur in the text,
each time in a new context and with new emphasis . Sometimes the
repetitions are literal , sometimes the phrases are emended in some
way, but always they comment on and receive comment from the sur­
rounding text . Since context is never the same and never stops , this
device says th&-meaning-is-always inJlux, always in the process of be­
ing created . Repetition , and the rewriting that repetition becomes,
m ake a perpetual beginning, like Stein ' s beginning again and again;
they postpone completion indefinitely.
Other devices of the open text include parallelism and montage
techniques . In parallelism , statements become interconnected by be­
ing grammatically congruent . Dissimilar things, being made alike
grammatically, become meaningful in common and jointly. There is a
ki nd of synergetic development occurring as a result, whereby the
meaning of one statement opens to that of another, the logical exten­
tion of which-the third term , so to speak-being in the hands of the
re ader, that is, out in the world . The following example is from the be­
ginn ing of a prose work of mine called " Resistance . "

Patience is laid out on my papers. Its visuals are painful and equably
square . Two dozen jets take off into the nigh t . Outdoors a car goes up­
hill in a genial low gear. The flow of thoughts- impossible ! These are
the defamiliar ization techn iques with which we are so fam iliar.
 2 74
Lyn Hejinian

There are six sentences here , three of which , beginning with the first,
go subject-verb-prepositional phrase . The three prepositions are on,

into, and in, which in isolation seem to have a similar meaning but in
the usage here have very different meanings . On is locational : " on my
papers . " Into is metaphorical and atmospheric : " into the night . " In is
atmospheric and qualitative : " in a genial low gear. " Patience , which
might be an element of a virtuous character attending t o work ( " is
laid out on my papers " ) , might also be " solitaire , " a card game fo r an
unvirtuous character who is avoiding attention to work . Two dozen
jets can only take off together in formation ; they are " laid out " o n the
night sky. A car goes uphill ; its motion upward parallels that of the
jets, but whereas their formation is martial , the single car is somewhat
domestic , genial and innocuou s .
One of the results of this compositional technique , b u il d i n g a
work out of discrete units, is the creation of sizable gaps between the
units . The reader (and I can also say the writer) has to overleap the
period , and cover the distance to the next sentence . But , meanwhile ,
what remains in the gaps, so to speak , remains crucial and informa­
tive . Part of the reading occurs as the recovery of that information (fo­
cus backward) and the discovery of newly structured ideas (focus for­
ward) .
A radical , paradoxical relationship exists between form and ma­
terial when the form is imposed , exoskeletal . Bernadette M ayer's
Midwinter Day is an example of a work that is written within and ac­
cording to a predetermined temporal framework, that is measured by
the time of composition . It begins when the stopwatch is turned on
and ends when the stopwatch stops.

It's true I have always loved projects of all sorts, including say sorting
leaves or whatever projects tum out to be, and in poetry I most espe­
cially love having time be the structure which always seems to me to
save structure or form from itself because then nothing really has to be­
gin or end. (letter from Bernadette Mayer to the author)

The determination of form by time is similar to the determina­

tion of form by number-a form that is dictated by the prior decision
 275
The Rejection of Closure

that the work will contain x number of sentences, paragraphs, stan­

zas, lines, etc. , or even of pages, as in Greeley' s Presences, and that
these may or may not bear a relationship to each other, increasing, al­
ternating, decreasing, etc . Whether the form is dictated by temporal
or numerical rules, what happens is that the work begins and ends ar­
bitrarily, and not because there is a beginning or an end to its mean­
ing. In fact, the implication (correct) is that the words and the ideas
(thoughts, perceptions, the material) continue. One has stopped be­
cause one has run out of fingers, beads, minutes, etc. , rather than be­
cause a conclusion has been reached or " everything" has been said .
The world runs through the work, albeit somewhat sorted.
When I began thinking about " the rejection of closure" and of
this talk, one of the first and most pressing questions concerned this
relationship of form , or "constructive principle" to "materials" -the
materials including not just the language (words) but the ideas and
perceptions. C an form make chaos (i . e . , raw material , unorganized
information, uncertainty, incompleteness, vastness) articulate without
depriving it of its potency, its generativity? Can form go even further
than that and actually generate the potency of uncertainty, incom­
ple teness, vastness, etc. ? I think the answer to this is yes, that this is in
fact the function of form in art, that form is not a fixture but an activ­
ity .
J urij Tynj anov says (in " Rhythm as the Constructive Factor of
Verse" ) :

We have only recently outgrown the well-known analogy : form i s to

content as a glass is to wine . I would venture to say that in nine out
. . .

of ten instances the word "composition " covertly implies a treatment of

form as a static term . The concept of " poetic line" or " stanza" is im­
perceptibly removed from the dynamic category. Repetition ceases to be
considered as a fact of varying stren gth in various situations of fre­
quency and quantity. The dangerous concept of the "symmetry of com­
positional facts" arises, dangerous because we cannot speak of symme­
try where we find intensification.

(Compare this with Gertrude Stein' s : "A thing that seems to be

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Lyn Hejinian

exactly the same thi n g may seem to be a repetition but is it? . . . . Is

there repetition or is there insistence . I am inclined to believe there is
no such thing as repetition . And really how can there be . . . . once
started . . . expressing any thing there can be no repetition because the
essence of that expre s sion is insistence , and if you insist you must each
time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while any­
body is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis . " ("Por­
traits and Repetitio n " )
Tynj anov goes o n t o say :

The unity of work is not a closed symmet rical whol e , but an unfold·
ing dynamic integrity . . . . This dynamism is revealed , first of all , in the
concept of the constructive principle . Not all aspects of a word are of
equal value; dynamic form is not the result of uniting or merging such
aspects . . . . the sensation o f form s in such a situation is always the sensa­
tion of flow (and therefore of change) . . . . Art exists by means of this in­
teraction or struggle .

I t was Ferdinand de Saussure who first elaborated the notion of

" distinctive features " in language , as part of his General Course in L in­
guistics: " in language there are only differences . "

The movement of Saussure ' s thought may perhaps be articulated as

follows : language is not an obj ect , not a substance , but rather a value:
thus language is a perception of identity. But in language the perception
of identity is the same as the perception of difference ; thus every linguis­
tic perception holds in its mind at the same time an awareness of its op·
posite .
-Fredric J ameson , The Prison House of Language

Utterances are made intelligible because of differentiating feature s,

features which are activated by the exigencies of the moment and con­
text of the utterance . They separate out those elements which make
that word on that occasion not any other word it might otherwise be .
What elements of a word or larger utterance are the distinctive fea­
tures depends on the context . For exampl e , to borrow a line from the
author of children' s books , Dr. Seuss : " The hat is on the cat . " Th i s
 277
The Rejection of Closure

may be pronou n ced in many different ways by many different parents

and remain intact : " the hat is on the cat " ; " the hayet is on the
cayet " : " the hot is on the cot " ; " ze het is on ze cet " ; etc . The vowel
soun d , supposecll y a short a, remains distinct in form if not in sub­
stance . The sentence remains distinct from its intended variations
which so delight the child audience of Dr. Seuss ' s poem : " the hat is on
the cot , " " the dot is on the mat , " and so on .
Differentiatin g features are quite similar to what Umberto Eco
calls " semantic disclosure s " in the introduction to his book The Role rif
the Reader. In any text , he points out , a great deal of very fundamental
information is carried without being stated-is " narcotized , " as he
rather colorfully puts i t . "Janet walked into the room and removed
her coat . Then she reached for the phone . " In this mini-narrative ,
certain properties or details remain dormant . We assume features
com mon to any room-walls , ceiling , furnishings-in a general way
but aren ' t given specifics, since thus far it is evidently irrelevant
whether this is a dining room , bedroom , or kitchen and we have no
wish to be burdened with irrelevancies. We don ' t for an instant won­
der i fJ anet m ight be a moulting snake and therefore don ' t need to be
told that she is a warm-blooded human in need of clothing when ex­
pos ed to the cold . The removal of J anet ' s coat , however, actualizes a
certai n amount of information: Janet has been outside , away from the
roo m and away from the house containing the room , though we don ' t
know how far away, whether i n Oakland o r just i n the garden . Also
we may assume that this is her room , or one in which she is " at
ho me , " as it were , since she doesn ' t hesitate before reaching for the
phone . " ' Operator, get me the police , hurry. There ' s nothing here .
I ' ve been robbed . My house is empty. ' J anet turned to stare into the
em pty room . Something soft seemed to grab at her feet and she lost
her footing, smashing her skull against the stone fireplace. "
The drama here , such as it is, depends on the activation of previ­
ously dormant information . The entire meaning of the little story
sw ings on the weight of a set of (as it turns out partly mistaken) as­
su mptions, and the coat , which we thought had disappeared into the
fu rniture has in fact been thrown to the floor because the furniture is
'
go ne , and now the coat reappears and commits murder.
 278
Lyn HeJinian

Two dangers never cease threatening in the world : order and dis­
order.

Language discovers what one might know . Therefore , the limits

of language are the limits of what we might know . We discover the
limits of language early, as children . Anything with limits can be
imagined (correctly or incorrectly) as an object , by analogy with other
objects-balls and rivers . Children objectify language when they ren­
der it their plaything, in jokes , puns , and riddles , or in glossolaliac
chants and rhymes . They discover that words are not e q u al to the
world , that a shift , analogou s to parallax in photography, o ccu r s be­
tween things (events , ideas , objects) and the words for them- a dis­
placement that leaves a gap . Among the most prevalent and persist ent
category ofjoke is that which identifies and m akes use of the fallacious
comparison of words to the world and delights in the ambiguity resu lt­
ing from the discrepancy :

Why did the moron eat hay?

To feed his hoarse voice .

Because we have language we find ourselves in a peculiar rela­

tionship to the objects, events, and situations which constitute what
we imagine of the world . Language generates its own characteristics
in the human psychological and spiritual condition . This psychology
is generated by the struggle between language and that which it claims
to depict or express , by our overwhelming experience of the vastness
and uncertainty of the world and by what often seems to be the inade­
quacy of the imagination that longs to know i t , and , for the poet , the
even greater inadequacy of the language that appears to describe , dis­
cuss , or disclose it .
This inadequacy, however, is merely a disguise for other virtues .
" What mind worthy o f the name , " said Flaubert , " ever reached
a conclusion? "
Language is one of the principle forms our curiosity takes . It
makes us restless . As Francis Ponge puts it, " Man is a curious body
whose center of gravity is not in himself. " Instead it seems to be lo-
 2 79
The Rejection of Closure

cated in language , by virtue of which we negotiate our mentalities and

the world ; off-balance , heavy at the mouth, we are pulled forward .

She is lying on her stomach with one eye closed, driving a toy truck
along the road she has cleared with her fingers . Then the tantrum broke
out , blue , without a breath of air . . . . You could increase the height by
making lateral additions and building over them a sequence of steps,
leaving tunnels, or windows, between the blocks, and I did. I made
signs to them to be as quiet as possible . But a word is a bottomless pit. It
became magically pregnant and one day split open, giving birth to a
stone egg, about as big as a football.
-My Life

Language itself is never in a state of rest . And the experience of

using it, which includes the experience of understanding it, either as
speech or as writing, is inevitably active. I mean both intellectually
and emotionall y active .
The progress of a line or sentence, or a series of lines or senten­
ces , has spatial properties as well as temporal properties. The spatial
density is both vertical and horizontal . The meaning of a word in its
place derives both from the word's lateral reach , its contacts with its
neighbors in a statement, and from its reach through and out of the
text into the other world, the matrix of its contemporary and historical
reference . The very idea of reference is spatial: over here is word , over
there is thing at which word is shooting amiable love-arrows .
Getting from the beginning to the end o f a statement i s simple
movement; following the connotative byways (on what Umberto Eco
calls " inferential walks ") is complex or compound movement .

To identify these frames the reader has to "walk," so to speak, out­

side the text, in order to gather the intertextual support (a quest for
analogous " topoi, " themes, or motives) . I call these interpretative
moves inferential walks : they are not mere whimsical initiatives on the
part of the reader, but are elicited by discursive structures and foreseen
by the whole textual strategy as indispensable components of the con­
struction . . . .
-Eco
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Lyn Ht!Jinian

Language is productive of activity in another sense with which

anyone is familiar who experiences words as attractive , magnetic to
meamng.
This is one of the first things one notices, for example , in works
constructed from arbitrary vocabularies generated by chance ope ra­
tions ( i . e . , some works by J ackson Mac Low) or from a vocabulary
limited according to some other criteria unrelated to meaning ( i . e . ,
Alan Davies ' a an av es, a long poem using only words without ascend­
ers or descenders-what the French call " the prisoner ' s convention , "
either because the bars are removed o r because i t saves their limited
supply of paper) . Such works say somethin g . It is impossible to dis­
cover any string or bu ndle of words that is entirely free of possible nar­
rative or psychological content. Moreover, though the " story " and
" tone " of such works may be interpreted differently by differen t read­
ers , nonetheless the readings differ within definite limits. While word
strings are permissive , they do not license a free- for-all .
Writing develops subjects that mean the words we h ave for them .
Even words in storage , in the dictionary, seem frenetic with ac­

tivity, as each individual entry attracts to itself other words as defini­

tion , example , and amplification . Thus, to open the dictionary at ran­
dom , mastoid attracts nipplelike , temporal , bone , ear, and beh ind .
Then turning to temporal we find that the definition includes time ,
space , life , world , transitory, and near the temples , but , significantly,
not mastoid . There is no entry for nipplelike , but the definition for
nipple brings protuberance , breast , udder, the fem ale , m ilk, dis­
charge , mouthpiece , and nursing bottle , and not mastoid , nor tempo­
ral , nor time , bone , ear, space , or world , etc . It is relevant that the ex­
changes are incompletely reciprocal .

and how did this happen like an excerpt

beginning in a square white boat abob on a gray sea
tootling of another message by the hacking lark
as a child to the rescue and its spring
many comedies emerge and in particular a group of girls
in a great lock of letters
like knock look
a restless storage of a thousand boastings
 281
The Rejection of Closure

but cow dull bulge clump

slippage thinks random patterns through wishes
I intend greed as I intend pride
patterns of roll extend over the wish
- Writing is an A id to Memory

The " rage to know" is one expression of restlessness produced

by language .

As long as man keeps hearing words

He ' s sure that there's a meaning somewhere

says Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust.

It's in the nature of language to encourage , and in part to justify,
such Faustian longings. The notion that language is the means and
medium for attaining knowledge , and, concomitantly, power, is old,
of course. The knowledge towards which we seem to be driven by lan­
guage , or which language seems to promise , is inherently sacred as
well as secular, redemptive as well as satisfying. The nomina sint numina
position (i . e . , that there is an essential identity between name and
thing, that the real nature of a thing is immanent and present in its
name , that nouns are numinous) suggests that it is possible to find a
language which will meet its object with perfect identity. If this were
the case, we could, in speaking or in writing, achieve the at-oneness
with the universe, at least in its particulars, that is the condition of
paradise, or complete and perfect knowing-or of perfect mental
health.
But if in the Edenic scenarios we acquired knowledge of the ani­
mals by naming them, it was not by virtue of any numinous imma­
nence in the name but because Adam was a taxonomist. He distin­
guished the individual animals, discovered the concept of categories,
and then organized the species according to their functions and rela­
tionships in a system .
What the naming provides is structure, not individual words.
As Benj amin Lee Whorf points out, " . . . every language is a
vast pattern-system, different from others, in which are culturally or­
dained the forms and categories by which the personality not only
 282
Lyn Hejinian

communicates, but also analyzes natu re , notices or neglects types of

relationships and phenomena , channels his reasoning, and bu ilds the
house of his consciou sness . "
In this same essay, which appears to be the last he e v e r wrote
( 1 94 1 ) , entitled " Lan gu age , Mind, Reality, " Whorf goes on to ex­
press what seems to be stirrings of a religious motivation : " . . . what I
have called patterns are basic in a really cosmic sense . " There is a
" PR EMONITION IN LA NGUAG E of the unknown vaster w orl d . " The
idea

is too drastic to be penned up in a catch phrase . I wou ld rat h e r

leave it unnamed . It is the view that a noumenal world-a
world of hyperspace , of higher dimension-awaits d i scon. : r v
by all the sciences ( linguistics being one of them ] , which i t w i l l
unite and unify, awaits discovery under its first aspect o f a
realm of PATTERNED RELATIONS, inconceivably man i fold and
yet bearing a recognizable affinity to the rich and s y stem a t i c
organization of LANGUAGE.

I t is as if what I ' ve been calling, from Faust, the " rage to know , ' '
which is in some respects a l ibidinous drive , seeks also a red em pt i ve
value from language . Both are appropriate to the Faustian legend .
Both also seem in many respect appropriate to psychoanalytic
theory, if one can say that in the psychoanalytic vision the " cure " is
social and cultural as well as personal .
Coming in part out of Freudian psychoanalytic theory, especially
in France , is a body of feminist thought that is even more explicit in its
identification of language with power and knowledge-a power and
knowledge that is political , psychological , and aesthetic-and that is
identified specifically with desire .
The project for these French feminist writers is to direct their at­
tention to " language and the unconscious , not as separate entities ,
but language as a passageway, and the only on�. to the unconscious ,
to that which has been repressed and which would , if allowed to rise ,
disrupt the established symbolic order, which J acques Lacan has
dubbed the Law of the Father" (Elaine Marks, Signs, Summer 1 978).
 283
The Rf(jection of Closure

If the established symbolic order is the " Law of the Father, " and
it is discovered to be repressive and incomplete, then the new sym­
bolic order is to be a " woman 's language, " corresponding to a wom­
an 's desire .
Luce Irigaray:

But woman has sex organs just about everywhere. She experiences
pleasure almost everywhere . Even without speaking of the hysterization
of her entire body, one can say that the geography of her pleasure is
much more diversified, more multiple in its differences, more complex,
more subtle, than is imagined . . . . " She " is indefinitely other in herself.
That is undoubtedly the reason she is called temperamental , perturbed,
capricious-not to mention her language in which "she" goes off in all
directions . . . .
-New French Feminisms

I find myself in disagreement with the too narrow definition of

desire, with the identification of desire solely with sexuality, and with
the literalness of the genital model of women's language that some of
these writers insist on .
But what was striking to me in reading the collection of essays
from which the above quote was taken was that the kinds of language
that many of these writers advocate seem very close to, if not identical
with, what I think of as characteristic of many contemporary avant­
garde texts-including an interest in syntactic disjunctures and re­
alignments, in montage and pastiche as structural devices, in the
fragmentation and explosion of subject, etc. , as well as an antagonism
to closed structures of meaning. Yet of the writers from this area
whom I have read to date, only Julia Kristeva is exploring this con­
nection.
For me, too, the desire that is stirred by language seems to be lo­
cated more interestingly within language, and hence it is androgy­
nous. It is a desire to say, a desire to create the subject by saying, and
even a feeling of doubt very like jealousy that springs from the impos­
sibility of satisfying this desire.
 284
Lyn Hejinian

This desire is like Wordsworth ' s " underthirst I Of vigor seldom

utterly all ayed . "
C arla Harryman :

When I ' m eating I want food . . . . The I expands. The individual is

caught in a devouring machine , but she shines like the lone star on the
horizon when we enter her thoughts, when she expounds on the im­
mensity of her condition, the subject of the problem which interests
nature .
- " Realisms"

I f language induces a yearning for comprehension , for perfect

and complete expression , it also guards against i t . Hence the title of
my poem " The Guard . "

Windows closed on wind in rows

Night lights, unrumorlike, the reserve for events
All day our postures were the same
Next day the gentleman was very depressed and had a
headache ; so much laughing had upset him he thought
The urge to tell the truth is strong
Delightful, being somewhere else so much the moment of
equivalence
To be lucky a mediation
To look like life in the face
The definition quotes happiness
The egg is peafowl
The kitchen : everyone eats in different cycles-yeh ,
the dishes are all over the counter . . . . yeh, food ' s
left out, things are o n the stove . . . . yeh , the floor's
filthy-that' s amazing! have you been there?
Like the wind that by its bulk inspires confidence
Red and yellow surefire reflect on the breakdown
The forest is a vehicle of tremors
When mad, aged nine, and dressed in calico
Confusion is good for signs of generosity
Each sentence replaces an hallucination
But these distractions can ' t safeguard my privacy
 285
The Rejection of Closure

During its absence, my presence

Every hour demonstrates time's porosity
The ghosts that blend with daylight come out like stars
in the dark longing to have their feet fit in boots
And finish in Eden .

Faust complains:

It is writtt>n: " In the beginning was the Word ! "

Already I have to stop ! Who'll help me on ?
It is impossible to put such trust in the Word!

Such is a recurrent element in the argument of the lyric:

Alack, what poverty my Muse brings forth . . . .

Those lines that I before have writ do lie . . . .

For we I Have eyes to wonder but lack tongues to praise . . . .

In the gap between what one wants to say (or what one perceives
there is to say) and what one can say (what is sayable), words provide
for a collaboration and a desertion . We delight in our sensuous in­
volvement with the materials of language, we long to join words to the
world-to close the gap between ourselves and things, and we suffer
from doubt and anxiety as to our capacity to do so because of the lim­
its of language itself.
Yet the very incapacity of language to match the world allows it
to do service as a medium of differentiation. The undifferentiated is
one mass, the differentiated is multiple. The (unimaginable) complete
text, the text that contains everything, would be in fact a closed text.
It would be insufferable.
For me, a central activity of poetic language is formal . In being
formal, in making form distinct, it opens-makes variousness and
multiplicity and possibility articulate and clear. While failing in the at­
tempt to match the world, we discover structure, distinction , the in­
tegrity and separateness of things.
David Levi Strauss: When you said that Adam was a taxono-
 286
Lyn Hejinian

mist , I thought , that he before he was a taxonomist he was a hungry

animal . I ' d like to hear more about the notion of desire and form , and
especiall y how feminine desire may lead to a rejection of closure that ' s
going t o be different from a masculine rej ection?
Hejinian : Well , in terms of being, as they say, gender specific , I
don ' t think I ' m ready, if I ever would be , to answer that exactly. I
think it ' s a red herring. Freud said that everybody had more or less
male or female in them ; therefore , to think that we anatomicall y fe­
male persons will write in a different way . . .
One of the things that is peculiar about my u sing Adam is that
he , and not Eve , gets to do the naming. And the French feminists
would really take that on and say that i t ' s the boys who get t o do the
naming and the girls are left with everything else .
Kathleen Fraser: Well , there ' s an interesting study that looked
at the social experience that a typical man or woman might have led
in the last forty years within a certain class differentiation , and it
showed that often people who live lives of nine- to-live responsibilities,
or that kind of linear or closed model , often preferred that way of
thinking or expressing, and that would carry over into writing.
Whereas , many times , wome n , who led interrupted , fragmented , dis­
rupted lives-also people who were out of work, male or fem al e , who
had a non-linear life , tended to find an expression that was valid in
that kind of writing.
Hejinian : Ron [Silliman] has answered that old question of why
have there been so few women writers, historicall y. And , of course ,
there haven ' t been few women writers, but what they 've been writing
was letters and diaries , more often than published works . And those
forms are fragmentary, and sometimes exoskeletally determined-like
the diary is just what we do every day and what we think about what
we do .
Ron Silliman: I was wondering about the question of open and
closed and the manipulation involved in either. When I was a lot
youn ger, I would look at a sonnet by Richard W ilbur and I had a
strong sense of claustropho bia from that kind of closed form , sensing
that it was not in fact very real . And after quite a few years , going
 287
The ReJection of Closure

through lots of mechanisms with my own work and the work of oth­
ers-and My Life is what calls this to mind with its particular struc­
ture, which in terms of its programmatic nature, thirty-seven thirty­
sevens, is in fact on the order of, although on a considerably different
scale, on the order of that which, if one could neutrally look at what a
sonnet was, the sonnet is.
Kit Robinson: The sonnet sequence.
Silliman: Right . But for me the question has been one of gener­
ative versus manipulative forms. There are forms which exclude auto­
matically certain kinds of phenomena or detail, and my initial experi­
ence with closed forms was the experience of those exclusions. And
when I come across forms that use that same kind of formality but
don't have those exclusions, there's this tremendous sense of libera­
tion .
But it ' s not just in those kinds of normally closed forms . Because
if you read newspapers you see as much get excluded as is being told .
Hejinian: That's why I defined the closed text as one in which
every element is directed toward a single reading, which is true of
newspapers.
Stephen Rodefer: I don't think that 's reall y true. Because it ex­
cludes the possibility of a reader who opens it and reads another read­
mg.
Hejinian: Well, Umberto Eco ' s book, The Role of the Reader, is
about that. He says that of course anytime any reader comes to any
group of words, there ' s lots of different readings available . But , in the
closed text, the variabilities are entirely extratextual and vicarious and
gratuitous . For example, imagine someone coming to a james Bond
novel with mirror vision and seeing it as Semaj Dnob, and assuming
that this was a Muslim Indonesian who ' s the hero. Now that would be
[laughter] another reading. But it would actuall y be just the vagaries
of this fluke . And, of course, all of us, when we read the newspaper,
read " between the lines, " and construe a whole other story than the
one that' s on the page. But that' s not exactly an open text .
Silliman: Well, what do you do with something like Bernadette
Mayer's Midwinter Day, which has this formality of a time, it has this
 288
Lyn Hejinian

great sense of expansion , but, at least through the first eighty pages­
and it ' s ostensibly a one-hundred and twenty page book written in
one day-it doesn' t mention writing. And that seems like this rather
large missing spot. It ' s what she was doing that day, more than going
to the store and picking up the kids.
Johanna Drucker: Lyn , I'd like to say something about the
newspaper before we get away from it, because I really differ on that
issue . I think of the newspaper as one of the most familiar open texts
that people encounter, simply because of its spatial distribution on the
page , which necessarily excludes the possibility of a single reading.
Hejinian: You mean the newspaper as a whole . I was thinking of
any individual item in it.
Drucker: But the fact is that the newspaper page by page is
structured in many ways like Robert Grenier' s field map poem . With
the possible exception of the first page, there are very few pages where
the reading is prescribed . And the text itself is made very much by the
j uxtaposition of fragmentary elements.
Sandra Meyer: But that ' s looking at it visually. It's not looking
at it in terms of comprehension.
Tom Mandel: The structure of a newspaper story, technically, is
such that you can always cut it from the bottom . It is something that is
constructed to be read only in one sequence . And it has the most strict
sequence that you can imagine . Especially given that it starts with a
headline, which is certainly what you ' re supposed to read first .
I think you were saying, Lyn , about form that it could be used
for closure or for openness . And it would certainly seem that a news­
paper is an example of using that formal device for closure .
Hej inian: I think I disagree with you , Johanna, but we can ar­
gue another day. [laughs] I feel we should get back to Ron' s point .
But go ahead .
David Scheidlower: To what extent does closure have to do with
conventionality? We look at a newspaper page and we ' re so used to it
that it' s closed, because we ' ve been trained to see it as closed .
Hej inian: No, because then after twenty-five years of reading all
kinds of poetry, then all poems would look closed and that ' s not true .
But my experience of reading newspapers is that there ' s a specific ,
 289
The ReJection of Closure

identifiable political and rhetorical bias and program to any given

newspaper.
I think Ron ' s distinctive between manipulative versus generative
form is important . And I think the newspaper is a manipulative form .
Strauss : I don ' t know how useful the whole distinction between
closed and open is , anyway. What you ' re talking about seems more
like large scale and small scale forms . And if you ' re talking about the
sonnet, it ' s more that it ' s a small scale form so you can have different
things happening within it at a different pace with different relation­
ships to the other parts .
Benjamin Friedlander: Think of a Bach score . It ' s closure
made as finite and compact as possible . There ' s no single reading,
there ' s nothing you can take out of it, it ' s all there .
Delys Mulli s : It seems that a lot of the distinction between open­
ness and closure hinges on the possibilities of meaning, which is not
really being talked about.
Hej inian: I was talking about meaning the whole time . That ' s
the whole business. That ' s the whole activity.
Steve Benson: Well , if the meaning of the structure simply has to
do with the valuation of that structure , then that would seem to be
very closed . A closed kind of writing would be something where
everything ' s engaged with itself, and reads out into one complex ,
symbiotic structure , l ike . . . it ' s a perfect knot . And a more open form
would be one that yields access to thinking about things that are out­
side it and have lots of loose ends. So a form might be any kind of
form , and it would have to do with how one used it.
Michael Palmer: All you have to do is to compare the Wilbur­
ian sonnet with the Shakespearian sonnet . So that you have " identi­
cal " forms . And you have a quite dramatically open semantic struc­
ture in the Shakespearian . . .
Rodefer: That ' s not really true , though , of all Shakespeare son-
nets.
Palmer: No , but it ' s dramatically true of some .
But the other question that comes up where it gets difficult to
make the distinction-Okay, if you have narrative, and if narrative
implies closure of a certain order, - this is where it gets tricky . . .
 290
Lyn Hojinian

Hejinian: But does it?

Palmer: I don ' t know . Take , for example , A Thousand and One
Nights or The Dream of the Red Chamber or something that goes on and
on endlessly with of course little closures within it , chapters or what­
ever you call them that come to certain kinds of conclusion , but this
parataxis involves a fundamentally different view of temporal struc­
ture and historical orders . . . Okay, how does that then, with all these
little closures in an open form , relate to something where-almost
mathematically like J ackson [ M ac Low] might do-you can set things
through permutations that arbitrarily end at a certain point , which
might also induce claustrophobia. It does for me when I read some of
the Stanzas for Iris Lezak.
Hejinian: Claustrophobia as a measu re of closure . [laughter]
Palmer: When you feel the asthma coming on you ' ve achieved
closure .
It becomes very tricky. Because narrative has come so often to
stand implicity for closure-in terms that is of modernism ' s particular
bias-so people have foregrounded in opposition to that these utterly
" closed " forms , in another respect , as generative of openness.
There ' s a labyrinth there that gets very hard to deal with .
Rodefer: It strikes me that in all this talk it ' s funny that these two
verbs are the very verbs we use in terms of what we do with a book .
And I can ' t imagine a form that is closed . Because it can always be
opened .
Hejinian: I said I didn ' t want t o divide all literature into . . . I
mean I used Dickens as a closed form , because every single element of
a Dickens ' novel is devoted to one single end . I t ' s an end which I
think is laudable and powerful . I purposefully took something that is
dear to my heart . I don ' t think that closure is necessarily horribl e .
Melissa Riley: B u t the thing is . . . I mean . . . What d o you want ,
Stephen? [laughter]
Rodefer: I think that dualities like high/low , open/closed , raw/
cooked are ill -fated to begin with .
Riley: But if you want to dispense with them , you don ' t want to
. . . [laughter] Are there better distinctions that you can make? Dis­
tinctions are always faulty. We just amuse ourselves with them .
 291
The Rejection of Closure

Aaron Shurin: Part of the trouble we ' re falling into here is that
we 've got a binary distinction in open and closed , and in fact there' re
multiple distinctions that we could make along this axis. And it causes
us to invest desire , actually, in one of these two terms . That really
mucks up some of our discriminations.
Hejinian: I think the characteristic of the desire I was talking
about is that i t ' s interminable. We all are on the bridge across the two .
The point is not to find what ' s closed and what ' s open and then all line
up and play tug of war. [laughter] The point is that there ' s a very gen­
erative struggle between the two impulse s . On the one hand, for the
writer, faced with the world of meaning and the intention or hope to
make something meaningful out of i t , there is an urge to identify, lo­
cat e , be comprehensive , have content . On the other hand , there is
the , to me, endlessly obvious observation that no single thing ever
holds it all , or even adequately comes to say what it was I thought I
could really get to this time . Which then means that my whole proj ect
has to remain open. Even if l want it to be closed , I can ' t do it. And ,
to me , that ' s what desire , even sexual desire, feels like . I t ' s like this
yearning fro m one t o the other and back again . This is why I used
that word desire .
And then , also , a whole other day could be spent talking about
what the relationship of language is to desire, and how libidinous is
speech , and all of that , which I 've been thinking about a lot, especially
after that panel discussion at Intersection , hearing people talk about
how they felt about talking. And it really seemed like there was a con­
nection , which I had n ' t thought about before, but the more I think
about it the more . . . [tape ends]
 Books by Contributors

Rae Armantrout:
The Invention of Hunger, Tuumba Press
Extremities, T he Figures

Alan Bernheimer:
State Lounge, Tuumba Press
Cafe Isotope, The Figures
translation:
Th£ Hamlet of th£ Bees, Valery Larbaud , W hale Cloth Press

Charles Bemstein:
Resisumce, Awede
Islets/Irritations, Jordan Davies
Th£ Occu"ence of Tune (with Susan B. Laufer) , Segue Books
Stigma, Station Hill
Controlling Interests, Roof
Legend (with Bruce Andrews , Ray DiPalma , Steve McCaffery, and Ron Silli­
man) , Segue Books
Senses of Responsibility, Tuumba Press
Sluuie, Sun and Moon Press
Poetic Justice, Pod
editing:
co-editor (with Bruce Andrews) of L =A N G U A
= = = = = G = E magazine
co-editor (with Bruce Andrews) of The L A N G
= = = = U = A G E Book,
= =

Southern Illinois University Press

Bruce Boone:
La Fontaine (with Robert Gluck) , Black Star Series
Century of Clouds, Hoddypoll Press
My Walk with Bob, Black Star Series

292
 293
Books by Contributors

Beverly Dahlen:
Out of the Third, Momos Press
A Letter at Easter, Effie's Press
forthcoming:
A booklength selection from A Reading, Momos Press

Alan Davies:
Active 24 Hours, Roof
Abuttal, Case Books
a an av es, Pates and Poets Press
Mnemonotechnics, Pates and Poets Press
forthcoming:
Name

Robert Gliick:
Elements of a Cqffee Service, Four Seasons Foundation
La Fontaine (with Bruce Boone) , Black Star Series
Family Poems, Black Star Series

Robert Grenier:
A Day At The Beach, Roof
Oakland, Tuumba Press
Cambridge, M 'ass, Tuumba Press
Sentences, Whale Cloth Press
Series, T his
Dusk Road Games, Pym Randall Press
editing:
editor of Robert Greeley' s Selected Poems, Scribners
editor of Larry Eigner's l'#zters I Places I A Time,
Black Sparrow Press

Carla Harryman:
The Middl£, Gaz
Property, Tuumba Press
Under the Bridge, T his
Percentage, Tuumba Press

Lyn Hejinian :
The GUiJrd, Tuumba Press
My Life, Burning Deck
Writing is an Aid to Memory, T he Figures
Gesualdn, Tuumba Press
 294
Writing/Talks

A Mark of Motion, Burning Deck

editing:
editor of Tuumba Press
co-editor (with Barrett Watten) of Poetics jouTTllll

Fanny Howe:
Alsace-Lo"aine, Telephone Books
Poems from a Single Pallett, Kelsey St. Press
The Amerindian Coastline Poem, Telephone Books
In the Middle of Nowhere, T he Fiction Collection
Holy Srrwke, T he Fiction Collective
young adult books :
The Blue Hill, Avon
Yeah, But, Avon
Radio City, Avon

Michael Palmer:
First Figure, North Point Press
Notes for Echo Lake, North Point Press
Alogon, Tuumba Press
Transparency of the Mi"or, Little Dinosaur
The Circular Gates, Black Sparrow Press
Without Music, Black Sparrow Press
Blake 's Newton, Black Sparrow Press
C 's Songs, Sand Dollar
editing:
editor of Code of Signals, an anthology of recent writings in poetics, North Atlantic
Books

Bob Perelman:
To the Reader, Tuumba Press
a. k. a. , T he Figures
Primer, T his
7 11-brks, T he Figures
Braille, Ithaca House Press
editing:
editor of Hills magazine, including Talks (Hills 6/7), an anthology of talks by
writers

Kit Robinson:
Riddle Road, Tuumba Press
Tribute to Nervous, Tuumba Press
 295
Books by Contributors

Down and Back, The Figures

The Dolch Stanzas, This
Chinatown of Cheyenne, Whale Cloth Press

Ron Silliman:
ABC, Tuumba Press
1)'anting, The Figures
Ke{jalc, This
Sitting Up, Standing, Taking Steps, Tuumba Press
Legend (with Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ray De Palma, and Steve Mc­
C affery), Segue
Bart, Potes and Poets Press
Mohawk, Doones Press
Nox, Burning Deck
Crow, Ithaca House
editing:
editor of In the American Tree, an anthology of new writing
criticism : The New Sen tence, Seque

Barrett Watten:
Total Syntax, Southern Illinois University Press
Complete Thought, Tuumba Press
1 -10, This
Plasrna!Parallelesi''X', Tuumba Press
Decay, This
Opera- U6rks, Big Sky
editing:
editor of This magazine and press
co-editor (with Lyn Hejinian) of Poetics journal
forthcoming:
Progress