[EDITOR'S NOTE. My own connection to what came later to be called
“language poetry” goes back to the early 1970s and first contacts with Ron
Silliman & soon thereafter with Bruce Andrews & Charles Bernstein, all
of whom I helped to bring together. It
was my perception – possibly misguided – that the experimental work that they
were then reviving had, like a number of earlier modernisms, a bona fide
resemblance to forms of language play and word magic that I had been uncovering
in shamanistic & related poetries & that I was then putting forward in
works like Technicians of the Sacred
and Shaking the Pumpkin. I first broached this with Silliman along
with an invitation to contribute something along those lines to Alcheringa, the magazine of ethnopoetics
that Dennis Tedlock and I were then publishing, in a letter dated 6 August
1973. The pertinent sentences read:
“What I’m principally writing to you about -- & it takes me a long time to
get around to it – is to wonder if you’d be interested in contributing
something to ALCHERINGA, specifically an exploration of the relation between
tribal poetry, non-wester game or graphic elements, etc. & the formal end
of matters in the work of writers in their mid-20s. Maybe a kind of mini-anthology, a sort of
reverse TECHNICIANS, with the contemporary work up front & the analogies
& derivations (the non-western counterparts) revealed in commentaries. Or any way you’d think to handle it.”
The result, which touched only lightly
on the ethnopoetic part of my proposition, was in fact the first anthology (on
however small a scale) of language poetry,
with some speculation (soon to be answered) about what that poetry might
possibly be called. The lineup of poets
was described by Silliman as follows: “9 poets out of the present, average age 28, whose
work might be said to ‘cluster’ about such magazines as This, Big Deal, Tottel's, the recent Doones supplements, the Andrewseditedissue
of Toothpick, etc. Called variously ‘language
centered,’ ‘minimal,’ ‘nonreferential formalism,’ ‘diminished referentiality,’ ‘structuralist.’
Not a group but a tendency in the work of many.” The poets included in the first run were Bruce
Andrews, Barbara Barracks, Clark Coolidge, Lee De Jasu, Ray Di Palma, Robert
Grenier, David Melnick, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten. (J.R.)]
SURPRISED
BY SIGN (NOTES ON NINE)
1. What connects
these writers beyond my impression of a connection is what
I take to be a community of concern for language as the center of whatever
activity poems might be, and for poetry itself as the "perfection of new
forms as additions to nature." Which raises questions, problems, answers,
solutions, recalls old modes (half-forgotten modernists such as Arensberg, say,
or the work of certain Russian Futurists) and reflects concerns that have not
previously been so extensively explored in the context of American poetry
(e.g., for the work of such as Lacan or Barthes) Some have come to this more or
less isolately, while others have found use in the work of their peers.
Inevitably, present correspondences will fade as each body of work follows the
trajectory of its own logic; others may develop. What this is, then, is a fix-in-time
of writing which bears a family resemblance.
2. Any poem's a
language: a vocabulary plus a set of rules by which to process it. For example,
English terms which are aural equivalents to words and word-parts of Latin +
the structure of the poems of Catullus. More commonly: the usual vocabulary of
the writer + a stylized conception of speech. But if what one goes after is a
direct confrontation with language, words (Grenier: "What now I want . . .
is the word way back in the head"; or as Charles Bernstein, a younger,
Steinimpacted writer, puts it: "wordness") or beyond (Tom Clark,
prefacing Big Sky 3, implies that for Coolidge words are a surface
intended to reveal "Neural activity . . . a multiplicity of simultaneous
operations functioning in a continuum. The basis for the system is frequency
modulation"), what vocabulary, what set of rules? First, neither the words
nor the processes of the poem must point out or away from the poem itself, a
literal reading of Creeley's "poems are not referential, or at least not
importantly so," must not carry the reader's attention away from the fact
of what's at hand. Even the use of the line to describe speech (Grenier again:
"Why imitate 'speech' . . . ? (I)t is only such.
To me, all speeches say the same thing").
What it finally becomes, as Grenier so clearly saw in "On Speech" (This
1) is "First question: where are the words most
themselves?"
3.
Words are not, finally, non-referential. For they originate in interactions
with the world. Even Melnick's metalanguage is based in its relation to a
vocabulary of derived terms. What can be done,
however, is to diminish the reference, an activity common to the work of all
nine. By the creation of non-referring structures (Coolidge, DiPalma. Andrews),
disruption of context (Grenier, DeJasu), forcing the meanings in upon
themselves until they cancel out or melt (Watten, the poem Tri,
and, elsewhere, in the work of Michael Palmer). By effacing one or
more elements of referential language (a tactic commonly employed by the Russian
Futurists), the balance within and between the words shifts, redistributes.
Consider the i in I
drink rice as a constant around which audio-visual variants
are developed, the clarity a consequence of the reduction of context. Or
Watten's self-referring Methodical Descriptive Prose, innermost
unit (word) pointing out to the sentence(s), outermost unit (paragraph) aimed
back in, to the same point. Or the flickering reoccurrences of information
(letter, sound, quantity, meaning) in Coolidge's work, each term of equal
import (the one truly Steinian element in his writing). Or DeJasu's
presentation of signifiers with (the
at least hypothetical, implied) signifieds, the referential nature of emotional
or intellective discourse "mapped out," an ironic mode. Roland
Barthes, in the essay "Is There Any Poetic Writing?" (Writing
Degree Zero, 1953), confronts diminished referentiality as
achieved by effacing connections (best present
example: DiPalma's third poem: "it is the Word which is 'the dwelling
place' . . . it shines with an infinite freedom and prepares to radiate towards
innumerable uncertain and possible connections. Fixed connections being
abolished, the word is left only with a vertical project, it is like a
monolith, or a pillar which plunges into a totality of meanings, reflexes and
recollections . . . ."
4. The "Hunger
of the Word," desire to become, as Coolidge once in correspondence noted, "growing
word plant," is as old as "in the beginning, etc." (The vertical
in Shakespeare: "Edgar I nothing am.") In Russia
5. Beyond such
"cues" as coneretism or certain tribal literatures, the work of two
men ought also to be noted as fire source: Creeley and Eigner. Creeley's work,
both in the poems and in such essays as "To Define" and "Poems are
a complex," has sensitized many to the possibilities of getting at, to, in
the word. Eigner, by fact of physical situation, has take the logic of speech
as such out of discourse, creating sequences of presences. Power to their
words.
6. The descriptive
term, by fact of its intention, does not exist, for its substance lays
elsewhere, in table, sky, chair. But is there a grammar capable of imposing
order on a room, the couch in a corner as some predication? The paradox of
Quine's Pegasus (Word & Object, p.
176) is not in the language, but rather a specific literary tradition, wherein
words are transparent and one could not see Dickens as primarily a writer of
phrases. Certainly such assumptions did not control Sterne's composition of Shandy.
Nor a Balinese Ketjak,
that powerful oral form. Language exists, is real, has weight, is physical: one
finds in tribal literatures poetries of sound or the visible more than equal to
a Cobbing or a Furnival. The bias of course was against the
"pre-literate," a question of domination previous to information. If
these aspects of language have come to a legitimization, seen now as integral
faculties of mind (in the Chomskian usage of
that term), during the modern and so-called post-modern periods, it has
principally been through the indirect influence of the visual arts, the likes
of Picasso who first began to accept and explore the possibilities of that
universe. One sees in the deliberate primitivism of a Harry Crosby a tendency
that
could be followed through
Finlay or Gomringer to the "sophisticated" machines of Coolidge (or,
to turn to a slightly older worker, one could argue that the Anglo-American
body of poetry most invested with a heritage of the literature of tribal
cultures is that produced by MacLow via computers). Such poetry is no longer simply an
extension of the formal grammars of the written.
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