PLASTIC Eine unwerdige Redensart brauchend kann man sagen: Jeder Mensch von Genie hat nur einen einzigen Kniff, der ihm ausschießlich angehört und den er in jedem seiner Werke, nur immer unter andrer Anwendung, anbringt [...] Der Kniff ist gleichsam nur ein Loch im Schleier der Natur, ein übermenschliches Stückchen in Menschen. Er ist durchaus der Brennpunkt aller Produktionen des jedesmaligen Genies [...] Seinem reflektirten Bewußtsein (Vernunft) ist der Kniff, so gut als Andern, ein Räthsel. So fremd ist uns die Vernunft • Schopenhauer Chris Emery
Juliana Spahr
The End
The Marginalization of Poetry
My ending up like Vesalius it seems, auditing what looks raw, shored up and inoculated, dying for a hit as I come to a halt freeze-framed below the east side slums with their little whiff and puddled ground, their steel night tingling with gorgeous wreckage. Those concrete genuflections, my old zones still multitudinous on the blackbird’s field of souls. My local dominatrix squats to contemplate dimpled vertebrae with eyes just slits above a burning ciggy. So I’m murmuring betrayals in the sodium night calming our nerves, so to speak, of watchful demons and liquid panic, so swanky I’ve regaled myself not to mention the running walls, the cabbage field, the clanking stove pipes, and doling out such unconsidered rapture in my mingy arse. Just gadding about with this angling for the grave. A lover surging in the vigorous mechanics of the soil. It’s true, you’ll come to know all beauty is butchery.
Peter Minter
Living Systems Under the dim grey sky of an early evening in September, that mountain sky when air rests across the surface of the world and strays on the body like cold, unremarkable sweat, you question the validity of new growth, an apparent urgency to fresh lime leaves unfurling from the tips of branches, knee-high grass left uncut for seeding heavy under the pressure of damp, point out to me the raindrops resting on leaves of grass like indian mirrors sprayed out across the yard. This one, like them all, held against the green verge by asymptotes of gravity and friction, the fabric of living and falling into the earth as a pebble or circle of life seems larger than the rest, the dark green shadow of the world and weight of the sky turned as an eyeball to eyes we bring and strain through the matter of belonging, here, against the matter of not belonging, the strain of accomplishment, the names we share and pretend again to forget. When night falls, again, forgetting the air that thickens from nowhere into rain, the raindrop gathers dark into its gentle, impressive detail and symmetry, the broad grass leaves sink to the ground and emerge as a field of black hands sprouting from the torso and blood and aeons of waiting for day. We stay to see the first lamp flicker away on the street, eyes watching the rain as it slides through arteries of light to our feet, and then, to the deepening clay.
In the poem “The Marginalization of Poetry” Bob Perelman notes that poetry is a marginal act–it is both something no one listens to he notes quoting Jack Spicer and text that has margins. In this poem while he doesn’t exactly embrace the marginal, he does see it as a useful description of the contemporary poetry scene. I like this move as much as I am bothered by it. What is bothersome, as Steve Evans pointed out to me the other day, is that we keep putting poetry on the margins, at the dark end of the street, on stakes (to reference three recent titles).
The rhetoric of “The Margin”
This rhetoric of margin and center is one that comes to us from cultural and ethnic studies in the 1980s. In many ways, this rhetoric makes good sense for discussions of identities, but the question in this context is does this rhetoric make good sense for linguistic practices.
The centrality of Poetic Forms
I guess, when it comes down to it, I want to see the form as central, not marginal. I want to argue that poetic forms are central to our culture and to our considerations of the ethical possibilities of a work. I want this because I am not sure poetry is marginal–I think of Hallmark cards, advertising ditties, the perfume Poème, my students’ poems which just seem to keep arriving week after week, the man who moved me into my apartment in New York who wrote poems and accompanied himself on the drums every evening, or the poems my mother crossstitches onto samplers to give to her friends. I think also of Perelman’s own book of criticism published by an established press where poetry is central and begins the critical discussion. I know these aren’t the forms of poetry we would necessarily put forward as products that are changing our reading, proposing new egalitarian possibilities, or helping us correct society’s repressions, but they are an indication that there is in our culture a centrality of the contorted form that might be the place where we should begin to chart poetry’s status. But in another way I like the way the term marginalization has come to mean its opposite in current thinking. By 1988 we have Gayatri Spivak noticing that there is an “irreducibility of the margin in all explanations.” Here we see the push and pull, the warp and woof of margin and center dissolve so that margin means its exact opposite. I’m not sure what this tells us about how to read Perelman’s book but it does point to a fin-dediscourse problem. In language writing this distinction between margin and center gets further muddled in the relationship between reader and work. It has often been noted that language poetry makes room for its reader. As Perelman notes here, “language writing is best understood as a group phenomenon, and that it is one whose primary tendency is to do away with the reader as a separable category.” (31). Perelman’s example of his writing experiments with Kit Robinson and Steve Benson in which one person reads from a book and two people type in response provides a good literal metaphor for this process.
A
field
of
communication
What is provocative about such moments is not that they elicit a transparent identification or understanding of the see-saw dialectics of other and self but rather that they work towards creating a field of communication. And I would argue that even more than language writing’s political claims, the importance of language writing is this willingness to mess with the separation between reader and work. Language writing in this context is part of a long tradition of writing that is concerned with egalitarian textualities and is valuable because it encourages readers to enter into a community, to read with writers and works, to share in a production of meaning that refigures community, breaking down its binarisms. But at the same time, as
Perelman is quick to point out, this isn’t something that is necessarily true of all language writing. One thing that the book The Marginalization of Poetry does is to begin to complicate this model and this is important work. As Perelman is well aware, to say all language writing constructs room for the further efforts of readers is the intellectual equivalent of Jameson’s reading of language writing as representing schizophrenia. And a tendency to see all forms of textuality as equal has been one of the mistakes of some poststructuralist and reader response theories, a mistake that has resulted in a depoliticization of works. What the criticism that surrounds language writing needs to do is to begin to complicate the model of the reader as a producer of the work. This is partially necessary because language writing is so diverse. The range of formal techniques used is immense and it is these that have the primary effect on the reader’s relationship with a work. Just as a Henry James novel demands a different sort of attention than a piece by Gertrude Stein, so a Ron Silliman new sentence requires a very different sort of attention than a Susan Howe page. The issue becomes one of evaluating what and how we read and how some works present more egalitarian textualities than others. Perelman’s canon is the beginning of a useful one. He argues, and I am being deliberately reductive here but this is how the book feels to me, for Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Robert Grenier, Barrett Watten, he is respectful towards Rae Armantrout, Carla Harryman, and Howe more on the grounds of gender than anything else, and skeptical of Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews.
Bi-Coastal
Bifurcation?
religious institution and I’ve found the poem best understood by those most excluded from making intellectual claims and least understood by those who have a stake in mastering intellectual and argumentative discourse. Just for this reason alone I want a more detailed discussion of what might make the poem a failure. Similarly, Perelman in his reading of Bruce Andrews’ work sees readers as unable to sort out the contradictory claims between statement and intent in his writing. But again, why? What evidence do we have of readers being unable to make such an interpretative move? In Perelman’s critical world, readers are enabled to respond but they seem at the same time to be Bartleby-esque and preferring not to.
Readers:
Resistant,
Active
Passive
Ethan Paquin
Some
Orogenies
His canon here is partially, weirdly coastal (in fact one of the things that must seem strange to those outside the language movement is the constant rhetoric within the movement that perpetuates or argues this geographic boundary in the age of jet travel). Perelman’s book is best and most forgiving when it touches on writers that he has had moments of community with, as if literally enacting the communion between reader and writer that is so important to language writing. But there are still moments where I have trouble sorting out who gets the okay and why, when I turn to textual matters. When it comes down to it, I am not sure that I would say that Watten’s work, which Perelman does not discredit but rather gives serious attention to for its “disidentification with . . . physical and political surroundings” (122), differs that much in its effects on the reader from Andrews’ work, which Perelman dismisses for leaving only a “narrow margin for readers” (108). Both aggressively challenge reading’s easy moments. Another example: Perelman’s reading of Silliman’s work, the best section in this book I think, presents readers capable of handling the way the new sentence breaks up “attempts at the natural reading of universal, authentic statements” (65) and the way it implies “continuity and discontinuity simultaneously” (67) and Perelman finally admits to the new sentence having an “ethic of activist prodding” (76). But in contrast Perelman argues about Bernstein’s attempts at a radically democratic poetry that “the utopian politics of liberated textualities are also cloudy” (90). In his reading of Bernstein’s “A Defence of Poetry” (this is a poem where Bernstein plays with non-standard language by writing a poem that discusses meaning and nonsense in a sort of approximation of English where most words are misspelled), Perelman argues that the poem’s project fails because it gets reinscribed as intellectual.
i. Mount Bond is restraint punched
Why?
xvi. Symbiosis, sickly cling: Ignore the triumph of dominion just above the patina.
But why? Is it because the poem makes an argument? Or because of the poem’s content? Or the poem’s form? Or because the poem requires translation? Or because the poem requires thinking to make sense of it? And what is the problem with any of these acts? I feel most suspicious of this argument mainly because I’ve taught this poem to entering freshmen at a large state university, at a small private school with elite pretensions, and at a medium-sized
&
In The Trouble with Genius, for example, Perelman presents, in the name of populism, some of the most radically resistant readers that we’ve seen in reader response criticism in years. But it seems to me that if we want to locate any legitimacy or worth in the project of language writing, which I want to do–we’ve got to begin with the assumption that readers are capable of a variety of interpretative responses, that just as they are capable of handling the jumps of the new sentence, they can handle the turns of Andrew’s or Bernstein’s work. At the end of the book The Marginalization of Poetry, Frank O’Hara and Roland Barthes are having a talk. Barthes, full of ennui as might be expected, complains: “Reading got to be such a chore, Frank” (163). And O’Hara’s answer is to titillate, to resort to the personal, as might be expected, and to talk of how he sucked off every man in Manhattan Storage and Warehouse Co. Here Perelman locates in O’Hara the beginnings of “a physically / and socially located writing” and a “self-critical poetry minus the / short-circuiting rhetoric of vatic privilege” that he calls for at the end of the poem “The Marginalization of Poetry” (10). To have O’Hara explaining the way out of the ennui of reading interests me and this finally might be the most provocative moment in this book. In its deliberate play with ideas of lineage it suggests that language writing is the bastard anti-heroic child of the New York school and French post-structuralism. It also points to how one of the useful ways language writing has refocused our thinking is that it has been willing to see readers as active, that it has not resorted to the condescension that some part of the population is capable only of passively ingesting cultural products. It is in this direction that I would want to evaluate language poetry’s forms: which ones activate the reader (and how they do so) and which ones don’t.
ii. The earthslide was once certain like a candle iii. If ii then iv iv. Words can drip wax too v. I read his ideas on order and see their prism: vi. western brooks, eastern tarns, vii. how some leaves forget the sun and others remember moons viii. The eighth rock on the pile ix. Pistils not my legs Motile Eventually the petal x. Sharp sinew in veering cloud xi. Thunderbanks brazen feed thirty six miles xii. Cliff, the ice fractal on shoulders of plummet xiii. Arbor strips the cling of eased blight xiv. The accretion by the Only hand is pyrrhic blade and trowel xv. Terranes still creak as jaundiced ampersands
xvii. Hawk, birdsong, wind: lyres. The peak and ridge: walls. Amphion houred here. xviii. Then–somewhere– the raspy infirmities that pin ledge-shelf and terrace
xx. meld into decay’s ochre melange:
Lukáš Tomin
xxi. Shrug and Wonder alternate tomb duty for Bloomed and Shrouded, xxii. col ferns care not for politics of rot, xxiii. sphinx V overlooks the drapery of trickle which is drapery of grind, cinder, bombast, xxiv. and grace is elsewhere’s wisp — xxv. the the the
the lotus formed, carved vein, scoured dome, couching nimbus
haunch.
xxvi. Because this is the twentysixth rock on the pile xxvii. Because there resists no meridian in timbre xxviii. Because there is vacuum’s abundance upon a bare cirque xxix. Climb never climbs but spins and whirls and floats never receding but gaining
Louis Armand & John Kinsella
Zoning
Discourse: Synoptical Echo Pangenesis
casting a pater-noster line outlooking into the water’s shadow-graph(ed concentricities)— what (there) it seems to presence— insequential per echo’s languid pangenesis—oedipal? & upping prolapse without the mother “issuing directly from the cogito” a premeditation of non-being blood-smeared & arithmetic—there where it smells of excrement & euclid the clotted drainage of semes after babel sequestered as bias in liturgy—adamic— (re)naming everything on-screen? or double-gazing of cathected sea-like creatures “depositing fragments about a place they might term landscape” ... qua meta-physical & (self-) erasure in counterfeit anatomies— elevating myth to gestalt therapy or lyrical solipsism (rodin-achilles?) or engenderment or simulacra simulating pre-socratic denunciation of origins— the striated body & its nemesis looming glacier-like from a desert or inland sea (the overarching wave-forms of limestone, whalebone, dissolving on mute petrifications of raftwood) flowing out to alluvial chiasms— paleo- or mesolithic— & time-lines fluctuating as erosion ushers in the platitudinous (darwinian geo-census miming plebiscites to millennial tremblers as res publica lurches backwards into history & we (re-)state the bloody obvious): out there where I trod & trod & trod abstracted from (its) contours [(‘) morphogenesis? part(ing)s companied with the sculptured or the real or the] miscreant like the deus ex machina of crows high over the nullarbor divining new jerusalems
Brian Henry
Untitled Before the hole in the yard expands to glacial size, before the porch eats the house in two, the house that buries itself beneath the grass yet rocks with each hard wind, the tree gives and comes down on a gust, not the one that sends the porch into the ground, not the one that pulls water from wood, and the tree, delivered to the wind at last, goes through the air with a purposeless grace, spins along an axis unknown to the slow as you watch it, having heard it first, and wonder what it takes to move that fast— more than lightness, or a frame almost full, a matter less of weight than of mass.
from
Kye Too
The year was 1963. A year of killings. Like 1993 or 1994. Or any of the years in between. He plomped out of his mother’s belly and pissed on the Universe. Then he started to cry. Remembering his past he composed himself and fell asleep. Did he dream. Towards midday he woke up and looked at the cots around him. Not a single soul to talk to. Shutting his eyes again he reflected. Must this be? Then he started to cry. Remembering his past he composed himself and opened his eyes. It must? Still unsure he shat on it to add a concrete proof. The stench and the warmth told him it had to be. And the nurse’s spank and the nurse’s curse. Oh but the question why was high on the agenda. Oh but so low on the answers. In the past, he remembered, he had asked the same question. This question is low on answers, my boy, he was told then, by another mother. Don’t bother. Why, he said then, when I have to lie here and cry and piss and shit without a soul to talk to? Don’t bother, she said to him then and was kind to him and made him suck her breast. He was glad of this and didn’t bother for then. For the length of the sucking. And then when he’d sucked enough she told him you’ll see you’ll forget once you get out of here and have souls to talk to. Until you have to suck again. But maybe she didn’t tell him that last thing maybe he just knew when it started to suck. With the first changed nappies he began to lose lucidity. Independence of thought soon followed. He became a baby. Life as a baby wasn’t too bad. Judging at least from what they told him about it. Grinning mostly. Grinning with mummy mostly in the photos, with auntie, with grandma. Not grinning mostly with daddy, with grandpa. Grinning or not grinning by the sea, in the fields, in the woods. With or without other babies. When with other babies an embarrassed expression the norm. If not downright hostile. When for example a bucket of blueberries between him and the other. With the other with an
out-stretched hand offering peace. Later he was a child, of course. The year was 1968. The grinning had stopped. Kye is a retard, Christian said to Samuel, he can’t even speak Czech. This was when the tanks had ceased to be amusing. He’s an American retard and a hippy. This was when long hair had to be cut. This was when long hair became imperialist. And the teacher became our comrade. Long sandy beaches. Hawaii. Happiness in clean warm blue seas. Sharks behind reefs. Father away lecturing. Cute baby brother safe in pram. Playing Spadla lzicka do kaficka with beautiful young mother. /Spadla lzicka do kaficka, udelala zblunk, is a Czech game involving mother and son holding hands, jumping up and down in shallow water, then suddenly squatting, thereby immersing themselves totally or almost. It can be great fun./ The envy of the shores. Then off to eat pistachio icecream. Then off to eat pineapple pizza. He was able to eat then no problem. Driving in a white impala off to eat all that. With mother beautiful at the wheel and with brother cute in his pram at the back. Life was no problem then and you didn’t have to wear any seatbelts either. You could just drive around like that smiling at people. Or you could pop over to the jungle for a while and impress people by swinging on the lianas. And you could have Hawaiian friends and you could have Italian American friends and you could have a black American nurse. Kye didn’t have a black American nurse but he knew he could have one if he’d wanted to. And you went to school and the teacher was called Mrs. Appau and it was fun and the teacher was not a comrade but she was almost a friend. And you could run around the class and paint pictures on the walls. Even if you couldn’t paint you could do it. And you could lie down on the floor and kick the air. And you could sing. He liked a girl called Sonia. But Sonia was the daughter of comrade deputy
Raymond Farina
Departure The illegal & proud exile —his sporadic houses his burnt landmarks & his foreign status— he wipes out He wipes out the final emblem of a secret & blurred Egypt his passion for a princess from an unknown dynasty The angels too He wipes the angels out The one who flies from the catastrophe hiding within himself the things he seems to have abandoned
& the one who rescued not a thing & not a person madman wanderer astray among the scraps of his own message He wipes out the bird & the obsessive theme of one who shatters his own image of one who sows new names to unhinge his identity & he wipes out the beast brought low by sorrow the ultimate stereotype of man’s despair
directress. On the way to lunch one day he sang her a song called Beautiful Lotty. Everybody laughed. Sonia turned purple and ran off to tell comrade mother. Sonia was blonde. Lotty in the song was black as boots. Perhaps that’s why. Kye cried. Grand Canyon. Kye cried in front on everyone and was laughed at. He was not tough. He ran from the classroom and from the school building into the park. He wished he was a dog. A little dog like the one with a loving mistress who would give him sweets. But he was just a little guy alone in the world and it was windy and dust got into his eyes and made him cry. And the loving mistress came up and shook him by the shoulders and kicked him in the ankle and told him he should be in school at this time of the day and not bother decent old folk like her with little dogs on walks at this hour of the day on the park can they never get any peace. And Kye ran from the mistress deep into the park and found a hollow tree and hid in it. Everything was huge and awesome, and golden and full of promise. The Colorado river was a trickle. Father was handsome in his white cowboy hat and in his denim jacket and in his denim trousers and in his boots. He carried mother from rock to rock. He was the perfect cowboy gentleman with the perfect cowboy lady. Mother had a lovely cowboy hat made of straw. Mother had long long hair that reached to her bum and shone in the sun. Mother didn’t have boots. Mother wore hippy jeans. She was not the perfect cowboy lady then, after all. But then father wore glasses. Did cowboys wear glasses I doubt it. Certainly not this shape. Kye didn’t wear glasses. But he wore a white cowboy hat like his father. He was the most perfect of them all. Sing a song in the hollow tree. Up by the entrance to the Grand Canyon National Monument other nationals danced behind bars. Feathered. These were the aboriginal peo-
ples. These were the original inhabitants of the North American continent. People threw them money. Sing a sad one. Everything was huge and hot and awesome, and golden and full of promise. New York. Too young to remember much from that. The Empire State Building and ants down below. The Buffalo Bill restaurant and his birthday and father screaming for the cost. Or was that Frisco? No, Frisco was the Wooden Indian and the Wooden Sailor. And the cold wind and the new blue hooded windproof jacket he liked so much and was later ashamed of. And the black sand on the beach with Maldoror too close for comfort. Or was that. He was too young. Too young to sing a sad song in a hollow tree. He left America in the tree, peeled her off snakelike, left her there to rot. He practised remembering his Czech and forgetting his English. He practised his accent, hardened it, udded the a’s and egged the e’s. Rolled the r’s like an opera singer, shortened everything, flattened everything. Changed his skin. Became a Pioneer. Red scarf round neck and Sonia in heart. Learned Rus-
sian. Was good at it. Began to charm comrade deputy directress. Comrade deputy directress was also the Russian teacher. At least as far as I could tell. Then. He spoke to her in Russian to charm her. To charm her to charm her daughter. It worked. Until. Until father the philosopher was proclaimed an imperialist agent and went to work at the turbines. Aristotle and Plato were imperialist agents. Father was an imperialist agent, too. Then Sonia stopped talking to him stopped seeing him stopped listening to his songs. Hey, Sonia, but I am a Red Pioneer, like you are. I wear a red scarf and I know Russian and I stand guard by the monuments to our glorious dead. Yeah, but your father is an imperialist agent. But Sonia. Mummy says so. And mummy knows. And mummy says we oughtn’t see each other any more. See? Father, why are you an imperialist agent? I mean I am a Red Pioneer, I wear a red scarf and a badge, see? Why do you work at the turbines, dad? Why do you read Aristotle and Plato when you work at the turbines, dad? Don’t hit me, dad. Are you a bad man, dad? I mean why do you have all those books in English and Greek and Latin, dad? Comrade deputy directress says that. And Sonia. Sonia is her daughter. I like Sonia very much. Don’t hit me. Why do you work at the turbines, dad? Why did we go to America? Where are you going, dad, say something, hit me. Dad. Father went out for a walk, banging shut the door behind him. He did that when he needed to calm his nerves, or to think. He did it several times a day. He did it in the night, too. He walked with hands clasped behind his back, leaning forward. With eyes firmly set on the path ahead he never looked around to see. With ears blocked by inner humming he never turned around to hear. With a frown that frightened children and disconcerted adults he ploughed his way to the river.
the ultimate last hope for tenderness
“possible” He wipes out “birth”
He wipes it all out
He still accords ten seconds to the heart that once inspired the fragile architecture of his dreams & that now clocks the scrupulous the necessary cruelty of the auto-da-fe
To which Greek will he restitute these “zoa loghika” To which god render back this “pulvis eris” that he liked to croon out in the ruins of the Em-pyre He wipes out “tragedy” “delirium” “innocence” He wipes out
Above
him
a heavy sky —like Baudelaire’s— He wipes it out
Within
him
the lack of answer to the only question ever raised fatigue patient feline that slowly wipes out his name translated from the French by the author with Jerome Rothenberg
plastic ©meltedplastix inc, 2000 lazarus@ff.cuni.cz