Modernism and Poetic Inspiration: The Shadow Mouth (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics)

Modernism and Poetic Inspiration Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetic...

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Modernism and Poetic Inspiration

Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics promotes and pursues topics in the burgeoning field of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetics. Critical and scholarly work on poetry and poetics of interest to the series includes social location in its relationships to subjectivity, to the construction of authorship, to oeuvres, and to careers; poetic reception and dissemination (groups, movements, formations, institutions); the intersection of poetry and theory; questions about language, poetic authority, and the goals of writing; claims in poetics, impacts of social life, and the dynamics of the poetic career as these are staged and debated by poets and inside poems. Topics that are bibliographic, pedagogic, that concern the social field of poetry, and reflect on the history of poetry studies are valued as well. This series focuses both on individual poets and texts and on larger movements, poetic institutions, and questions about poetic authority, social identifications, and aesthetics. Language and the Renewal of Society in Walt Whitman, Laura (Riding) Jackson, and Charles Olson: The American Cratylus By Carla Billitteri Modernism and Poetic Inspiration: The Shadow Mouth By Jed Rasula

Modernism and Poetic Inspiration The Shadow Mouth Jed Rasula

MODERNISM AND POETIC INSPIRATION

Copyright © Jed Rasula, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–61094–1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rasula, Jed. Modernism and poetic inspiration : the shadow mouth / Jed Rasula. p. cm.—(Modern and contemporary poetry and poetics) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–230–61094–3 1. Poetics. 2. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) 3. Poetry, Modern— History and criticism. 4. Modernism (Literature) I. Title. PN1042.R26 2009 808.1—dc22

2008051797

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: June 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Contents

List of Figures

vii

Preface

ix

Acknowledgments Permissions Introduction: Shadow Mouth

xiii xv 1

One

The Murmur: Modernist Alchemies of the Word

13

Two

Drawing a Blank: Episodes in the Poetics of Unworking

43

Three

Poetry’s Voice-Over: Techniques of Inspiration

97

Four

Gendering the Muse

139

Five

Medusa’s Gaze: Deep Image, or Traveling in the Dark

159

Six

“When the Mind Is Like a Hall”: Places of a Possible Poetics

187

Notes

205

Bibliography

219

Index

241

This page intentionally left blank

Figures

1.1 1.2 1.3 2.1 2.2 2.3 4.1 6.1 6.2 6.3

Francis Picabia, La Sainte Vièrge Otto Nebel, Unfeig Man Ray, Space Writing (Self-Portrait) Microscopic Enlargement of Robert Browning’s Voice Alexander Melville Bell, “Sawing Wood” Viking Eggeling, Sketch for Diagonal Symphony Siegfried J. Schmidt, “original ist nur die kopie” Friedrich Kiesler, Horizontal Sky Scraper Fritz Kahn, “The Surface of One Man’s Bloodcells” Fritz Kahn, “The Work of the Heart”

19 36 41 57 59 66 150 188 196 198


Preface

T

he subject of this book is poetic inspiration, but this is not a transhistorical account. Most of the work I attend to is from the past 150 years. Yet much of the primary research involved concerns ancient Greek prototypes (Muse, Orpheus, Medusa). There is precedent: the sense of modernity in poetry I address here derives from Mallarmé, who characterized his aspirations in terms of an “orphic explanation of the earth.” Orpheus—having suffered infernal descent in vain, subsequently torn apart and beheaded by the Maenads—has been astonishingly reanimated in the twentieth century (by Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus most famously, but also Cocteau’s films, and countless artworks and musical compositions). Gramophones Pianolas Orgues Tous répètent la musique d’Orphée Le 11 septembre Sur la Tour Eiffel Il donne un concert T. S. F. (Lyrik I, 218) These lines from Yvan Goll’s “Le nouvel Orphée”—the title poem of his 1923 book—despite the uncanny premonitory date linking the inaugural radio broadcast in Paris with the attack on the World Trade Center eighty years later, attests to an Orphic dissemination through modern mass media, which might seem as inimical to Rilke’s pastoral Orpheus as Baudelaire’s famous embrace of metropolitan vulgarity for its poetic nourishment. But the quotidian, the daily dross, he insisted, though half of “modernity” in art, was only half; so a host of mythological figures roam Baudelaire’s Paris like

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the oldest homeless people on earth. If most of the poems cited in the following pages are modern, their authors felt (“in their bones” T.S. Eliot says) a mythopoetic silt underfoot. Any book that appears to capriciously dart about from antiquity to modernity will seem peculiar, especially a work of scholarship. But as with a previous book, This Compost, this one tilts the application toward poetics. That’s to say, the writing itself is not an instrumental expedience; it vibrates to the sound waves of its subjects. Nearly every page portends a three dog night. I abide by Laura Riding’s supposition: “To go to poetry is the most ambitious act of the mind” (Poems 410), though there’s no denying the pretentiousness of speaking about “poetry” as such, and the abject lark of that pretence extends to all the other subjects thronging at the gateway here: muse, inspiration, voice-over, not to mention murmur and blank and all the country cousins given passkeys with such terminological abandon. Guilty on all counts, I offer this study as a plea-bargain with fellow travelers, those who know themselves in Riding’s sense as “equal companions in poetry.” The full context behind Riding’s salutary insistence on companionship between reader and writer is worth quoting, and heeding: In poem-writing and poem-reading the stirring up of the poetic faculties has been a greater preoccupation than their proper use; the excitement of feeling oneself in a poetic mood has come to be regarded as adequate fulfillment both for the reader and the poet. Hence the frequent vulgarism “What is this poem about?”—when the reader feels that there is an element in a poem beyond that designed to evoke in him the flattering sensation of understanding more than he knows. . . . The trouble is that as poets have transferred the compulsion of poetry to forces outside themselves, so readers have been encouraged to transfer their compulsion to the poet: the poet in turn serves as muse to them, inspires the reasons of poetry in them. And the result is that readers become mere instruments on whom the poet plays his fine tunes . . . instead of being equal companions in poetry. (408, 411) Riding’s “companions in poetry” resonates with Robert Creeley’s dedication to what he called “the company” of fellow poets, artists, and readers held in trust; and these configurations in turn are picked up by Robin Blaser in his homage poems to “Great Companions,” Robert Duncan and Dante Alighieri. The germination of material for this book goes back to the early 1990s when I gave talks at various conferences and institutions sparked by a question one panel organizer had posed: “What do we talk about when we talk

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xi

about poetry?” I welcomed the provocation, as it made me realize that “we” (in the public domain, in thrall to anthologies with titles like The Voice That Is Great Within Us—twisting the thematic screw of Wallace Stevens into the moral agon of nationalism) invariably presume that voice to be speaking about “us.” I wrote an exercise in literary sociology on that subject, The American Poetry Wax Museum, pondering the fractured, discontinuous, uneasy situation of poetry appropriated for some ostensibly universal but invariably parochial cause—poetry taken under the wing of a charitable institution, beneficently taken for granted, and neutered in the process. My term “poetry’s voice-over” made its debut in the model of the wax museum (cf. Wax 36–51), where it referred strictly to a special effects studio, a.k.a. the English Department of the New Criticism and the consequent intersections of reputation and expectation it engineered. In Modernism and Poetic Inspiration I follow a completely different way of thinking and imagining voice-over, more honorary than onerous, but not without its perils and traumas. Literary history requires document, proof, but a work of poetics (stimulated all the while by every kind of evidence that comes to hand) really sails by the seat of its pants, takes nothing for granted. Where poetics is concerned, there is no risk assessment, nor any assurance of gain or predictable outcome. It’s more a matter of getting your head around something. The political term for this prospect is anarchism, and as this book elaborates, an-archē encompasses that which is ungrounded, without foundation, as well as what is baseless in a telling vernacular expression. It will seem paradoxical to cite a precedent for this unsecured vulgar locality, but that’s a role Mallarmé plays here, the poet of Un coup de dés with its typographic theatre of unmoored destinies. “For him,” Jacques Rancière observes, “every poem is a layout that abstracts a basic scheme from the spectacles of nature or of the accessories of life, thereby transforming them into essential forms. It is no longer spectacles that are seen or stories that are told, but world-events, world-schemes” (Future 94). To this disarmingly expansive prospect, I would balance the scales—and welcome the reader aboard— with Marianne Moore’s salient menu from “Picking and Choosing”: only the most rudimentary sort of behavior is necessary to put us on the scent; “a right good salvo of barks,” a few “strong wrinkles” puckering the skin between the ears, are all we ask. (Poems 138)


Acknowledgments

F

irst and foremost, my gratitude goes to Rachel Blau DuPlessis for her longtime support, and most of all for the serendipitous invitation that conjured a book out of what had been a halo of expectancy hovering over some file folders. Earlier invitations by Dee Morris to contribute to Sound States and Charles Bernstein to contribute to Close Listening proved to be crucial premonitory nudges. The resources of the Helen S. Lanier endowment of the University of Georgia have done much to facilitate my work. Finally, Gabriel Lovatt’s ability to fit the square pegs into the round holes (and vice versa) where permissions are concerned, has paved the way: I offer my thanks in partial compensation for a thankless task. Books like this don’t happen without exemplary company.


Permissions

“The Black Plague” by David Antin from Selected Poems 1963–1973, Sun and Moon Press, Los Angeles, 1991. Reprinted by permission of David Antin. Excerpt from “The Explanation” from Houseboat Days by John Ashbery. Copyright © 1981, 1984 by John Ashbery. Reprinted under fair use and with acknowledgment to Georges Borchardt, Inc. Excerpt from “More Pleasant Adventures” from A Wave by John Ashbery. Copyright © 1975, 1977 by John Ashbery. Reprinted under fair use and with acknowledgment to Georges Borchardt, Inc. Herbert Behrens-Hangeler, “Obibi” from Het Oversicht Nr. 21, April 1924. Reprinted by permission of Margot Schubring. Walter Benjamin, excerpt from The Arcades Project. Reprinted by permission of the publisher from The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, p. 462, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Originally published as Das Passagen-Werk, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, Copyright © 1982 by Suhrkamp Verlag. Gerard Manley Hopkins, excerpts from pages 233–234, 235–236, 289 from The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by Humphrey House, Copyright © 1959 Oxford University Press. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press. Frederick Kiesler, Horizontal Skyscraper (1925). Copyright © 2008 Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna. Reproduced with the permission of the Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation.

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Permissions

Otto Nebel, “Unfeig” reproduced from Unfeig: Eine Neun-Runen-Fuge zur Unzeit gegeigt, ed. R. Radrizzani, Zurich: G. Blumer, 1960. Copyright © Otto Nebel-Stiftung, Bern. Reproduced with the permission of the Otto Nebel-Stiftung. Michael Palmer, excerpt from “Q.” By Michael Palmer from The Promises of Glass, copyright © 1999 by Michael Palmer. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Francis Picabia, “La Sainte Vièrge.” Copyright © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro.” By Ezra Pound, from Personae, copyright © 1926 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted under fair use and with acknowledgment to New Directions Publishing Corp. Man Ray, Space Writing (Self-Portrait), 1935. Copyright © 2008 Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris. Jed Rasula, “Poetry’s Voice-Over.” From Sound States: Innovative Poetics And Acoustical Technologies by Adalaide Morris. Copyright © 1998 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher. Jed Rasula, “Understanding the Sound of Not Understanding.” From Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, edited by Charles Bernstein. Copyright © 1998 Oxford University Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc. Jerome Rothenberg, excerpt from “The Ikon.” By Jerome Rothenberg, from Khurbn and Other Poems, copyright © 1989 by Jerome Rothenberg. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Prof. Dr. Siegfried J. Schmidt, “original ist nur die kopie,” 1993. Reproduced by permission of Prof. Dr. Siegfried J. Schmidt. Kurt Schwitters, “Cigarren [elementar].” From Kurt Schwitters, Das literarische Werk © DuMont Buchverlag, Köln 1973. Reproduced by permission of the publisher Dumont Buchverlag. Paul Virilio, excerpt from The Aesthetics of Disappearance, trans. Philip Beitchman, New York: Semiotext(e), 1991. Copyright © Semiotext(e). Reprinted by permission of the publisher Semiotext(e).

Introduction Shadow Mouth

T

o speak in earnest about the Muse in the twenty-first century is tantamount to admitting a paradox, which is that poetry persists despite its attachment to what might seem a disabling anachronism. This is hardly an original consideration; Robert Graves made the same point fifty years ago in The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth: “I am still amused at the paradox of poetry’s obstinate continuance in the present phase of civilization” (3). Graves’ mission in The White Goddess is dedicated to a fundamentalism evident in his vocabulary: The reason why the hairs stand on end, the eyes water, the throat is constricted, the skin crawls and a shiver runs down the spine when one writes or reads a true poem is that a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living, the ancient power of fright and lust—the female spider or the queen-bee whose embrace is death. Housman offered a secondary test of true poetry: whether it matches a phrase of Keat’s’, “everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear.” (12) Though their ranks may be dwindling, there are those who still speak of the “true poem,” happy to legislate its formal criteria, and content with the gendered division of labor in the “great tradition.” But “the ancient power of fright and lust” need not preserve the social arrangements that validated it. What’s more, the challenge of modernity makes it difficult to detect anything quite so primeval as spine tingling panic in a poem—or, as Emily Dickinson felt it, the sensation of having the top of one’s head taken off. This may, of course, be evidence that what’s called poetry is merely a stylized

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social exchange, personal preoccupation, career opportunity, or blog. Rather than legislate what is and is not a true poem, I’m more curious about the “obstinate continuance” of the urge to compose poetry, and the persistence with which the urge retains the archaic term muse. It would be easy to say that whatever is now casually meant by Muse has no connection with the ancient sense of the term. After all, the historical evidence Graves brings to bear on the subject makes it unlikely that any modern poet, including Graves, could be plausibly linked to his white goddess: his rowan berries, druid riddles, and bull-footed god are hardly the unvarying ingredients of poetry. But as I’ve suggested in This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry, the commanding factors of a planetary life impose sufficient conditions of continuity to perpetuate the archaic force of poetry. Aesthetic theory in the West has rested firmly on Aristotelian criteria for two millennia, during which poetics was primarily a theory of genres. Genre takes on very different inflections in modernity, however—especially modernity in the broadest (post-Gutenberg) sense. “If conditions for a positive reception of lyric poetry have become less favorable, it is reasonable to assume that only in rare instances is lyric poetry in rapport with the experience of its readers,” observes Walter Benjamin, sensibly adding: “This may be due to a change in the structure of their experience” (Illuminations 156). Benjamin’s monumental dossier of nineteenth-century Paris, The Arcades Project—which may someday be recognized as a companion to The Cantos—is dedicated to the pursuit of this phantom transformation in human experience. More recently, the Dutch phenomenological psychiatrist J.H. van den Berg devoted many volumes to the study of historically specific mutations in psychology, for which he coined the term “metabletica,” science of changes.1 The present book is a study of the sources and resources of poetic inspiration, exploring those aspects of poetry that supplement the concept and experience of the poem; but while it goes back to Hesiod for a primal scene from which the authorizing figure of the Muse derives and has held sway ever since, my investigation is guided by the conviction I share with Benjamin and van den Berg—namely, that the mutability of human nature transforms all cultural activities over time. Poetic inspiration now is demonstrably different than it was two thousand years ago (and, for that matter, two hundred years ago). But the legacy of the Muse persists insofar as it offers instruction about the unexpected, unwarranted, and sometimes unwelcome promptings that issue in poetry. From the Greek Muse to modern communications models of cybernetics—from divine infusion and mediumistic spell to noise-free channels and optimal bandwidth—poets have identified strategies to gain access to some enabling prompter. By means as diverse as

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calculation and hallucination, procedural methods and systematic derangement of the senses, poets have pursued the urge to be animated by the protolinguistic pulse of signification. Since Mallarmé this has become an explicit compass for the poetic engagement with modernity. The key factors impinging on modern poetics, from the perspective of metabletics or the science of change, are: (1) the invention of printing and (2) the concomitant consolidation of vernaculars, leading to (3) erosion of the authority of the classics, signaled most conspicuously by (4) the rise of the novel, the preeminent literary genre of modernity. A set of conceptual coordinates amplify the impact of these four factors: (5) the Copernican revolution, and (6) the European discovery of the Americas impose a burden of self-authorization on “man,” a burden exacerbated by (7) Darwinian evolutionary theory, with adjustments in estimating the role of race and gender as a recent refinement of the theory. Historically and culturally, (8) the collapse of the ancien régimes and the rise of the bourgeoisie inaugurate modernity as a condition characterized by change—and various species of revolution— and (9) a corresponding collapse of the biological ancien régime and the consequent population explosion fueling urbanization and industry, situates human affairs in a notably defamiliarized world. Finally, as a kind of literary footnote relative to these immoderate transformations, (10) genres undergo renewed scrutiny in the transition from “letters” to Literature in its gradual absorption into modern educational and cultural institutions. Modern poetics engages—and often affirms—these transfigurations in the name of: (1) plain speech, and the modernizing of diction and vocabulary; (2) generic openness or indeterminacy; (3) typographic and orthographic opportunity; (4) infusions of prose order and prose standards; (5) linguistic nationalism; (6) programs of emancipation, including political agitation as well as the cultural avant-garde; (7) strategies of defamiliarization as modernizing means; (8) a rising culture of individualism; (9) the affirmation of the sacred mission of poetry. The enumeration could be extended, but this is enough to emphasize the transformative (and deformative) pressures brought to bear on poetry, especially in the last century. A quick elaboration of these issues will bring me to the point of considering what’s at stake in the ongoing retention of the Muse tradition. The platform envisioned for a specifically modern poetry in Emerson’s essay “The Poet” and in Whitman’s affiliated prefaces and “backward glances” appended to Leaves of Grass affirm the initiatives enumerated above. Autobiography is the “colossal cipher” envisioned by Emerson and embraced by Whitman, tacitly pioneered by Wordsworth’s Prelude. The Americans stress the democratization of subject matter, Emerson in particular insisting that poetic inspiration cannot be expected to comply with decorum. Poetic

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empowerment means that everything serves as an exponent of meaning: high and low are equally eligible (one of Whitman’s favorite poses is candor). This amounts to a doctrine of noninterference, not being meddlesome, acknowledging poetry’s alliance with dictation and transcription while risking frivolity. This aptitude of pure expectancy, attentive to the slightest prompting, retains the legacy of the Muse while also infusing it with the spirit of Christian devotional exercises and Protestant soul-searching, in which spirit is its own evidence, and Emerson’s “metre-making argument” (450) is propositionally reconfigured by Robert Creeley’s “        ” (as memorialized by Olson in “Projective Verse” [Prose 240]). Creeley was preceded by the Russian Futurist Alexei Kruchenykh: “Once there is a new form, a new content follows; form thus conditions content” (Lawton 77), and by Kandinsky in the Blue Rider Almanac: “Form is the outer expression of the inner content” (149). It’s a proposition that could be extended far enough back in time to make it seem oracular, which it is. For sacred mission to be distilled from the spirit of the times, when those times are crassly commercial and heedlessly opportunistic, may seem surprising; but Whitman’s characteristic boosterism is not discrepant with his larger purpose. He was professionally situated in the reigning communications medium of his day, the popular press, gaining from that experience an immersion in the vernacular unrivalled by his genteel peers. Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads reminds the reader that “the language of such poetry as is here recommended is, as far as possible, a selection of the language really spoken by men” (Hazard Adams 440). When Whitman reiterates the case for plain speech, he spells out the implications for versification: “The poetic quality is not marshalled in rhyme or uniformity or abstract addresses to things nor in melancholy complaints or good precepts . . . The rhyme and uniformity of perfect poems show the free growth of metrical laws and bud from them as unerringly and loosely as lilacs or roses on a bush” (11). Taking a distinct cue (close to plagiarism, in fact) from Emerson, and anticipating Baudelaire’s avowal of metropolitan provocation, Whitman also proposed as the “direct trial of him who would be the greatest poet is today” that a poet should “flood himself with the immediate age as with vast oceanic tides,” and in a veritable prescription for generic indeterminacy, “in the swimming shape of today [the poem grasps] the ductile anchors of life, and makes the present spot the passage from what was to what shall be, and commits itself to the representation of this wave of an hour” (23–24). The wave of an hour was most vividly manifested in the newspaper, the display type and arrangements of which would eventually inspire Mallarmé’s typographic emancipation of the poetic page. While not known at the time, orthographic experiments by Emily Dickinson and

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Gerard Manley Hopkins mark an adventure by which the poet composes not only the words but the letters and the page, the look of it, anticipating initiatives that come to a head in the typographic exuberance of the Russian and the Italian Futurists. The ubiquity of prose by way of newsprint helped substantiate the rise of the novel from novelty to serious aesthetic aspiration, news that stays news as Pound would have it, and Pound (thinking of Henry James) famously urged fellow poets to heed the call in his remark that “poetry should be at least as well written as prose” (Essays 373). Pound had an exceptionally acute ear for the vernacular, but resisted what he took to be Wordsworth’s heedless pursuit of plain speech. So his Imagist dictum about “direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective”—along with his emphasis on verbal economy—follows Ford Madox Ford’s quip that “Wordsworth was so intent on the ordinary or plain word that he never thought of hunting for le mot juste” (Pound, Essays 3, 7). In fact, Wordsworth too recommended prose as a model: “the language of a large portion of every good poem,” he wrote, “even of the most elevated character, must necessarily, except with reference to the meter, in no respect differ from that of good prose.” Furthermore, “some of the most interesting parts of the best poems will be found to be strictly the language of prose when prose is well written” (Hazard Adams 40). William Butler Yeats dramatized the point in his 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse by rendering Pater’s prose evocation of Mona Lisa as free verse. Various initiatives—from vers libre, Hopkins’ sprung rhythm, Pound’s emphasis on the musical phrase as preferential to the metronome, Williams’ variable foot, to Charles Olson’s projective verse—are concessions to an encompassing domain of plain speech and prose writing. The phenomenon of the “prose poem” is otherwise unthinkable; and, as initially envisioned by Baudelaire, arose as a distinctly modernizing gambit: “Which one of us, in his moments of ambition, has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical, without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the jibes of conscience?” (Paris Spleen ix–x). Linguistic nationalism is itself a species of print culture predicated on the development of the vernacular. Given a huge boost in the wake of various democratic revolutions following in the wake of the American and the French ones, a new domain of “invented traditions” promoted various forms of linguistic allegiance in which poets were lionized as “the supertadpoles of expression” in Marianne Moore’s memorable phrase (Poems 152). Shakespeare was for the English what Dante was for the Italians, and Goethe to Germans. The Finnish folk-epic Kalevala was assimilated in an unusually direct transfer from orality to print (prompting Longfellow’s Hiawatha).

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But it was surely under the archaic halo of bardic glamour that nineteenthcentury poets like Tennyson, Hugo, and Pushkin held such distinguished places in national pride. At the far end of this association is Whitman’s hyperbolic bit of patriotism in the preface to the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass: “The United States themselves are the greatest poem” (5). Linguistic nationalism was predicated on demonstrable forms of political enfranchisement, much as it would also be infused with opportunism and chauvinism. Insofar as poets felt themselves meaningfully invested in plain speech, and energized by the vernacular in all its variety, they couldn’t help but conflate poetry with political destiny. Shelley dimly makes this out in his impetuous characterization of poets as “unacknowledged legislators” of mankind (Hazard Adams 529). Rimbaud is more ardent, but more precise, in acclaiming the poet as “truly the thief of fire . . . responsible for humanity, even for the animals.” Responsibility rather than legislation would be the poet’s burden. “Enormity becoming normal, absorbed by all, he would really be a multiplier of progress!” Rimbaud went on, recognizing singularly among his male peers, “When the endless servitude of woman is broken, when she lives for and by herself, man—heretofore abominable—having given her her release, she too will be a poet!” In the meantime—Rimbaud, at seventeen, is patient—“let us ask the poet for the new—ideas and forms” (309). Rimbaud’s notion of the new may or may not be the same as Pound’s famous demand, Make It New, but the poetic craft of making merged with the constant unveiling of thresholds through which modernity appeared with if by historical inevitability, such that poetry became more closely aligned with the new than with its longstanding task of cultural conservation. As Pound’s verb make suggests, there is labor involved, work to be done. The new might seem to pour down effortlessly from the abundant conduits of modernity, but a different sort of sapience was required for the poet to actually inaugurate the vita nuova of a renovated poetic domain. Again, Rimbaud signals the shift with his grammatical twister and existential challenge: “I is someone else” ( Je est un autre) (305). Reiterating ancient wisdom, Rimbaud observes that the “first study of the man who wants to be a poet is the knowledge of himself, complete,” but then he spells out what this entails, which is not at all in line with humanist self-cultivation: “the soul must be made monstrous: in the fashion of the comprachicos, if you will! Imagine a man implanting and cultivating warts on his face. I say one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses” (307). Such strident gestures of self-making were recognizably Bohemian, challenging conformism and political retrenchment after the 1848 revolutions. The figure of the dandy, the poète maudit, cultivated by Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Nerval, Verlaine,

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Swinburne, and others gradually mutated into the modernist vanguard publicist: Marinetti, Tzara, Breton, Mayakovsky. In such figures we apprehend poetry as one of a number of “indexes,” as Muriel Rukeyser puts it, to “our own wishes and hostilities” (Life 5). Behind this emotional complex is a fear of poetry “produced by a mask, by the protective structure society builds around each conflict” (44). Or in Pound’s blunt consideration, “A sound poetic training is nothing more than the science of being discontented” (Essays 216). Corresponding to these notably secular configurations of talent and publicity is the vocabulary of election inherited from religious traditions. Mathew Arnold recognized that poetry (in the broad sense, meaning artistic culture as such) was displacing traditional religion. “More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry” (Hazard Adams 604). From Blake to Whitman to Lawrence we find an affirmation of sacred calling, poetry identified in its prophetic, vatic, or shamanistic capacity as prerational access to the fundamental order of things. The challenge, as Yeats felt it, was to resist the institutional designs that this role might entail: “How can the arts overcome the slow dying of men’s hearts that we call the progress of the world, and lay their hands upon men’s heart-strings again, without becoming the garment of religion as in old times?” (Essays 162–163). The stakes that emerge from Yeats’ concern are to affirm the sacred mission of poetry while dispensing with every inherited administrative apparatus that would appropriate the sacred for cultic ends. Participation in a sacred mission, it turns out, necessarily involves access to that primordial voice I mentioned at the outset. As I elaborate in chapter one, the figure of a prelinguistic “murmur” is a pervasive preoccupation of French theorists (Blanchot, Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva) whose public profile would place them seemingly at odds with mythopoiesis. So how did they come to contribute to this legacy in which, furtively blinking like a lighthouse, the Muse persists? In various ways, I think, their works set aside the text to examine the subtext—subtext understood as a tangle of striations, ideological stress marks, in which psychology and politics, sociology and aesthetics, are indiscriminately mingled in the leavening clutch of language. The murmur is like a radioactive trace element of all these forces fused into one. Another way of considering it is to call it noise, in both the common acoustic sense and in the computational ratio of signal to noise in information theory. Poetry’s debt to the “noise upon which the word is based, the discrepant foundation of all coherence and articulation,” discloses for poet

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Nate Mackey an “anti-foundational acknowledgement of founding noise,” and such a “discrepant engagement sings ‘base,’ voicing reminders of the axiomatic exclusions upon which positings of identity and meaning depend” (Discrepant 19). Singing “bass” is not only voicing undertone: foundation is inseparable from all that is base. “In the work man speaks,” Blanchot specifies, “but the work gives voice in man to what does not speak: to the unnamable, the inhuman, to what is devoid of truth, bereft of justice, without rights” (Space 232). From its dire declivities, abasement shines. Those suffering figures we make out in the infernal circles in Dante’s pilgrimage are, one and all, the very words of his poem. “Poetic language is language owning up to being an orphan, to its tenuous kinship with the things it ostensibly refers to” (Mackey 234). Tenuous, yes, but blindingly so. Scenarios of poetic inspiration commonly stress some disabling precondition, with Homer’s blindness as inaugural symptom. The poet, inspired, is blinded by or knows nothing of the text that passes through him as its vehicle. Poets practice a peripheral vision, alert to numinous apparitions that can’t be seen straight on. Their language is accordingly warped and disfigured; indirection serves a directional instinct. Writer’s block becomes the whole heavenly mountain; and the summit, if attained at all, will be experienced with such despondency and fatigue that its very existence seems an oneiric miscue, and the poem attesting to the experience will be endowed with the ontologically preposterous status of Coleridge’s souvenir, the “flower of having passed through paradise in a dream.” “The purer the inspiration,” writes Blanchot, “the more dispossessed is he who enters the space where it draws him” (Space 182). And yet, the poem wants “to dwell in this negligence” (107)—negligent because it is so openly unconcerned with boundary distinctions. So up might as well be down, and vice versa; and the outer world is the vastest attainable interiority (in “the ordeal of conversion,” says Blanchot, we experience “that return inward by which we go into ourselves outside of ourselves” [173]). Negligent, too, because inspiration is precisely a “movement outside of tasks, of acquired forms and proven expressions”—partaking in nothing less than “refusal’s superabundance,” and an “emptiness, the excess by comparison to which fullness is still lacking” (182). Long before Blanchot elaborated his suppositions concerning the “space of literature,” Emily Dickinson occupied the premises (in both senses), affirming the algebraic magnitude of the negative: “ ‘No’ is the wildest word we consign to Language” (Letters 246).2 For René Daumal, “The pure No, stained with the names of gods, saw the world boiling with a skin of bubbles” (Contre-Ciel 32). Refusal’s superabundance is the subject of chapter two, a constellation of scenarios having in common the necessity of drawing a blank, stripping away layers of mediation

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in order to come closer to the ground of the murmur and dwell in the hum of its negligence. The labors of negation may put the poet in touch with whatever inspirational proclivity is meant by Muse, making explicit an automatism inherent in the very notion of the muses. The prospect of erasure is itself indebted to the subliminal pressure of the Muse as murmuring integrity, a phantom sensation behind or below the blank slate. Chapters three and four explore the stubborn persistence of the Muse, regarded in an expansive sense as “poetry’s voice-over,” that endowment by which the plenitude of the murmur achieves figuration, as well as attaining the status of a foundation myth. The beneficence imputed to the Muse is a necessary fiction for poetic confidence; but as these chapters indicate, inspiration is consistently vexed by challenges ranging from ventriloquism to automatism, as the voice presumed to be autonomous has debts running the gamut from pocket change to Mephistopheles. The uncommon contrivances of poetry settle down in the muck of common language, one way or another, as the dream of commonality lurches into the drama of actual contact. The figure of inspiration in full combat gear is the subject of chapter five, “Medusa’s Gaze”—emblem of an inspiring horror that returns us, chastened yet weirdly invigorated, to the enabling ground of temporality. Poets, having endowed the ages as gold, silver, and bronze, find that they end up living in one of them. What are the possibilities of inspiration in an unaccommodating place or time? The book concludes with a synoptic diminuendo, ruminating on architectural resonances traversed throughout in the figure of echo, the voice that repeats, recedes, and promises a return—albeit a return in the form of a life sentence. Language sentences us. Simple as that, and as complex. Complicitously so. There is a sense in which all poetry is elegiac, commemorating the loss of power, lapse of volition, inefficacy of speech, or marking the abandonment of some primal ground of utterance entailed by speaking a particular language (“It is as if the acquisition of language were possible only through an act of oblivion, a kind of linguistic infantile amnesia,” writes Heller-Roazen in Echolalias [11]). Yet it refuses speechlessness. As Rilke writes in his poem for Hans Carolla—ringing tones on three key words: Verlieren (losing), Vergessen (forgetting), Verwandlung (transformation)—“Losing too is still ours; and even forgetting / still has a shape in the kingdom of transformation” (Ahead 165). In this realm, in which inspiration is not empowerment but relinquishment, the poet is an erasing angel, a trickster of language: “not the declarative speaker of traditional prophecy,” writes Lewis Hyde of the trickster figure, “but an erasing angel who cancels what humans have so carefully built, then cancels himself” (287). Trickster: the writing eraser, each swipe

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on the slate emitting a growl. And that menacing sound is a token of fatal endearment, to which one ends up enthralled and victimized at once. Gary Snyder sagely observes, “language does not impose order on a chaotic universe, but reflects its own wildness back” (Place 174). André Breton, despite all his clubhouse posturing as pope of Surrealism, remained permanently in thrall to this arousing infliction, in comparison with which “one no longer has an ear for anything except what the shadow mouth says” (Conversations 65, here from Blanchot, Space 178). Breton’s affirmation quotes the title of a famous poem by Victor Hugo, “Ce que dit la bouche d’ombre,” written in 1855 and published in Les Contemplations. Perhaps reflecting the influence of Surrealism, a selection of Hugo’s poems edited by Henri Parisot was published by Gallimard in 1943 under the title . . . la bouche d’ombre: Poèmes choisi (ellipsis in title). Shadow mouth, an oblique name for the Muse, attenuates the inherited sense of exaltation or inspiration. The shadow mouth is close to the mutter of matter, a nonredemptive gurgle of illumination. Or is it luminous desperation? Folded into the enunciatory context of poetic issue, the poem is like a phantom tongue flickering out from the shadow mouth, poised to devour and full of effrontery. Introducing her prescient book of poetics, Broken English, Heather McHugh emphasizes the ravages of poetry’s “unguaranteed domains: the unsayable, even the unspeakable. The place of the poem is the place of our homelessness, our groundlessness. A poem is untoward” (1). She goes on to ponder the split being (“zwiespalt”) Rilke attributes to Orpheus in the third of his Sonnets. “The poem occurs in an old time (the undone) and in an old language (the penultimate). It contradicts itself, is true twice. The forked tongue, second face, double bind got bad press: everyone’s from two. And poetry is of two minds: it is language’s way of being of two minds” (3). This lovely confessional explication of duplicity has the air about it of a manifesto for any double-talk induced by the Muse. By withholding reference to the Muse, however, McHugh endows language itself with initiatory agency: its very function, then, is not only to facilitate communication between people but to enable a single mind to split, to come to grips with the second thoughts of a second nature, but in a medium (the poem) seemingly agitated by single purpose. The present study abides with McHugh’s sense of language and doubleness, while adding archaic figures like Muse, Orpheus, Echo, Sphinx, and Medusa into the mix. This is not an attempt to reinstate the pantheon in a naming ritual, however. The legacy of the Muse has cast a long shadow over the history of poetry—even if, in many cases, as a perfunctory reference, an obligatory honorific—and I want to blend that shadow into the shadow mouth, to close the gap in discrepant vocabularies applied to modern

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poetry. Rilke spoke of his Angels, and García Lorca of duende, around the same time Ferdinand de Saussure’s concept of the signifier and the signified began to circulate, and Wittgenstein famously declared, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (Tractatus 149). What immediately precedes this declaration is Wittgenstein’s strategical determination: “If I cannot give elementary propositions a priori then it must lead to obvious nonsense to try to give them.” Wittgenstein was trying to steer clear of nonsense, designating where words were of no use in the pursuit of sense. But I want to retain the virtue implicit in “obvious nonsense,” since that’s what we might as well call angels and muses, elementary provocations given a priori: ancient terms meant to indicate where indication won’t serve. It’s enough, in Wallace Stevens’ line, that “Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation” (Palm 209). Indication is not the same as naming. Indication draws up short, for instance, in the case of angels and ghosts, and this shortfall was integrated into Jack Spicer’s low ghost, provocative nonsense punning on that most eminent term for the inaugural Word in the Book of Genesis. Puns, for Spicer, were an instance of divine insubordination, a species of the unimaginable in concrete form. There is no irony in his profession of “Being faithful to the nonsense” (174). So the figure of the ghost—descended into pun as into a submarine—is decisive for his poetics. Virtually any trope is simultaneously gateway and loophole. Metaphor is a “shorthand to admit the unknown” (162); and ghost is “the first metaphor they invented when they were too tired to invent a universe” (182). The low ghosts proliferate in Spicer’s work— poetry and sex, taken together, are “a machine to catch ghosts,” a premonition of “ghosts as an India-rubber eraser created to erase their own past” (171)—and they herald poetry as a vanishing act, melting away in the very process of inscription, like sky-writing. In this, Spicer reaffirms that sense of the untoward, as McHugh calls it; coming and going instantaneously, adding and subtracting, writing and erasing, or in the venerable provocation of German Romanticism, a poetry indistinguishable from its poetics. True criticism, Novalis proposed, is the ability to create the product to be critiqued (Seyhan 82). A vivid example is jazz, in which substantial portions of the score are not scored at all, where score is understood as prepared scenario anticipating the unexpected. Preparation for an arrival. Ready to become coincident, past and present concurring in singular spasms of what the future ends up reflecting on, or reflected in. The soloist launching into “All the Things You Are” can’t help but note a crowd of others crammed into the preposition, not to mention all those who’ve already sauntered by whistling the tune. All the things you are: a machine to catch ghosts. Don’t for a moment suppose that poetry is anything less than the most ancient

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technology. “Poetry is a mechanism that demechanizes man and his relation with things,” suggests Greek poet Odysseus Elytis. “The poet reaches the point where he goes into partnership with his own contradiction” (Ivask 30). The present book is a shadow mouth: a repeating machine that visits and revisits this partnership. A repeating machine, a waterwheel, a mill of particulars (to cite Robert Kelly’s title): Oh the mill sang of many things but its wheel was always rolling whether you noticed it or not. The wheel that is still today but much larger. It cautioned us to leave but we slept the exact duration of the idea that never leaves us now. (Ashbery, A Worldly Country 34)

CHAPTER ONE

The Murmur: Modernist Alchemies of the Word

M

urmur: a word rustling in the thickets of certain propositions about literature, emitting a solemn iridescence. Give it a slight tug, and much of Maurice Blanchot’s theoretical work bunches up around it. It goes back to an exhortation by André Breton, Blanchot’s touchstone in The Infinite Conversation. The Surrealist magus “calls upon the writer to trust in ‘the inexhaustible character of the murmur’ ” (Infinite 9)1—an “infinite murmur, infinitely disjointed but infinitely renewed” as Philippe LacoueLabarthe characterizes it in his own homage to Blanchot (13)—and like an engraving by M.C. Escher in which the same person ascends and descends incommensurable staircases in an otherwise plausible architecture, Breton’s sanction of the murmur radiates through the prism of Blanchot, finally settling into the collective murmur of Tel Quel at that rhapsodic threshold concentrated in the (collectively unsigned) articles of faith enumerated in Théorie d’ensemble (1969), prefacing essays by Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Sollers, and others. The project of Tel Quel—as journal, as book series, as a contentious intervention in French literary culture launched in the wake of existentialism and the nouveau roman—might be characterized as an attempt to turn “literature” inside out, to expose the social façade of literary institutions to the asocial taunt of language as such, beset by the murmur. In Michel Foucault’s influential account in Les Mots et les choses: “The idea that, when we destroy words, what is left is neither mere noise nor arbitrary, pure elements, but other words, which, when pulverized in turn, will set free still other words—this idea is at once the negative of all the modern science of languages and the myth in which we now transcribe the most

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obscure and the most real powers of language.” Furthermore, “it is because [language] has never ceased to speak within itself,” he says, “that we can speak within it in that endless murmur in which literature is born” (Order 103). Implicitly following Blanchot, Foucault retains “literature” as a field of exceptions to any law, a field known only by the ludic undertow language exerts on discourse, “a murmur of analogies rising from things” prior to denomination (119). So, while discourse “dissipates the murmur,” Foucault says, “without it it could not speak” (120).2 Literature attends to what the murmur emits, not what the subject reports. There are two characteristic responses to this predicament. In the first, the propensity of language to signify as such without agency is resisted by affirming innate meaning in the world or in human institutions. Words might be slippery, but the enduring values are pre- or extra-linguistic (the struggle to affirm such an outlook is a major theme of Eliot’s Four Quartets). The role of literature, from this perspective, is to master an unruly throng of signifying particles. The alternative response is no less diligent, even as it embraces the murmur: whether in the Dada sound poem, the Surrealist sleeping fits, automatic writing, and the game of Exquisite Corpse, the subterranean rumble of language as such is enthusiastically affirmed as value—as unconscious, indigent, subversive, pre-social plasticity, a flânerie of sounds and graphic particles. Both models share a compensatory attitude: in one, a powerful configuring agency (language) requires subordination to a prevailing order (ethical, religious, political); in the other, a powerful configuring agency (the discursive norm) is resisted by confiscating its (pre-discursive) raw material and draining it off for ulterior ends (as in Situationist détournement 3). But the pre-discursive underpinnings of language—those intramural segmentations of phonemes and graphemes—do not begin to resemble literature until invited to do so at the Cabaret Voltaire, Dada’s ground zero. The advent of Dada sound poetry mobilizes an enunciation exceeding the institutions of discourse, and in the same gesture it offers an apparition of wordless literature, literature returned literally to letters. These disclosures are preserved in the terms used by Hugo Ball to designate what emerged on the stage of Cabaret Voltaire: Lautgedicht (sound poem), and Verse ohne Worten (verses without words). In that context, the implications for literature of Ball’s “Karawane,” Tristan Tzara’s faux-African chants or the “simultaneous poem” (“L’amiral cherche une maison à louer” performed by Tzara, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Marcel Janco) were obscured by the venue itself, in which formal recitations of poetry mingled with chansons from the bal musette, bursts of ragtime, masked processionals, abstract dance, puppet shows, and general mayhem. Even in the chaste parameters of the

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writing desk, however, Virginia Woolf could exclaim, “what is the use of painfully elaborating these consecutive sentences when what one needs is nothing consecutive but a bark, a groan?” (Waves 209–210). A significant encounter with the groan or murmur had been glimpsed a century earlier by Novalis in his “Monologue,” a rumination on the ways in which language puckishly evades instrumental application; how, when we abandon ourselves to the tidal currents of language itself, forfeiting the pretense of mastery, we speak authentically, whereas earnest declarations oblivious to the caprice of language are implicitly ridiculed by the way words upend our intentions (Rasula and McCaffery 502). Novalis, like Foucault, honors language as phantom double, furtively accompanying human discourse in an uncanny sort of ontological shadow boxing. Sound poetry, from this perspective, is the phantom in action— the phantom sensation in search of a material host. It can also become, in Jan Tschichold’s meticulous graphic design for Kurt Schwitters’ Ur-Sonata, a sonar device detecting the rift between sound and sense, that crack in the golden bowl of rational proposition. The sound poem, despite being semantically intransitive, is charged with magical efficacy, flinging phonemes back into the somatic cauldron from which curse and howl emerge. But a howl is unintentional—suggesting that Allen Ginsberg’s polemical poem may be mistitled—whereas a curse takes aim. Hugo Ball marveled at the way Richard Huelsenbeck “delivered his poems as if they were insults” (55–56). Huelsenbeck was known for pounding a drum at Cabaret Voltaire, not only during his own recitations. “He comes across as arrogant and looks the part. His nostrils quiver, his eyebrows arch. An ironic sneer plays across his lips, his mouth is weary but resolute. And he reads, accompanied by the big drum, roars, whistles and laughs.” The impact of Huelsenbeck’s pugnacious declamations had a considerable impact on Ball, who concluded that this ritual exorcism was “an attempt to capture in a lucid melody the totality of these unspeakable times, with all its cracks and tears, all its din and mindless racket. The Gorgon head of a measureless horror smiles up from all this fantastic destruction.” The liturgical momentum noted by Ball in his own performance of “gadji beri bimba” while wearing the “magic bishop” outfit (“I noticed that my voice had no choice but to take on the ancient cadence of priestly lamentations” [71]) likewise functioned as a linguistic purgative: “In these phonetic poems we totally renounce the language that journalism has abused and corrupted,” Ball told the audience. “We must return to the innermost alchemy of the word, we must even give up the word too, to keep for poetry its last and holiest refuge” (71). Ball’s sense of sacred mission distinguishes his own explorations of sound poetry from those of his peers, possibly because his

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inspiration and guide in “aesthetic gnosis” was Kandinsky, whom he had met in 1912 and was the subject of his 1917 lecture at Galerie Dada shortly before he withdrew from the Dada scene (114). “The artist of this age does not decorate hunting lodges,” said Ball, preparing his audience for the challenging news that “artists of this age turn against themselves and against art” (225). Kandinsky said the goal of a work of art was to achieve a “certain complex of vibrations” and the aim of art in general to facilitate a “progressive refinement of the soul by means of the accumulation of different complexes” (Complete 257). These vibrations are Kandinsky’s way of referring to something as rudimentary as notches on a stick, each of which means nothing in itself but, taken together, disclose a pattern. Kandinsky’s pulsations turn out to be pledges of allegiance to the murmur. Ball was heartened by Kandinsky’s faith in a new art returning to the twitch, starting from scratch. “The nervous systems have become extremely sensitive,” Ball wrote in his diary. “Absolute dance, absolute poetry, absolute art—what is meant is that a minimum of impressions is enough to evoke unusual images. Everyone has become mediumistic” (108). The Surrealists too experienced the furor of phantom sensations. “This moment when everything escapes me, when giant cracks make their way in the castle of the world,” wrote Aragon in Un Vague des Rêves (1924), “then I am no longer the bicycle of my senses, the grindstone for remembrances and encounters” (Jean 127). Breton advocated the sur- and the hyper-rational in his essay “Entrée des mediums” in Littérature (November 1922). Although the Surrealists sought the sur-rational in the form of psychic automatism, Breton professed admiration for “those who are well versed in the most complex mental gymnastics” like Picabia and Duchamp. Breton retained Freud’s topography, in which id and ego and superego are coiled up together like a version of the Laoköon. Surrealism would not be restricted to “a few words fallen from the ‘mouth of shadows,’ ” however alluring (Lost 91). The “magic dictation” embraced by Breton would naturally avail itself even of the most acutely rational means. Medium can accordingly be understood in two ways, as mediumistic spirit and as the medium to which artistic labor is consciously applied. For the Surrealists, the mediums enter the medium. Spirit materializes in objets trouvées; the soul becomes a flea market. As mediums spiritualize and a medium materializes, the contrasting states of idea and matter become reciprocal terms convened in a single creative adventure—as well as a terminological quandary. In 1938, Kandinsky weighed the choices in his contribution to the catalogue for the “Abstract Art” exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum. “Abstract or Concrete?” Kandinsky wondered, coming out emphatically in favor of the latter. “In every truly

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new work of art a new world is created that has never existed,” he observed. “Therefore, every genuine work says, ‘Here I am!’ ” (Complete 832). Carola Giedion-Welcker, a prescient advocate of Joyce, Arp, Ernst, and Brancusi, among others, made the sensible observation that “the approximation of nature cannot be accepted as a requirement when the artistic aspiration is directed towards making visible a new independent organism” (342). The more the work sheds those reflexes associated with mimetic routine, the more blatant is the autotelic declaration, here I am. Curiously, a similar proposition became a hallmark of the New Criticism, by way of the famous conclusion of Archibald MacLeish’s poem “Ars Poetica”: “A poem should not mean / But be” (107). The New Critics never recognized an implicit corollary, that to be is to forfeit meaning. “Ars Poetica” begins, in fact, with couplets declaring the necessity of silence (“A poem should be palpable and mute / As a globed fruit”) and, while surely not in the sense embraced by Foucault as murmur, “A poem should be wordless / As the flight of birds.” Laura Riding came closest to the mark in her poem “The Biography of a Myth,” pledging allegiance to “the loyalty of words / That do not pledge the mind to believe itself” (Poems 180). The protocols of minimalism have escalated since Kandinsky’s terminological preference for concrete over abstract. In the visual arts, where minimalism troubled the myth of the innocent eye, a conceptual and often contextual frame surrounded works on display, establishing a tacit reciprocity between object and discourse. But in the domain of literature—although it can’t be taken for granted that sound poetry prioritizes an allegiance to literature over performance—the boundary between text and context is more problematic than in the visual arts, simply because the medium is language in both instances. A sound poem like Kurt Schwitters’ “Cigarren” (1921), being also a concrete poem, obliterates text and context simultaneously, reducing its title (and sole word) to a column of growls and hisses. In doing so, it unabashedly declares itself a “genuine work” in Kandinsky’s terms— and more, inasmuch as the verbal cigar rolled back and forth in a performer’s lips has the status of Magritte’s famous pipe with the painted declaration “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” Cigarren Cigarren Ci gar ren Cé

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i gé á err err e en Cé CéI CéIGé CéIGéA CéIGéAeR CéIGéAeReR CéIGéAeReR CéIGéAeReR CéIGéAeReR eREeN EeN eN Cé i gé á err err e en Ci gar ren Cigarren Schwitters’ cigar is no cigar; and yet, “cigar” is all there is. It is a “pulsation,” pure and simple—or is it impure and not so simple? Schwitters’ cigar appears in a context in which the other texts readily meet the criteria of literariness. Unlike his Ur-Sonata, outfitted with Jan Tschichold’s exquisite typography, “Cigarren” doesn’t resemble a score in the musical sense, even though it can be (can’t help but be) performed.4 One way of filling in “context” with reference to “Cigarren” is to call it Dada; and, in that domain, it might be compared to another Dada work like Picabia’s La Sainte Vièrge (1920).

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Francis Picabia, La Sainte Vièrge, 391 (1920): 12.

Courtesy: 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

“Appropriately for the Blessed Virgin, she appears to be a pure splash, unmodified by aesthetic considerations subsequent to the act of creation,” William Camfield observes. Of course, “Such speculation is based on identification of the ink splashes as the Blessed Virgin; if instead Picabia conceived her as the white sheet of paper, the nature of his blasphemy becomes graver still” (141–142). There’s nothing blasphemous about Schwitters’ cigar (it doesn’t even have the facial innuendo Groucho Marx invariably brought to his stogie); and yet, while blasphemy might not be a factor, such a work is

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so distant from literature as conceived by T.S. Eliot and the New Critics that even a rude dismissal would have seemed pointless. Despite his emphasis on the “music” of verse, what Eliot understood by music was never proximate to murmur. Music remained either a term for the ideal code of euphony, or a generic expression for concrete features of prosody that could be scanned. But it never led to pure sound, “the league and leak of acoustic matter delegated from word to word” in what Garrett Stewart characterizes as “the errand of meaning versus the errancy and hazard of signifying” (27). In order to flesh out the pertinence of “Cigarren” for literature, then, the only real help lies elsewhere, in a tradition of Continental theory that has borne within it, like a fateful echo, the unappeasable specter of incomprehension and intransigence associated with Mallarmé. Amidst the ponderous Hegelian coils of “Literature and the Right to Death,” Blanchot deposits a clue: “By turning itself into an inability to reveal anything, literature is attempting to become the revelation of what revelation destroys” (Gaze 47). A difficult proposition, easily mistaken for a positive declaration about the negative and the abject; but Blanchot has more sense than to assign nullity a place in a taxonomic cabinet. What is it that revelation destroys? It can’t be named. To apprehend it, one would need to open oneself to literature’s “revelation of what revelation destroys”—and as Blanchot would (and does, again and again) add, the self opened to that revelation is no longer a self in any sense we commonly mean: “The self has never been the subject of this experience” (Infinite 209). Having been pried so far open, it’s emptied of whatever might constitute selfhood. What remains in its place is equivocation, blur, wobble, vibration. Blanchot favors “dispersal” from Mallarmé: “The mind, says Mallarmé (after Hegel) is ‘volatile dispersal.’ A book that gives access to the mind will thus give access to an immensely destructive force, a boundless anxiety it cannot contain, that eliminates all content, all limited, defined and complete significance” (Siren 237). What is extravagant abides with the blank in lieu of any prescription: persisting without prospect or recompense.5 Far from being a category that unifies genres and canonizes authors, literature consists of those writings having in common only the noncompliance that animates them one by one. Even to name it is to constitute it as a unity, which is to betray its salutary indigence. “A name has been given to this voice of interruption,” Jean-Luc Nancy says, following Blanchot. “But no name is suitable here. The place or the moment of interruption is without suitability” (Inoperative 63). Nancy preserves in his title (La Communauté désoeuvrée) the special felicity of Blanchot’s term, “désoeuvrement,” translated variously as “unworking,” “inertia,” and “uneventfulness.” But insofar as the word oeuvre figures in it as that which is to be undone—unworked

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into a detour—it’s a faithful reflection of Blanchot’s preoccupation with literature as that which cannot be positively designated, but only surmised insofar as each example discloses a space retracted from further workability, in a simultaneous gesture of inscription and erasure: as if to say, Moby-Dick?—once is more than enough, and more is all. Literature is the exhaustion of the salutary instance; and from this exhaustion a singularity is exhaled, disclosing the domain of one-of-a-kind. Each one is a limit, in the land of literature underwritten by the murmur. Incarnating its own limits, every work (and each work needs to be a limit work) inaugurates its own unworking—“it makes language, no longer that which speaks, but that which is—language become the workless depth of being”—something at once exemplary and antiphonal, poised and desperate (Blanchot, Reader 148). Necessary but also necessarily extravagant. “Extravagance,” as the antiessentialist dispensation of literature, becomes “une intransitivité radicale” for Foucault (Mots 313, Order 300). Literature is the modern phenomenon par excellence: “it breaks with the whole definition of genres as forms adapted to an order of representations, and becomes merely a manifestation of a language which has no other law than that of affirming—in opposition to all other forms of discourse—its own precipitous existence . . . where it has nothing to say but itself, nothing to do but shine in the brightness of its being” (Order 300). Foucault’s understanding of literature (as distinct from literary works) was openly indebted to Blanchot, who in turn adhered to what Mallarmé called “la scansion rythmique de l’être,” mortal pulsation as figuring insistence, incipient moiré: “Nothing is created and no discourse can be creative except through the preliminary exploration of the totally vacant region where language, before it is a set of given words, is a silent process of correspondences, or a rhythmic scansion of life” (Siren 237).6 Foucault, too, remains faithful to this rhythmic scansion throughout his work, in the name of “an incessant primordial murmur” (Order 118), “the infinite murmur of discourse,” “a murmuring that repeats, recounts, and redoubles itself endlessly” (Aesthetics 150, 91), an animating pulsation like the vâc which, in Vedic mythology, is the verbal residue of spanda, the cosmic vibration that brings things into being and tears them apart in a single pattern of convulsive energy.7 The Paradise of Pitfalls In Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult, Malcolm Bowie wonders whether, in Un Coup de dés, the poet “has brought off that supreme outrage against art, a work which means less as we read it more?” (115). But this is not necessarily a loss: “Here is an exercise in reading which requires of us that

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we unlearn to read” (116). Preliminary to the task of unlearning, another issue needs to be addressed, which is that of the manifest implacable visibility of anything one might presume to read. As Mallarmé’s famous poem illuminates, reading and looking are conspiratorially bound up together. W.J.T. Mitchell draws attention to “the way in which images (and ideas) double themselves” in a reciprocal delirium of image and likeness, word and thing. “The dialectic of word and image seems to be a constant in the fabric of signs that a culture weaves around itself,” he suggests. This amounts to nothing short of an open rivalry, and “among the most interesting and complex versions of this struggle is what might be called the relationship of subversion, in which language or imagery looks into its own heart and finds lurking there its opposite number” (43). Mitchell’s studies of iconology, helpful as they are, rely on too stark a division of word from image. Rather than beginning with the graphic sign, and lingering on the moment in which it confronts “its opposite number,” it’s fruitful to consider a graphism freely allocated to word and picture alike. To do so is to apprehend the ongoing deviancy of the trace, the detours by which it insinuates itself so that text becomes inseparable from texture, and the sign is inextricably implicated in design. In his prophetic books, William Blake probed an equivocal interface between the pictorial dimension of writing and the nascent lettrism of visual art, as if this interface were at the root of the alchemical wedding, the hieros gamos of that universal expressive key, the clavis universalis, or what Gustav René Hocke calls “speech alchemy.” Having its roots in Latin antiquity and in Jewish mysticism, this hermetic legacy plays a prodigious role in Renaissance and Baroque combinatorial arts. The tradition as a whole is motivated by the dream of a felicitous condensation of meaning into signs that are, in themselves, signs of “motivation”—that is, models of a transformative union of signifier and signified. As a tradition of esotericism, such practices accompany a sufficient number of poet-seers into modernity to have warranted attention as an “orphic” legacy (by Gwendolyn Bays in The Orphic Vision, Elizabeth Sewell in The Orphic Voice, and Robert McGahey in The Orphic Moment—to cite three symmetrically titled studies, along with the Orphic and Hermetic modes proposed by Gerald Bruns in Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language). The aspirations of literary mannerism and orphism are perhaps most familiar in the recapitulations of Jorge Luis Borges, whose tales are parables of a divine script, a universal library, an incarnate Logos, and the bewitching enigma of the alphabet as a combinatorial medium rivaling the elements of the periodic table. As Borges’ parables elucidate, the pursuit of the clavis universalis encompasses the Kabbalistic arts of temurah and gematria, the hermetic disciplines of

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alchemy and astrology, as well as the practical pursuits of cryptography and hermeneutics. While not couched in the vocabulary of esotericism, Mallarmé’s pursuit of “le Livre” and Pound’s manifesto (via Fenollosa) “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” are installments of a modernist speech alchemy. In the visual arts, a corresponding dream of the articulate image is evident in the work of Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Max Ernst, and André Masson, among others. Regardless of the medium, writers, artists, and composers at the fin de siècle felt the persistent allure of pan-semiosis as an instigation of creative cosmogenesis. Under the impact of Wagnerism transmuted into Symbolism, pan-semiosis as a model of the intelligible universe was displaced by synaesthesia, the dream of holistic participation. The convergence of these two legacies, pan-semiosis and synaesthesia, can be plausibly dated. Paul Valéry, encountering Un Coup de dés in Mallarmé’s worksheets in 1897, described the text as tracing the pattern of thought itself: It seemed to me that I was looking at the form and pattern of a thought, placed for the first time in finite space. Here space itself truly spoke, dreamed, and gave birth to temporal forms. Expectancy, doubt, concentration, all were visible things. With my own eye I could see silences that had assumed bodily shapes. Inappreciable instants became clearly visible: the fraction of a second during which an idea flashes into being and dies away; atoms of time that serve as the germs of infinite consequences lasting through psychological centuries—at last these appeared as beings, each surrounded with a palpable emptiness. . . . there in the same void with them, like some new form of matter arranged in systems or masses or trailing lines, coexisted the Word! (Leonardo 309) Un Coup de dés revealed to Valéry a reciprocity between the alphabet and the stars: “He has undertaken, I thought, finally to raise a printed page to the power of the midnight sky,” he reflected of Mallarmé. “I was now caught up in the very text of the silent universe” (312, 311). Within the scope of synaesthetic suggestibility, this kind of silence could also evoke music, and Valéry found Un Coup de dés gave “the impression of an orchestral score,” its typographic complexity calculated “to rediscover the mood induced in us by orchestral music” (318–319). In addition to inciting musical reveries, Un Coup de dés established the criteria for typographic precision as an integral feature of poetic practice, provoking Italian Futurist free-word compositions on one hand, and Stefan George’s orthographic reforms for German typography on

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the other. More importantly, after Mallarmé poets not only wrote words, they traversed a space. The synaesthetic potential felt by Valéry may be rendered variously: Am I reading a text or looking at the starry constellations? Do my eyes scan lines of verse or do I submit to mental pilgrimage? Does the poem, in the act of reading, achieve its pulmonary destiny in the bloodstream, carving furrows in cerebral matter? To what secret imprint am I subjected by reading for the content, as it were, while the form is smuggled past imperceptibly? By rendering content opaque, the brusque material insinuations of form begin to be felt as phantom sensations of a beguiling undertone. The equivocation between reading and seeing, between semantic comprehension and pathic feeling, attests to the sensation Mallarmé’s poetry imposes on its readers: being held off, resisted, disarmed, or unworked. Such a transposition was applied to Un Coup de dés itself by Ernest Fraenkel in Les Dessins trans-conscients de Stéphane Mallarmé (1960). Fraenkel’s sixty-eight seismographic and astral diagrams (or “stylizations”) practice a truly graphic mode of literary analysis. It was Fraenkel’s conviction that “a plastic text rests hidden in the extra-conscious layers of the poet, paralleling the verbal text of the poem” (9)—a thought not far from Moholy-Nagy’s appraisal of “a new lyric expression” in Dada, “like an x-ray revelation, making transparent that which was previously opaque” (315).8 In their accentuation of the visual character of Un Coup de dés, Fraenkel’s designs are like watching a movie with the sound turned off, forced to rely on gesture rather than dialogue in order to follow the action. In Fraenkel’s treatment, Mallarmé’s words are relieved of semantic administration and dispersed into a pure evocation. His method could also pass for a demonstration of Walter Benjamin’s notion of translation as the “removal from one language into another through a continuum of transformations” (Reflections 325). Crossing a linguistic threshold, one becomes a different person as it were, and each checkpoint emits yet another persona. In this garden of forking paths, each border (each word) simultaneously announces and renounces, saying hello and goodbye in a single utterance. From this prospect, words are members of the broader species of signs, and at some ultimate semiotic portal no two signs are alike, so there can be no repetition. Each use of a word traces a new profile. Benjamin’s conclusion reiterates the linguistic vision of Novalis’s “Monologue”—albeit in a paradigm worthy of Kafka: “The language of nature is comparable to a secret password that each sentry passes to the next in his own language, but the meaning of the password is the sentry’s language itself ” (331–332). Benjamin touches (lightly—like the tip of that wing rustling obliquely through so many poems by Mallarmé) on a drama in which one passes

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through the word rather than by means of it, embarking on that pilgrimage identified by Osip Mandelstam: Every word is a bundle and the meaning sticks out of it in various directions, not striving toward any one official point. When we pronounce “sun” we are, as it were, making an immense journey which has become so familiar to us that we move along in our sleep. What distinguishes poetry from automatic speech is that it rouses us and shakes us awake in the middle of a word. Then the word turns out to be far longer than we thought, and we remember that to speak means to be forever on the road. (13) Mandelstam understands the word as a journey through the rhetorical medium of analogy, much as Fraenkel’s “stylizations” are visual analogies to Mallarmé’s poem. Analogy is a means of conceptual locomotion, creating potential interplay between disparate and seemingly incommensurable domains. As Mandelstam’s passage and Benjamin’s scenario of sentries imply, language is a singularly analogical operation. Mallarmé raised the stakes dramatically by liberating analogy from the neoclassical category of “fancy.” His audacity was to invest in analogy a power of utmost necessity (this is not like that: this is that) while at the same time admitting the arbitration of the arbitrary. In the poem, then, the relation of signifier to signified is simultaneously motivated and capricious. Wrestling with the “demon of analogy” in a poem by Mallarmé, the reader might well affirm the wisdom of Mandelstam’s remark that to pronounce a single word is to embark on a journey that encompasses the waking as well as the dreaming mind, effectively collapsing them into one. The poem becomes both dream quest and computational rebus. The convenience of dictionary definitions obscures the fact that, like a color in a painting, the word in a poem is a word in a specific environment. A different environment alters the word. Every apparent repetition is accompanied by this environmental difference—a difference brought to attention by Mallarmé, and said to be “spreading” in the first of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. Repetition is not succession. A throw of the dice pushes the principle to its limit: much as it repeats the familiar terms of the previous throw, another throw owes nothing to it. So repetition is inaugural. The relation of each occasion to the next can be charted only by way of analogy. Analogy is repetition with difference—but with this difference: it cancels indifference from the equation. Each throw of the dice clenches knuckles. Analogy remotivates difference as the form of supplication by which repetition may be known; and, in knowing, honored. Behind our assent to the

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adequacy of generalizations lurks a faith in the power of analogy. A statement like “Trees are green” hypothesizes an analogical relationship between all the varieties of green, absorbing even blues and grays into its greenery. The appeal to analogy was widespread throughout modernism, from Symbolism to Surrealism.9 Analogy is implicit in Cubism, Simultanism, the development of collage; and it is vital to the “historical sense” theorized by T.S. Eliot. Joyce’s Ulysses and Pound’s Cantos are monuments to the principle of analogy, in their inducement of a simultaneous apprehension of past and present. Yet the supposition underlying analogy is coincidence, a species of the arbitrary (as theorized by Saussure with reference to the linguistic sign). Freud recognized that arbitrariness might be a clue to the way psyche organizes trauma into patterns of intelligible gratification. Following Freud and Dada, the Surrealists claimed arbitrariness, chance and accident as operative procedures for making art. Despite efforts to impose doctrinaire unanimity, Surrealism was most effective as a migratory inflection touching on all the arts, inciting in them the “demon of analogy” (Mallarmé’s title) as a way of liberating chance and, in the process, elevating it from a principle of aesthetic play to an existential imperative. As Breton wondered in Nadja, “By what latitude could we, abandoned thus to the fury of symbols, be occasionally a prey to the demon of analogy, seeing ourselves the object of extreme overtures, of singular, special attentions?” Answering his own question: “we may imagine the mind’s greatest adventure as a journey of this sort to the paradise of pitfalls”—“paradis des pièges” (111–112, Oeuvres 716). A pitfall is a trap, as Breton was aware by using the term (piège derives from the verb “to trap,” piéger). Appended to paradise, though, what does it mean? What’s the entrapment in paradise? To embrace accident or chance or happenstance as a governing credo in the making of art has been familiarized by Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, and others. Max Ernst recognized that his method of inducing forms to appear by means of rubbing (frottage) was “a great blow to art critics, who are terrified to see the importance of the ‘author’ being reduced to a minimum and the concept of ‘talent’ abolished”—anticipating by decades similar claims by Foucault and Barthes (Jean 271). Despite the contributions of Surrealism to chance procedures (Ernst’s frottage, Wolfgang Paalen’s fumage, Gordon Onslow Ford’s coulage), Breton’s apparition is literary, and based on something he affirmed by way of analogy. Breton’s source is Pierre Reverdy’s definition of the image in Nord-Sud in 1918, which Breton cites in his 1924 manifesto of Surrealism: The image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities.

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The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be—the greater its emotional power and poetic reality. (Manifestoes 20) Reverdy in turn was reiterating a theme announced by Mallarmé in “Crise de vers”: The poet will “institute an exact relation between images, and let detach there a third, blendable, clear aspect, presented for divination” (Divagations 207). Reverdy’s crucial augmentation—the very thing most appealing to Breton—is the concept of juxtaposition, literalized as coincidence. Where Mallarmé imagines the poet studiously cultivating a rapport between the two images, Reverdy suggests that any active comparison be dropped altogether. One is left, instead, with haphazard incommensurability—like the encounter, sketched by Lautréamont and constantly cited by the Surrealists, of an umbrella and a sewing machine. The paradise of pitfalls is a lucky break, the way the dice beat the odds in a single unrepeatable throw. In this way, the traditional poetic power of analogy became annexed to chance, revealing in the process the hidden determinations by which analogy had always been subject to chance anyway. Once analogy is aligned with chance, much of what passes for analogy in the form of poetic metaphor turns out to be mere comparison; and, compared with analogy, comparison is an agent of reason. Compared with comparison, on the other hand, analogy is the signifier of difference, difference as unaccountable but felicitous. Unrepeatable, but inaugural. In its quest for a motivated link between signifier and signified, the tradition of the clavis universalis pursued combinatorial algorithms of a complexity unapproachable until the advent of the modern computer. The management of data is now consigned to computational technologies securely founded on binary digits. Yet we continue to speak, and speech is unsecured by anything other than the ad hoc accumulation of conventions. Through custom we become accustomed to conventional meanings, and conventional meanings are based on “arbitrary” correspondences between signifier and signified (the canine retains its bark through successive names, chien, Hund, dog, perro, cane, etc., though in English we still have to deal with the fact that its bark doesn’t grow on trees). Such an account of signification reduces the concept of language to nomenclature; but as Mallarmé and others touched by the clavis universalis understood, syntax remains to be considered. Words do not signify one at a time, but in clusters, flocks, hives and cascades. “Words form swarms which a mysterious Eros reassembles and destroys” (Pierssens 13). The bundle of the word, in Mandelstam’s model, must be untied and strewn about on the public thoroughfare, its

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singularity scattered to the winds. As the Russian poet knew, this dissipation paradoxically expands the word until it becomes the road itself and even the journey. Mallarmé’s contribution to this endless task of rearticulation is désoeuvrement, an unworking that has to do with chance, a throw of the dice (dés), so we might as well call this unworking dice work. A throw of the dice will not abolish chance, the poem says. In fact, it confirms the inescapability of chance, while at the same time disclosing our investment in coincidence, covenant of an uncanny motivation. We take motivation (meaning) wherever we can get it, however fugitive its manifestation. To use words is to take dictation from the murmur, in the sense that you submit to the arbitration of chance in the options given by a particular language. The poetic option submits these chances to the providence of analogy, which is a way of learning how to affirm coincidence as simultaneously motivated and arbitrary. The demon of analogy emancipates chance, scattering invitations in all directions to follow the trail to the paradise of pitfalls. You want meaning? it seems to ask. Bon chance. Messages Without Words The “dice work” or labor of unworking (désoeuvrement) is a paradigm shift germane to that fin de siècle prospect of artistic synthesis often associated with the Wagnerian enterprise of the Gesamtkunstwerk, when the intelligible universe of the clavis universalis was subsumed by synaesthetic reverie. In Mallarmé’s anecdotal paradigm, however, the grandiose orchestral forces are swept aside; poets are no longer required to play subservient basso continuo and are free to go off on their own. The orchestra is deorchestrated, undone into a cascade of coups de dés. The total artwork is restored to the imagination (or the Hegelian Spirit), while the individual arts are free to follow arabesques far beyond previously assigned section parts. Words and images and sounds pursue a new sentience in the paradise of pitfalls. In the Romantic legacy sustained through modernism, each art is revitalized by conceiving itself in terms of another art, taking its chances with analogy. In lieu of its “vocation of disorder,” Blanchot wonders what qualifies as Romanticism: “Where it manifests itself, rich in projects, or where it dies out, poor in works?” (Infinite 352) The answer: equivocation. Or, to use a term the Romantics themselves were fond of, the arabesque, the ability to wriggle simultaneously toward contrary poles. Although such wriggling can remain intransitive, and the work uncompleted, “ ‘this superiority of intelligence over the power of execution’ is the very sign of authenticity” as Blanchot puts it by way of Valéry (Leonardo 354). Execution is tacitly the domain of the artisan, so the artist asserts authority in a sovereign gesture of disdain,

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as if the poet, conceiving the masterpiece, says to the reader you do it, where doing amounts to a laborious temporal extraction of the divine Idea from a patent muddle (in which James Joyce sets his hen pecking at a suspiciously sodden letter in Finnegans Wake). Resisting completion can also be decisive in its prevarication between available means; terminal indecision is hard to distinguish from polyvalent creative options. The painter executes a sonata in pastel or oil; the composer narrates pure sculptural plasticity; the poet pulverizes words to feast on sounds. The migration of words into images and back again finds an enthusiast in filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, who makes the intriguing claim that Paradise Lost “is a first-rate school in which to study montage and audio-visual relationships” (Film 58). In a context ranging in its references from Finnegans Wake and Lewis Carroll to Freud, Mayakovsky, and the director’s own films, Milton may seem anachronistic. But Eisenstein’s point is so simple as to transcend historical specificity. As Eisenstein demonstrates, each line of Paradise Lost launches an image equivalent to a film shot, imposing on the reader the need to provide continuity—that is, to assimilate the “stills” of sequential lines into narrative momentum. In this way, “The image planned by the author has become flesh of the flesh of the spectator’s risen image” (34). Eisenstein’s terms suggest the defamiliarization obtained by putting an animal mask on a human face. Estrangement animates, or discloses the animation concealed by familiarity. “Milton’s achievements are many,” writes Richard Bradford, “but the one with which he has not so far been credited is his role in the founding of visual poetry” (17). This is a surprising assertion about the contemporary of George Herbert, yet Bradford’s point is as basic as Eisenstein’s, though it involves a bit more historical context. Eighteenth-century prosodists, including John Walker and Thomas Sheridan, drew attention to the fact that enjambment in Miltonic blank verse obscured the function of the line as metrical unit by carrying the sense over from one line to another. Blank verse, it seemed, blanked out or expunged the very criteria that made the line a line—whether as a constituent of rhyme, accentual stress, or syllabic count. Walker went so far as to offer a passage of Paradise Lost rearranged so that the lines correspond to a rudimentary semantic; and, curiously, this rendering makes Milton look like a practitioner of modern vers libre. Bradford finds an instructive link between modernism and these eighteenth-century agonies over blank verse, one that indicates the extent to which poetry overcame its notational deference to prosody, becoming attentive instead to its potential as visual signifier. Just as rhyme operates not only as a marker of the line ending but as a device that thickens and intensifies meaning, so the visual structure that replaced

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it would come to represent an axis in the interplay between abstract form and signification. The loss of rhyme was one stage in the institution of visual form as a component of the double pattern, and . . . the destruction of the pentameter would bring its function, literally, into sharper focus. (17) To bring the poem into focus in this sense is paradoxically to make it unreadable. In order for the glance to sweep across the total shape of the poem on the page, the impulse to read needs to be thwarted. Abolishing words renders the visible legible on its own account, so the page emerges as space, map, diagram, plot, zone, template, or grid—confirming Rosalind Krauss’s proposal that an “imperviousness to language” in the form of the grid contributes to a range of avant-garde art works purportedly invested in originality; and this underlying grid reveals that “ ‘originality’ . . . itself emerges from a ground of repetition and recurrence” (158). To be able to read a poem is a distraction, deflecting the gaze from the visual template as a field of pulsations, visual corollaries of the murmur, “minding its meanderings, rather than by positing it as an object of knowledge” (Kristeva, Desire 145). To mind the meanderings, says Yeats in the idiom of his day, “the soul moves among symbols and unfolds in symbols when trance, or madness, or deep meditation has withdrawn it from every impulse but its own” (Essays 162), responsive to nothing but “la scansion rythmique de l’être.” The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation, by hushing us with an alluring monotony, while it holds us waking by variety, to keep us in that state of perhaps real trance, in which the mind liberated from the pressure of the will is unfolded in symbols. (Essays 159) To imagine the executive role of the will dislodged by the rhythmic persistence of another order of events is a prerequisite to making the synaesthetic leap stipulated by Mallarmé, in what must be his most frequently cited passage: The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet speaking, who yields the initiative to words, through the clash of their ordered inequalities; they light each other up through reciprocal reflections like a virtual swooping of fire across precious stones, replacing the primacy of the perceptible rhythm of respiration or the classic lyric breath, or the personal feeling driving the sentences. (Divagations 208)

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Extending the reverie, Russian Symbolist Andrey Bely launches the gleam into the starry sky: Every act of cognition is a firework display of words with which I fill the void surrounding me. If my words sparkle with colors, then they create the illusion of light. This illusion of light is also cognition. No one persuades anyone. No one can prove anything to anyone. Every argument is a battle of words, is magic. When I speak I do so only for the purpose of casting a spell. (103) For Bely, “magic is nothing other than the musical resonance of the soul increased to an exorbitant degree” (78). Soon Symbolism meets Dada in the quest to “rediscover the evangelical concept of the ‘word’ (logos) as a magical complex image” (Ball 68). “Artistic creation is a process of conjuring,” Hugo Ball surmised, “and its effect is magic” (104). By means of such magic, Ball said of sound poetry, “We tried to give the isolated vocables the fullness of an oath, the glow of a star” (68). An exemplary demonstration of how such an oath is taken and the spell is cast—yielding in this case to the specific metabolic parameters of hallucination—is Henri Michaux’s Connaissance par les gouffres in which he chronicles the “endo-polyformations” or the “tennis of synonyms” that spasmodically arise and dissipate under the influence of hashish (Light 78). Michaux ascribes the dissymmetry of observations and concepts to the texture of the drug. “Three major operations are involved. Spying on the hemp. With the hemp, spying on the mind. With the hemp, spying on oneself” (63). When “spying” is transposed to writing, generally in short lines, finely modulated so that each line marks an event horizon, the line becomes a punctual event in its own right. It marks the spot. The vault of noises lifts . . . the jaws that swallowed Jonas open and close in time according to my reflections (Light 74, ellipsis in original) As the hashish gives access to a domain of atomic elements, a “rather special phenomenon manifests itself which I should like to call neotenic thinking,” Michaux says. “Before a thought has fulfilled itself and matured, it gives birth to a new one, and this one, scarcely born, incompletely formed, brings still another into the world, a litter of others which similarly respond to one

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another by means of unexpected and unseizable references, which I have not so far succeeded in rendering” (63–64). Instructively, any attempt at rendering lapses or collapses, and Michaux’s transcription ends up monitoring the nervous system as it emits pulsations. As sensation succumbs to pulsation, lines of text are succeeded by lines as such, lines without words. Together they induce an echo effect of thought upon neotenous thought, expanding in the agonized sensorium like a dripping faucet. Traffic spinspreads spinspreads the prodigy I cannot write this “without cease” without cease ——— ——— ——— ——— ——— ——— ——— ——— ——— ——— ——— ——— ——— ——— The impression, the hand, the least Interceptions interceptions (Light 75) Culminating this section (titled “Conveyer belt in motion”) is a symmetrical figure created by centered lines of type and symmetrical bars of increasing size (87): plunging toward more resonance toward more toward more more More MOR E

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Words disappear into a tar pit of deep associative writhings. The drugged mind descends like Orpheus into Hades, and what comes back is always different—the skein of difference as such. The word had plunged. “Pinched” returned as “corset.” I have often followed a thought. Was it always a thought? At times rather a mental phrase, mute, signaled, unpronounced, as African tomtoms transmit messages without words. I noted for example: —— — —

—— —— — — — —— —— —— —

——— —— —

— — — — — — . . ———– — —– (102–103) In this passage the text is sustained as vacancy by the lines, bearing “messages without words,” rhythms of the drums. T.S. Eliot thought “a poem, or a passage of a poem, may tend to realize itself first as a particular rhythm

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before it reaches expression in words, and . . . this rhythm may bring to birth the idea and the image” (On Poetry 38). Closer to his jazz age “Sweeney Agonistes,” Eliot was more colorful: “Poetry begins, I dare say, with a savage beating a drum in a jungle, and it retains that essential of percussion and rhythm”—and then, reading phylogeny as ontogeny, he adds, “one might say that the poet is older than other human beings” (Use 155). Michaux, on the other hand, uses his series of lines to score the incipient pattern of creative conjecture, as if to suggest that a poem begins in the mind as a series of geometric lines subsequently fleshed out, in composition, as words.10 Michaux’s procedure is theoretically encompassed by Point and Line to Plane (1926), in which Kandinsky restores a sense of “line” as something other than a term coincidentally used with reference to poetry and drawing. While not intended as such, Kandinsky’s terms offer coordinates for the renovation of poetry promoted by Wordsworth and Whitman, becoming modernist dogma with Pound: to lay it on the line and get the point across in plain words. But Kandinsky’s terminology is more astute, and he takes care to define “point,” “line,” and “plane” in ways that are applicable to poetry not only in its topographical capacity as the occupation of a field by graphemes. Defining the visual point as “the briefest, constant, innermost assertion,” Kandinsky’s phrasing invokes nothing less than the image of Imagism (Point 32). Likewise, his view of the line brings to mind Vorticism, the line being defined as “concentric tension” erupting out of the point and taking on a life of its own (54). Ernst Bloch offers a complementary notion, speaking of the musical note: “The note began as something which was pulling and stretching, but does it want to go on like this?” (228). Marianne Moore’s famous poem on poetry undergoes such drastic reduction in her revisions over the years (from thirty lines in 1919 to three in 1967) that it might be said to contract to a point. Finally, Kandinsky postulates the plane as a living being emitting a characteristic “sound” (his own volume of poetic experiments was titled Klänge or Sounds), a model bringing to mind Mallarmé’s sense of the book as a “total expansion of the letter” (Divagations 228). But Kandinsky’s adherence to the notion of a sound emanating from a visual surface reveals his synaesthetic subtext. So the line marks a threshold of tensions between text and image, specifying the site of a semantic promiscuity, a site in which cognition is revealed to be a duplicitous reservoir, and seeing is always seeing double. The twofold understanding of the line discloses the ecstatic agitation of signs, lending pathic resonance to Kandinsky’s goal to “make . . . pulsation perceptible” (Point 145). If the spell cast by the linear pulsations of Michaux strikes a familiar note—the frantic or inconsolable mind confronting the abyss, le gouffre familiar from Baudelaire through the Symbolist twilight, pacing the parapets of an Elsinore off the map—it’s because Michaux stands with Mallarmé at a precipice (commensurate with Rilke’s castle Duino) where “Toute Pensée émet un Coup de Dés” (Mallarmé, Poems 145).

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To emit a thought in material form is to throw the dice, but when chance encroaches on language the poet may well resent “the intolerable wrestle / With words and meanings” (Eliot, Complete 179). In “East Coker,” T.S. Eliot depicts himself Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure Because one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating, In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, Undisciplined squads of emotion. (182) Despite such an apparently confessional moment, Eliot manages to mobilize language by following its native gleam, as in the line “We must be still and still moving,” where the antithetical states of rest and motion rely on the same word (183). The magnetic appeal of a binary flip (now this now that; no, but yes) compacted into a single word is what thrilled Hegel about the German term “Aufhebung” (from the verb aufheben, which can mean to cancel and to preserve). Aufheben “is among the most important concepts of philosophy,” Hegel said, finding it “remarkable that a language should have come to use one and the same word for two opposite determinations. It is a joy for speculative thought to find words which in themselves have a speculative meaning” (119–120). Mobilizing a semantic equivocation within language, such words are cousins of the slippage examined above between the line of poetry and the visual line. In either case—the word with a double meaning, or the verse line and its lineated effacement—they partake of a flicker or pulsation when the reader flips back and forth between the alternatives. To do so is to apprehend the structural integrity of a material constellation; and this is what artist and poet Otto Nebel addressed in his audacious poem Unfeig. Following a theatrical apprenticeship with Rudolf Blümner (whose sound poem “Ango Laïna” from 1923 is the major rival in scale to Schwitters’ Ur-Sonata), Nebel studied art with Kandinsky, sharing the latter’s synaesthetic orientation (he titled a watercolor The Well Tempered Triangle in 1927). After the First World War, Nebel began to publish poetry in Der Sturm. He organized a book length sound poem, Unfeig, as a fugue in runes (the runes being nine letters of the alphabet, basic building blocks of a combinatorial art preternaturally indifferent to grammar and semantics).11 Nebel characterized Unfeig as a form of “extensive language research and poetic glimpses and labors” (7).

Figure 1.2

Otto Nebel, Unfeig.

Courtesy: Otto Nebel-Stiftung, Bern.

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The subtitle, “A Nine-Rune-Fugue Fiddled at the Wrong Time” (or inopportunely) forwards the musical motif running through the text: Geige (violin), Geiger (violinist), and the verb geigen fiddle and befuddle their way through a ballet of consonants and vowels. Although the text fixates on a number of such key words, the nine letters are recombined throughout the work, summoning words from the dictionary and (more often) the neologistic proclivity of German syntax; slivers of sense helplessly appear, shuffled into proto-semantic chunks of word stuff, reducing common vocabulary to the status that “rocket” (Rakete) has in Schwitters’ Ur-Sonata. As Oskar Pastior notes in a recent reissue of the text, Unfeig is basically a lipogram (70), and in fact Nebel regarded Unfeig as preparatory to the twelve rune work Das Rad der Titanen (The Wheel of the Titans). But lipograms are about a generally surreptitious exclusion (Georges Perec’s La Disparition famously orchestrates an entire narrative around the omission of the letter e from the text), whereas Unfeig is conspicuously invested in displaying the combinatory art and artifice of its rudimentary runes: Tiefteufen erfugen Tiefteufen ereifern Tiefeifer teufen Tiefteufeifer tiefen Tiefteufeifer tiefer teufen Tiefteufeifer feurig tiefer teufen Tiefteufeifer erneut feurig erfugen tief Tieffeuerfugen enteifern (29) In my crude rendering: deepdevil fugues [verb] deepdevil gets excited deepzeal bedevils deepdevilzeal deepens deepdevilzeal deepens bedevils deepdevilzeal fiery deepens bedevils deepdevilzeal renews fiery deep fugueing deepfirefugues dezeals Nebel encoded the runes for a visual template as well, made up of emblems that reinforce the abstract nature of Unfeig while suggesting a primary communicative ensemble starting up from scratch. With Unfeig we come to the

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lip of the crucible in which signs and sounds perturbate the murmur, giving new meaning to Velimir Khlebnikov’s startling prediction that “Henceforth a work of art could consist of a single word” (King 119). Unfeig balances geometric precision with the spirit of the murmur. Its vocalizations may sport with French as well as German, but in either case they undergo a descent, submitting to what Mallarmé christened “the orphic explanation of the Earth” (Divagations 3). The Orphic outlook sustains its own furtive legation to intransigence, not only through strategies of drift, incompletion, and difficulty, but also by way of the thematic contours of Orpheus’ descent into Hades. The momentary doubt that nudges the singer’s glance fatally back at Eurydice amounts to a freeze-frame in the cinematic sense, a psychological and semantic paralysis. This moment inaugurates a supreme iconographic endowment, the birth of the image. That most famous of Imagist poems, “In a Station of the Metro,” is an underworld vision by a poet who would soon inaugurate his Cantos with a descent to Avernus on piggyback (as though Andreas Divus were to Homer like Aeneas carrying his father on his back in the Aeneid).12 And yet, even this unimpeachable miniature equivocates, hesitates in the delivery of its image, forcing us to reflect on a bifurcation of image in the poem and the poem itself as image. The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. (Poems 287) But look at the same poem punctuated by blanks in the arrangement specified by Pound for its publication in Poetry, in 1913: The apparition of these faces in the crowd Petals on a wet, black bough .

:

The textual stability of “In a Station of the Metro” is contested by its typographic variant. But, given the brevity of the text, in either version it’s possible to consider the poem itself as aspiring to the instantaneity of the glance that inspired it: a pre-Polaroid snapshot. The poem is an image before it is read, before its semantic image is processed. Pound’s contemporary, Andrey Bely, proposed that “In poetry the words are grouped in such a fashion that their totality gives the image” (97). Mallarmé offered a similar hypothesis of the way poetry, “out of several vocables, makes a total word, entirely new, foreign to the language, and almost incantatory” (Divagations 211). Mallarmé and Bely were probably not thinking of anything

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as concise as “In a Station of the Metro.” Even so, they propose that every poem is the incarnation of a new word—a mechanical integrity like William Carlos Williams envisions in his introduction to The Wedge (1944).13 A poem like Wallace Stevens’ “Anecdote of the Jar” has clearly attained that status: its jar in Tennessee is autopoietic, a naming ritual inaugurating a space that is, tautologically, none other than itself—as if to say, I hereby declare I am I as in Kandinsky’s definition of a genuine art work: “ ‘Here I am!’ ” (Complete 832). Rimbaud’s famous formula, “Je est un autre” introduces a genuflection into this moment (or movement), a crack in the golden bowl, and a swerve along the lines of Lucretius’ clinamen (304). The slippage or deviance inaugurated by Rimbaud—in which Here I am necessarily configures I as other—adds a crucial modernist twist, prying open a surreptitious synaesthesia. Seeing words, tasting sounds, reading images, fondling an idea—or most improbably, being other: “Thus a tiny, unassailable cell of continuity will be formed in the serrated extension of the discontinuous” (Calasso, Literature 159). The artistic challenge is, how to accomplish the opposite of accomplishment? How to disclose and revoke at once? How displace intention by serendipity? How does one become precisely lucky? German Romantic theory of the Mischgedicht (mixed genre) scrambles the polarities of this magnetic field such that genre no longer admits of recurrence, but can only be thought by way of radical singularity: “Every poem a genre unto itself” in Friedrich Schlegel’s audacious supposition (Szondi 93). In order to come into being—to accomplish itself as a genre unique to itself—a work requires unworking. This thought or urge, this urgency or creative emergency, became widespread by the twentieth century. A charter event for modernist unworking is Man Ray’s effacement of a poem for Picabia’s journal 391 (May 1924). The length of each effaced word is rendered visible by the thick line that occludes it—ostensibly, that is, since it’s doubtful there ever were any words under the strikeouts. The fact that the obliteration is so total is cause for suspicion, since the ascenders and descenders of letters like “b” and “d” and “p” should visibly extend above and below Man Ray’s lines. It’s likely that the artist did not work with an actual text, then, but through a series of lines of varying lengths he evokes the visual template of a poem, unwittingly contributing to Puttenham’s legacy (cf. note 10, p. 208). The context of Man Ray’s contribution to 391 is also pertinent, as this particular issue is presented under the auspices of “superréalisme,” with a secondary rubric, “hyperpoésie,” terms that suggest Man Ray was offering a literal account, his lines being above and beyond both realism and poetry.14 Clearly, unworking is not simply cancellation, though it’s by way of certain photographic discoveries by Man Ray that the concept is most intriguingly

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approached. His Rayographs exposed objects in space (and sometimes in motion) to photosensitive paper; the spectral images seem released from gravity as well as density. Appearance and disappearance coalesce in an object without substance—but even “object” suggests something concrete. If these are objects, they are “objects that dream and that talk in their sleep,” Tristan Tzara suggested (Phillips 56). In fact, all that subsists in Rayographic space is pure subject matter, and the subject is light. “Light is an instrument as subtle as the brush,” Man Ray found (Schwarz 236). “Like the undisturbed ashes of an object consumed by flames these images are oxidized residues fixed by light and chemical elements of an experience, an adventure, not an experiment” (237). Tzara fancied these Rayographs “filtered like a mane of hair through a comb of light” (Phillips 6). Fellow Dadaist Georges RibemontDessaignes proclaimed Man Ray “a subtle chemist of mysteries who sleeps with the metrical fairies of spirals and steel wool” (Schwarz 238). With the Rayograph, “It is no longer a question of preserving images in a box; but of making an astonishing destructive projection” (238). That is to say, the projection of the image abandons the object from which it derives, while the Rayograph dissipates the image itself. Art is inducement to disappearance. “Art is the negation of inspiration,” Man Ray provocatively declared (Phillips 12). What he sought to preserve in his studies and inventions was unqualified inspiration, not the production of objects (hence his impact on Surrealism). The photographic work in which he most closely realized this aspiration, and the one with the greatest bearing on poetry, is Space Writing (Self Portrait) (1935) in which the photographer, through a sustained open shutter, erases himself from his own photograph: carefully positioned in a frame mounted on a chessboard, he has busily filled the space instead with luminous traces from a small flashlight. This is writing, but the text is as unrepeatable and unrecoverable as the image of the artist himself. In its inventive arabesque, Space Writing is a documentary illustration of the consequences of “progressive, universal poetry” envisioned by the German Romantics (Schlegel 31). Poetry in the universal, progressive sense is the part that swaps places with the whole. Its theory is inextricable from the work itself. In Space Writing, appearance bids farewell. With cunning prevarication (like Odysseus in the cave of the Cyclops, punning on his name to conceal his identity), such a work’s claim to sovereignty is backed by no power, it rises to preeminence with no show of force, yet for that very reason it cannot be deposed. There’s no there there, other than the tacit utopia of non-servitude Adorno advocates in Aesthetic Theory. It’s the bottle imp working wonders but obedient to no command. It gratifies your wishes only by coincidence: that is, if it offers what you happen to desire, then you can fancy it’s at your service. But you can never get hold of it and put it to

Figure 1.3

Man Ray, Space Writing (Self-Portrait) (1935).

Copyright © 2008 Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris.

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work. It exists only in the grammatical form of the future perfect: it will have been—whatever it will have been: quodlibet, as Giorgio Agamben calls it in The Coming Community, “whatever” (1–2). Whatever is another name for the murmur. Désoeuvrement means working in the domain of the murmur, not as vocation but equivocation, where the interplay between abstract and concrete becomes the work itself, the work in its undoing. Kasimir Malevich, after painting Black Square (1915), issued one of the most impetuous and monumental declarations imaginable: “I have transformed myself in the zero of form” (173). If Un Coup de dés exemplifies an inaugural “zero of form” for poets, it still has words, and those words still unfold by means of lines, much as they solicit something else from the white space all around them. Pondering the inexhaustible character of the murmur, Blanchot asks: “How can one write in such a way that the continuity of the movement of writing might let interruption as meaning, and rupture as form, intervene fundamentally?” (Infinite 8). In various ways, the challenge of such writing extended to all the arts in the twentieth century. Schwitters’ cigar, Man Ray’s Space Writing, Nebel’s Unfeig, Michaux’s pulsations follow the allure. Reading in order to unlearn reading, looking so as not to see, listening so as not to hear: these are the protocols of désoeuvrement—dice in movement, constellations shuddering into momentary signification in the luck of analogy—coming to grips with the rhythmic scansion of being, oscillating between sound and sense, hearing and seeing, knowing and unknowing.

CHAPTER TWO

Drawing a Blank: Episodes in the Poetics of Unworking

“C

rumbling is not an instant’s Act,” wrote Emily Dickinson. “Dilapidation’s processes / Are organized Decays” (Poems 463). Picasso called his art a “sum of destructions” (Evans 81). Despite the apparent stability of his rectilinear compositional grids, Piet Mondrian was of like mind: “I think that the destructive element is too much neglected in art” (Golding 45). “In New York, when asked why he was reworking earlier canvases rather than simply painting new ones, he replied, ‘I don’t want pictures. I just want to find things out’ ” (Golding 46). Almost fifty years earlier, Jarry’s Père Ubu declared: “We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well” (106), and Arthur Symons approvingly cited Eleanor Duse’s opinion: “To save the theatre, the theatre must be destroyed” (Collected 217). Symons, who entertained the prospect that “There is such a thing as perfecting form that form may be annihilated” (Symbolist 5), inherited his outlook from Mallarmé, who confided to a correspondent, “Destruction was my Beatrice” (Letters 77). In Valéry’s clarification, “Destroying and constructing are equal in importance, and we must have souls for the one and the other” (Dialogues 70). Italian poet Eugenio Montale, who admired Valéry, recalled his early struggle to achieve an idiom: “I wanted to twist the neck of the eloquence of our old aulic language, even at the cost of a counter-eloquence” (Biasin 8). Louis Aragon concluded Paysan de Paris with the ringing exhortation, “Push the idea of the destruction of individuals as far as it will go; then, go beyond it” (167). Standing behind these intrepid articles of faith is Nietzsche, whose last published work was Twilight of the Idols, or, How One Philosophizes with a

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Hammer. However, this is no manifesto of a bull in the china shop; these idols are “touched with a hammer as with a tuning fork,” suggesting that obliteration requires a light touch, a certain delicacy of application (466). Preceding Nietzsche, there is that famous anarchist reminder by Bakunin: “The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!” (57). As modernism gained traction, beginning to seem more like a creative tendency than a series of intemperate outbursts, the representational stress borne by inherited literary and pictorial genres became acute; and writers and artists sought ways to draw a blank, as it were, in order to imagine themselves anew in light of modernity. If their blanks are now full for us, dense with the history of spectacular retractions, their blankness extends an incentive to forget the modernism we think we know, and roll the dice of unworking. It’s not as easy as it sounds, of course, so we can only submit to Paul Klee’s audacious instruction to subtract in order to see how it all adds up: “An exercise as a joke: Represent yourself without mirrors and without the kind of a posteriori conclusions that you get from mirrors. Exactly as you see yourself, therefore without a head, which you do not see” (184). In film director and theorist Jean Epstein’s estimation: “We need an eraser to efface styles, and then start constructing afresh. But are we capable of so much amputation?” (Abel 242). There’s a sense in which pursuit of the murmur has uncanny affinities with cases of acute amnesia, like that of the English musician Clive Wearing, whose affliction left him unable to recall even the preceding moment. Gradual improvements, like the ability to carry on a conversation (fitfully, and tending toward monologue), are attributed to the fact that the linguistic center of Wearing’s brain was unimpaired, as well as his ability to play music. Oliver Sacks distinguishes between two sorts of memory, “a conscious memory of events (episodic memory) and an unconscious memory for procedures” (108). Procedural memory, which another neurologist calls “fixed action pattern” memory (110), is based on learned templates like music and language. Being situated in a fixed action pattern (a poem, a sonata) momentarily alleviates Wearing’s plunge into the abyss, and this suggests something about artistic hankering after the murmur in general. In a passage Sacks cites from Victor Zuckerandl’s book Sound and Symbol, “Hearing a melody is hearing, having heard, and being about to hear, all at once. . . . Every melody declares to us that the past can be there without being remembered, the future without being foreknown” (112). To follow a pattern is, in effect, to become consumed in the process (as, in Islam, abstract patterns are the visible means by which the prohibition of images is carried out). Is the “real” Clive Wearing the man who has no idea who you are just seconds after meeting you, or the man who can effortlessly

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play a piano sonata? The question mirrors Yeats’ equivocation of dancer and dance in “Among School Children.” The great irony is that, in order to achieve the maximum self-effacement required for inhabiting the pattern of an artwork—playing music, painting, composing a poem—you might end up as a hero or a star. Henry James’ story “The Private Life” is a disturbing portrait of the artistic imagination, which is so utterly expended in execution that there’s sheer vacancy behind the façade, as if every writer were a Clive Wearing unabashedly pledging allegiance to José Lezama Lima’s credo: “The knowing that is not ours and the not knowing that is ours form for me true knowledge” (102). The poetics of unworking are attempts to get access to the fertilizing agency of the murmur, the plan or pattern exceeding personal volition, while somehow retaining a measure of identity in the process. The following episodes are documents of the murmur becoming explicit. To copy sound; to transfer the heft of experience from one medium to another, or from one sense to another; the extension of utterance from individual to multitude; the enigma of alphabetization, in which divergent systems cohabit a primal script; and the discrete nudge into distillation afforded by heightened consciousness: these are the pragmatic means by which the murmur has enabled poets to draw a blank, take a breath, and find some refreshment commensurate with Marianne Moore’s definition: “Poetry is a magic of pauses” (Prose 589). The Baying of the Hound In 1877 Thomas Edison chanted “Mary had a little lamb” into a microphone conducting the sound to an aluminum foil cylinder. He was already entertaining the remedial possibility of offering up Dickens’ novels in recorded versions for the benefit of those unable to read them. Edison soon switched to wax as the medium for his recording cylinders, and in 1890 his agent Colonel Gouraud prevailed upon certain public figures in England to deposit their voices for posterity in the new medium, Browning and Tennyson among them. These recordings mark a little noted watershed in the history of poetry. Dim as Tennyson’s voice sounds now, with its imbalanced ratio of noise to signal, it’s still possible to make out the cadence and the bardic resolve. It sounds as if the poet laureate—like the aged Ulysses he had prophesied in his own youthful poem, setting out on new adventures in his twilight years—were clinging by sheer oral tenacity to the magic of the voice machine. The ferocity audible in the recording looms out of the past as a corporeal angst, a profoundly somatic intuition that a limit was at hand, a frontier crossed. Though little noted, that border is as obvious as the Great Wall of China. The existence of recording media divides humanity

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into two clans, those with voices and those without. On one side of this unalterable partition we have Yeats, Eliot, Pound, H.D., Williams, Frost, Stevens, Auden, Moore, and a ceaselessly expanding cavalcade of poets preserved reading or performing their work. On the chill nether side are those huddled together as in an infernal setting Dante might have devised, the Circle of Poets Whose Voices are Silenced; and to list them would be to summon those who very names signify “poetry,” from Sappho to Keats, Li Po to Rimbaud. Foremost among Thomas Edison’s expectations was that the phonograph and the poet would be mutually beneficial. The voice of the poet was to be a cornerstone in the triple alliance of phonography, neurology, and spiritualism. In a postmortem rehearsal that inaugurates a precinct of this poetic Necropolis—a scenario blending science and seance—Robert Browning’s friends gather to hear the dead poet’s voice reanimated from wax cylinder recorded by Edison’s agent in April 1889. Partway into his recitation Browning stops apologetically, unable to remember his own lines. “I am exceedingly sorry that I can’t remember my own verses: but one thing that I shall remember all my life is the astonishing sensation produced by your wonderful invention” (Clark, Edison 164). The uncanny alliance registered by the survival of the voice endows memory with a funereal commemoration that even Plato had not suspected when he denounced writing as a blight on memory. If writing impairs even as it benefits, orality too has its liability, acceding to the sheer flow of words as they occur, swept along by a pace that may or may not coincide with understanding. Tennyson was also recorded by Gouraud, “giving magnificent readings in a voice of amazing power,” writes his grandson, “in spite of having to speak into a tube under such unfamiliar conditions” (Charles Tennyson 519). One of them is “Northern Farmer,” notable for its assiduous annotation of dialect. Seeä’d her todaäy goä by—Saäint’s-daay—they was ringing the bells. She’s a beauty thou thinks—an’ soä is scoors o’ gells, Them as ’as munny an’ all—wot’s a beauty?—the flower as blaws. But proputty, proputty sticks, an’ proputty, proputty graws. (689) Tennyson’s manner of recitation struck his contemporaries as oracular, chanted not spoken, incantation rather than recital. His preferred device was the vowel drone. In the account of one who heard him read “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington” in 1884, “he lengthened out the vowel a in the words ‘great’ and ‘lamentation’ till the words seemed as if they had

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been spelt ‘greaat’ and ‘lamentaation,’ and . . . he rolled out and lengthened the open oes in the words ‘To the nooise of the moourning of a mighty naation’ ” (Hair 64–65). Reflecting in old age on his distant boyhood, Ford Madox Ford recalled an atmosphere of numbing pomposity whenever his parents’ friends came over to the house and declaimed their verse. Mournfully, then, up and down the stone staircases, there would flow two hollow sounds. For, in those days, it was the habit of all poets and poetesses to read aloud upon every possible occasion, and whenever they read aloud to employ an imitation of the voice invented by the late Lord Tennyson, and known, in those days, as the ore rotundo—“with the round mouth mouthing out their hollow o’s and a’s.” (Hueffer 110) Ford adds ruefully, “The effect of this voice heard from outside a door was to a young child particularly awful. It went on and on, suggesting the muffled baying of a large hound that is permanently dissatisfied with the world.” In fact, this was the voice-over of a particular metrical tradition insinuated into the very notion of poetic cadence—a “standard currency, a guaranteed emotional tender insured against inflation” as Walter J. Ong puts it (151). Assessing this tradition as the particular legacy of Spenser, Ong notes, “In this bright and shining world of a successful Newtonian physics, a Cartesian mathematical solvent for all reality, and a naïve materialism, there is something which inevitably gave body to a ‘continuous literary decorum.’ Like the decimal measurement systems, Spenserian smoothness represented great achievement to the enlightened mind” (152). Another endowment, and an implicit subtext of English verse tradition—at least since the imperial cadences of Paradise Lost—was Virgilian Latin; and Latin, as a dying language in the late nineteenth century, was a medium of narcosis (as Leopold Bloom notices in the Lotos Eaters chapter of Ulysses, peeking into a Catholic church). The ensemble of sound elements tenuously clings to the semantic dimension in poems of the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins, inviting a hypothetical if unlikely alliance with the sound poems pioneered by the Dadaists. The explicitly ceremonial and liturgical aura surrounding Hugo Ball’s initial presentations of his sound poems at Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich serves as a reminder of the spirit of sanctification discernible in Tennyson’s oration as well. In the recitation of poetry, the liturgical style stresses (often unwittingly) an alliance between the high sublime and the sound poem, disclosing both as exercises in orality as incomprehension. Incantation legislates between the bardic posture of superior wisdom and a less privileged endowment, which is that of the stupefied

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or narcotically enchanted auditor. This latter position is bequeathed to any latecomer in a tradition, effectively consigning the whole contingent of poets and readers alike to the insecurity and bewilderment of belatedness, a dilemma given simply with the defamiliarizing anaesthetic of old cadences persisting in the present. Hearing stress and pitch as ventriloquial imperatives, bulletins from the ward bosses of prosodic heritage, we glean the uncanny thought that understanding encompasses rather than clarifies, and that within its circumscribed territory there are dark areas, zones that exceed what “understanding” normally signifies. Accentuation of stress and pitch is a normal prerogative of oral performance, as in Ezra Pound’s nasal drawl that doesn’t lend emphasis to the text so much as amalgamate it to innuendo. This manner is most effective in a poem of social satire like “Moeurs Contemporaines,” in which the poet intones the opening four lines in one continuous breath, with lingering stresses, and in a steadily falling tonal drone. It is a memorable demonstration of the collapse of air out of a pair of human lungs, dazzlingly coordinated to lavish its physical decrescendo on the satirical target: Mr. Hecatomb Styrax, the owner of a large estate and of large muscles, A “blue” and a climber of mountains, has married at the age of 28, He being at that age a virgin, The term “virgo” being made male in mediaeval latinity (Poems 522)1 Interestingly, Pound’s locution has drawn on another feature of medieval latinity, the plainchant. If nasal stress marks this passage in recording as satirical, the liturgical ebb and flow of a voice devotionally consorting with its phonological base rings through loud and clear. Certain words are sufficiently elongated that they might well be assigned notes on a musical staff, as demonstrated by Joshua Steele in Prosodia Rationalis (1775). What is most notable here is not the “musicality” of Pound’s performance—at least not insofar as that quality is associated with lyric transport—but his incorporation of musical intonation into speech cadence—not that far removed, in fact, from Schoenberg’s Sprechstimme. Music, in other words, is held in strict abeyance to the sonority of the voice, while the voice emphatically retains its conversational register. Pound achieves a paradoxical delivery in which the listener seems privy to gossip while attending Evensong. Other features of Pound’s characteristic reading style are the rolled r’s and a semi-tone hum (less nasalized when the subject is not satirical); but this is by no means unique to Pound. It is strikingly similar to the way Yeats reads “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” which, in turn, is in the “ore rotundo”

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mode of Tennyson. Igor Stravinsky heard Yeats on a BBC radio broadcast and observed “one could as easily notate his verses in musical rhythm as scan them in poetic meters” (Albright 26). This triple alliance of Tennyson-YeatsPound would be unthinkable were it not for the existence of recordings by all three that delineate a manner of recitation that seems to have ended with Pound. Louis Zukofsky’s famously “musical” ear is deeply insinuated into his deft balancing of phrasal registers, but the undertone (even in so potentially abstract a text as his homophonic rendering of Catullus) is securely bound to a conversational speaking voice—as T.S. Eliot thought it should: “The music of poetry . . . must be a music latent in the common speech of its time” (On Poetry 31). The sound dimension released in, and inhabited by poetry need not aspire solely to the condition of music. Or, to be precise, “music” is a variable term that, with regard to poetry, is like the X in an algebraic equation. Music, it’s commonly assumed, is a vocal sonority that impresses the ear as “poetic.” But is it the voice that is sonorous, or the poem—and how do you tell the difference? Might it be that this indeterminacy marks the conjunction—like a sidereal eclipse—of sound and sense, of the sensed and the senseless? In Michael Taussig’s exposition of somatic particularity in anthropological encounters—a realm somewhere “between the real and the really made-up”—he provides a tantalizing image of nineteenth-century ethnographers hauling phonographs into the Amazon for fieldwork (xvii). In the jungle, the mimetic faculty is reinstalled “as mystery in the art of mechanical reproduction, reinvigorating the primitivism implicit in technology’s wildest dreams, therewith creating a surfeit of mimetic power” (208). The image of the RCA dog, ear alert at the bell of the horn, stands guard at this site of mimetic surplus, with the gullible fidelity of Nostromo in Conrad’s novel. Technological supremacy is secured by this bewitchment of the sub-human. Is the development of sound in late-nineteenthand early-twentieth-century poetry related to mimetic superfluity? Do the indulgences of sound in Swinburne and Hopkins, like the sheer somatic vocal expectorations of Hugo Ball or Kurt Schwitters, exuberantly insist on scraping away a veneer of chatter in order to arrive at the sonic heave of language itself, thoroughly cleansed of human trace elements, preserved in the voice machine like NASA’s orbiting effluvia awaiting alien intelligence? Making the Ear an Eye Does the familiar reference to the music of poetry work only as analogy? References to music abound in Mallarmé’s preface to Un Coup de dés, as a “strange influence” presiding over the union of free verse and prose poem.

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Mallarmé intimates that the text may “little by little” follow the path of the symphony; and, “for whoever would read it aloud,” the typography approximates a musical score (Poems 122–123). Addressing the conspicuous scatter of typographic elements across the span of facing pages, he goes so far as to identify the white space (“les ‘blancs’ ”) with silence (121). But there’s a countertrend at work in the poem, according to the preface. Intriguingly, Mallarmé suggests that the page itself serves as a kind of blotting paper, mopping up images: “The paper intervenes each time an image, of its own accord, ceases or withdraws, accepting the succession of others” (121). This is followed by a tantalizing formulation consigning the lines of the poem to safety handles for “vraisemblance”: “it is not a question, as it usually is, of regular sound patterns or verses but rather of prismatic subdivisions of the Idea, at the instant they appear and for the duration of their concurrence in some exact mental setting, the text imposes itself, variably, near or far from the latent guiding thread, for the sake of verisimilitude” (is there a more exact description of Gertrude Stein’s compositional practice than this?). The delicacy of the poet’s assessment of his own means is rivaled only by Henry James’s prefaces to the 1904 edition of his fiction. Like James, it’s oddly evasive and precise. Mallarmé’s evocation is often taken to mean that his poem approximates the movement of thought or consciousness; and he admits it bears the imprint of a “stripped-down mode of thought, with its retreats, prolongations, flights” (122). But the synaesthetic aura of the preface suggests that the poem is not so much the material manifestation of a cognitive event, but a switchyard transposing various materials into and through one another, an ensemble of what appears in one light to be abstract and in another light concrete2: “Broadway Boogie Woogie” fifty years before Mondrian painted it. By the end of the nineteenth century, certain bodies of poetry had begun to evade cognitive grasp even as they invited submission to their unique soundscape: Swinburne, Hopkins, and Mallarmé in particular reach some “abstract rhythm never quite articulated as human speech” (Prins 57). Under the increasing sway of a musicalization of cultural ideals—epitomized, for literature, by Walter Pater’s emphatic pronouncement, “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music”3 (86, italics in original)—poetic “sense” suffered distinctive bifurcation. To strictly apprehend the meaning required a fortitude no less exacting than Odysseus having himself tied to the mast to withstand the call of the Sirens; and, conversely, to indulge the captivating contours of the poem’s phonetic material was to suffer the eclipse of semantic sense. Addressing this incipient gulf between poetic sound and sense, Sidney Lanier’s 1880 Science of English Verse opens with an “Investigation of Sound as Artistic Material”; and the very first definition of verse he offers is that

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“when formal poetry, or verse . . . is repeated aloud, it impresses itself upon the ear as verse only by means of certain relations existing among its component words considered purely as sounds, without reference to their associated ideas” (21). As a practical demonstration, Lanier proposes “the simple experiment of substituting for the words of a formal poem any other words which preserve the accentuation, alliteration, and rhyme, but which convey no ideas to the mind,—words of some foreign language not understood by the experimenter being the most effective for this purpose.” Lanier’s experiment is most radical in its affirmation that “all ideas may be abolished out of a poem without disturbing its effect upon the ear as verse” (21). Needless to say, Lanier doesn’t envision anything like sound poetry as such, largely because the appeal to musicality was well established; and “sound” in his own poetry, as in much Victorian verse, is chained to a soporifically melodious sense of rhythm. The sound of “sense” is compromised by verse decorum that, like Victorian furniture, is so plush as to confound the functions it’s meant to serve. By contrast, Swinburne’s acoustic dimension is so melodiously narcotic as to anaesthetize the rational faculty, short-circuiting the routine sentiments of versified piety embraced by his contemporaries, leaving a body of work in which the sound of not understanding is implicitly all there is to be understood of the poems—work that might well qualify for philosopher Alain Badiou’s characterization, “the poem is an unthinkable thought” (19). Badiou repudiates Plato’s expulsion of poet enchanters from the polis. “For our part, we will welcome the poem because it permits us to forego the claim that the singularity of a thought can be replaced by the thinking of this thought” (27). To consider a comparably “musical” poet like Gerard Manley Hopkins is to discern another potential altogether, however, in which synaesthesia does not so much fuse disparate senses as drive them even farther apart. Here is Hopkins encountering his own verse in that heightened frame of mind, defamiliarization—by which I mean not only Shklovsky’s sense in which literature is that which roughs up convention and violates expectation, but also Kandinsky’s experience coming into his studio and seeing one of his canvases leaning upside down and through that momentary misrecognition finding the path he would take into abstraction. [W]hen, on somebody returning to me the Eurydice, I opened and read some lines, reading, as one commonly reads whether prose or verse, with the eyes, so to say, only, it struck me aghast with a kind of raw nakedness and unmitigated violence I was unprepared for: but take breath and read it with ears, as I always wish to be read, and my verse becomes all right. (Bruns 138)

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At this point Hopkins is reversing Lanier’s sense, “that is the best description which makes the ear an eye” (22). Hopkins’ glimpse of his own writing discloses a horrible disfiguration: denuded words reduced to graphic marks, sucked clean of the inbreathed logos. Hopkins’ vision is keenly attuned to sound, although he prioritizes orality when discussing his craft. Regarding “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves,” he urged Robert Bridges to “remember what applies to all my verse, that it is . . . made for performance . . . loud, leisurely, poetical (not rhetorical) recitation, with long rests, long dwells on the rhyme and other marked syllables, and so on. This sonnet shd. be almost sung” (Works 472). Hopkins set more than two dozen lyrics to music, and “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo” was intended as a choral hymn for his never completed play “St. Winefred’s Well.” He would appear, then, to be among those for whom poetry aspires to the condition of music. The journals tell another story. Here is a characteristic passage, from July 22, 1873: Very hot, though the wind, which was south, dappled very sweetly on one’s face and when I came out I seemed to put it on like a gown as a man puts on the shadow he walks into and hoods or hats himself with the shelter of a roof, a penthouse, or a copse of trees, I mean it rippled and fluttered like light linen, one could feel the folds and braids of it—and indeed a floating flag is like wind visible and what weeds are in a current; it gives it thew and fires it and bloods it in.—Thunderstorm in the evening, first booming in gong-sounds, as at Aosta, as if high up and so not reechoed from the hills; the lightning very slender and nimble and as if playing very near . . . Flashes lacing two clouds above or the cloud and the earth started upon the eyes in live veins of rincing or riddling liquid white, inched and jagged as if it were the shivering of a bright riband string which had once been kept bound round a blade and danced back into its pleatings. Several strong thrills of light followed the flash but a grey smother of darkness blotted the eyes if they had seen the fork, also dull furry thickened scapes of it were left in them. ( Journals 233–234) This extraordinary evocation offers a minute registration of the tactile quality of the muggy day and the visual excitement of its lightning conclusion; but notice how little attention Hopkins pays to sound. This passage is symptomatic of his journals in general, which might just as well have been penned by a deaf man. The visual acuity on the other hand is astoundingly precise: “I took a last look at the breakers,” he notes a few weeks after the thunderstorm, “wanting to make out how the comb is morselled so fine into string and tassel . . . I saw big smooth flinty waves, carved and scuppled in shallow

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grooves . . . the crests I saw raveled up by the wind into the air in arching whips and straps of glassy spray and higher broken into clouds of white and blown away. Under the curl shone a bright juice of beautiful green. The foam exploding and smouldering under water makes a chrysophrase green” (235–236).4 Soundless underwater explosions incite the poet’s eye, all the sonority being reserved for the elastic resonance of his (written) English applied to the mute scene (“arching whips and straps of glassy spray” and “foam exploding and smouldering under water” could be inserted verbatim into his poems). This indifference to sound seems strange in a poet whose work is commonly accorded a supreme place among English ravishers of the ear. The extent and skill of Hopkins’ draftsmanship in the notebooks reinforces the intensity of his visual orientation; so it’s tempting to regard his copious application of diacritical markings to his verses as visual supplement rather than aural cue. There are numerous instances in his poetry in which the stress indicators fall at unlikely places, where stresses bunch up inside a line (sprung rhythm being a method for indicating contractions and expansions internal to the metrical measure, as if all metrics were part of an exfoliating continuum like fractals). To study the notebooks is to sense a man overmastered by a vision of his poems even as he purports to be merely notating them as speech. Hopkins’ visionary gleam is compounded on and harbored in a romance of sound as grit, phonemic incident as testament. Hence his famous definition of poetry compelling notice of language for its own sake: Poetry is speech framed for contemplation of the mind by the way of hearing or speech framed to be heard for its own sake and interest even over and above its interest of meaning. Some matter and meaning is essential to it but only as an element necessary to support and employ the shape contemplated for its own sake. (Poetry is in fact speech only employed to carry the inscape of speech for the inscape’s sake . . .). ( Journals 289) This may be the most cited of all Hopkins’ pronouncements, generally taken to sanction a subordination of sense to rhapsodic oral delivery. But he goes on to carefully distinguish a work “composed without meaning” (such as nonsense verse) as insufficient to stand on its own as poetry. “But if it has a meaning and is meant to be heard for its own sake it will be poetry if you take poetry to be a kind of composition and not the virtue or success or excellence of that kind, as eloquence is the virtue of oratory and not oratory only and beauty the virtue of inscape and not inscape only” (289). For its own sake. Hopkins routinely took special note of etymological cues in sounding out the sense of words, but sake was special. “It is the sake of

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‘for the sake of,’ foresake, namesake, keepsake. I mean by it the being a thing has outside itself, as a voice by its echo, a face by its reflection, a body by its shadow,” he wrote in a letter, “something distinctive, marked, specifically or individually speaking, as for a voice and echo clearness; for a reflected image light, brightness” (Letters 83). To overflow oneself is the literal meaning of the word ecstasy—to stand outside, to be set apart. Hopkins refers this distinction to the sound of the voice and the patina of reflected light, suggesting a radiance of devotional intensity, ecstatic transport—the peace that passeth understanding. The vocalization of a poem, especially a poem “meant to be heard for its own sake,” is one in which the acoustic dimension literally marks the limits of understanding. In the ecstasy of orality, the poem stands apart; its sense no longer aligned with understanding but with that profound stutter characteristic of Hopkins’ syllabic anatomy. It stands aside or gets out from under. At times, Hopkins’ visual emphasis on voicing induces a near nonsense stress pattern. “I cannot keep my attention fixed for more than a few minutes,” Yeats confessed about reading Hopkins. “His meaning is like some faint sound that strains the ear, comes out of words, passes to and fro between them, goes back into words” (Oxford xxxix). And the córn is córded and shóulders its shéaf, The ear in milk, lush the sash, And crúsh-sílk póppies aflásh, The blóod-gúsh bláde-gásh Fláme-rásh rúdréd Búd shélling or bróad-shéd Tátter-tángled and díngle-a-dánglèd Dándy-húng dáinty héad (Works 132) Dimly made out through the crackle of accentuation is the perspective of the woodlark of the poem’s title, surveying cornfields and spotting poppies in bloom. As indicated by the stress marks, this passage, if read aloud, would be a nearly continuous staccato, the effect of which is to obliterate the sense of the words as they snap along the string of acoustic firecrackers. There’s an abortive discrepancy between sound and sense here, which may be why Hopkins didn’t finalize this draft. In this fragment, the diacritical marks almost seem like divine sparks, beneath which the accidentals that are words have been summoned into momentary existence (but not quite for their own “sake”). “Stress” as a feature of prosody is absorbed by Hopkins into the metaphysical drama of instress, “the selving force within a being” (MacKenzie 234).

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In scansion, then, one might observe that the stresses are where the poem achieves its being, the pattern of marks that “selve” it. Stress is salvation. This salve of selving is agonized in the opening of “The Leaden Echo”: “How to keep—is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or catch or key to keep / Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty . . . from vanishing away?” (169). The echo effect named by the title is immediately rendered in the double “any,” and multiplied in a bubble of “b” sounds abounding into the quadruple “beauty” minutely discriminated by the stress, as if the very sign of self arising from indiscriminate matter is precisely that diacritical flick, or flicker. The stress is not to be confused with emphasis or with any verbal pressure; Hopkins’ stresses are not alternatives to italics. The stresses are like thorns on Christ’s brow: they ride the words like pricks of numinous incident, summoning one syllable after another into a transposing dimension of redemption through individuation. In “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” the fatal “Disremembering, dísmémbering” marks that riven condition Rilke memorably calls “zwiespalt”—split as spilt, figured by Hopkins here in the two spools on which are punned a silent waxing, waning, and winding: Only the beakleaved boughs dragonish | damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black, Ever so black on it. Óur tale, O óur oracle! | Lét life, wáned, ah lét life wínd Off hér once skéined stained véined varíety | upon, áll on twó spools; párt, pen, páck Now her áll in twó flocks, twó folds—bláck, white; | ríght, wrong; réckon but, réck but, mínd But thése two; wáre of a wórld where bút these | twó tell, éach off th២ e óth er; of a ráck Where, selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless, | thóughts agaínst thoughts ín groans grínd. (Poetical Works 191)

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The oracular impact of the Sybilline leaves is comparable to the method of prophecy given in the parable, where the leaves (like pages of an unbound book) blow away, suggesting a master script now literally cast to the winds. The immense variety of things, descended to the dichotomous zone of black/ white (words on a page) and right/wrong (deeds inscribed in the heart), signify the sundered being stuck on the spit or rack of self-division, where self is division (and division gives rise to divination), its stress an agony only the providence of a savior can properly scan as “instress.” To be alive,

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for Hopkins, is to submit one’s speech to the graphic (ominously explicit) symptoms of a text. To live the Christian life is to incarnate in oneself the scriptures—that is to say, the wrack of marks, the wreck of signs. Visible Speech In Hopkins the sounds of the world are confined to the poems, almost as in exile, where they’re paradoxically hemmed in by the thicket of diacritical cues for enunciation. The same paradox is commonly found in attempts to notate regional speech. In the Dorset poems of William Barnes, for example, the hazard of dialect impinges heavily on the phrasal and lexical dimension: Good Meäster Collins heärd woone day A man a-talkèn, that did zay It woulden answer to be kind, He thought, to vo’k o’ grov’lèn mind, Vor they would only teäke it wrong, That you be weak an’ they be strong. (207) While it’s admittedly easier to transpose this into familiar English than, say, the Scots poems of Hugh MacDiarmid, the specific inflexions of the dialect are mutilated by being forced through a substrate of standard English orthography as through a funnel. The problem of dialect, in Thomas Hardy’s estimation, is that “if a writer attempts to exhibit on paper the precise accents of a rustic speaker he disturbs the proper balance of a true representation by unduly insisting upon the grotesque element” (Griffiths 83). If writing is merely the representation of speech, you still need to know whose speech and in what accent. By what right or on what basis does writing neutralize or efface the prodigious variety of speech patterns? Derrida’s early model of deconstruction assumes a tacit conflict between the One of logocentrism and the Many of textuality; but to introduce the claims of actual speech into the equation is to confront a reversal of perspective, in which writing violates diversity by inaugurating an alphabetic monodrama to chasten elocutionary difference. Curiously, then, the very advantages claimed by deconstruction on behalf of writing—marks and spacings—are most insistently produced in these efforts to make writing speak, to register the truth of a vocal deviation in or by means of a ballet of signs, as in the tantalizing “Microscopial Enlargement” of Browning’s voice in the journal Black and White in 1891.

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Microscopic Enlargement of Robert Browning’s Voice, 1891.

Source: Black and White, December 12, 1891.

Anyone who has seen Pygmalion (or even My Fair Lady) will recall Shaw’s sense of English as a summit from which native speakers are in danger of slipping. Linguistics professor Henry Higgins (or ’enry ’iggins) could well have hazed the Cockney lass Liza Doolittle with this passage from Browning’s “The Flight of the Duchess” as yet another in his series of intimidating tongue-twisting exercises in phonology: I could favour you with sundry touches Of the paint-smutches with which the Duchess Heightened the mellowness of her cheek’s yellowness (To get on faster) until at last her Cheek grew to be one master-plaster Of mucus and fucus from mere use of ceruse: In short, she grew from scalp to udder Just the object to make you shudder. (Frye xiv) This is versification of a sort more familiar from novel exercises in sibilants, fricatives, and other phonemic contours. But amidst the nineteenth century’s cultural flotsam there is an entire zone of published matter submitting to comparable labyrinths and straits of vocalization—namely, in elocution manuals and public speaking primers. “Abracadabra, babe, babble, baptism, bauble, beblot, bedaub, beef, bepeppered, beverage, biblical, biped, blubber, brabble, bribe, bobbin, bubble, bump, hubbub, probable” (Bell, Principles 166); “ith iss ith, ith ish ith, iss ith iss, iss ish iss, ish iss ish, ish ith ish” and

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“ip it, ip ik, it ik, it ip, ik it, ik ip” (Bell, Elocutionary 66). These examples mark another site of the convergence of poetry and vocalization, writing and speech, in the work of Alexander Melville Bell, Professor of Vocal Physiology at Edinburgh University, and author of some of the most influential manuals of oratory and elocution in the nineteenth century (Alexander Graham Bell was Melville’s son, whose invention of the telephone was an attempt to extend his father’s “visible speech” as prosthetic aid to those with hearing disabilities). The unique soundscape of Victorian poetics is illuminated by comparison with the contemporary vocal exercises of Bell. Under “Syllabic Quantity” in Bell’s Elocutionary Manual are found such prosodically enticing word clusters as “help, felt, elk, tent, lamp, dreamt, bank” and “alps, bolts, belch, bulks, prints, inch, imps, tempts, thanks” (examples of “Breath Articulations,” 64, 65); “leave, bathe, ease, rouge” and “bulbs, builds, bilge, rhumbs, lands, finds, fringe” (“Voice Articulations,” 65); and “act, tact, sect, erect, strict, hacked, shocked, ducked, poked, looked, walked, ached, leaked, liked, cactus, lacteal, affected, lecture, picture, dictate, instructive, octave, doctor” (“Mixed Articulations” utilizing what Bell calls “Breath Obstructives” such as pt and kt, 65). Bell’s books bristle with catalogues like this, stockpiles of atomic particulars from which flexible oratory may be built up as if in search of Hopkins’ prosodic sound world. Speech for Bell is a mechanical activity elevated by the elusive quality of “feeling.” “There is a Vocal Logic; a Rhetoric of Inflection; a Poetry of Modulation; a Commentator’s explanatoriness of Tone” (111). He presumes a remedial function for many of the uses to which his books may be put (cure of stammering and other speech impediments, enhanced clarity in normal articulation); and one manual culminates in a compendium of “difficult sequences” for practice, ranging from the ludic but vocally challenging (“Robert loudly rebuked Richard, who ran lustily roaring round the lobby,” “Pull the poor fool out of the full pool”) to the homiletic tags of Victorian mass-cultural sentiment (“Vice oft wears variegated velvet, while virtue walks in vulgar velveteen”) (Principles 252–254). As a proponent of well-tuned “vocal physiology,” Bell wanted recitations of poetry to be unconstrained by avoidable defects of pronunciation and phrasing. To this end he conspicuously printed many poems in prose so as to arrest the reader’s tendency to overstress line ends. The gist of Bell’s teaching is that prose sense should prevail over metrical nonsense. Bell’s method may be counted as one of the broader cultural influences contributing to the eventual rise of free verse. He commends the printing of poems in prose “as a mode of obviating the too rhythmical delivery which is often associated with metrically printed ; and as an assistance to the habitual use of pauses and tones in strict accordance with the ” (Standard 139). If

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line ends unduly suggest pauses, abolishing them forces the reader to seek intratextual cues consonant with the sense (that is, thought and feeling combined) for the ebb and flow of vocalization. Like Hopkins, Bell devised methods of indicating stress and inflection; and as in the case of sprung rhythm with its allegiance to actual speech, Bell’s marks are designed to admit the local variables that subsist beneath metrical patterns, constituting a phonemic domain of effective delivery. A chart outlining the “Gamut of Inflexions” prepares the aspiring orator to take on a sarcastic enunciation of the sentence “One murder makes a villain: Millions a hero” (21) by prompting exclamatory renditions of single words. In Elocutionary Manual these inflexional marks are combined with a repertoire of others indicating modulation, force, time, and expression. As applied to lines from Coleridge, the result is a text fully anatomized for recitation. Remorse is as the heart in which it grows: If that be gentle, | it drops balmy dews Of true repentance; but if proud and gloomy, | sic It is a poison tree, that, pierced to the inmost, | Weeps only tears of poison. Eventually, this system of physiological indicators was to become Bell’s great ambition for “visible speech,” an orthography devised with strict attention to the vocal organs, the letters of which could be applied as readily to any language and even to acoustic sounds, like the noise of sawing wood:

Figure 2.2

Alexander Melville Bell, “Sawing Wood.”

Source: Visible Speech (1857).

Nor does Bell refrain from “spelling” the sounds of suppressed chuckling, a hiccough, nausea, clearing the throat, a soft hem, a “baby’s scolding,” sipping, sniffing, spitting, and even kissing. Having numbered the vowel sounds in The Elocutionary Manual, Bell then offers orthoepic exercises keyed to the numerals. An uncredited poem, “The Law of Love,” is abruptly lifted out of the bric-a-brac of Victoriana and given a Futurist look avant la lettre: P11–8r f11–8rth th2 10–1l, p11–8r b12ldl2 f11–8rth; 2t w2l n10t f3l 9nt2l Th7–13 f3l4st v4s4lz t13 pr12v7–1d wh2tch 2t m3 l7–8rdzhl2 f 2l.

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B9t th4n, wh4n s9tch 7–8r f 7–13nd n12 m11–8r, th12 fl12–2ng br10d 5nd fr1 T2l th4n, 5nd n9r2sht fr10m 10n h7–1, 2t str3tw3 st7ntsht w2l b1. D2g ch5n4lz f10r th2 str1mz 9v L9v, wh4–8r th3 m3 br10dl2 r9n:— 5 nd L9v h5z 12v8rfl12–2ng str1mz, t13 f 2l th4m 4v8r2 w 9n.— B9t 2f, 5t 4n2 t7–1m, th7–13 s1s s9tsh tsh5n4lz t13 pr12v7–1d, Th2 v4r2 f 7–13nts 9v L9v, f10r th1 w2l s13n b1 p7–8rtsht 5nd dr7–1d. F10r w1 m9st sh4–8r, 2f w1 w13d k1p, th5t g13d th2ng fr10m 6b9v. S1s2ng t13 g2v, w1 s1s t13 h5v ; s9tsh 2z th2 L10 9v L9v. Other exercises in varying inflection begin to sound like Gertrude Stein’s manner of composition as continual adjustment to the virtual present: “He reads correctly. He reads correctly. He reads correctly. He reads correctly when he likes. He reads correctly when he likes. He reads correctly when he likes to pay attention” (Standard 37). Finally, a memorable feature of Bell’s elocutionary challenges are the “Literal Exercises” in which, as the title indicates, “breath articulations” and “voice articulations” are confined to letters themselves in a piece that forecasts such purely abstract works as Alexei Kruchenykh’s “Heights (Universal Language)” or Kurt Schwitters’ Ur-Sonata: bd db bdb dbd bddb dbbd bg gb bgb gbg bggb gbbg dg gd dgd gdg dggd gddg bdg bgd dbg dgb gbd gdb bv vb bvb vbv bvvb vbbv bw wb bwb wbw bwwb wbbw b v w b w v v b w v w b w b v w v b. (Principles 249) In Bell’s exercises the rudiments of speech are reduced to their physiological minima, the mastery of which requires the instinct of sports, in which skills are honed by getting the mind out of the way. But there is a kind of sport in art, evident in Arnold Schoenberg’s admission that he composed many songs without any consideration of the contents of the poems on which they were based. I had composed many of my songs straight through to the end without troubling myself in the slightest about the continuation of the poetic events, without even grasping them in the ecstasy of composing, and that only days later I thought of looking back to see just what was the real poetic content of my song. It then turned out, to my greatest astonishment, that I had never done greater justice to the poet than when,

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guided by my first direct contact with the sound of the beginning, I divined everything that obviously had to follow this first sound with inevitability. (144) In the program for the premiere of Pierrot Lunaire in 1912, Schoenberg included a telling quote from Novalis, reaffirming the subordination of sense to sound: “One can imagine tales where there would be no coherence, and yet associations—like dreams; poems that are simply euphonious and full of beautiful words, but with no meaning or coherence whatever. . . . Such true poesy can have, at most, an allegorical meaning, as a whole, and an indirect effect, like music” (Green and Swan 203–204). “We can be deeply stirred by hearing the recitation of a poem in a language of which we understand no word,” in T.S. Eliot’s estimation, “but if we are then told that the poem is gibberish and has no meaning, we shall consider that we have been deluded—this was no poem, it was merely an imitation of instrumental music” (On Poetry 30). But what if there’s no such disclosure? Furthermore, why is it not legitimate to be “deeply stirred” by gibberish? Pound recommended that the aspiring poet “fill his mind with the finest cadences he can discover, preferably in a foreign language, so that the meaning of the words may be less likely to divert his attention from the movement” (Essays 5). If, as Stevens writes in “Man Carrying Thing,” “The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully” (Palm 281), isn’t the lineage unwittingly promoted by the elocutionary exercises of Bell and rendered in explicitly poetic choreography by Schwitters and Kruchenykh the very one that embodies a sound resisting understanding? They provide a clue to Stevens’ quest “to find of sound the bleakest ancestor” as “The poem goes from the poet’s gibberish to / The gibberish of the vulgate and back again” (Palm 225, 222). Graphic Emblems The phenomenon of “sound poetry”—not the sound of poetry—presages a sound exceeding the boundaries of poetic diction or conventional presumptions of musicality. But what is this sound? And what do we know or hear when we hear it? These concerns hinge on a crucial distinction debated in the visual arts in the 1930s concerning abstract versus concrete. The advent of sound poetry is commonly attributed to the Dada evenings at Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in the summer of 1916. But it’s important to recall that this inauguration can’t be exclusively associated with Hugo Ball’s “verses without words” or the multi-phonic concoctions of Tzara, Huelsenbeck, and Janco. When Kandinsky’s poems were performed there, “the audience received them with prehistoric howls,” Arp recalled (282). These were

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the prose poems the artist had published under the title Klänge (Sounds) in 1912, the same year his play The Yellow Sound appeared in the Blue Rider Almanac. Kandinsky was at the same time pioneering abstraction, though concrete became his term of choice (Collected 832). Kandinsky’s exploratory outlook, manifested in the synaesthetic preoccupations evident in the title of his play, was profoundly influential. “All at once, ‘according to the laws of chance,’ around 1914, the human mind underwent a transformation: it was confronted with an ethical problem,” Arp recalled, demanding action. “Concrete art wants to transform the world. It wants to make life more bearable. It wants to save man from the most dangerous of follies: vanity. It wants to simplify the life of man” (139–140). For those alert to the occasion, modern art had ceased to be a succession of styles. Suddenly, it was the dawn of a new world. Artists hunkered before their canvases as if they had suddenly been outfitted with transistor tubes, cathode rays, building a time machine for immediate access to the future. To encounter such a devotee in action was unforgettable: In 1912 I visited Kandinsky in Munich. He gave me a very warm reception. It was the period when abstract art was beginning to turn into concrete art; that is to say, the avant-garde painters no longer stood before an apple, a guitar, a man, or a landscape to convert or dissolve them into colored circles, triangles, and rectangles; on the contrary, they created autonomous compositions directly out of their most intimate joy, their most personal suffering, out of lines, planes, forms, colors. (Arp 282) In this revealing memory, elementary sensory input has been liberated from normative models. Suddenly, to see two or three primary colors on a canvas, unrestrained by any representational content, was to behold the rebirth of color itself—and, behind that, the reinvigorated human eye. Fernand Léger was adamant on this point, reiterating a position that stretched back through Delaunay to the Fauves, the Nabis, and the clotted glow of canvases by Van Gogh and Gauguin: “color is in itself a plastic reality. It is a new realism” (122). Léger’s terminological choice was strategic. By the 1930s “constructive” was emerging as the term of choice, replacing Constructivism with its programmatic implications and “abstract” with its connotations of the decorative rather than the utilitarian. Lecturing in New York in 1935, Léger offered this clarification: apparent abstractions “are not ‘abstract,’ since they are composed of real values: colors and geometric forms. There is no abstraction” (110). Herbert Read weighed in, favoring (like Kandinsky) “concrete” over “non-figurative” and “abstract,” “since, as Jean Hélion has pointed

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out, this ‘abstract’ art is really the most concrete of all arts, relying (like pure poetry) on the immediate appeal of the materials” (7). “The shapes we are creating are not abstract,” Naum Gabo insisted, “they are absolute” (109). Of El Lissitzky’s objection to the term “abstract,” Katherine Dreier wrote: “To him the old art belongs to the period of the dinosaurs and not to the period of the radio. . . . ‘But why,’ he asks, ‘do you call our Modern Art abstract? Is the radio wave abstract or realistic?’ ” (76). Abstract, concrete, nonobjective; neoplasticism, constructivism, new realism: these were numerous tails pinned on a conceptually indeterminate donkey, albeit one that had grown to such proportions as to merit comparison with the proverbial elephant fingered by the blind. Regardless of its label, the expectations surrounding its artistic prospects were flush with a trepidation registered by Kenneth Walsh in 1937: There is no going back to the instinctive faculties, one cannot reacquire instinct. The abstract painter is a sort of individualistic chemist, trying things this way and that, and hoping that a new live thing may some day jump out of the test-tube. It is much too early yet to say what new form of consciousness will emerge. And therefore it is impossible to come to any permanent conclusions about the importance of Abstract Art. (10) Although Dada tends to be associated with buffoonery—Hugo Ball’s journal locates the enterprise midway between circus and mass—it’s more accurate to think of it as a test-tube experiment pioneering pure poetry. Cabaret Voltaire: a distillery of the murmur and the hoot. Lecturing on Kandinsky in 1917, Ball declared modern artists to be “creators of new natural entities that have no counterpart in the known world” (225). Tristan Tzara likewise urged the creation of “locomotive organisms,” launching a juggernaut eclipsing familiar considerations of the art object, the poem, and the musical composition all at once (Motherwell 78). In the Dada milieu, sound poems were locomotive organisms encompassing noise, mayhem, and liturgical supplication. The sound poem was a tabula rasa that could accommodate Ball’s researches in ancient gnosticism as well as Tzara’s agit-prop antics. By the end of the war, Raoul Hausmann’s “optophonetics” gave the sound poem a typographic (and sometimes calligraphic) endowment, culminating in Kurt Schwitters’ variations on a Hausmann text (originally called “Portrait of Raoul Hausmann”) in his magisterial Ur-sonata, which served Jan Tschichold in 1932 as a demonstration piece of the guidelines he set out in The New Typography (1928). This brief trajectory, then, from 1916 to 1932, reenacts the legacy optioned for it in advance by Hopkins, Bell, and Mallarmé, rendering sound effect as visual epiphany.

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The case of Otto Nebel’s Unfeig in the previous chapter suggests that this voco-visual dalliance deploys the sound poem as the most eligible literary interface with art. For one thing, it dispels the mimetic obligation that would reduce the visual to “illustration.” By the same token, it imposes on the text a semantic disinvestment, but this risks dissolving the context around the text as well—and, except for venues in which the primal ardor of the body is a raison d’ être, sound poetry has been unable to proceed without special pleading (or maybe, in a more benign formulation, operating instructions). This is a problem manifest almost at the outset with the sound/concrete poems of Herbert Behrens-Hangeler published in the Flemish journal Het Overzicht in 1923–1924. “Obibi,” for instance, typographically highlights the unifying motif of oil in a list of industrial brand names. O B I B I bromocarnOL gargarisnOL buccocystOL polygonOL bituminOL hydravasOL chinoterpOL uvacystOL sonatOL hermidOL legumOL hydosOL glitzonOL narsosOL vendOL tilkOL hartOL brikOL pOL (159) Effective as a sound poem, and visually striking, it is nonetheless a work devoid of a context until recently, perhaps, in the one articulated by Canadian sound poet Christian Bök’s aspiration “to make literature out of the life of a motor,” as he put it in a presentation at the conference of Associated Writing Programs, Atlanta, March 2007. “I like music by machines, for machines,” he declared,

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proclaiming an affinity with dee-jays who, in effect, outsource their unconscious to an alien brain. In his quest for a work in which the “letters of the poem become the literary variants of subatomic particles” (“Plastique” 94), Bök spins a reverie of plasticine intoxication—absinthe for twenty-first-century poets: The invention of plastic has given birth to a celluloid spectacle, whose reveries displace the esemplastic imagination of the romantics, filling our hollow skulls with an injection-moulded mentality, as pliable and durable as any blob of polypropylene. Has not language itself begun to absorb the synthetic qualities of such a modern milieu, becoming a fabricated, but disposable, convenience, no less pollutant than a styrofoam container? Has not the act of writing simply become another chemically engineered experience, in which we manufacture a complex polymer by stringing together syllables instead of molecules? (93) Bök’s inversion of the man-machine hierarchy is not altogether tongue in cheek, inasmuch as it reaffirms the view taken by Ezra Pound on the subject of machine art: “any man intending to practice the plastic arts; or to know excellent from mediocre or inefficient in the plastic arts might, in our time, more readily awaken his eye by looking at spare parts and at assembled machinery than by walking through galleries of painting or sculpture,” Pound proposed. The reason is simple: “They do not stir one to pathos by reasons extrinsic to their form”—which is to say, “one can still think about the machine without dragging in the private life and personality of the inventor” (Machine 57). Pound may well have had in mind his friend T.S. Eliot’s insistence on art as an escape from emotions. But for Pound, as for Bök and his predecessors in sound poetry, it was never a matter of escape but determinate expansion of artistic possibility. Drawing a blank, as for Mallarmé, turns out here too to be a bold initiation into the largest possible outcome, one that would recognize itself in Arp’s recommendation: “Artists should not sign their works of Concrete art. These paintings, sculptures, objects should remain anonymous and form part of nature’s great workshop as leaves do, and clouds, animals and men” (Guggenheim 29). Ironically, nature’s workshop found an ally in the most imposing machine art of all: cinema. Equivocation between “abstract” and “concrete” reaches its apogee early, in the attempts by Viking Eggeling and Hans Richter to devise a universal language directly on celluloid. Stills from Eggeling’s Diagonal Symphony (1921–1924) became veritable insignia of the international avantgarde, circulating in magazines throughout Eastern and Western Europe in the twenties, ranging from Dada, Cabaret Voltaire and Zeltweg to De Stijl, Ma, and Plastique.

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Figure 2.3

Viking Eggeling, Sketch for Diagonal Symphony (1921–1924).

Source: Vešč/Objet/Gegenstand 3 (May 1922).

The synaesthetic initiative was taken up by Oskar Fischinger, who characterized film as “graphic art in motion”—and, with the advent of the talkies, began to draw music directly on film stock to produce “graphic sounds” in works like Optical Poem in 1937, shortly before his ill-fated alliance with the Disney studio (Moritz 189, 179). In other hands—and, for the general public, in Fantasia—these graphic sounds were infused with Surrealism, a movement generally indifferent to music (it seems symptomatic that Salvador Dalí hoped to do a film called The Flesh Wheelbarrow with the Marx Brothers, one of whom was Harpo, the mute harpist). But by means of Surrealism—a sort of clearing house for things passing over to the dark side—“it is now possible to photograph either on paper or on canvas the amazing graphic appearances of thoughts and desire,” wrote Max Ernst (Guggenheim 139). The technological specification here is in accord with Maya Deren’s view that “The reality which we must today extend . . . is the relativism which the airplane, the radio and the new physics has made a reality of our lives” (17); and such extension, Deren insists, involves a “depersonalization” by way of “ritualistic form” (20). Ritual in Transfigured Time was the title of one of her films, and she characterized as a cine-poem another film, Meshes of the

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Afternoon (1943), in which she memorably opens her mouth to slide a key off her tongue while sitting at a table with her doppelgänger, suggesting a penumbral doubling of shadow mouth and clavis universalis. From the bouncing tacks solarized on celluloid in Man Ray’s La retour à la raison (1922) to the petrochemical torrents memorialized by Alain Resnais in his industry documentary Le Chant du Styrène (1958), for which Raymond Queneau provided a voice-over in alexandrines,5 “the synthetic philosophy of the rapid glance” unfolds (Michelson 25). Jean Epstein, early theorist of cinema and promoter of Cendrars’ simultanism, called it “lyrosophie”: “lyrosophy supersedes science just as science supersedes religion” (131). These are only a few of the initiatives by film pioneers constituting a celluloid tributary that flows directly back to Mallarmé, whose synaesthetic vision of a typographic symphony was ultimately indebted to the dance: not just any dance, but the coordinated light and movement spectacles devised by Loie Fuller. Filmed by the Lumière brothers and Georges Méliès, dubbed “the electric fairy” by the Parisian press, Fuller was “an exemplary graphic emblem of the age of electricity” (Rancière 98), her “decorative leaps evoking oceans, evenings, perfume, and sea foam” to the poet’s enthralled imagination (Divagations 137). If only Hopkins had lived to behold this embodiment of “a hieroglyphic language,” the very figure who for Mallarmé inspired the “analogy between leaps on the stage and verse on a page” (139): a graphic emblem unfurling itself on virtual space. L’Orphéide Writing to Tristan Tzara on December 20, 1919, Belgian poet Clément Pansaers invited himself into the Dada enclave: “Please take notice of my adhesion to your group. Cocteau has arrived these days for a lecture in Brussels on the movement Apollinaire etc.” (Van den Berg, Import 25). Bearing in mind Pansaers’ carefully imprecise “et cetera,” the plausibility of a “mouvement Apollinaire” derives from his role as “a ringmaster of the arts” (Shattuck 254). Roger Shattuck’s tag is apt, evoking as it does the circus, the music hall, and other venues of modernity before and after the Great War. Apollinaire’s ally Blaise Cendrars conspicuously declared, in the first line of his poem “Contrasts,” “The windows of my poetry are wide open onto the boulevards and in its shop windows” (Complete 58). Like the wares in display windows and the roving glance of the flâneur, Cendars’ poems (he called them “elastic poems”) consist of discrete objects and scenes united by nothing more than their near-simultaneous apprehension, like a glance out the window, a walk around the block. Apollinaire had pioneered this method with his “poem-promenades” and his “conversation poems,”

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devices promptly taken up by Pierre Albert-Birot, editor of the review SIC (for sounds, ideas, colors), who added to this poetic toolkit the “poèmeaffiche” or poster-poem, as well as the casual “poem chronicles” that presage the work of Frank O’Hara a decade before the American poet was even born. Collectively, and with the addition of Cendrars’ principle of elasticity, such works as Albert-Birot’s “Chronique-Jazz,” Apollinaire’s “Lundi Rue Christine,” and Cendrars’ “Crépitements” might be called poems of the everyday. The everyday as it appeared in 1914 was substantially different than it was in 1904. “La face du monde est changée,” declared Nicolas Beauduin, “A monde nouveau, poésie nouvelle” (Bergman 283). For a new world, new poetry; and a new constellation of evolved sensibility: “un homme nouveau, l’homme-machine, l’homme multiplié, l’homme oiseau” (288). Recognizable modernist postures such as Shklovsky’s concept of defamiliarization can be traced to an attitude pioneered by Apollinaire, which might be called the recovery of the everyday for art—yet always with the expectation of surprise: as André Breton approvingly observed, “Apollinaire has vowed always to satisfy the Desire for the unexpected, the sign of modern tastes” (Lost 16). Yet as late as 1949 C.M. Bowra could still imagine a reader wary of “too many signs of smart modernity and of the sophisticated, urban jauntiness which invaded poetry about 1910” (62). Across the Channel, Ezra Pound admired T.S. Eliot because he had somehow modernized himself on his own, without participating in a selfconscious program like Imagism. For Pound in particular, Imagism had been a necessary tonic for purging the archaic diction of his early verse. But even Marinetti, ringleader of Futurism, wrote complacently Symbolist lyrics up to the point that he theorized “words in freedom” and adopted the advertising placard as visual model for his telegraphic poems. Like Pound, Apollinaire exhibited enviable command of traditional verse forms throughout his career, and while he pioneered the calligram and other innovations, his greatest notoriety as a “modern” came when he deleted the punctuation from the poems in Alcools just before publication. To purge commas and periods was a barbaric gesture, tantamount to going native in the tropics and strolling about unclothed. No wonder the signs and symptoms of modernity included “paroxysme,” a movement suggesting an art in league with primal scream. Modern verse, declared its proponent Beauduin, should derive “from the gesticulations, cries, tumults of contemporary life, beauty in action, no more contemplative; a barbarous and brutal beauty, perhaps, over which passes violent tremblings, strange vertiges, like the shivering of motors and the pantings of chimneys, and which will be animated with the exasperated rhythm of modern life” (Pondrom 286). Despite the fact that Beauduin’s posture was distinctly prewar, the urgency of his commendation

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of the modern established him as one of the few poets whose work became de rigeur in avant-garde magazines of the twenties, when sections of his book length poem L’Homme Cosmogonique appeared in Polish, Hungarian, Serbian, Rumanian, Italian, Spanish, and other languages—borne along by Marinetti’s enthusiasm (in his 1924 survey of global futurism) for the Frenchman’s role as “singer of jazz-band paroxysm and the international Grand Express.” Paroxysme was one of many literary movements with which Apollinaire was vaguely associated, since his avidity for promoting any avant-garde tendency helped his easygoing alliance with Expressionism and Futurism, while his advocacy of Cubism lent theoretical weight to Orphism, Simultanism, and even Vicente Huidobro’s Creationism, leaving Dadaists and Surrealists avowedly in his debt. These associations gave credence to his verse, which epitomized modernity for poets throughout Europe long after he died in 1918. An American writer in 1922 predicted that Apollinaire would be recognized as the “forerunner of almost everything of importance . . . that will take place in the literature of the next generation,” because he “urged the poets of this time to be at least as daring as the mechanical wizards who exploited the airplane, wireless telegraphy, chemistry, the submarine, the cinema, the phonograph, what-not” (Bray 10–11).6 The tribute is just, but also a bit misleading, for what was obscured by the continuous stream of eulogies to Apollinaire in avant-garde journals (like this one from Broom) for a full decade after his death was the foreground of an “Orphism” preceding Apollinaire’s application of the term to the vivacious colors of Delaunay. The point is not to dispute or challenge Apollinaire’s eminence, but to revisit a curious episode in poetic obscurantism. In October 1913, Ezra Pound reported to The New Age on a French poet proposing to write poems “like orchestral scores with a dozen voices at once.” By this method, “One might represent the confusion of metropolitan life where too much does certainly happen all at once. M. Barzun offers a mode of synthesis that is not to be despised. Of course there are any number of objections. If you insist in being all apperception and all sorts of apperceptions at once you are in danger of paralyzing thought; of bringing all your other faculties to a standstill. Art is, at least to some extent, selection.” Nevertheless, Pound admits to being moved by Henri-Martin Barzun’s Hymne des Forces, concluding, “The polyphonic method will be justified when a great work is presented through it. In the meantime there is no use blinding oneself to the fact that the next great work may be written in this manner” (Pondrom 198–199). In fact, F.S. Flint had already drawn attention to Barzun in The Poetry Review for August 1912—and, in Chicago’s Poetry the following March, Flint would publish the concise criteria of Imagism

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in tandem with Pound’s “A Few Don’ts.” To cite Flint’s appraisal from The Poetry Review: “in the vast synthesis that M. Barzun has in mind, simple lyricism becomes absorbed by a manifold, superior lyricism: voices, presences, entities, crowds, speak and the poem becomes drama” (Pondrom 103). Six months after his presentation of “Imagisme” in Poetry, Flint returned to Barzun, proposing an inaugural status for the Frenchman’s simultanéisme: “The vers libre was a reform in length; the simultaneous poem will be a reform in depth” (Pondrom 226). These estimations of the potential of Barzun’s “polyphonic method” are so considerable as to make one wonder what ever happened to him. Piqued by curiosity, New Directions publisher James Laughlin contacted the poet’s son during the Second World War, resulting in Jacques Barzun’s “Some Notes on Créteil and French Poetry” in the ninth New Directions annual in 1946. Laughlin’s mentor, Ezra Pound, was also wondering about Barzun elder in the Pisan Cantos: “Monsieur Barzun had, indubitably, an idea, about anno/ domini 1910 but I do not know what he has done with it” (Cantos 472). As Jacques Barzun recounts, his father had been a member of Abbe Créteil outside Paris, an artists’ colony (which included, in addition to several poets, the salon cubist Albert Gleizes). During its brief existence (1906–1908), it confronted “the characteristic issues of our epoch: how shall men organize their life in common, and what kind of art shall express this new life?” (393). The “dramatic or orchestral complexity” sought by Henri-Martin Barzun was in the process of being realized in a monumental choral poem L’Orphéide when the Great War erupted, “plung[ing] the author and the movement into eclipse” (393, 396, 395). That L’Orphéide had still not been published a quarter century after the end of the war, the son attributes to a “logic of feeling that dictates that a ‘collective’ conception of poetry should not go with the usual egotism of the poet brandishing his sonnet” (399). These details, such as they are, may be historically piquant but add little to the profound expectations raised by Flint and Pound. However, in a masterstroke of understatement, Jacques Barzun claims that the interest aroused by the circulation of L’Orphéide in manuscript was responsible for bringing Mallarmé’s revelatory Un Coup de dés to light (397). It was the two works together, Barzun contends, that ushered in a “principle of simultaneity in poetry [that] necessarily seemed cataclysmic”—nothing less, in fact, than a post-Laoköon reconfiguration of verse, abandoning the practice of “one word after another” and its concomitant fetish of the printed line, all on behalf of simultaneity (395). But if the scribe tradition is rejected and instead of lines and books the poet should begin with sounds and sensations, he would logically arrive

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at the view that his page was simply a convenient portion of space in which to organize the symbols for what he hears. Space relations would indicate time relations as well—would create a larger syntax for his use— and he might then give himself and others the feeling that he was composing a world in motion instead of merely “extending remarks” like a Congressman. (395) This “ ‘thick,’ manifold, synchronous kind of expression” would be communal and participatory, not a solitary performance (396). Henri-Martin Barzun characterized his choric method as “audio-visualplastic expression in verbal polyphony” (Orpheus: Modern Culture 4). He also spoke of “orchestral poetry,” “abstract poetry” and even “3-D literature.” But what was it? Primary texts remain fugitive. Eugene Jolas published a panoramic foldout of a brief section of L’Orphéide in Transition in 1938, and Jacques Barzun’s New Directions contribution prints four pages. But, given the scale of the work, this is like estimating the height of a giraffe from its hoofprint. These extracts resemble concrete poetry more than anything else, lacking as they do the theatrical instructions Barzun had deployed in L’Universel Poème (1912) that had excited Pound:

Le Chef pilote: Les moteurs: Le Chef pilote: Les moteurs: Le Chef pilote: Le hélices, le vent: Les pavillons: Le Chef pilote: La Sirène du bord:

{ {

Que les moteurs vrombissent et rugissent —— vrom, vromb, vreueu vron, ron, ou, or ou, or, meu Que les hélices tournent follement ronvronronvron dron, vreu, —— oo, ooarr

{

{

Que les sillege d’air baigne les faces qui se lèvent —— wirl, wou wirl, wou-ll, woua, wirl -wen, ll —— clac, clac, —frou -ou -clac —— rrou, sss En avant! au-dessus des cités! et saluons l’œuvre des hommes . . . —— Ho! huu-uu-ho!-hohu! ho huohuohuohuho -hu. (Bergman 300)

Clearly, on this basis, Orphic choral poetry involved simultaneous enunciation by different speakers embodying different functions; its means of vocalization extended to ambient sounds and noises; and, to judge by Barzun’s later proselytizing tracts,7 it pursued a Whitmanian dream of “the Federal chorus of America Singing, while just one word he uttered a century ago put the choric concept in a nutshell: Ensemble! that is, many together” in a vast synthetic hoedown (Orpheus: Modern Culture 11).

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The grandiosity of Barzun’s enterprise may have been its downfall, inasmuch as he seems to have aimed as high as Bayreuth while dispensing with the music, the volkisch nationalism, and the dubious pietism mobilized by Wagner. But it may be misleading to think of this Orphic art as public manifestation at all (however much Barzun encouraged it); for, in claiming affinity with cubism, “the Cube and Chorus of the new century were not theories but technical forms cast from life.” Consequently, the new artist was compelled by the new environment to deliver no more the traditional one or two but the six sides of the cube of life become complex and multiform—while the poet or writer could no longer be satisfied with just his own voice in soliloquy or dialogue, but had to hear and “orchestrate” (Greek: ensemble) with his own, all the voices, rhythms, and chants of the human chorus surrounding him. (Orpheus: Modern Culture 17). There is an enthralling naïveté at work here, as Barzun tries to claim credit for awakening, in poetry, a practice familiar to any church choir—and, what’s more, he imagines that the augmentation of poetic monody by choral polyphony deserved comparison with the most advanced discoveries in art and science, from cubism to radiography. “My use of letters no more as signs but as the basis of a vocal art of pure sounds, that is, ‘raising’ cubist fashion, from a two-dimensional flat text a third one, the sound—which gives it volume and power to transmit the geometric sign to a fellow-man, the word ‘heresy’ was too mild to characterize the ‘crime’!” (98). The case of Henri-Martin Barzun’s Orphism remains open, unsolved, not only for lack of evidence, but because everything he claimed on behalf of his enterprise has become indelibly associated with other poets and artists8: the emotion of multitude had come to him by way of Whitman, as he admitted, to which Fernando Pessoa added a decisive turn to that screw 9; simultanism had been identified with Apollinaire and Cendrars, and Orphism claimed by Delaunay and Kupka; cubism in poetry was the province of Picasso’s inner circle (Max Jacob, André Salmon), and the cubistic dimension of sound followed a course established by the Dadaists in Zurich, Raoul Hausmann, and Kurt Schwitters; the aviation epic Altazor, demonstrating g-force linguistic torque, was published by Vicente Huidobro in 1931; the classic modernist poem of polyphony was The Waste Land (“a telephone poem,” in Hugh Kenner’s apt characterization, “its multiple voices referable to a massive short-circuit, at the central exchange” [Mechanic 36]), though it’s plausible that Pound followed Barzun’s lead in the vocal panorama of his collage epic, The Cantos. A piece on “Simultanism” in the inaugural

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issue of Stieglitz’s journal 291 offered the sensible observation that, for polyphonic poetry, “printing is not an adequate medium, for succession in this medium is unavoidable and a phonograph is more suitable” (Bohn 51). This is precisely what filmmaker Walter Ruttmann realized in Weekend, a sound montage for radio broadcast in 1930 as a kind of aural successor to his silent film Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927). But Weekend ’s compilation of everyday clatter makes little allowance for voices. Still, the fate of the word in the poetry of multiplied man was tenuous as it was. Hopkins tried to tease a dimension out of sound that Barzun would call cubist; and Mallarmé had rendered white space indelibly provocative. And after the raucous public onslaught of Futurism the Dadaists had little incentive to think of sound poetry as choral: it was primal. The Stuff of Coincidence A salutary primal episode in the poetics of unworking—a prospect Blanchot saw in Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés, a work that “exists only insofar as it expresses the extreme and exquisite improbability of itself” (Book 234)— comes by way of Virginia Woolf. In Mrs Dalloway, Peter Walsh returns to London after long years of imperial service and experiences an urban epiphany of the sounds that make up speech poised midway between human agency and stochastic process. It sounds like sound, but Woolf delivers it in lines. A sound interrupted him; a frail quivering sound, a voice bubbling up without direction, vigor, beginning or end, running weakly and shrilly and with an absence of all human meaning into ee um fah um so foo swee too eem oo— the voice of no age or sex, the voice of an ancient spring spouting from the earth; which issued, just opposite Regent’s Park Tube Station, from a tall quivering shape, like a funnel, like a rusty pump, like a wind-beaten tree for ever barren of leaves which lets the wind run up and down its branches singing ee um fah um so foo swee too em oo, and rocks and creaks and moans in the eternal breeze. (Mrs Dalloway 105)

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The voice of an ancient spring (drink deep, or not at all, says Pope) is instructively quotidian in Woolf’s depiction. The modernizing trends in poetry outlined in the Introduction (Wordsworth, Whitman) were reaffirmed in the simultanism of Cendars, who not only opened his poetic window to the babble of the boulevard, but found poems already in print (“Dernière Heure” in Nineteen Elastic Poems is from an article in Paris-Midi), and cribbed a whole collection from an adventure novel. Ron Padgett notes that “though most all of Kodak is lifted from Le Rouge’s Le Mystérieux Docteur Cornélius,” the poet “has cut away all the narrative claptrap, extracted ‘facts’ that Le Rouge saw only as background and atmosphere, and substituted felt landscapes for dross and silly or moralistic stories” (Cendrars xxix). If discovery is the characteristic outlook of the Romantic sublime—the poet plunged into measureless resonance, attuned to the beyond in a premonitory chasm—then recovery is the apt term for Cendrars’ recycling initiative. Acts of recovery entail a prefiguring gesture, a frame or portal through which cognition apprehends itself as re-cognition. The poem, as in a cinematic lap dissolve, discloses the news clipping behind it. Recovery of a snippet of the familiar is a conceptual event made accessible through the simple expedience of scissors and paste, or click and drag. Classical rhetoric understood certain repeatable elements of composition as topoi, or commonplaces. These were not formal elements like end rhymes, but topical ingredients, familiar themes and tropes that recur from writer to writer. What the modern practice of collage shares with these topoi is the use of prefabricated parts. The originality of Max Ernst’s collage novels is inseparable from their submission to the prodigious torrent of raw material from which they were derived, particularly cheap romance illustrations. Ernst, like Homer and Shakespeare before him, finds inspiration in the debris of available material resources, trace elements of an “open source” culture (cf. Lethem 60). The development of the Internet has revitalized the lived experience of open source culture through file sharing and the fugitive if enlivening circulation of materials beyond the pale of copyright. Ubu Web is one of the longest running instances of a Web-based clearinghouse for innovative poetics, and its Webmaster, Kenneth Goldsmith, has reflected at length on the vicissitudes of a site that “can take liberties that other people don’t take” (Jourden). Goldsmith is also the author of numerous conceptual books, including Day (consisting of a single issue of the New York Times, laboriously typed out as raw text unalleviated by visuals or graphic format), Soliloquy (a transcription of everything the author recorded himself saying in the course of a week), and Weather (a year’s worth of New York city radio weather reports). “In conceptual writing the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the

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work,” according to Goldsmith. “When an author uses a conceptual form of writing, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the text” (98). Characterizing Soliloquy’s 487 pages as “relentless and unreadable,” Christian Bök suggests such work is “a genre of word processing or data management, in which our tedium is the message” (“Silly” 66), disclosing the reservoir of boredom latent whenever the medium is itself the message. Considering the excess or waste product of Goldsmith’s books, Bök reflects, “Words become disposable pollutants in a milieu of urban ennui, and language is sublime, not for its quality, but for its quantity—which in turn has an uncanny quality all its own” (“Silly” 65). What Bök finds arresting in Goldsmith’s work in general is the dedication to programmatic means, reflecting his own commitment to procedural writing (Bök’s Eunoia is a bravura seventy-page lipogrammatic text in five chapters, each of which is restricted to words with a single vowel: a, e, i, o, and u in sequence). “The writer no longer composes a poem in order to transmit a lyrical meaning; instead, the writer launches a stochastic program in order to document a contingent outcome,” writes Bök in his ars poetica (“Aleatory” 11). The summons of chance set tumbling in Mallarmé’s dice is implicitly reframed in the conceptual gambit, combining a random or arbitrary content with a determining protocol. Hovering between “readable” and “unreadable”—medium and tedium—a stochastic program forces the question of where (or how) any trace of human feeling is to be detected in a mechanical ensemble like the fabled clockwork universe of the philosophes. In procedural work, as Eunoia discloses, predestination helplessly ends up bearing traces of what we normally attribute to personality. “Slick pimps, bribing civic kingpins, distill gin in stills, spiking drinks with illicit pills which might bring bliss” (57) evokes a jittery underworld at odds with “Folks who don ponchos for comfort don boots or clogs to go for strolls on downtown docks” (65). “Enfettered, these sentences repress free speech,” Chapter E begins (31), disclosing the slack underbelly of a purported freedom in a medium like language that structurally requires roughly 50 percent redundancy. Bök would presumably agree with Pound that verse is never “free” for the poet who wants to do a good job. Redundancy as a structural principle of grammar (and, to varying degrees, spelling) is also reflected at the level of discourse: the protocols of intelligible communication sanction a certain measure of repetition, belaboring the obvious, and other means of inciting recognition, inviting response. As an open source arena, discourse is the zone where language is never private. We cohabit language, and as Bakhtin never tires of repeating, a “word in language is half someone else’s”; “The word, directed toward its object,

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enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words” (Dialogic 293, 276). What, then, are the parameters of cohabited identity? What ψυχη´, what ruah, k’ i, atman, esprit, or spirit animates one who reads aloud a poem by Sappho, Wang Wei, Rumi, Hugo? By the same token, whose hand guides the pen or forces the fingers on the keyboard copying out citations? Somehow, along this continuum of displacements, a personal voice or expression is expected to rise up from a host of other voices—and, what’s more, to pass through this vocal barricade to the subterranean hyperpoiesis wherein language, as such, speaks. An incredible presumption: that autonomy might spontaneously arise from a dense weave of alphabetic minima; that the unique might coincide with the commonplace—no less incredible of course than the story of a divine breath animating materia prima. Such is the case with the most famous patient Freud never analyzed in person. Conceiving himself to be the center of the universe (convinced he’s being sodomized by God), Judge Schreber’s cohabitation of mortality and divinity elevates coincidence to cosmological destiny. His apprehension that bird song consists of mutilated bits of human language becomes, for him, proof of the universality of coincidence: that is, all events coincide, copenetrate in an insidiously libidinal divine scheme. The aggregate twitter of birds in a sanatorium garden speak German to Schreber, whose malady reanimates the problem of coincidence as the very stuff of language, its material complication perpetuated fold upon fold, implicating every instance with its double and shadow dimension—its dementia. Schreber is a limit case, and while he’s become an icon of linguistic distress, it’ll be useful to alleviate the eschatological resonance of linguistic alterity by considering, instead, a thought experiment given narrative buoyancy by Jorge Luis Borges. In the corpus of inimitable scholastic tales penned by Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” stands out for its audacity. The premise is simple: a twentieth-century man resolves to replicate a few chapters of Cervantes’ famous novel, and he succeeds. The conceit is elegant: Menard’s replication is to be an autonomous creation, not a mere transcription; a production rather than a reproduction; not a copy but a replicant. Consisting mainly of bibliographic annotations and a retrospective critical assessment, Borges’ tale lacks a plot; but this approach suggests something about Menard’s strategy—that it’s meant to abolish time. This is only the superficial side of a more paradoxical and heroic endeavor, collapsing temporal distance so as to reconvene time in the image of plenitude rather than loss. Accordingly, Menard’s Quixote, while “verbally identical” with that of Cervantes, is “almost infinitely richer” (42). Even when stylistic anachronism is not paramount, the ideas expressed will resound with historical discrepancy—as in the transformation of Cervantes’ merely ornamental

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characterization of history as the mother of truth into a pledge of Jamesian pragmatism by Menard (43). Menard’s aspiration suggests that, unlike the developmental logic of scientific progress, history does not invalidate the basic repertoire of creative gestures, it simply reconfigures them. A constitutive enigma of the arts is that time does not play the unilateral role it does in scientific progress. Because cultural time is both layered and meandering—palimpsest and rhizome—it is often baffling to estimate who a writer’s real contemporaries are (a subject for which Borges had a special knack). As a static ensemble, the letters fixed in a text can be duplicated, just as literary works retain their canonical dimension in a multitude of editions. What Menard introduces is a temporal displacement whereby duplication gives way to repetition—repetition being the inauguration of difference, however minute, as when a language teacher says to a class “Repeat after me.” The result may not be cacophony, but neither is it uniformity. Repetition is not a threat, especially in the classroom. But artistic transaction is another matter, and Harold Bloom’s identification of an “anxiety of influence” conceives all difference as psychomachia. Interestingly, Borges’ Menard displays no such anxiety: his Cervantes seems scarcely an author, let along a “precursor,” and the great book is itself less a monumental challenge than a bit of historical flotsam, washed up in the twentieth century in a debased form as “the occasion for patriotic toasts, grammatical insolence and obscene de luxe editions” (43). This is Menard’s own view of the matter, so it might mask anxiety; but if there’s anxiety in this case it can hardly be one of “influence.” On the contrary, influence would presumably be welcome for one aspiring to replicate a text word for word. Borges amusingly recounts Menard’s tactical considerations: “Know Spanish well, recover the Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or the Turk, forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and 1918, be Miguel de Cervantes. Pierre Menard studied this procedure . . . but discarded it as too easy” (40). Borges is obviously ridiculing a familiar interpretive ideal—not for being chimerical but beneath contempt. This ideal is articulated by E.D. Hirsch, Jr. as “the ultimate verificative principle” for interpretive judiciousness: “the imaginative reconstruction of the speaking subject” (Hazard Adams 1114). But what of Menard’s apparent alternative, which is to receive the letter of the original (rather than the spirit) by spurning the basic principles of hermeneutics altogether? Isn’t this method rather like the famous anecdote of information theory, concerning the remote statistical possibility of a monkey at a typewriter eventually pecking out Hamlet? While it’s common to regard an author writing “in the spirit” of another writer, duplicating another’s letter is more readily identified with plagiarism. In Bök’s advocacy of procedural constraint, the focus shifts from “rules of imitation (and the

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decline of their masters)” to “games of agitation (and the ecstasy of their players)” (“Aleatory” 14–15). Rather than attend to the charm of a personal expression, he suggests, now “the reader must ask: ‘How surprising or how disturbing is this coincidence?’ ” (11). Procedural strategies emit “a discourse not for communicating an expressive sensibility, but for generating an unexpected coincidence” (6). Note, here, the preference given to coincidence, in relation to which the aleatory means fall by the wayside. Coincidence is another name for serendipity; and Bök’s vision of ecstatic results is in league with Jonathan Lethem’s “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism.” “Rather than isolatable anxieties of influence,” writes Jim Collins, “the struggles texts engage in to ‘clear a space’ for themselves within specific semiotic environments are the clear result of an all-pervasive anxiety of confluence that affects all cultural production” (6). Being in the right place at the right time is not as easy as it sounds: there’s always a crowd. For Menard, the real challenge is not becoming Cervantes as such, but absorbing the man plus his world—and for Menard, unlike Bloom, the two are inseparable. Menard’s replication of chapters from Don Quixote does indeed have something of the character of psychological defense. But what sort of defense is it when an author seeks not to “swerve” slightly from his predecessor but to map himself onto him point by point? The narrator suggests that “Menard (perhaps without wanting to) has enriched, by means of a new technique, the halting and rudimentary art of reading: this new technique is that of the deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution” (44). The paradox of Menard’s Quixote is that it has an equivocal relation to the Cervantes text it appears to duplicate word by word, simply because words themselves are vessels of anachronism. This paradox suggests that a word is a nimbus rather than a stable entity; and, further, that in the enchanted realm of “word by word” the interstices between words shuffle into the pack of the text the regressus ad infinitum of Zeno’s paradox. That is, insofar as identity is modeled on duplication (like a proper name and a legal signature) and ceremonies of repetition (like a birthday), the peril of iterability to which Derrida has offered such remorseless testimony will fall prey to the combinatorial buoyancy of the Lucretian clinamen, as letters blend in and out of constituent words just as atoms freely interpenetrate bodies.10 To compose a lipogram and take an aspirin are gnostic equivalents in the ground of being. Combinatorial fecundity exerts an inexorable multilateral pressure, such that all the king’s horses can never make Quixote step in the same river of letters twice. By the same reckoning, you can’t repeat a mistake, so the primary ingredient of stochastic composition is the felicitous bounty of errors, any one of which, like the clinamen, tilts toward errantry—and errantry might be defined as the art of making the right mistakes, an art Cervantes’ hidalgo perfected.

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Under the sign of errantry, to adopt a strategy of textual metamorphosis—as is the case with translation—involves an element of supplication. As supplicants we are constantly performing ritual gestures prepared in advance, and language is the cardinal vestment. Mounted atop a living language (like riding the sandworms in Frank Herbert’s Dune), there can be little pretence of control. At best, there are intertextual schemes afoot, as in Darren Wershler-Henry’s The Tapeworm Foundry: use a dotmatrix printer to sound out a poem in which each line is a series of pauses whose length is determined by formatting codes and then record the squeal and lurch of the printhead moving across the paper and then replay the noise and then have it transcribed as chamber music for cello or voice andor compose a text acknowledging that words are fourdimensional objects in spacetime andor write an essay on the collected works of jane austen treating the text as a tour de force lipogram that never once makes use of any characters in the sinhalese alphabet andor escape from a paragraph by eloping along bottomless discourses andor point out that super mario world is actually a complex digital allegory for the writings of terence mckenna andor pen a treatise for andre breton and philippe soupault in which you discuss the magnetic fields emitted by each vowel when it attracts the surrounding consonants like iron filings and then note that sometimes the letter y emanates a magnetism of its own andor proceed according to a philosophy of whatever andor insert chapbooks into the newspapers sold in vending boxes on the street andor do it even more than usual andor learn everything that you can about the life of cervantes and then rewrite don quixote from the viewpoint of the windmills. (1–2) The connective device “andor” substitutes for punctuation, becoming the turnstile through which all the schemes pass, mimicking the windmills at which they tilt for another fifty pages. As if worn out by the prospect of actually executing Goldsmith’s ponderous conceptual tomes, WershlerHenry ticks off a burgeoning list of unrealized prospects, encompassing Borges and Duchamp and legions of others in a waiting room from which there is no exit. But there is no entry either: this is the neurological precondition of language, the only medium in which the art form is contingent not on a specific sense but on the brain itself. “Once conceived,” Christopher Dewdney speculates in The Immaculate Perception, “language became selfreplicating, a lexical organism embedded in the species. The evolution of language, inextricably bound with the evolution of our consciousness as a species, has diverged from its parallel status and taken on a life of its own.

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Language is virtually an independent intelligence utilizing humans as neural components in a vast and inconceivable sentience” (57). Grammatical predication, in Dewdney’s scenario, is a parasitic predator. Familiar expressions colonize entire populations, although it’s rare to find the parasite so patently on display as in Dewdney’s “The Dialectic Criminal,” a total semantic body prosthesis: “It was no great shakes but I had to go against the grain, iron out the details. You see, I pulled a few strings & had to go off the deep end. But I guess I had reckoned without my host. (That’s burning the candle at both ends because this whole thing rings a bell.)” (Alter 93). In a letter dated September 22, 1945, Antonin Artaud makes a curious assertion: “ ‘Jabberwocky’ is nothing but a sugar-coated and lifeless plagiarism of a work written by me, which has been spirited away so successfully that I myself hardly know what is in it” (Selected 451). Claiming authorship of a poem that preceded his own birth, Artaud finds himself at the end of his rope—there where it rings a bell (and where it always tolls for thee). Artaud’s entire quest (or psychopathology, to give him his due) is to get to the bottom of things, confront “all that swarms in the lower depths of the mind” even as he feels invaded and contaminated by what he knows he’ll find there (312). He knows the murmur as Manichean fatality and would rip off its mask to reveal the Medusa: “if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time,” he writes in the preface to The Theater and its Double, “it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames” (13). This denunciation would seem to apply to procedural works like Eunoia or Soliloquy, but I think Bök and Goldsmith share a fascination with the subterranean pulse of signification (signaling through the flames is still signaling). “Beneath the poetry of the texts, there is the actual poetry, without form and without text,” Artaud insists, invoking the murmur (Theater 78). His investment in the dehumanizing potential of ritual gesture in theater, and eruptions of glossolalia in late poems like “Artaud the Mômo,” and “Here Lies,” and “To Have Done With the Judgment of God” are no less charged with the rapture of coincidence than the lipograms of Bök and Perec; and Artaud’s determination to “restore all the arts to a central attitude and necessity, finding an analogy between a gesture made in painting or the theater, and a gesture made by lava in a volcanic explosion” (80) makes explicit the terms of his voyage to Mexico in search of a pan-semiotic environment with its ceremonial entitlements. The land of the Tarahumara is full of signs, forms, and natural effigies which in no way seem the result of chance, as if the gods, whom one feels everywhere here, had chosen to express their powers by means of these

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strange signatures in which the figure of man is hunted down from all sides. (Selected 379) Symptomatically, these geomorphic ciphers stake a predatory claim: “Let us first make poem, with blood,” Artaud specifies in his quest for “the poematics of the blood bath of reality” (476). Susan Sontag identifies his plight as a writer: “one earns the right to speak through having suffered, but the necessity of using language is itself the central occasion for suffering” (21). In an instructive tabulation of protocols, Artaud hailed Lautréamont as precursor of this semiotic affliction: For the operation is not to sacrifice one’s self as a poet and at that moment as a madman to the whole world, but to allow oneself to be penetrated and violated by the consciousness of the whole world in such a way that one is in one’s body merely the slave of the ideas and reactions of everybody. (Selected 473) At the heart of this agonistic prospect, Catholic empathy with Christ on the cross reveals a desire to share (like Schreber) in the divine logos, the speech that utters things not words. Artaud’s complaint about “Jabberwocky” has nothing to do with copyright: it’s all about divinity. As in the case of Woolf’s crooning tube station, or Schreber’s birds, divining the source of a sound is tantamount to hearing the source as divine. The implications sink their claws into rival theories of language, nominalist and realist alike. Insofar as a sanctioning energy stimulates the combinatorial fecundity underpinning discourse, or else guarantees the semantic assignment of word to thing, the suspicion of a higher intelligence arises like steam from a geothermal vent. Divine intervention is not required for the suspicion of divine intervention to take hold, and once it does, it’s commanding. The muse dictates words the poet transcribes (Hesiod’s experience of the voice-over, chapter three). Or an idea entices the procedural poet to rev up the stochastic engine. These are forms of behavior not distinct in principle from the commuter reading her horoscope on the subway, the weatherman estimating the chance of snow, or the student taking an exam. Each one huddles under a nimbus of signs, hoping the signs add up or filtrate down. Probabilities play a role, to be sure (hearing a rustling in the woodwork, a Baltimore resident will think mouse or squirrel, not mongoose or cockatoo), but the totality of language does not impose itself all at once. Divinity is the latent supposition that something more than our local activity holds it up, or makes it work, or keeps it from fading away when we’re not looking. The dream and drama of poetic inspiration solicits this sense of something

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at work in words exceeding what we can personally account for—and that dream does not come without dread. Calling the dread duende (Lorca) or angel (Rilke) does not mitigate the threat of a force (insidious or beneficent as the case may be) infiltrating the psyche by means of words, coming right on in without knocking and making itself at home. Wittgenstein’s anxiety about the perversion of thought by words is hardly unique to him. Its conceptual ancestor is Plato, who feared that writing would abolish memory. Writing may be a surrogate memory, but it remembers more than we expect; writing remembers everything, in a sense, and to become literate is to suffer the burden of the universal in the particular—a torment to which Artaud and Judge Schreber offer some of the more explicit affidavits on record. When you read, you don’t activate a selection of your own memories in a moment of reabsorption or repatriation. Quite the contrary: you expose yourself to the contagious propensity of language to take itself apart and put itself back together in the combinatorial seething of difference, submitting yourself to a potentially disfiguring flow in which the best that you can hope for is to find, with Ralph Waldo Emerson, “I am a fragment, and this is a fragment of me” (491). In a Yoruba proverb, “The white man who made the pencil also made the eraser” (Roach 6). Inscription and erasure constitute together a complicitous arrangement, the consequences of which are never unequivocal. “Cursed be that mortal inter-indebtedness which will not do away with ledgers. I would be free as air; and I’m down in the whole world’s books,” laments Melville’s Ahab (514). In the grim apogee of his ruminations, Ahab asks his carpenter (which is to say—in the double-coded buoyancy of Moby-Dick—the carpenter-god who fabricates peg legs for him): “How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where thou now standest; aye, and standing there in thy spite?” (513). This is indeed the question one might put to language as such, an uncanny dimension that precedes and includes us while at the same time offering itself as innate, pliable to intention like a tool yet ominously insinuating itself into the structure of desire, such that the expressive urge tends to conflate the will of the speaking subject with the grammatical mechanisms of the language. But the executive utility of words is hardly illusory; the verbal command marks the moment. Words measure time, and time measures us. The illusions of linguistic impregnation are never imprisoned in language, just as speakers are never confined to what they have said, for what is said can always be supplemented by saying something else. Menard bears witness to an uncanny force by which such saying is already underway; and the “speaker” may be another, or in a more sinister supposition irretrievably

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other, sprouting up with manic vegetal insistence in the words on the page. But at that moment the force of circumstance dispels any consolation of interpretive “undecidability”: whether or not the fatal command emanates from a grammatical requirement or a malevolent will, the fatality obtains. Time can be convened in the image of plenitude; but the plenitude that tells us so also lets us know we are down in the world’s books. Mushroom Eyes Charles Olson is routinely mentioned by authors who have probably not read his work. While this might apply to books about modern poetry, the authors I have in mind are those who write about drugs. The Olson of these chronicles is a cipher, at best a supplement to Allen Ginsberg who, in turn, leads to the Beats and William Burroughs’ “algebra of need,” a touchstone of drug culture. For readers of Olson, on the other hand, the fact of his psilocybin experiences may have other consequences. “It would be convenient if the two peyote [sic] sessions that Olson had with Timothy Leary and company in December 1960 and February 1961 ‘changed everything,’ as the clichéd phrase has it,” Ralph Maud wistfully says, only to add, “such neatness is denied us” (157). In Charles Olson’s Reading, Maud documents Olson’s familiarity with psychedelic literature (both scientific and popular), usefully contextualizing his denial of biographical “neatness” by pointing out the impact on Olson of esoterica by Henry Corbin, Hans Jonas, Jung, and others. The most that Maud concedes to the drug experience is Olson’s sheaf of writings gathered in Proprioception (1965) and published extensively in journals—produced “like gallstones,” Maud suggests, affirming the poet’s own admission that they’re “not readable . . . they’re incongestible or something.” “That he sent them out for publication may be a sign of a burst of confidence in his own idiosyncrasy: this may have been in part the mushroom’s doing” (164). Such a conclusion misconstrues the drug experience along conventional lines, attributing textual obscurantism to a toxic event. But so much of The Maximus Poems idiosyncratically embodies the readably unreadable that a different consideration is called for, one that heeds Avital Ronell’s characterization of literature itself as “a breeding ground of hallucinogens” (11).11 After the Second World War, Olson visited Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital in Washington D.C. The director of St. Elizabeth’s, whose benevolent treatment of Pound enabled him to receive a steady stream of visitors like Olson, would soon participate in the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program which, throughout the 1950s, would conduct experiments (usually clandestine, on human subjects uninformed about the tests) involving

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morphine, heroin, ether, LSD, mescaline, peyote, psilocybin, cocaine, and amphetamines. In 1958 a research unit at Stanford University, supported by MK-ULTRA, hired creative writing student Ken Kesey to take LSD. After the success of his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, written partly on acid, Kesey used the royalties to sponsor various mind-blowing events in the Bay Area, for which the house band was a group called The Warlocks (soon renamed The Grateful Dead); and in 1964 Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters embarked in their psychedelic bus on a transcontinental trip destined for the World’s Fair in New York, during which they made an unscheduled visit to a mansion in Newton, Massachusetts, housing ousted Harvard professor Timothy Leary, by then deeply engaged in research conducted under the auspices of the International Foundation for Internal Freedom—or IFIF as its acronym disclosed. At this same location, back in December 1960 in the early days of his Harvard research, Leary first administered psilocybin to Charles Olson. Olson was one of a number of artists recommended by Allen Ginsberg for Leary’s experiments, and Ginsberg experienced his inaugural acid trip in 1959 thanks to an invitation by Gregory Bateson to participate in the same program at Stanford that dispensed Kesey’s first dose the year before. In lectures and interviews throughout the 1960s, Olson often made reference to his experience at “Mr. Leary’s beautifully perfect temple of truth” (Muthologos I 192). He was indignant to hear, in 1966, of Leary’s pot bust (“And now this man who sought to subjectively create equal conditions for us all, like a barbershop or a drugstore, has been sentenced to thirty years in the Federal pen for three ounces of marijuana”), but even his exasperation did not prevent him from recalling a delightful visit to Gloucester by Leary and his daughter: I wrote a poem on Phryne, the great mistress of Athens, walking into the sea yearly because men wished to see—men and women wished to see a perfect body. This was the model for Praxiteles’ Cnidian Venus, that utterly beautiful thing. That woman, the Miss Suzanne Leary, appeared on the beach right out this house, the front beach of Gloucester, the Pavilion Beach, at fifteen years old, and the whole town blew up at seeing a body in a bikini! (Muthologos I 194) As commemorated in The Maximus Poems: thronged to the seashore to see Phryne

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walk into the water (Maximus 205) Adamant in his support for Leary,12 Olson nevertheless took care to distinguish his art from the drug experience. For a Paris Review interview conducted in 1969, Gerard Malanga asked: “Do you feel that by taking drugs a poet, any poet, yourself for instance, is put in touch with higher senses while writing?” “No, not while writing. But certainly gets an enormous confirmation,” Olson replied. “Like, if poetry doesn’t exist to completely set right everything that’s wrong I don’t think it has an inch to stand on” (Muthologos II 143). Given his unstinting gratitude to Leary, it’s serendipitous that Olson, student of Mayan hieroglyphs and advocate of typewriter composition for the poetic field in “Projective Verse,” would have as guide for his psilocybin adventure the author of “The Experiential Typewriter,” a mechanism Leary devised so that people on acid trips might encode their experiences more expediently than the alphabet allowed. “We can think or speak at the rate of three words a second. That means that one-thousand-million-minus-three registrations cannot be communicated,” Leary reports. However, “When you ask a psychedelic subject what is happening, he can’t tell you. He looks at you blankly or he gasps: ‘Wow!’ ” (71). Ironically, Leary’s experiential typewriter confines this prodigious neural magnitude to a keyboard of twenty keys. “The Experiential Typewriter” was published in Leary’s journal The Psychedelic Review, as was “Maximus from Dogtown IV.” Olson says he “put that poem in there to prove that you just need poetry to get strung out” (Muthologos II 2). The Psychedelic Review also published a translation of a curious essay by German poet Gottfried Benn, “Provoked Life,” for which Olson expressed enthusiasm. “Provoked Life” (1943), written in Benn’s characteristic blend of philosophical precision and poetic reverie (“a promiscuous froth of abstractions and images,” in Roberto Calasso’s ripe account [“Repulsive” 296]), begins with the Nietzschean topos of prerational Dionysian seething, with its instinctive “defense against the beginnings of consciousness, its senseless imperative projects” (49). In this zone of detachment, “Hours are filled with the satisfaction of the desire to drift along as formless life. To call this animalistic is to be mistaken: this process is far below the animals, below the reflexes, it is near roots, chalk and stone” (48). This is the realm of Olson’s “The Kingfishers,” with its “dripping, fetid mass” beneath which the poet resolves to “hunt among stones” (Distances 6, 11). Benn traces this prerogative back to the origins of consciousness in the use of pharmacological substances, the

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goal of which gives the essay its title, provoziertes Leben. Under the mushroom, says Benn, “The cortex loses its recently acquired property of specific sensory quality (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting) and answers in forms of general resonance. The ‘external’ is not yet there; grounds, yes, but hunting and fishing grounds:—the prehistory of ‘reality’ ” (50). In place of “general resonance” we get sensory specificity through the cultural inputs that segregate the senses, enhancing them with art and artifact, and convening a different kind of overarching resonance that passes for reality. For Benn, the social crisis—the social as crisis—begins with the formation of the concept of reality: reality as consensual hallucination. “Provoked Life” concludes by embracing the erratic but ungovernable specificity of nonconsensual or private hallucination. There is no end and no limit to the ensuing crisis: “there were always creative crises. The brain is the mutative, revolutionary organ par excellence. Its nature was always form, not content, its means expansion, its needs—stimuli” (54). The paradigmatic stimulus, as Benn sees it, was first induced by a systematic pharmacological derangement of the senses. Octavio Paz characterizes the evolutionary allure of sensory deregulation: “Drugs provoke the vision of the universal correspondence of all things, arouse the powers of analogy, set objects in motion, make the world a vast poem shaped by rhymes and rhythms” (Alternating 76). When Paz characterizes poetry as a form of “experimental knowledge” (75) he is tacitly including it in the domain of hallucinogens, moving in the direction of Terence McKenna’s understanding of the human body itself as a psychedelic compound (Kripal 374). Experimental knowledge and creative crisis converge in all sorts of ways that Henri Michaux found agonizing. He characterized mescaline as “an infinity machine” (Miracle 38) precipitating an “Inexhaustible process of ornamentogenesis” (Light 9). In a “Strange multiplication” in which “this entire universe is born by means of spasmodic gestation” (Miracle 37), the “metaphysical [is] taken over by the mechanical” (Miracle 64), and Michaux felt himself combed or raked, unable to re-form before another onslaught of “Cellular autoscopy” as we saw in the previous chapter (Miracle 36). In fact, cellular self-scrutiny is a common perceptual awareness on drugs. The onset of universal correspondence converts every stimulus into “chattering oceans of elf language” (McKenna 61). Ernst Jünger remarks of the German word for being high, “Rauschen denotes a lively movement, like that of wings, which becomes, also acoustically, noticeable as Geräusch” or noise. “The movement may become violent—the Anglo-Saxon rush implying stürzen (onrush),” Jünger adds. “Rauschzeit is swarming time” (337). The impetuosity of universal correspondences is pervasive in drug literature. Baudelaire noted, in “The Poem of Hashish,” that “the correspondences

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take on an unusual liveliness; they penetrate and invade the mind, despotically overwhelming it. Notes of music turn into numbers.” Agile transpositions may even make one “feel that you yourself are evaporating, and that your pipe . . . has the strange power to smoke you.” As Baudelaire observed, under the pantheistic inducement of the drug, “the contemplation of outward objects makes you forget your own existence, and you soon melt into them” (Heart 97). Theophile Gautier, one of the founders of the Hashish Club in Paris in the 1840s, likewise felt a secret affinity: “I melted into the object I was looking at, and became myself that object” (94). When the membrane separating subject from object dissolves, a remorseless spatiotemporal paranoia unfolds; Gautier’s attempt to go down a flight of stairs extends the steps to infinity (“looking down, I felt rather than saw, an abyss of steps, a whirlwind of spirals, a dazzling number of convolutions” [96]). Perpetual iteration, in its more beneficent aspect, gives way to synaesthetic reveries. “My hearing was prodigiously developed,” Gautier reports. “I heard the sound of colors. Green, red, blue, and yellow sounds came to me in perfectly distinct waves” (Devereux 51)—as if he were having clairvoyant glimpses of Kandinsky’s play The Yellow Sound. Walter Benjamin also experienced auditory colors in a hashish session in which spoken words were “instantly converted into the perception of colored, metallic spangles that coalesced into patterns” (Hashish 58). Also on cannabis, Arthur Symons, author of The Symbolist Movement in Literature, had the sensation that “my eye seemed to be turning into a vast drop of dirty water in which millions of minute creatures resembling tadpoles were in motion” (Boon 232); Jean Cocteau, in his addiction to opium, felt like he was “planting a spoon in the soft tapioca of my young cells” (Opium 24); William Butler Yeats on peyote observed “a series of dissolving views . . . carried swiftly before me” like a kaleidoscope (Jay Stevens 7); Havelock Ellis experienced “living arabesques” courtesy of mescaline (Jay 78), a drug that gave American physician Weir Mitchell his vision of “miles of rippled purples” (Klüver 16); for Ernst Jünger, on psilocybin “Everything became skin and was touched, even the retina” (Hofmann 165). As Michaux discovered, virtually any stimulus multiplies itself to infinity: space is teeming with self-substitution in this “Tennis of synonyms” where words become invasive “endo-polyformations,” thoughts are prematurely hatched and then rapidly multiplied in what he called “neotenic thinking” (Light 65, 78, 63), and every attempt to say anything is: “Very . . . It is very . . . Everything is very . . .” (Miracle 38). “It is intolerable to be in the midst of the superlative of everything,” Michaux complained (Miracle 70). Given the mechanistic apparition of analogy succeeding analogy in perpetual motion, an instinctive survival strategy is to break the rhythm, stagger the

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pace of associations by changing the frame—like that moment in Wagner’s opera when Gurnemanz tells Parsifal “zum Raum wird hier die Zeit”: time here becomes space (96). In Jünger’s assessment, the characteristic proliferation of phenomena experienced on drugs could only go so far: even though “intoxication does not add up, it multiplies. It even makes fractions smaller,” it nonetheless “lacks that higher power of addition, which brings something else and something new, and which eros does possess” (Bullock 207). The reverberation to infinity of cognition and perception in trance lacks one essential ingredient: encounter. It’s emphatically in such an encounter—the struggle with the sea serpent—that Olson attained his special vision in a Maximus poem written after his second psilocybin experience: “I shaped her out of / the watery mass with mushroom eyes.”13 Despite his generally negative experiences, Michaux affirms two principles that resonate with Olson. First, the experience is “pre-personal” and “infinitely archaic” (Miracle 87). Second, “A drug is not so much a thing, as it is ‘someone’ ” (Light 41). “Paradise is a person,” The Maximus Poems declares, and Maximus himself is a figure extending persona trans-corporeally until it includes all that might be “trenched out, smeared, occupied” by the Gold Machine, the alchemical alembic. Asked if she wanted a glass of water during an acid trip, Anaïs Nin replied “I want a pagoda” (257). Sensing “images behind images,” she felt the “whole room became filled with gold, my whole body was becoming , liquid gold, scintillating, warm gold. I  ” (257, 258). The Maximus poem beginning “I am the Gold Machine” is an impetuously constellated confrontation with what’s identified as “the ugliest passage” (Maximus 301)—which is just how immersion in the infinitely archaic appears: a necessary but unwelcome visitor. To address this visitation in the form of a person is to contend more pragmatically with Michaux’s dilemma, being forced to endure “the superlative of everything.” The stuttering perpetuity of a drug induced vision converges with the visionary apparition of infinite worlds in which “all the beings of the celestial universe are drawn into the ascending movement of limitless eternities toward horizons and toward creative acts of thought belonging to universes still unformulable”—a prospect characterized by Henry Corbin as “a ‘Gothic style’ of cosmology” (133). Corbin’s essay, “Cyclical Time in Mazdaism and Ismailism,” was of considerable importance to Olson, for whom some of Corbin’s formulations seem preternaturally destined. The spiritual adept, for instance, “is himself the total Time of his own measure” (163), and therefore a figure in accord with Olson’s admiration for those who “go on the frozen being and do take the marks and bearings” (Maximus 481). Increasingly, in the later Maximus poems, the sense emerges from Corbin’s dictum that “through every reality it is possible to discern a

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person—that is, to grasp this reality as or in its celestial person” (137). In an extended passage informing the composition of “Maximus, at the Harbor,” Corbin writes: Everything takes place as though the question “Who is it?” were substituted for the question “What is it?”—as though to name the person were to define its essence; and it is to this person and not to the abstract, universal concept that the ta’wil or internal exegesis leads back. We gain this impression by juxtaposing propositions such as these: “Paradise is a person (or a human being).” “Every thought, every word, every action is a person.” And finally: “Every true thought, every true word, every good action has an Angel.” (165) In Olson’s adaptation: Paradise is a person. Come into this world. The soul is a magnificent Angel. And the thought of its thought is the rage of Ocean : apophainesthai (Maximus 240) The Greek α´πoϕαινεσuαι means “that which shows forth”; and Olson never tired of reiterating the basic precept of The Secret of the Golden Flower: “that which exists through itself is what is called meaning” (Muthologos I 64; Wilhelm 23). But note what the poem says: where there is appearance, there is rage. Rage is the unappeasable. It’s the wink or nudge of the nick of time that reminds us our being crests, without appeal, on the throbbing portentous gist of the infinitely archaic, where the murmur is as hot as lava, hot as Ahab. For a guide to rage, consider this passage from Robin Blaser’s poem “Mappa Mundi”: Olson once said he wished he could learn how to handle verticals from Boulez—horizontals being what we do everyday toward horizons—he had in mind the Second Piano Sonata, the eruptive violence of them—in conversation with Beethoven’s Hammerklavier—a rage of rhythm. (Holy 389) Readers of The Maximus Poems invariably confront eruptive verticality in the second volume. A few weeks before his psilocybin experience, Olson wrote to Ed Dorn about the quagmire the Maximus poems had become: “The fucking ‘subject’ . . . leads me, and sucks like mud,” and he characterized

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work on the poem as “A dreadful sort of slavery actually” (Clark, Olson 291). The attainment of mushroom eyes gave Olson a way to handle the verticals and overcome the drudgery of a predetermined course, rendering sapience experimental again. The mushroom opened Olson’s eyes to the autonomic nervous system. Michaux’s recognition of the “infinitely archaic,” like Benn’s affirmation of prehistory, and his conflation of prehistory with the roots of human consciousness in artistic extravagance, can be taken as guides to Olson’s characterization of psilocybin and LSD as “autonomic drugs”—that is, drugs facilitating awareness that “we live in the autonomic system,” the function of which, he says, “is to preserve our organs from our will ” (Olson subsequently added peyote and marijuana to his list of the “four great autonomic drugs” [Muthologos I 194]). Tripping, we encounter “that which the organ itself requires to be permanently in function with the terms of creation” (Muthologos I 49). Physiologically, the autonomic system directs bodily activities that elude conscious control, like digestion, breathing, and heart rate. The drug, says Olson, “puts you on your own autonomic nervous system—as against the motor” (Muthologos I 33). So what does it entail, being “put on” your own autonomic system? Olson found out at the zoo. In his disquisition on the mushroom, at one point he offers this curious anecdote: Have you ever looked in a tiger’s eyes? I think they’re in it all the time. I once had an affair at the Washington Zoo with the wife of the tiger, and the tiger looked at me as though I was really casting eyes at his woman! I got the hell scared out of me! And they were two beautiful tigers. (Muthologos I 47–48) Tigers, and cats in general, suggest some hypnogogic state in their demeanor combining savagery and sedation (as in an ad for Librium, a sedative that was the most prescribed drug in America in the mid-1960s: “The Drug That Tames Tigers—What will it do for Nervous Women?” [Davenport-Hines 327]). An alternative image, and a plausible rendering of the autonomic system also from the zoo, is Rilke’s encounter with a panther in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris around 1903. The Panther From so much prison strobe his gaze is stoned and doesn’t see. For him it’s just a thousand bars and nothing else. No world.

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Pacing his tight circle, he comes to a point where the dance of his mighty body condenses into a giant will. Sometimes the gape of his eye opens and clutches an image bundling it into his heart.14 Rilke’s poem is a wonderful demonstration of Gottfried Benn’s remark, that “What lives is something other than what thinks”; “there are millennia living in our souls, lost things, silent things, dust” (Primal 116, 127). In the “hybrid, beast-shaped, sphinx-pouched features of the primal face” (Primal 37) we manifest this dust, this insistent residuum of species life Benn identified as the phenotype—albeit with the important provision that the phenotype, being historically mutable, shouldn’t be mistaken for the persistence of some primal transcendental characteristic.15 “The phenotype of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries celebrated courtly love; that of the seventeenth century, spiritualized ostentation; that of the eighteenth, secularized knowledge; and the phenotype of today integrates ambivalence, the fusion of every concept with its opposite”: “on the one hand, tired—on the other, yearning for ski jumps” (Primal 123, 124). In the phenotype, Benn suggests, “We are creatures of giant cities; it is in the city, and there only, that the Muses exult and grieve” (Primal 177). Olson’s declaration “Polis / is this” confirms the phenotype (Maximus 185): It is the imposing of all those antecedent predecessions, the precessions of me, the generation of those facts which are my words, it is coming from all that I no longer am, yet am, the slow westward motion of more than I am

There is no strict personal order for my inheritance. (Maximus 185)

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Benn recognized that the phenotype abolished the principle of the Bildungsroman, a point delivered with emphatic irony in the title of his anti-generic disquisition, “Novel of the Phenotype.” Writing to a friend, he declares: “Hometown, family, development, a private life: everyone has these things, they are completely beside the point—let’s put an end to developmental novels, to the individual’s personal circumstances and to the taking so seriously of familiar and psychological things, of experiential details” (Primal 120). Despite its obvious abundance of experiential details, The Maximus Poems might plausibly be subtitled, following Benn, Poem of the Phenotype. There’s speculation that Ernst Jünger and Martin Heidegger dropped acid together, presumably in the Black Forest (Ronell 33). Regardless, it was by way of Heidegger that Benn encountered the “new word” existential, a term born to operate in the phenotype. “It removes the main weight of the ego from the psychological, casuistic sphere into that of the species, the dark, closed realm, the stem” (Primal 121). The importance of the phenotype is that it identifies a portion of genetic inheritance persisting without reference to identity. Phenotype is the autonomic system of the species. So here we have Benn proclaiming the inner inherence of phenotype—the existential stem preliminary to any flowering of ego—and Olson insisting on the autonomic system recovered on the mushroom, in which “your ego goes and your self is on” (Muthologos I 39). “The great generalization,” Olson says, “is that everybody is what they are” (Muthologos I 27). “All is actually each,” observed Aldous Huxley, who found on mescaline that “The point of each thing is identical with its being. Its point is that it is” (63). Speaking ad hoc to a group assembled to hear about his psilocybin experience, Olson may have regarded it as generalization, but it’s unnervingly precise. The is and the are converge, just as phenotype and autonomic system surf through the chatter and lattice-work of the ego, clenching cellular protoplasm through the turbulent but momentary feat of an organism. Imagine a continuum between the avuncular elucidations of Aldous Huxley, or Alan Watts in The Joyous Cosmology, and the impetuous freewheeling participatory prose of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe. Does The Maximus Poems have a place here? Would it be instructive to heave it up alongside a book Olson approvingly mentions, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead by Timothy Leary and his Harvard associates? After all, Olson was emphatic that the mushroom was “a true love feast and a truth pill” (Muthologos I 24), which would relegate it to the Summer of Love. The Maximus Poems may not strictly belong in the company of Leary and Watts, Wolfe and Huxley, but it balances the proselytizing spirit (typified by Allen Ginsberg) with capacious

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investigations of another order. There’s no dropping out after tuning in and turning on, since the crucial event for Olson—as it was for Stewart Brand, who went from Merry Trickster to Whole Earth Catalog, from counterculture to cyberculture—was the emergent image of the earth as globe. “I find myself constantly returning to that unit, Earth as orb,” Olson declared; and “if there is any legitimacy to the word that we call mythology it is literally the activeness, the possible activeness and personalness of experiencing it as such” (Muthologos I 70)—it being the orb. A “rigorous and irreplaceable individuation . . . of that divine presence,” as Henri Corbin puts it in the essay from which Olson got apophainesthai (25). “Heaven is not the wide blue sky,” we read in The Secret of the Golden Flower, “but the place where the body is made in the house of the creative” (Wilhelm 25). Olson’s project, especially in the later Maximus poems, is to pursue this house as a portable event (cf. the Algonquin tale in Maximus about the man who carries his house on his head). “That is, it takes the earth to make a feather fall” (Prose 291). In this “initiatic cosmos” (Prose 372)—a term he credits to Corbin—Olson’s singularity is reflected in his use of an obscure trope known as anacoluthon, from the Greek term for “anomalous.” Olson underlined the definition in Webster’s Dictionary: “Abandonment in the midst of a sentence of one type of construction in favor of one grammatically inconsonant” (Muthologos II 195). In his editorial note, George Butterick provides the text of a short unpublished poem read by Olson on the Folkways recording of selections from Maximus IV, V, VI: “anacoluthic, and drag, / is the nature of a poem when / it satisfies the problem of movement.” Olson’s attraction to anacoluthon is evident throughout the second and third volumes of The Maximus Poems. Even the earliest Maximus poems, in their abundant use of parentheses (rarely closed), anticipate anacoluthon. But the proliferation of this trope in the wake of “mushroom eyes” suggests not a rhetorical enhancement of initial conditions but a newly convened bifocal vision, whereby the geological precedence of Gondwanaland nudges Cape Ann from one direction, and the archetypal figure of the angel approaches from another (anacoluthon-like), converging in the poet-become-Maximus, ever more maximally arrayed. Olson evoked this figure—the angelic visitant encountering the soul on the Cinvat Bridge, postmortem, via Corbin—at the Vancouver poetry conference in 1963: There is this angel who’s coming towards you as you are coming towards him. And there’s a moment when you pass through your angel and become the creature, not of the two, but of the fact that you are without any chance involved with another figure who is you, who is coming towards you in time as you proceed forward in time. (Muthologos I 15–16)

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What better means of attesting to this encounter than by anacoluthon? In the later Maximus poems, Olson’s twist is this enhancement of text by oral dislocation; changing his mind in the middle of a sentence; launching the sentence in order to summon the change, and changing the summons in order to steer as it happens into what about this. A summons by indirection and serendipity, as in these lines from a late Maximus poem: Go down, moon and teach me too to swallow what by analogy and continuity I now, at 55 know is as much condition as the purchase of my soul by love as they (Maximus 521) How did we get here? The question may seem preposterously encompassing, but let’s accept its deictic openness (who are “we” and where is “here”?), while recognizing the mundane rhetorical gesture of arriving at a conclusion. What’s to conclude? Delivering “Mushroom Eyes” as a conference talk, I taunted the audience with this exasperating summary as a prefatory glance at what was to come: Formless life undergoes a creative crisis by way of experimental knowledge, also known as poetry, a crisis morphologically inseparable from the hallucinatory encounter with an infinity machine purring along in the autonomic nervous system of the organism. To break out of the repetitive mechanical flicker of sheer pulsation in the phenotype—the inheritance of the archaic—a special twist is needed, a syntactic jolt easily mistaken for revelation, something known to Greek philosophy as the clinamen, the sudden unaccountable swerve of atoms in the void inaugurating the differential, a principle put into practice by Olson in the rhetorical figure anacoluthon. (American Literature Association conference, Boston, May 24, 2007, approximately 1:15 p.m.) To clarify the hitherto unmentioned term, clinamen, I offer a text I participated in writing but, the project being collaborative, isn’t strictly mine—a condition befitting the land of Maximus, in which History (finding out for oneself, as Olson was wont to say) is inseparable from myth or muthos (mouthing: what is said of what is said): The clinamen refers to the minimal swerve of an atom in laminar flow. In contrast to Democritus’s earlier deterministic model of an invariant vertical fall, Lucretius’s theory installs the random declination of the atoms as its basic law. As he explains in Book Two, the descending atoms suddenly

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and randomly swerve, and without this clinamen nature would never have created anything. Atomic collision then is both inevitable and unpredictable, occurring in “a time smaller than the minimum of thinkable time,” and “differ[ing] from nothingness by the smallest possible margin.” As the being-of-movement, the clinamen becomes apparent to itself only in the disappearance of stabilities. Like a slip of the tongue, the clinamen is less a performance than a happening. (Rasula and McCaffery 532) Coda As a model of poetic agency, the clinamen appears to be nothing less than the Muse in a molecule. As compositional minima, it suggests that just a slight nudge will reveal an alternate universe. In his aspiration to resist “the lyrical interference of the individual as ego” (Prose 247), Olson settled on the transformative persona of Maximus, proof that something as simple as a change of name can be a creative opportunity. Consider the famous case of Fernando Pessoa (whose very name, conveniently, means “person” in Portuguese). Like the torrent of composition that launched The Maximus Poems, Pessoa too was seized by the sudden appearance of his “master,” Alberto Caeiro, rustic genius of The Keeper of Sheep. Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos followed, together amounting to “a magnum opus of the impersonal creative power” (Selected Prose 36). Pessoa conceded that a multiplication of poetic identities might be a symptom of neurasthenia, but he had a clear understanding that “the mental origin of my heteronyms lies in a persistent and organic tendency of mine to depersonalization and simulation” (Always 7). The Muse is not some superego added to a personality, but a power that disregards the lyrical interference of the ego. The creative bounty of depersonalization is also evident in an intriguing scenario, the Spectra hoax perpetrated by Witter Bynner and Arthur Davison Ficke in 1916 as a spoof of Imagism. For two years, under the names Anne Knish and Emanuel Morgan, Bynner and Ficke perpetrated a “spectrist” movement with a book of verse, numerous periodical publications (including Poetry, The Little Review, and Others), clandestine correspondence, and even reviews and lectures of the phenomenon published under their own names. Although Spectra was meant to be a hoax—concocted “from ten quarts of Scotch in ten days” (Smith 17)—once it was revealed it proved difficult for Bynner in particular to shed the persona of Emanuel Morgan. “I find now that I write like him without the slightest effort,” he realized. “I don’t know where he leaves off and I begin. He’s a boomerang!” (Smith 43). “The hoaxers themselves were hoaxed,” suggested William Marion Reedy, “for some of their pseudonymous performances were better stuff than they had ever done

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under or over their own names” (Bynner xvi). Reedy’s observation—from his preface to Bynner’s collection The Beloved Stranger (1919)—recounts the poet’s role in Spectra and suggests that much of the volume is the work of Morgan rather than its putative author, Bynner. Reedy quotes a poem not included in the collection, “Self-Portrait,” that exquisitely vacillates between self and author in a way that anticipates Borges’ unnerving prose poem “Borges and I.” “I saw myself sitting at the next table, / But only in profile,” the poem begins (xvii). Its conclusion: But when the full face turned, I knew again That there was no such person. No such person, and yet a person speaks: that is the enigma of the legacy of the Muses—or, as the next chapter elaborates, the voice-over.

CHAPTER THREE

Poetry’s Voice-Over: Techniques of Inspiration

I

f, as Wittgenstein remarked, philosophy is a struggle against the fascination of words, poetry may be a struggle in words against the prepossessing clamor of identity. In The Birth of the Modern Mind, Paul Oppenheimer identifies the origin of modern inwardness with the Renaissance development of the sonnet, the invention of which “unwittingly helped to change how human beings were to look at themselves and express themselves . . . by creating the lyric of the private soul” (40). But as the case of the sonnet suggests, the lyric soul in postures of disclosure or sincerity is mediated by technical requirements. The sonnet’s confidentiality is no simple expression; rather, it is the expression of expressivity. “There is, in the best personal poetry, a deep paradox” Oppenheimer suggests, in that “the personal, or the thrill of the mind revealed for all to see, in all of its individual intensity, may be possible only when the methods of the poetry are impersonal. The greatest intimacy may emerge from the greatest artifice and the greatest privacy, as at a secret meeting of secret lovers” (31). A particular verse form like a sonnet is not strictly necessary: Whitman’s catalogue rhetoric, as a proto-cinematic device of furtive disclosures, retains the intimacy of the rendezvous in a way that explicit rhapsodic ovations to sex do not. Even the metonymic ardor of serial automatism that runs riot in the work of Charles Bernstein emits distinctly personal touches. The poem “Sunsickness” is indicative (Dark City 31–38). The title plays off seasick, the first of a series of substitutions that rev up the proliferation engine. Pronoun substitutions (“Certain / things are private or anyway demand / privacy—but I’d be reluctant to say / who” where who substitutes

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for what); phonological exchange (“to note the calm (calamity)”) and substitution (“mimes (minds)”) or “haze of the subject / brought to a locus” instead of focus) complex semantic puns (“The important thing is the sweep by which / the specific is hampered / on its way to the / laundry”); conceptual puns (“hit in the face by a / wave—yet no particle / cares that much”); semantically occluding rhyme (“But revenge is for cues & / plates (tools & / states”): these techniques retard grammatical predication and expository logic. At the same time, they submit the poem to a machine logic of mechanical substitutions: The Tapeworm Foundry again. Bernstein’s work may be read in part as a contest with the undertow of such logics; or it may be construed as a concession to the poststructuralist epiphany that “language speaks” prior to, through, and beyond the speaker. Bernstein’s poems often adopt the persona of Homo Rhetoricus (one collection is called The Sophist), only to introduce disequilibrium into the authority of the speaker by systems of substitutions like those in “Sunsickness.” As demonstrations of language, these poems pursue the cues of Ionesco’s absurdist theater: “for the word ‘Italy,’ in French we have the word ‘France,’ which is an exact translation of it,” as the professor tells his student in The Lesson (69). The logic of language turns out to be contaminated by languages, plural. The abiding plurality (or, from another perspective, duplicity) of poetry is dramatized in a primal scene: Hesiod’s encounter with the Muses, who dictate directly into the inner ear or mind, as into a recess deeper than personality. Poetry’s “voice-over” discloses the mode of production authorizing these sounds of subjective autonomy—a point that will require clarification and refinement, since my concept of voice-over is intended neither in a wholly negative nor positive sense. Rather, voice-over doubles the voice, splitting its allegiance in ways that can be traumatic as well as humanizing. David Farrell Krell suggestively describes Hölderlin as having “found his voice precisely in being at a loss” (Lunar 22). This loss is exposure and risk: prayer, mantra. But more fundamentally, “The poet disappears behind his own voice,” says Octavio Paz, “a voice which is his because it is the voice of language, the voice of no one and of all. Whatever name we give this voice—inspiration, the unconscious, chance, accident, revelation—it is always the voice of otherness” (Children 160). While poetry is one of the archaic products of the species, it’s not a primitive or unsophisticated one. Poets are “technicians of the sacred” (Jerome Rothenberg), while poetry itself is an ecological survival technique; and I would emphasize the technological incentive, bearing in mind Heidegger’s insistence on poiesis as the constitutive ground of technē. “Why did art bear the modest name technē?” he asks with regard to Greek aesthetics. “Because it was a revealing that brought forth and hither, and therefore belonged

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within poiesis” (Question 34). Poetry utilizes the most sophisticated and volatile of all our technologies: language. A poem is the technical means by which the honeyed voice is skillfully engineered, even while masquerading at being innate. In the process, poetry may challenge ideologues of the prevailing order because it mounts a display, an extravagant show, of ways the “natural” is culturally styled. The following tableaux reanimate certain primal episodes dramatizing the mythic protocols of poetic voice—a medium enabled by its voice-over to converse with the dead, revive a stricken cosmos, awaken and inhabit the phantasms of love and spiritual ascesis, enumerate theogonies and even “do the police in different voices” (Eliot’s working title for The Waste Land). It’s in the spirit of the primal scene, in Freud’s sense, to regard the troublesome wish as traumatically manifested in masquerade. Pleasure, always compromised by reality, moves in detours, meanders, and entanglements. The act of creation, in whatever medium—whether in the flesh or by aesthetic extension into other materials—deposits a residue distinct from the literal outcome. This residual tremor is a rhythmic cue that needs to be absorbed into a contextual sonority, an ensemble of polyrhythms. I have in mind a choice formulation of Freud’s, when he contends that “palpitations that occur in hysteria and anxiety-neurosis are only detached fragments of the act of copulation” (96–97). In Freud’s Dora case, parental coition overheard by the child is preserved acoustically. Since the original acoustic cues were only fragmentarily available in the first place—and since sexual innocence turns out to be the perfect preservative, because the child cannot assemble the fragments into a coherent representation—the sensory traces of the primal scene prompt a provisional embodiment. Preoccupied with unconscious thoughts as symptoms of an integral (if submerged) system, Freud overlooked a telling implication: namely, that the mnemonic traces of the primal scene are preserved in the body. Freud identifies his patient’s troubled breathing with her father’s asthmatic huffing during coitus, but fails to notice in this primal scene a primal symmetry: the life-bestowing heavy breathing is sheltered and continued in the life bestowed, which carries forward the breath-principle of the (sexually) animated body. Dora breathes in gasps, replicating the paternal stammer of procreation. The fact of respiration is the unconditional precedent for sex—and sex the unconditional proponent of life, germination. Freud regards breathing as a latent memory of sex, but does not see that sex is itself the primal scene of breathing. Freud was still caught up in the metaphysics of anamnesis or recollection, in which the present moment always refers back to a prior occasion. Yet his work was inspired by biology, which at the phylogenetic level functions as a system of productive overflow and expenditure, not retention as given in

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his topography of the primal scene. But the primal scene labors on behalf of production, not recollection; projection, not commemoration. The full pressure of coital abandon blurs rather than reinforces boundaries of the self. To procreate is literally to forget or lose oneself, a point reinforced by the radical proximity of sex with death (not only linguistically, but biologically in the case of certain animal species). Freud curiously “remembers”—to use the term in a sense antithetical to his—the function of the primal scene in the primal scenario of analysis, in which the analyst is self-effacing, saying little or nothing, and by this instructive abstinence lending all the breath, the inspiration as it were, to the patient. It is a mutual if imbalanced pact, since the moment the “talking cure” is terminated, the activated voice is perpetuated by the analyst in the surrogate medium of writing. Dora leaves, but Freud painstakingly revisits her words, generating his own in the process. Freudian theory is literally a rewriting of linguistic pathogenesis. The patient’s disclosures presuppose concealment, as Freud surmised, yet what is hidden is not withdrawn from circulation but preserved on behalf of it. Concealment preserved: this is the very definition of a hermetic tradition; and Hermes, after all, is patron of boundaries, thresholds, and interpretation. Inspiration is thoroughly implicated in this dramaturgy of the primal scene, disclosed by the Dora case as a gendered transaction involving a Muse. “The primal scene is always the primal scene of words,” writes Ned Lukacher, in which “voice has always been a mode of distortion and concealment, for along with its promise of presence, voice has also proclaimed, by virtue of its ‘fading,’ a haunting message of distance and absolute separation” (68, 80). It’s not surprising that Lukacher’s polyphonic interweaving of Freud, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Derrida, Lacan, and Barthes should impinge on the question of writing. Not only are these authors themselves preoccupied with language—with both acoustic and graphic signs—they are mesmerized by the inconsolability of transmission, by the thought that every act is compromised by the medium of its enactment. By calling the mythopoetic scenarios of poetic inception “primal scenes” I adhere to the paradox of an enabling disablement, or a superior subordination. These episodes retain a sense of incommensurability between voice and voice-over; but that’s as it should be, given that while voice-over is a means of empowerment, it is haunted by a sense of ambiguous gratification. Rather than simply conflating voice-over with inspiration, I follow the lead of Lacan and Althusser, identifying a propensity of the free-floating voice to affix itself with uncanny exactitude on the seemingly innocent bystander—the “hey you” they call interpellation. Likewise, the voice of the poet is the summons of an ideologically prefabricated voice-over, although it’s not reducible to ideology: like the witches’ cauldron in Macbeth it brews


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to a fine broth the unpalatably dense residue of plots that need leavening and watering down to be properly heard. For that reason, the myths suggest a divine source for the voice-over, as is the case with Hesiod’s Muses, who choose a specific poet as medium precisely because the brew of their utterance requires a human distillery. From a different perspective, that of ideology critique (which may be nothing other than the anamorphic shape of mythopoeisis), the notion of an individual voice serves as subpoena for an entire cultural habitus, a way of disposing as personal and inviolable something dictated, by ventriloquism, well in advance of a given poem. But that’s not all: ideological subvention and intersubjective sensitivity are supplemented by the peculiar torque of the spellbound consciousness in the act of creation, in which “I myself am nothing but a terrified, enslaved spectator of the things which I am accomplishing” (Ellenberger 165). Because our media environment is saturated with stagings of voice-over, it’s hard to imagine an unprompted encounter with a work of art. Film subtitles, prerecorded sales pitches, public opinion solicitations, canned laughter, public address systems, intercoms, musical overdubs, background music, lip-sync, karaoki, catastrophe footage with broadcast voice-over, and sportscasters reviewing instant replay all converge in a congestion of voice-over scenarios. Consciousness as such would appear to be a voice-activated technology. Contemporary monitors of cultural heritage—from print sources like textbooks, prefaces, and introductions to anthologies, reviews, and other media including museum headset tours and television documentaries—contribute to the voice-over, offering guidelines, coordinating the reader’s attention, and mapping the territory germane to “the poet’s voice.” The poet’s voice has long been our paradigm for a voice that compels assent by imputing to all who hear it an agreement about its priority. The poet’s honeyed voice is a benchmark of the irresistible, the voice one can’t help but heed. The poet’s voice, complicit with a cultural voice-over, is intimate with ecstatic inertia. Stunned with gratitude, we gape open-mouthed at the sound of a voice ringing in our ears, the voice of the other implanted directly in our heads, a consoling technical effect: voice-over. _

Primal Scenes: Techne 1 Hesiod, a shepherd tending his lambs on the flank of Mount Helikon, is rudely addressed (in the plural) by the Muses: “Shepherds of the wilderness, wretched things of shame, mere bellies, we know how to speak many false things as though they were true; but we know, when we want to, how to tell the truth.”

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So said the ready-voiced daughters of great Zeus, and they plucked and gave me a rod, a shoot of sturdy laurel, a marvellous thing, and breathed into me a divine voice to celebrate things that shall be and things that have been; and they bade me sing of the race of the blessed gods that are eternally, but ever to sing of themselves both first and last. (81) To be inspired by the Muses is to be filled with their spirit, their breath or pneuma, which may or may not coincide with truth. (For this reason Plato expelled poets from his Republic, since in their trances they were out of their minds, unreliable citizens, irresponsibly uttering words not their own, and worse, words that the Muses concede might be untrue.) There is ventriloquism at work here, in this confidential insinuation of another’s voice into one’s own mouth and words. And the truth of words is henceforth bound up with the problem of “voice” as a security deposit for any subsequent claim of authenticity. The lesson of Hesiod and the potential duplicity of the Muses is a lesson about language, and about voice. For Hesiod, taking dictation, the voice precedes the words. That is, the voice compels transcription as immediate obligation. The semantic content of the words received in such a state is beyond mediation. Hesiod becomes a radio transmitter or a solid state amplifier for the Muses, and this is not rational. He succumbs to the glamour of the voices that croon the words, inaugurating a condition that’s plagued poetry ever since: for to cede authority to the Muses, with their acknowledged power of duplicity, is to concede the unsuitability of the logos as a means of distinguishing true from false. The logos, with its “vicarious, rhetorical, supplementary nature,” precipitates ambiguity and duplicity, and it is implicit that those who throw in their lot with the Muses may be intent on dissimulation (Pucci, Hesiod 19).1 Poetry emerges, under Hesiod’s proxy authorship (first among ancients to attach a personal name to his poem), as a way of pondering a split in language itself. Insofar as writing is thought to follow orality, writing assumes control of an echo. Writing is, in effect, the ventriloquial means of transposing an acoustic event onto an optic event, thereby pacifying the sensory incertitude of hearing by substituting another sense as legislator. The proprioceptive and exteroceptive ambiguities of sound are suspended, as the voice is fixed in graphic relay. Such a paradox makes poetry the phantom double of language. By means of its metrics (measure) poetry displays a stylistic control at odds with semantic control, for the truth or falsity of what is said is attributed to the Muses. A rift opens up between mind and tongue, thought and word. A mythopoetic prototype is the nymph Echo, who suffers perpetual grief at the dislocation


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of her voice, its unchecked proliferation in a state of nature.2 There’s an affinity between Hesiod’s audition on Mount Helikon and the plight of Echo, punished for gossipy indiscretion by being dispossessed of her voice. The mocking multiplication of Echo’s voice by the streams, cliffs, and forest glens dispels the aura of speakerly control in ways that parallel Hesiod’s mimicry of the Muses. But surely all words are echoes in an unending babble—this is the turf of that subterranean darkbook Finnegans Wake—an echolalia of prolific sentience that stirs tongues as well as leaves on trees. For the Tukanos of the Columbian rainforest the word for “measure” is also the word for “echo,” keori. An echo, in other words, is “the measure of sound” (Levin 236–237). It’s instructive to compare the synaesthetic connotations of rainforest echo-measures with those measures or metrics of a poetry that develops in concordance with the measuring ratios of Western rationality. On the shore of Walden Pond Henry Thoreau came to a different estimation of Echo: “The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood; the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph” (83). The words may be trivial, but the sound is original, casting a spell or charm; and spells and charms return us to the old mantic provocations of poetry before it was fully distinguished from prophecy. A “spell” is a bewitchment; but to spell someone means to relieve them, to take their place. An echo points to the strangeness of identity, the peculiarity of repetition and self-sameness. Robert Frost’s poem “The Most of It” is a revolt against the intolerable monomania of the repetition compulsion, registered in a fear of echoes: He thought he kept the universe alone; For all the voice in answer he could wake Was but the mocking echo of his own From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake. Some morning from the boulder-broken beach He would cry out on life, that what it wants Is not its own love back in copy speech, But counter-love, original response. (307) Frost goes on to envision originality as wilderness creature, an “embodiment that crashed / In the cliff’s talus on the other side” that turns out to be a buck, as if to confirm in advance Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “becoming-animal”: “Singing or composing, painting, writing have no other aim,” they write, but “to unleash these becomings.” Becoming-animal

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is for them complicitous with rhizomatic proliferation, “following alogical consistencies or compatibilities.” It’s not surprising, they insist, to find that “becoming and multiplicity are the same thing”; nor to discover that “the self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities” (272, 250, 249). The stability of the self is threatened, for Hesiod, by a fear of contagious falsehoods; yet poetic inspiration exposes the self to this risk of infection—a justifiable concern, considering such monstrous alliances as the Minotaur or Ahab’s becoming-whale. Truth and falsity are merely veils deflecting attention from the disturbing hybridity of inspiration, of which Lezama Lima provides a vivid account of the premonitory sense he felt emanating from words in childhood: “Words were a hand excessive in its perspiration, an adjective was someone’s profile or head-on look, eyes upon eyes, with the tension of a deer’s perked-up ears” (102). In the specific charter of the Muse, the voice of an other penetrating the poet’s consciousness threatens to turn him into another species altogether, usurping his biological basis and leaving him scattered like the nymph Echo in alienating matter. In Frost’s terms, at issue is not true and false but copy-speech and counter-love, each of which harbors a kind of madness. The notion of poetry as madness or furor—the poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling—is a late supplement to mythopoetic scenes of instruction. As the Chadwicks exhaustively elucidated in their three-volume survey of the world’s oral literatures (1932–1940), and as N.K. Chadwick summarized in Poetry and Prophecy (1942), mantic inspiration requires elaborate procedural controls. More recently Penelope Murray has concluded that “the idea of poetic inspiration in early Greece differs in a number of important ways from subsequent conceptions. It was particularly associated with knowledge, with memory and with performance; it did not involve ecstasy or possession, and it was balanced by a belief in the importance of craft” (100). Hesiod’s initiatory encounter is interpreted by Gregory Nagy as a conciliatory threshold in the creation of a “pan-Hellenic theogony” in which “the Muses have to come down from Helikon and go up to Olympus, through the intermediacy of Hesiod” (Mythology 60). Nagy arrives at this conclusion by noting a parallel between the Muses’ disconcerting ability to utter both truths and falsities and the Bee Maidens of Parnassos in the Homeric “Hymn to Hermes,” who tell the truth when fed honey but lie when deprived of it. Apart from the issue of poetic glory (kléos), and the reconciliation of competing theogonies in Homer and Hesiod, there is also a significant alliance being forged here between poetry and prophecy. The “Hymn to Hermes” has to do with the rivalry between Hermes and Apollo, concluding with an exchange of tools to signal accord: Hermes gives Apollo his lyre, receiving the bees in return. “The imagery in which the bee maidens are clad, with its


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traditional evocation of both poets and seers, enables them to bring to a fitting close a hymn whose chief concern is the rivalry, and then the harmony, between the poetic and mantic spheres” (Scheinberg 28). Bees also figure in Virgil’s Georgics, in his augmentation of the Orphic descent to Hades, narrated within the frame of apiculture patron Aristaeus, who loses his bees after lustfully pursuing Eurydice to her inadvertent death (Raymond Clark 95). Insofar as mantic divination provoked, for the Greeks, anxieties about accuracy, these same anxieties apply to poetry as long as it has prophetic aspirations—and the bees persist: “My wall is loosening,” writes Yeats in a late petition. “honey-bees, / Come build in the empty house of the stare” (Poems 202). The ancient equivocation between truth and falsity becomes, in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, a matter of much concern in faculty psychology. As the medieval Jewish commentator Abraham Ibn Daud puts it, in a formulation close to those regarding the Muses and the Bee Maidens, the danger of imagination is that “sometimes it creates a false form . . . and sometimes it brings forth a true form” (Cooper 39). The history of the transformation of the Greek concepts phantasia and eikasia into their Latin correlates, fantasia and imaginatio, is too involved to rehearse here, but the underlying concerns have to do with the role of imagination, and whether images are divinely inspired or a merely human production. Various expositions of the matter, from Plato to the Neoplatonists and Aristotle to the Stoics, through Augustine and Maimonides, Aquinas and Dante, do not move out of the orbit traced here involving inspiration in poetry and prophecy, and mimetic repetition in the myth of Echo. Whether phantasia is an afterimage of sense experience, or an imprint in the soul from a divine source, it is subject to repetition and duplication. The Muses’ acknowledged duplicity becomes, by the Middle Ages, a trauma of the incarnate rational soul, for whom phantasia can lead downward to carnal image or upward to divine vision; the way of regress and dissolute materiality versus the path of purification and askesis. In the medieval sense, the vertical axis is a register of moral rise and fall; but “The fall, even before any moral metaphor intervenes, is a constant psychic reality,” writes Bachelard. “This psychic fall can be investigated as an aspect of poetic and moral physics. The psychic slope changes constantly. The general tonus—that dynamic fact that every consciousness grasps at once— becomes immediately a slope. If the tonus increases, the man straightens up at once. It is in its traveling upward that the élan vital, the impulse of life, is the humanizing impulse” (11). In this spirit Eugene Jolas, editor of Transition (1927–1938) and author of Secession in Astropolis (1928), issued a manifesto, “Poetry is Vertical” (1932), inaugurating what he called Vertigralism, a

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perspective he periodically revisited up to Vertical: A Yearbook for RomanticMystical Ascensions (1941). “Twilight of the Horizontal Age” is a pledge of allegiance to several principles, including: The Vertigral Age believes that we stand in direct line with the primeval strata of life. The Vertigral Age is re-discovering the mantic forces of pre-historic man. ... The Vertigral Age wants to create a primitive grammar, the stammering that approaches the language of God. (6) Jolas pragmatically understood that this would involve all the initiatives of the avant-garde rather than a return to glossolalia (not for nothing had he published much of Finnegans Wake as Joyce’s “Work in Progress” throughout the run of Transition). So he proposed some neologisms for a verticalist vocabulary (“: Fly through the air emitting fire and sound,” “: Verb denoting daydreaming” [Vertical 95, 96]) and offered, in “Alchemical Chant,” something close to Tolkien’s Elvish: Allala roóna acástara leéno Moórando clísta alára moolán Glínta aloóma brostína metámo Bíllala clánta erásti roolán (Vertical 97) Jolas’s whimsies might seem beside the point but for the fact that his enthusiasm was shared by his contemporaries, ranging from Vicente Huidobro’s book-length poem of aeronautical glossolalia, Altazor (1929), to the enthusiasm for “aeropittura” among the Italian Futurists in the 1930s—a legacy that owes something to the astral provocation of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés. A comparable devotion to the vertical axis can also be discerned in the telluric preoccupations of César Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, Federico García Lorca, and Aimé Césaire. The axis of ascent and descent is retained as a model of temporality in modern psychoanalysis, in part because of Freud’s preoccupation with archaeology. The logic of the primal scene stipulates that phylogenesis is recapitulated in ontogeny, that extrapersonal (or species) trauma subsists in the deepest reservoirs of individual psychosis. Deep time is retained, monstrously, in deep psychic space. Despite the Muses’ eruption into the proprioceptive balance center of his ears, Hesiod does not chart a voyage into interiority. But the Muses do bring him knowledge of the past; so Hesiod’s


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concerns about the Muses, in this light, reflect the anxieties of historians and psychoanalysts alike in their concern to verify the past. The soft spot in rationalism is not the present, which is under administrative control, nor even the future, which is susceptible to forecasting and planning, but the past, which is at once delimited and thus tantalizingly inviting to review, yet maddeningly out of reach, except in its “fallen” capacity as mute material residue—all too subject to manipulation, yielding not truth but show. The mantic or irrational resources of poetry propose themselves as “inspired” to the degree that they offer some conduit to the past, or even to a different order or time altogether. Homer invokes the Muses’ aid to enumerate the names of the ships and their captains headed for Troy: Tell me now, Muses, dwelling on Olympos, as you are heavenly, and are everywhere, and everything is known to you—while we can only hear the tales and never know— who were the Danáän lords and officers? (Iliad 51 [II.254])3 Despite this ancient urge to consult the Muses to get the facts straight, the skeptical tone of scholarship today suggests that even the most devoted readers of poetry favor form over content. Admittedly, we don’t go so far as to regard poetry as an outright pack of lies. But Ezra Pound’s exhaustive rehearsal of the Adams administration, Doughty’s Dawn of Britain, Charles Olson’s chronicle of Gloucester, Susan Howe’s captivity narratives, or the smorgasbord of topics constituting Robert Lowell’s History, tend to be regarded as idiosyncratic and unreliable. The poet’s task may be capacious, but it’s not held responsible for information—a plight Ed Sanders protests in his manifesto Investigative Poetry. Sanders’ belief that “poetry should again assume responsibility for history” might seem out of step with the times (3), but these “times” have prevailed since Aristotle elevated poetry above history (and in effect exempted poets from historical accountability), contending that “poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars” (2323). Aristotle goes on to associate this universality with probability, implying that the law of averages favors poetic truth, which is replicable; whereas historic fact, being contingent, is unique. It sounds honorary, but think about it: the Aristotelian distinction, prioritizing poetry as the vehicle of universality, privileges voice-over as the prevailing concept, the legislative installation of an autonomous function (which comes to be known as the speaking subject) as a probabilistic ratio. This

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formulation rushes the account, however, for I don’t mean to suggest that Aristotle stipulates a robotic voice-over as the ideal average of the aggregate of speaking voices. But Aristotle perpetuates a tradition based on Hesiod’s experience of the Muses’ duplicity, in which the falsity of a voice may be converted, through the medium itself, into a simulated “truth,” and that which is most common and replicable is misconstrued as the unique sign of individuation. Aristotle’s is thus an inaugural moment in the requisition of poetry for information technologies, probabilistic thinking, and serial access memory. Poetry is not definitively linked to this endeavor until the Cartesian embrace of mathematics and poetry as formal languages, one commensurate with material extension, the other with Milton’s “paradise within” (for a magisterial reading of this legacy, see Byrd, The Poetics of the Common Knowledge). If mathematics constitutes the objective coordinates of Cartesian idealism, the subjective coordinates are engineered in poetry. The poem becomes implicated—particularly in the high sublime—in this uninhabitable but indispensible dimension. The Cartesian cogito, transfigured into the Romantic ego, becomes a finitude resonating in the echo chamber of the infinite; the cogito replicated exponentially in the domain of selfreference. The residues of a haunting anxiety—the tension precipitated by the Cartesian split between mirroring idealisms of subject and object, each endowed with a private infinity—begin to accumulate a cultural legacy; so now we have a nostalgia for this trauma, a sentimentality aspiring to reclaim the authenticity of the original affront, a compulsion to repossess a primal rather than a merely derivative hurt. In its pursuit of this phantasm the poem—swollen with its Cartesian-Kantian-Hegelian-Freudian helium of the sublime—develops a squeaky novelty voice. Susceptible to hermeneutic delirium, its interpretations follow the path of hypermaterialization insofar as the poem itself is regarded as an ideal object, an object somehow distinct from the words on the page, an object that participates in that reverberatory hyperspace called “the tradition” that (thinking of Eliot’s version) settles for an infinite regress as the proper image of its magnitude, or the magnitude (suggested by the concept of the sublime) to which it aspires. It’s not surprising, then, that the work most acclaimed at the end of the twentieth century as exemplifying the high sublime was by John Ashbery, author of “Daffy Duck in Hollywood,” “The Lonedale Operator,” “From Palookaville,” and many other poems stressing the novelty effect and the trick proliferation of vantages of vision. His may often be a world of kitsch melodrama, but his sense of the postmodern fairytale rivals that of Angela Carter, in which the dopey is rendered obscenely proximate to the uncanny. Nor is the shift from low to high, from melodrama to sublime, a matter of


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collage as in high modernism. Ashbery’s is a world of acute noncoincidence of self and consciousness; a world in which digression preempts the show, the periphery invariably drains attention from the center; a world of ravishing spectacles staged at precisely the moment you take your eyes off the stage to whisper some frivolity in the ear of your companion, or make an ill-timed trip to the concession stand. Harold Bloom’s term for Ashbery’s predicament is “belatedness,” a pathic pressure he sees inciting an agon of poetic succession (203). But the two columns of the long poem “Litany” in As We Know suggest a synchronic rather than a diachronic struggle. To “read” this text would be to attain an improbable bifocal vision (not to mention a multitrack mind): the columns of “Litany” can never be read simultaneously by one person. One is always nagged by the doppelgänger of one’s own reading. The unread portion of the text not only lies ahead in the pages yet unturned, but recedes behind in the pages already “read,” accompanying the reader at each moment as the tangible periphery, the herm or boundary of reading, the visible rem(a)inder of the unread(able). Ashbery’s is an almost Islamic sense of script coming alive, organically fruiting in a decorative ensemble than defies reading. The “difficulty” of his work is not due to referential challenges like those in Pound or Olson; rather, Ashbery is a literalist of Stevens’ dictum, “The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully” (Palm 281). Ashbery’s is a poetry of peripheral vision: distraction trumps attention. His most characteristic terms are “meanwhile,” “anyway,” “but like I was saying,” “in any case,” “maybe,” “I suppose,” “apparently,” and so forth. Daniel Cottom calls it “a poetry of fugitive linguistic events” and “a poetry of asides” (184). His typical rhetorical posture is the afterthought; and narrative compulsion, which is pervasive, manifests itself as a variety of straggling. So “the real story, the one / They tell us we shall probably never know / Drifts back in bits and pieces / All of them, it turns out” (Ashbery, Self-Portrait 66). Heck, it’s anybody’s story, A sentimental journey—“gonna take a sentimental journey,” And we do, but you wake up under the table of a dream: You are that dream, and it is the seventh layer of you. We haven’t moved an inch, and everything has changed. We are somewhere near a tennis court at night. We get lost in life, but life knows where we are. (Ashbery, Wave 16) Ashbery’s vacillations and indeterminacies, as it turns out, converge on the problems of doubling and duplicity that emanate from Hesiod and the technical supplement of the Muses. The “we” of Ashbery is only in part the

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polite plural of pedantic discourse. It is also a signal of Muse-retention, of the poet’s voice registering as artifice its technical plurality. Hesiod’s legacy suggests that poetic interiority is mesmerizing because of its alterity. The poet’s voice both is and is not that of the person, just as words are and are not true, and the force of an event retained in the mind is distinct from the original stimulus. So, if “The mouth of lyric is an ear,” then “the tongue is an eye” (Zwicky 336, Stevens, Opus 167). Poetry is a manifestation of such thresholds, conveyer of a delicious duplicity, as well as a doubling of resources. Language, transmitted by the Muses, is enriched but also disabled inasmuch as its semantic nature is compromised. Paradox is native to poetry as well as to philosophy, in the sense indicated by Louis Zukofsky’s concise definition of poetry as “an order of words that as movement and tone (rhythm and pitch) approaches in varying degrees the wordless art of music as a kind of mathematical limit” (27). Rather than attenuating meaning, this threshold marks an oscillation between the abstract nature of the liberated word and its concrete apparition as materialized force. The pulsation of words flickering back and forth between mental and physical sense constitutes a “hyperanimacy” comparable to that which Ellen Basso attributes to the “powerful beings” of the rainforest Kalapo people, whose “multiplicity of essence or ‘hyperanimacy’ is coupled on the one hand with a multiplicity of feeling and consequent unpredictability and on the other with a monstrous intensity of some feeling or trait; hence powerful beings are dangerous beings” (69). These powerful beings turn out to incarnate the essence of music; and humans can only copy music, not originate it (a function reserved for language) (70). Assessing poetic musicality, Zukofsky cites the prospect of someone listening to Homer without knowing Greek, enabled thereby “to ‘tune in’ to the human tradition, to its voice which has developed among the sounds of natural things” (28). The voice reclaims for itself an alignment with putatively natural sounds. Poetic voice is not strictly human, and this complicates the alignment of subjectivity with poetic ambition. Poetry may not be humanizing, but dehumanizing. Sound, as Charles Olson said, is a dimension humans have extended. The reciprocity implied in Zukofsky’s formulation, between natural sound and human voice, facilitates a suggestive reversal of Olson: the human is a dimension that has been extended by sound, and voice is the signature of this extension. Vocalization inducts its referents into that somatic interiority in cranium and solar plexus where the “things” of the world reverberate and are shaken apart seismically into an intangible materia prima, not unlike the way ultrasound pulverizes gallstones. We change ourselves by the sounds we make, and practice these changes on the world evoked in utterance—that realm of the “infinite rehearsal” (in Wilson


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Harris’s title). In the Vedic heritage the word (vâc) is a pulse integrated into a cosmological vibration (spanda) that generates and destroys worlds. Poetry is not a “language art” but a play on words— in several senses. It seeks to activate words in the dimension of sound. Language is an instrumental plectrum of beseeching sonorities. Poetry is also at play in the sense of trading on semantic insecurities. Such play may seem too specific unless we recall that tropes themselves are a species of semantic multiplication, guided less by a spirit of replacement than proliferation, generation. The gift of the Muses compounds the sense that dread and wariness are indistinguishable from mastery and ecstasy. Poetic accomplishment is a threat, specifically the threat implied by an accomplice, a sacred share. Possession and dispossession are intertwined in the endowment of the poet’s voice by the Muses’ voice-over. The legacy of the Muses situates poetic inspiration among prosthetic technologies, or elaborations of human propensity in alien material. Inspiration is alienation, as in alieniloquiam, speaking otherwise. Hesiod’s initiation into poetry is at once an affirmation of voice and a disturbance of identity. The gift of the Muses becomes an insurgency in speech itself; speech as originary inspiration is revealed to be a secondary mimicry, and the poet’s authority is at once elevated by divine support and undermined by the Muses’ admission that they tell lies as well as truth. This is of course much the same scenario Derrida calls “Plato’s Pharmacy,” which adds yet another source of anxiety to poetry’s voice-over: writing.4 Poetic voice plays itself out, expends itself, grammatologically. The empowering tropism of poetic language is also its downfall: “Metaphoricity is the logic of contamination and the contamination of logic” (Dissemination 149). The supplementarity with which writing contaminates speech is what Derrida means by dissemination: vocal force and mnemonic inspiration are expended (this is Plato’s fear) in writing; furthermore, these degrading expenditures have the capacity to proliferate on their own, sow stray seeds, and reap their own vagabond crops. Insofar as poetry negotiates the transition from oral to written culture, then, it begins to accommodate ever more diverse and intolerable aspects of play—play as performance, play as juvenile, play as unalleviated expenditure, play as the labile exhaustion of purpose—until it arrives utterly spent on Kant’s doorstep, exemplifying to him “zwecklichkeit ohne Zweck,” purposiveness without purpose. Memory invested in the Muses—those daughters of Mnemosyne and Zeus—is memory abandoned to celestial seizure, in which the agent or medium may be divine, but the human is cast in the subordinate role of a tool, stage prop for divine chatter. The effective poet, as in Pindar’s sixth Olympian ode, becomes a graphic implement (a sharp whetstone on the

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tongue), a cipher-stick of the Muses, and a vacant container (a mixing-bowl of thunderous songs) (112, 114). There is a reversal of function, then, as the poet turns out to be accessed from above and beyond, by Muses, or by Apollo: a human megaphone, a prosthetic stylus. Before the metal stylus of the pen there is the quill, a diminutive switch or rod, by which the deepest resources of Indo-European linguistics and mythology refer writing to wood (from the Ygdrassil tree to bark/book). Writing is woodlore, magic skill. The Muses give Hesiod a laurel staff, and laurel (“daphne” in Greek) is also associated with Apollo. The scepter of the king and the wand of the magus derive from similar associations. The Indo-European roots uat (inspire) and ueid (behold) knit together a resounding complex of associations, from which we derive wisdom, prophecy, fury, sight, idea, and wood. An echo may harbor, or presage, an ecosystem. The symbiotic relation between host and parasite implies, for Osip Mandelstam, a sense of the word burrowing into, and nesting in, human agents. “The word is a Psyche,” he says. “The living word does not signify an object, but freely chooses, as though for a dwelling place, this or that objective significance, materiality, some beloved body” (52). This burrowing is a technical expedience—and it’s best to reiterate, following Rothenberg, that any poetics is “a question of technology as well as inspiration; & we may as well take it as axiomatic . . . that where poetry is concerned, ‘primitive’ means complex” (Symposium 100). Such a directive stipulates mythology as a medium in which the primitive apparition camouflages complex technological specifications. The pastoral myth of Hesiod’s Muses represents, then, the state of the art. In its primeval inception, poetry cohabits a landscape of premonitions along with oracle, prophecy, testimony, oath, proclamation, and glossolalia. These are all technical systems, media networks, even if they appear to be natural omens. The hiss of wind in a rock channel, scrutinized for vocable semiosis, converts topographic space into a cultural implement. A cleft in rock is an internet portal. The oral roots of Hellenic poetry are well known. But Jean-Pierre Vernant, in “Speech and Mute Signs,” has made the enlightening suggestion that the Greeks favored oracles because vocal utterance kept the priests at bay, with all the sacerdotal custodianship that attends written scripture (311). The voice of conviction, compulsion, and possession—whether in trance or in conscious exhortation—is an early invitation to prioritize poetic voice by affirming it as the most progressive technology. Graphic materializations of language, in Vernant’s view, are magical epiphenomena susceptible to supervision and control. The perils of the sacerdotal were acutely disconcerting to Antonin Artaud, who felt himself ravished by “the orgy of the dubious unconscious of all against the consciousness of one” (Selected 472), for whom the problem of


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voice assumed the gnostic specter of a universe designed for the purpose of eviscerating a single soul, as if even speech were a divine predator. “God is thus the proper name of that which deprives us of our own nature, of our own birth; consequently he will always have spoken before us, on the sly. He is the difference which insinuates itself between myself and myself as my death” (Derrida, Writing 181). Artaud’s project for renovating drama into a Theatre of Cruelty involved in part a “magic respiration” to rescue breath from words, to rejoin the “active, plastic, respiratory sources of language . . . to the physical motions that gave them birth”—to restore words to sonority in the grammar of a gestural language (Theater 112, 119). This project is a revolt against the Muses and their voice-over, particularly as laden with the trauma of duplicitous meaning. Artaud would reclaim an unlegislated state of prelinguistic speech, a speech prior to the Muses’ intervention. During his years in the Rodez asylum Artaud’s notebooks filled up with anatomizations of words. His own name is homophonically transformed: “ -  /  -  -  / de ” (poux=lice), and he becomes the parasite of Everyman. Declarations of identity produce homophonic stutter: “Avant l’esprit il y a l’aum, l’am, l’âme” (Weiss 123, 130). Artaud was preoccupied with the sense of his body filled up with words, words to be excreted as feces, pus, and sperm; and even writing appeared to him little more than “the gism of a terminal phosphorus” adrift “in the infernal crucible where it’s never a question of words anymore nor of ideas” (“Pounding” 41, 42). Grim as it may appear, a body full of words fills the prescription of the Muse, a legacy Clayton Eshleman clearly detects in his introduction to Artaud’s late work: “I have found that in Artaud the ancient, black springs of poetry are graspable, like a writhing piece of star gristle. Antonin Artaud is the stamina of poetry to enact in a machine-gunned hearth the ember of song” (Artaud, Watchfiends 43). The case of Artaud, despite his early association with Surrealism, cleaves to the apocalyptic fervor of Expressionism. “The Expressionist,” wrote Hermann Bahr in a suitably violent expression, “tears open the mouth of humanity” (85). The forlorn howls Artaud recorded for radio shortly before he died (but withheld from broadcast) certainly sound like something being rent apart, but they also share an affinity to that other sense of a mouth torn open, as in Gottfried Benn’s lugubrious yet oddly tender manger scene in his poem “Happy Youth”: The mouth of a girl who had lain a long time in the rushes looked so nibbled away. The breasts broken open, the feed-pipe so full of holes. Finally in a copse under the diaphragm was discovered a nest of young rats.

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One sister ratlet lay dead. The others lived off liver and kidneys, drank the cold blood and had spent a happy youth here. And short and sweet their death was too: The whole pack were thrown into the water. Oh! how the little snouts squeaked! (Miller and Watts 58) The organic sump exposed in this poem is a far cry from the digitized panorama of communication technologies, pointing up the extent to which Hollywood films now deftly switch back and forth between agitated agents clicking a keyboard, frantically absorbing a data stream, between bouts of gunplay that never portend the mice nest. Approaching this elision from an altogether different direction, Julia Kristeva in Revolution in Poetic Language considers the function of art “as a signifying practice: under the pleasing exterior of a socially acceptable differentiation, art reintroduces into society fundamental rejection, which is matter in the process of splitting” (180). At the core of this rejection— which, being both psychological and social, is manifested with particular clarity by the avant-garde—is what Kristeva names the “chora,” maternal matrix of semiotic drives that impose and disrupt (one almost wants to say ooze into) the symbolic order, or what she calls the “thetic.” The chora, being “analogous” to vocal and kinetic rhythm, is prelinguistic (26). “Mimesis and poetic language,” being grounded in the chora, “do not therefore disavow the thetic, instead they go through its truth (signification, denotation) to tell the ‘truth’ about it” (60). This is almost, but not quite, giving Benn’s mice the last word. Kristeva’s model of poetic production conceives inspiration as a deep ungrounding somatic heave, as if all rejection since the infantile separation from the mother filled the lungs with air, and every pair of lungs henceforth respirates and inspirates in a rhythm blending living and loss with each breath. This fundament, this animal resource—bíos—exerts mindful pressure on utterance by telling “the truth” about the truth: inflecting every mention, reference, appeal, with quotation marks or italics or whatever else is needed as genuflection to an incalculable debt that, accompanying speech, at once adds to it and subtracts from it, leaving something like the “zero of form” (Malevich 173) that, in poetry, might resemble a gaping mouth: mothers will boast of us but with each step the arsenal inside our heads will clatter we will mimic our instinctive primal cry


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if they had only stuck us in a nest in time we would have mastered bird talk but our mouths are linked forever to our mothers (Nezval 121–122) Primal Scenes: Bíos Simultaneously celebration and loss, commemoration and grievance: this is the legacy introduced by the Muses, “a force of separation, isolation, intensification, and metamorphosis” (Nancy, Muses 22). Rilke knew it well: “Always torn open by us again and again, / the god is the place that heals” (Ahead 492, my translation). The supplementary character of language (“words add to the senses” says Stevens [Palm 172]) troubles the body by blurring its boundaries. In contrast to the seriality of syntax, Apollonian intelligence (Apollo being god of the bow and the lyre, patron of poetry and the Muses) is “all seeing,” taking in all at a glance. Hence the incommensurability of divine vision with human witness: the revelation overflows the receptacle and dissipates. Giovanni Manetti attributes the semiotics of Greek divination to a lack of fit between divinity and human vessel: “Divinatory logic . . . allows for the reintroduction at the human level of the ‘obscurity’ of Fate (reduced, if not entirely eliminated, by the very nature of divine omniscience) by means of the ambiguity of the sign” (19). The sign, then, is a token of what can’t be assimilated. Prophetic utterances like those given by the oracles resemble an index ripped out of a book (in Sybilline prophecy the book itself is shredded). Whatever can be gleaned from ciphers will have to suffice when the ordered text is nowhere at hand. Inasmuch as the world is full of signs, unlimited semiosis is contingent on perception. To bear something in mind is to pluck a thing from its mooring in the quotidian and dispose of it in the twilight realm of interiority, where Muses and madness intermingle. Gregory Nagy’s etymological speculations are pertinent: The very form Mousa . . . may well be derived from the same root *menas in mania. If this etymology is correct, then the very word for Muse reflects an earlier stage when not only the one who is inspired and the one who speaks the words of inspiration are the same, but even the type of mental state marked by mania is not yet differentiated from the type of mental state marked by formations with *men-t- and *men-h—, “remember,” “have the mind connected with” (“Ancient” 61) To remember is to be crazed by an elusive provocation; to speak is to repeat a prompt. Nagy’s speculations are foreshadowed by Phaedrus, in which Plato

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sketches an etymological background linking mantikē (divination) with manikē (craziness): as Socrates says, the simple addition of a letter is sufficient to render manic as mantic (491). In the primal semiosis of poetic origins, however, a different belief arises—one that finds solace in a homology of linguistic seriality with the proliferation of forms in nature. Grammar predicates multitude. In a simultaneous declaration words and the world achieve congress. The principle, it’s important to note, is not a doctrine of correspondences but a code, a ratio of integrations and integrities—a decorative or cosmic concord, not a universal compulsion (for Kant this is a pre-articulate murmur of consent since in his view “in the judgment of taste nothing is postulated but . . . a universal voice” [50]). The Hellenic model of a speaking, or at least euphonious, universe derives from Pythagoras. Aristotle ridicules the Pythagorean doctrine of universal harmony, pointing out we do not actually hear the music of the spheres: “it appears unaccountable that we should not hear this music, [but the Pythagoreans] explain this by saying that the sound is in our ears from the very moment of birth and is thus indistinguishable from its contrary silence” (479). Aristotle’s skepticism gives way to a curious equation: if silence is all we “hear” of the cosmic symphony, the act of hearing is synonymous with deafness—and, by analogy, knowing with unknowing. It is, however, possible to hear the equation otherwise. Pythagorean cosmology posits a harmony that exceeds the perceptual range of human ears, to which we may nonetheless become attuned. Hearing is therefore a domain the ears sample but cannot master. Just as we recognize visionary experience that is not contingent on eyesight, the Pythagorean worldview stipulates a “visionary” experience in the auditory mode, in which we have proprioceptive assurance of harmonies we cannot hear. For the Pythagoreans, universal harmony did not take the form of a voice. If we hanker after a measurable acoustic perception of cosmic harmony we need an aid, a prosthetic extension of hearing. To consider the nature of voice-over any further, we need to consider a different primal scene, one that acknowledges prosthetic augmentation of an initially “natural” if deaf (or unresponsive) state. The prosthesis rearticulates the boundaries of body and self, so that the voice of the other may appear out of the deepest resources of interiority—and interiority, reckoned as the fount of subjective nature, can then be retrofitted with the symptoms of primacy that are culturally endowed as natural. As the prophetic sensibility attunes itself to the vaporous moaning of chasms, the groan of trees in wind and the bubbling of springs, vocalization extends throughout a sacred landscape. The world speaks, and this is Orphic. Orpheus allows us to hear the world speak, while at the same time


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obliging us to be the ventriloquists if we would hear nature’s voice in our own language. Nature “speaks” on the condition that we do the talking. As with the silent harmony of the Pythagoreans, humans have to supplement a primal language by technical amplification. The speaker (or singer, aiodos) must become a speaker (technē, broadcaster). The figure of Orpheus signifies the emergence of a human language from a world of expressive sentience, but this emergence is always partial and conditional. “The myth [of Orpheus] oscillates between the power of form to master intense passion and the power of intense passion to engulf form” (Segal 8). Besides inaugurating poetry as a specifically human enterprise, Orpheus is the first talking head, his sumptuous song persisting long after his decapitation by the Maenads. The Orphic perspective signifies a reversal, not only of sound to silence, but of life to death, and vice versa. In the Orphic cosmogony, Orpheus was a prophet, a magus empowered by his access to the secrets of the dead. Such shamanistic abilities are technical skills, downplayed in the popular rendition of his underworld descent to fetch Eurydice (Warden ix–x). Under Orpheus’ tutelage we discover voice as technē. He is a primary figure, then, among “technicians of the sacred,” proposing an interface between ancient and contemporary resources of poetry. To turn to this legacy is not primitivism; as Elizabeth Sewell insists, concluding The Orphic Voice, “we have to return to it, not as a vague ornament of life but as one of the great living disciplines of the mind” (405). As Sewell elaborates, these Orphic “disciplines of the mind” are contingent on techniques of the body. Orphism thrives on the rediscovery of mind as embodied, and body minded. “The only choice for the mind lies not between mythology and logic but between an exclusive mythology which chooses to overlook the body’s participation and an inclusive mythology which is prepared in varying degrees to admit the body, the notion of the organism as a whole, as a partner in that very odd operation known as thought” (38). The “voice” Sewell speaks of is a somatic manifestation in language.5 Language, in the Orphic view, is a biological epiphenomenon in which the body orchestrates thought, moved by a prelinguistic corporeal density affiliated with the voice-over. Orpheus’ mother was a Muse (Calliope is usually cited), and the Muses impinge on the speech act from inside the cranium. Orphic embodiment is thus attuned to the estrangement of proprioceptive awareness, the sense that the bodily habitus itself is saying something the mind generally ignores. In fact it’s perilous not to ignore this cenesthetic amplitude. That we literally inhere in our bodies is to find ourselves inhabiting a paradoxical condition, for the body as ground of awareness recedes from attention to the degree that the figures of perception are in focus, thereby rendering ground (and body) invisible. The most adept

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realization of the body’s articulation, then, is unconscious, and the supreme knowledge is unknowing. To call on the Muses for aid in memory is not the whole story. The proprioceptive occasion of Orphic corporeality demands another kind of salvage, a descent into the body.6 Orpheus’ descent signals an expedition through somatic topography to recover lost images, configured as vital persons of the soul. At one level this is dramatized as Orpheus’ descent into the underworld. To conceive descent in terms of a memory that has corporeal overtones is to associate self-knowledge not with the past but with the present. Orpheus’ resourcefulness, in this light, is a kind of yoga, involving integral postures of expansion and contraction, requiring strict breath control. Complementing the inspiration or breathing-in the Muses impart to Hesiod, there’s the expiration of Orpheus, completing the respiratory cycle. So Orpheus’ legends are necessarily as much about depletion (exhalation) as about animation. It’s in this spirit that one of the great Orphic reveries is Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” a poem that rekindles a memento mori out of the turbulent froth worked up from the ferry’s prow. “Flood tide below me, I see you face to face” he begins, as though seeing himself at once prefigured in and dissolved in the river’s amniotic seething. “I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,” he writes in section six. Embodiment is the knot: “I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution, / I too had receiv’d identity by my body, / That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I knew I should be of my body” (310) The “solution” here is simultaneously preservative and key, indicating the terms of a colossal reciprocity of meaning and being, life and death. (It also reiterates Emerson’s opening declaration in Nature: “Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put” [7].) As a poem of the body, it is a poem of Orphic release and sparagmos— “The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme, myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme” (308)—in which Whitman beholds his head reflected in the water as he gazes down from the ferry railing: I too many and many a time cross’d the river of old . . . Saw the reflection of the summer sky in the water, Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams, Look’d at the fine centrifugal spokes of light round the shape of my head in the sunlit water. (309) The head, transfigured by its spokes into a rind emitting light, is transcendentally iconic. Interpreters have frequently commented on the Christ-like


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image, and we have only to recall that in the Middle Ages Orpheus was regarded as a precursor of Christ to see the composite figure Whitman discovers in himself as bard. Orpheus took on Christ-like attributes as a guide of souls after death—his relation to Eurydice expanded to include humankind in general—and as Whitman rhetorically affirms, “What gods can exceed these that clasp me by the hand, and with voices I love call me promptly and loudly by my nighest name as I approach? / What is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that looks in my face? / Which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you?” (312). As these lines suggest, Orpheus represents a recovery of the body in the act of speech. But this is too simple a formulation. As patron of poetry, Orpheus does not sponsor a “speech act,” but a song, and even a text. Woven as integument, speech recedes from orality and breath; vocalized as song, words are charmed into music, becoming extralinguistic. Beginning as a mute signal in the head, then a coordinated feeling (of Pythagorean cosmic harmony) in the body, emerging finally as vatic utterance, it turns out that the resources of the speech act are confoundingly multiple, polymorphously perverse. One speaks, but “one” is two or many. The poet “sings,” but the song is an act of writing—and writing is dictation. In the Dionysian sparagmos or dismemberment, Orpheus’ head goes on singing by itself. Whitman’s scenario suggests a merger of the Orphic and Pythagorean traditions, as the head recollects remote impulses of the body to which it is no longer attached, vocalizing them as if the body were instantaneously proximate to the whole universe: as in the case of Orpheus, the singing head is a mediumistic phantom that gathers up an entire cosmic order on its way to song. An Orphic proponent overlooked by Sewell is French aphorist Alain, whose treatise The Gods affirms that “the reality of the imagination is always in some impulse of the body.” Alain finds in the Orpheus myth a schema for phantom sensations: Orpheus bringing Eurydice back, is the essential text of the imagination. For it is true that emotions like fear, anxiety, surprise, create a kind of presence in our bodies, one that is even sensitive to touch, which is, as we see, the most deceptive of the senses; and it is also true that our senses are quickened by our own blood and disposition so as to produce the beginnings of phantoms—a humming in the ears, spots of color, butterflies in the stomach, pricklings, salivation, nausea, and other effects of heightened expectation; but these disturbing forms, if we should pay attention to them, would present us with nothing more than the structure of our own body, though in a state of flux. (37)

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Eurydice, in Alain’s account, is an anthropomorphized model of neuronal firings, synaptic leaps, electrochemical impulses of the central nervous system, most of which are invariably lost when we attempt to retrieve them from the somatic underworld. Orphic sensibility is attunement to what’s beneath attention, ungraspable except in those heightened states of distraction otherwise known as inspiration, and even then realized only as expenditure, as jubilation and lament. In a different approach to subliminal awareness, Walter Benjamin regards Baudelaire’s work as the exemplary instance of a lyric afterimage precipitated out of the concussive “shocks” of modernity—to the degree that Baudelaire “envisioned blank spaces which he filled in with his poems” (Illuminations 162). Benjamin posits an historical cause for this particular case of inspiration, in which the poet’s alliance with memory (Mnemosyne) is attenuated by the industrial invasion of the human sensorium; memory is no longer part of the shared fund of orally transmissible experience, traditionally germane to the lyric voice; so in a desperate gambit the poet apprehends the space of the poem as a blank, without precedent but also without appeal. The poem by default appeals to an aura left utterly behind but, in a utopian gesture, conceived as somewhat ouroborically awaiting in the future in the gaze of a responsive reader. “To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return,” writes Benjamin (188). When we have senses again—when we come to our senses—the sentience invested in our artworks will awaken, and we’ll have to meet its gaze. In “The Gaze of Orpheus” Maurice Blanchot reads descent as erasure, memory as inseparable from forgetfulness. “Orpheus’ gaze links inspiration to desire. Desire is linked to carelessness by impatience. He who is not impatient will never achieve that carelessness which merges care with its own limpidity.” This rehearsal of the outlines of Orpheus’ descent is instructive for Blanchot about writing as such, the inauguration of which he attributes to Orpheus’ gaze: “we can only write when we have reached that point which we can only reach in the space to which writing gives access. To write we must already be writing” (Siren 181).7 The Muses, of course, figure as the mechanism by which this “already” occurs. Poetic inspiration is a tautology that challenges, even as it perpetuates, the foundations of poetry. That is, the mantic or divinatory energy that provides the literal force of inspiration submerges mind in an extralinguistic somatic environment where it no longer recognizes what it has to say. Orpheus’ descent suggests something about the dangers of language. His turning to verify that Eurydice is following is an instance of the conduit theory of words. In this model the mind, being sensually and prelinguistically attached to its objects, has no use for words but as cognitive glue: there is always a proper conjugal


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bond between word and thing. The other facet of the myth, having to do with Orpheus’ enchanting songs as a prodigal elan vital, binds the resources of poetic expression to expenditure: nature’s creatures are animated by the gratuitous promptings of his charmed voice. These two faces of Orpheus are instructions about linguistic nominalism versus realism, testifying to the dual pathos of losing the beloved object and/or being smothered in the disjecta of one’s own fertility. Not surprisingly, then, Blanchot finds in Orpheus a counterforce to accomplishment and completion: Orpheus “links poetry with an outrageous urge to vanish” (Siren 173). Expression is expenditure. To return to the surface is to efface the trail leading down to the underworld and the subconscious, to lose in the return the object of the descent. Blanchot’s attribution of “carelessness” to poetry is echoed by Stephen Owen in Mi-Lou: Poetry and the Labyrinth of Desire: “Poetry may call to that part of us that hungers for straying,” he writes, commending poetry as “a precise art of negligence” (5). Mallarmé held that the mind is “volatile dispersal,” developing his own field composition strategies of spacing and scattering—about which Blanchot observes: “For Mallarmé, language is not made of words, even unadulterated words: it is that into which words have always already disappeared” (Siren 247, n. 5). Un Coup de dés reflects this encounter with pure space as “a rhythmic scansion of life” (237). “Space does not accommodate things; instead,” says Levinas in a Mallarméan perception, “through their erasures, things delineate space” (146). These formulations are all Orphic: they adhere to a model of creation as squandering, an effusion of superabundance in which accomplishment is abandoned to bíos—the order of physical dispersal. In contrast to Hesiod—for whom inspiration means technical augmentation, a conceptual supplement establishing a secure and distinct space for a “song” uttered in writing—Orpheus represents that poetic longing for unmediated expression embodied in voice. The enigmas that emerge from Mallarmé and Blanchot have to do with their attempts to transpose Orphic song to the space of a text by intuiting significant affinities between blank page and inscrutable somatic perception. This cenesthesic sense of balance, intactness, and postural readiness was not squarely addressed for poetics until Charles Olson’s ruminations on proprioception. In his view, “Neither the Unconscious nor Projection (here used to remove the false opposition of ‘Conscious’; consciousness is self) have a home unless the  implicit in physical being . . . is asserted, or found-out as such. Thus the advantage of the value ‘proprioception’ ” (Prose 182). Proprioception, for Olson, provided a model for enacting the ancient hermetic dictum Quod inferius, sicut superius est (as above, so below). Because the internal “sense” of well being is not of the

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same order as the exterior senses, we know interiority only as blank depth, an inner cosmos inciting analogies with the starry sky—both being equally ungraspable yet oddly intimate. A star chart is a recovery of the body in a stellar vocabulary, gazing at seams that bind not only by analogy but which reconstitute the sundered corpus signified by the figure of Orpheus: I looked up and saw its form through everything —it is sewn in all parts, under and over (Maximus 343) Blanchot linked Orpheus to vanishing, but in light of Olson’s poetics— based on Whitehead’s sense of the cosmos imbricated in each moment, the perpetual penetrating the transitory—Orpheus naturally gives way to an “Orphic cosmology” because his vanishing is a motivating reminder of space and distance. Orpheus never vanishes: rather, he is simply diminished amidst our ever increasing awareness of the immensity of his context. Astray in the cosmos, Orpheus becomes that accidental apparition that reminds us how far we have to go to have a chance at ever retracing our own steps. As a caution against the craving for duplication, corroboration, repetition, Orpheus is at the same time the figure of rhythmic recurrence. The Orphic cosmology, though not by that name, is reaffirmed in Henri Meschonnic’s attention to rhyme, “the rhythm that knows us and that we do not know” but through which we experience “a state of significance indefinitely being born” (90, 95). Rhyme, for Meschonnic, is synonymous with order, and “the order of language, being an order in language, evokes and mimes a cosmic order” (93).8 “Order was therefore the first rhyme, the first principle of rhyme” (95). (I’m reminded, reading Meschonnic, of Robert Duncan’s punning attestation, “language gives me orders.”) “Rhyme is not only an echo from word to word, but in addition the echo of an echo that is its model” (93). Poetry, by attending to this echo, “belongs, like life, to the irrational continuous” (91): so poetry is a search for order in mime, as it were, by making mimetic gestures, and making them manifest, materialized. “An indirect theology. A making as much as a meaning” (93). “Of and Or are snails, repeat vegetable lessons,” Duncan sagely observes (70). By my reckoning, Meschonnic encourages a similar postural adaptation, so the writing of a poem, like doing yoga, skiing, or executing a somersault, is a way of “finding the measure” (as Robert Kelly titled a book), negotiating the


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passage, learning the form (the phrase my t’ai chi teacher used). Repetition of formal devices clarifies the nature of in-formation, or handling what you need to do with what you know in order to handle what’s done to and fore you by what you don’t know. But it’s better said with a parable—and, preliminary to the parable, Marianne Moore’s biosemiotic view of poetry as “an unintelligible unmistakable vernacular like the language of the animals—a system of communication whereby a fox with a turkey too heavy for it to carry, reappears shortly with another fox to share the booty” (Prose 329). Every trace of spoils and burdens shared and of passages negotiated consists of disseminated contours of an ongoing passing, the most elegant version of which is an Ashante tale of the trickster Ananse. A rival comes to his house and asks to see him, but Ananse, having foreseen this, has instructed his children in what to say: that their father’s penis broke in seven places, and he’s gone to the smith for repairs. The rival asks for the mother, and the children reply that she went to the river to fetch water, dropped her pot but luckily caught it just in time. So why is she not here now? She didn’t quite finish catching it, and has gone back to the river to do so. _

Primal Scenes (Modern): Techne 2 For the Dogon people of West Africa, language is pragmatically implicated in weaving. To speak and to weave both involve fabrication. (Mandelstam is likewise moved to consider Dante as “a dyer, a textile worker,” and poetry as such “a carpet fabric with a multitude of textile warps” [40, 4].) In the Dogon creation myth a spirit ancestor combines the functions: “By opening and shutting his jaws the Spirit caused the threads of the warp to make the movements required in weaving. His whole face took part in the work, his nose studs serving as the block, while the stud in his lower lip was the shuttle” (Griaule 28). This labor is made richly complex by additional elements, including a sexual anthill instrumental in the propagation of words (the loom is situated over the mouth of the anthill, so weaving is contingent on the disclosure of words by an ant9). Thus there was recreated by human lips the concept of life in motion, of the transposition of forces, of the efficacy of the breath of the Spirit . . . and thus the interlacing of warp and weft enclosed the same words, the new instruction which became the heritage of mankind and was handed on from generation to generation of weavers to the accompaniment of the clapping of the shuttle and the creaking of the block, which they call the “creaking of the Word.” (29)

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Nathaniel Mackey has taken up this myth as a general insight into the ambiguous nature of language as possession/dispossession. For him, the creaking of the Word “is the noise upon which the word is based, the discrepant foundation of all coherence and articulation, of the purchase upon the world fabrication affords” (19). Mackey then clarifies the derivation of the title of his book, Discrepant Engagement: “Discrepant engagement, rather than suppressing or seeking to silence that noise, acknowledges it. In its antifoundational acknowledgement of founding noise, discrepant engagement sings ‘base,’ voicing reminders of the axiomatic exclusions upon which positings of identity and meaning depend.” The pun on singing “bass” as base discloses foundation as abasement. Undertones stabilize, but also remind of traumatic breakage and ancestral violations. For Mackey, “Poetic language is language owning up to being an orphan, to its tenuous kinship with the thing it ostensibly refers to” (234). The orphan peregrination of language renders poetry itinerant. Poetry enacts the exile of language, which is not so much banishment as it is the constant displacement of the word into other media—signified by the shuttle in the Dogon myth. Walter Benjamin characterizes storytelling as an “old co-ordination of the soul, the eye, and the hand” (Illuminations 108). The storyteller, working out of traditions of recital, assimilates rival versions and variants in the mode of weaving, a handiwork enfolding orality. In addition, Benjamin respects storytelling literally as manual labor, an “artisan form of communication” (91). Storytelling has been replaced by the cult of information, in Benjamin’s view. Story arises from companionship, a solidarity formed by mutual presence of reciter and auditor, and above all by the assimilative lassitude of mental relaxation and even boredom. Nothing now supports this unique archaic web, according to Benjamin, whereas the rustle of daily life proliferates in its place a surface static of data. Had he written his essay “The Storyteller” now rather than in 1936 he might make his point by suggesting that stories arise from humans, information from computers. The graphic supplement of voice with writing, in a familiar version of cultural succession, persists in another medium equally intent on capturing voice: the phonograph. Michael Taussig describes the role of the phonograph as a cross-cultural instrument of intimidation: To take the talking machine to the jungle is to emphasize and embellish the genuine mystery and accomplishment of mechanical reproduction in an age when technology itself, after the flurry of excitement at a new breakthrough, is seen not as mystique or poetry but as routine. Taking the talking machine to the jungle is to do more than impress the natives and therefore oneself with Western technology’s power . . . it is to reinstall


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the mimetic faculty as mystery in the art of mechanical reproduction, reinvigorating the primitivism implicit in technology’s wildest dreams, therewith creating a surfeit of mimetic power. (208) Mimesis, under the aegis of such technology, imposes repetition-compulsion as “developmental” masquerade—progress as mimesis. But Taussig’s account is not altogether about the colonial dimension, in that he recognizes “the primitivism implicit in technology’s wildest dreams,” the foremost consequence of which is in “the power of the copy to influence what it is a copy of” (250). To the soul-eye-hand nexus of the storyteller, then, Taussig adds the phonographic complex of copy-contact-contagion. The phonographic copy, unlike writing, registers a vocal index; and this point of contact suggests a corresponding possibility of contagion—the sound of a cough emanating from either a recording or a telephone receiver had people worrying about germs. This is what Taussig means by a surfeit of mimetic power. Mimesis and alterity reciprocate so vigorously in the enhanced zone of reproductive (cultural) technologies that the distinction of self from other is no longer tenable. The concept of mimetic surplus inclines to an Aristotelian rather than a Platonic version of mimesis; biological reproduction versus a devolving archetype; adherence to a pulse, not replication of a form. “The process is not mimetic, imitation of a prior imitation, but ontomimetic, imitation of ‘being’ itself” (Lawler, 20). Mimesis does something quite different than hasten after the real with a copy: it reanimates somatic purpose with its excess. The power vested in Hesiod or Homer by the Muses is the power not only to know but to feel and see, to taste the manifold of difference that in Sanskrit poetics is known as rasa, the distilled broth of aesthetic savor. René Daumal emphasizes the somatic contribution to rasa theory: first, “a savor is immediately perceived; second, among all our senses, taste is peculiar in that the object must be introduced into the body to be tasted; and finally, as the physical organism is tasting a substance, it already begins to assimilate it into its own substance” (Powers 126). To reread is to burn with ardor for being contaminated once again: immersion, not termination, is the goal. Joseph Conrad’s famous preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ is a plea for readers to heed the novelist’s immersion in sensory detail: “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see” (133). It’s almost as if, anticipating Pound, Conrad urges that prose be as well written as poetry, but with the implicit understanding that fiction is a sluggish genre, so the novelist slogs along panting, making up for lost time, temps perdu. The burden of narrative, perpetually belated, has a paradigmatic storyteller

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in Scheherazade, icon of unbounded fertility, but whose lifespan is strictly contingent on her narrative persistence. For her, death is proximate to narration. “Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell,” writes Benjamin. “He [sic] has borrowed his authority from death” (94). The performative intensity incorporated into the tales of Orpheus, of Narcissus, of the Sirens, draws on the anxiety of destruction. I’m not concerned here with the funereal lament, elegy, or thanatopsis as such. Rather, it is the technical injunction of the apparatus, the voice-over, that stages fantasies of loss, dismemberment or discorporation, and finally even death. In “The Phonograph’s Horned Mouth,” Charles Grivel characterizes the Muse as a “repeating machine inside poetry” (33)10 —a machine externalized in the phonograph. “The phonograph emphasizes the self in the lack of subject,” Grivel writes, introducing a paradoxical split: “it identifies a voice, fixes the deceased (or mortal) person, registers the dead and thus perpetuates his living testimony, but also achieves his automatic reproduction in absentia” (35). The phonograph resurrects the dead in a simulation uncannily responsive to Lyotard’s question, “can thought go on without a body?” (8). But the phonograph also affirms that the speaking voice may subsist without a body—a paradox like trying to think of bodiless running or sleeping. This is not a technological misadventure but a poetic longing: At just about the same time [as the invention of the phonograph in 1877], Rimbaud was writing that “ je est un autre” (I is someone else), Mallarmé that a blank volume is his expression, Lautréamont that poetry is made up of everything and by everyone, and Nietzsche, of course, that since God is dead, the voice, without reservation, dissolves. A machine arrives in the nick of time to capture all this and give it an appearance. (33) Reviewing Hesiod in this light, the Greek shepherd turns out to have participated in an initial dispossession, an initial retooling for prosthetic interface, entering the Muses’ “listserve” with all the enthused wariness of Case (a name designating a puzzle, and a container) jacking in to the matrix in William Gibson’s Neuromancer. “I am buried in its entrails (or it is in me): I am the equal of this imitating device. When it speaks to me, it also represents to me, outside of me and without me, the absence of subject: it repeats me without my being there.” Predictably, then, “The first consequence of the mechanical reproduction of the voice was to break the bond unifying sign and person, the self and its support or medium” (Grivel 52). Thereafter, the body subsists as biologically unfit for new technologies, with a remedial relation to the social skills that institutionalize these technologies.


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Modern poetry openly embraces the normative functions of a speaker in order to attest to the savor of individual experience. But poetry can mistake the nature of its voice-over when it appropriates voice for subjective instrumentality—particularly when subjectivity becomes a socialized medium of technical affiliations. As Foucault tirelessly elaborates, the modern modes of subjectivization are not modes of subjugation and repression; power is less likely to circulate now (at least in democratic societies) as repressive constraint. “What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse” (Power 119). The incitement of productivity is none other than an injunction to prosthetic alignment, in which subjectivity is a matter of negotiating consoles and interfaces, and communication is discharged on the model of data flows and serial processing (“feedback,” a cybernetic term, entered the language to specify homeostatic self-regulation in the production and maintenance of the techno-subject). Subjectivity is that process of subjection, or insertion into what Scott Bukatman calls “terminal identity” in his book of that title, in which transcendence of the human takes on the dystopic character of assimilation to telematic paraphernalia, and we begin to endure the wonder of our creations by enlarging them to a scale that requires our (in)habitation of them, and ultimately our own rehabilitation to them. In Paul Virilio’s prognosis, social mobility is being recalibrated on the model of handicapped access. The fate of the individual, then, is that of a “terminal citizen who will soon be equipped with interactive prostheses whose pathological model is that of the ‘motorized handicapped’ ” (“Third” 11)—a prospect vividly forecast in Bernard Wolfe’s 1950 novel Limbo. Subjectivity is that process by which we’re ideologically enjoined to cultivate our own lives by sorting, packaging, and shaping raw sociocultural material. In the media matrix the insipidly jovial appeal to “personality” is the proletarian underside of subjectification. The episode on Mount Helikon prepares us for a poetic legacy that will court subjectivity as an alternative to the epistemological discrimination of true from false—recuperated by Kant as a transcendental idealism. In modern regimes of enticed/enforced subjectivization, language becomes an ideological medium of adjustment and self-maintenance. Poetry becomes complicitous with the regulative endeavors of selfhood. But before the self could emerge as an irresistible intoxicant, the world of the senses had to fade away under the punitive glamour of the voice-over. The paralytic freezeframe of ecstasy is encoded in this hallucino-literary medium: “Poetry as a ‘possession of the inner mind’ arises in erotic and alcoholic intoxication; authorship arises in rereading what had been unconsciously written in the

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delirium; poetic works, finally, are media for the hallucinatory substitution of realms of the senses” (Kittler, Discourse 109). Poetry is proximate to engineering, not humanities: “In the discourse network of 1800, the Book of Poetry became the first medium in the modern sense. Following McLuhan’s law, according to which the content of a medium is always another medium, poetry supplemented the data of the senses in a way that was reproducible and multiplicatory” (115). Poetry, in Kittler’s hypothesis, anticipates fantasies of virtual reality. The poem becomes a technical support in a randomaccess memory device—a hard drive, as it were, for activating the serial components of an identity that can no longer identify itself in the reflective screen of a monitor.11 It’s as if self-awareness had been subcontracted to a prosthetic memory, an outside agency (which is just what Lacan proposes as the combinatorial of the Symbolic and the Imaginary). Poetry is the terminal that accesses the database: the subcontractor is the discourse network that writes (and patents) the software, as in the procedural work of Kenneth Goldsmith discussed in chapter two. Hesiod preserved the trauma of voices inside his own head, perpetuating the anxiety of introjected alterity as a legacy of poetry. From the outset, poetry has prepared us for the allure of a disembodied voice—and a beheaded body: software mysteriously tracing its commands on a compliant medium. This specter is memorably documented in an account of a nocturnal apparition reported to the spiritualist journal Shekinah in 1852. Just as he was about to drop off to sleep, the author was aroused by five apparitions peculiarly dressed, filing into the bedroom. A box was set on the table, and “electrical emanations, like currents of light of different colors, were seen issuing from the box. One of the company placed a piece of paper, pen and ink, on the lid of this box,” as the astonished witness saw “luminous currents” gather around the pen, “which was immediately taken up and dipped in the ink, and without the application of any other force or instrument, so far as I could perceive, the pen was made to move across the paper, and a communication was made which I have since learned was in the Hebrew language” (Sconce 38). Whether poetry, scripture, or shopping list we’re not told. As soon as his inventions began pouring out of Menlo Park, its “wizard,” Thomas Edison, began receiving a voluminous amount of testimonials to unbidden scriptural propensity. One correspondent divulges that, “by holding my pencil at a certain position,” it would begin writing “without any conscious assistance on my part,” concluding that “electricity was the medium and my hand and pen the telegraphic instrument as it were, of the invisible operators” (Gitelman 193). This self-directing pencil and the boxlike apparatus with its luminous recording components suggest something of the wonder with which new technologies might be received in the late


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nineteenth century. In his 1919 essay “Ur-Geräusch” (Primal Noise), Rilke recalls a boyhood encounter with the phonograph. What most impressed him was not the magical appearance of sound from the technical device, but “the markings traced on the cylinder,” which he later came to identify with the coronal suture of the human skull. The thought of applying the phonographic needle to the suture led him to reveries of returning the entire world to Orphic audibility: “what variety of lines then, occurring anywhere, could one not put under the needle and try out?” (Silence 53–54). The verb unterschieben (translated as “put under”) also implies substitution, supporting Rilke’s intuition that the compelling element of the phonograph is not the recording, but the needle, which might well be applied to surrogates. Just as the Dogon figure of the weaver offers insight into the handicraft of textuality, Kafka’s writing machine/torture device in “In the Penal Colony” provides an unsettling image of writing as lethally haptic sentence. This augments in turn the uncanny dimension Rilke detects in the phonograph, as the needle on the stylus makes explicit its tactile claim. A similar tactility occasions Michel Leiris’ reverie (auspiciously titled “Persephone”). Leiris’ childhood experience of the “slightly fatty quality” of static produced by the sound of the needle in the grooves of a record fractures the otherwise placid flow of time, leading to a speculative traversal of subterranean openings associated with gnomes in mines, the penetration of the body by foreign (metallic) substances, and much more (83). Such associations reawaken “der Seelen wunderliches Bergwerk” of Rilke’s poem “Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes”—the marvelous mine of souls through which the figures travel to the underworld as if through veins of ore (Ahead 54). The lines followed by the stylus of the phonograph bear an uncanny conceptual kinship with lines of poetry, and poetry in its Orphic dimension can become audible or legible anywhere, as in Whitman’s encounter with “the trail of drift and debris” on Paumanok’s shore, “seiz’d by the spirit that trails in the lines underfoot” (394). Rilke, like Whitman, pursues voice as a paradoxical integration of jubilation and lament, significantly rendered as erotic adhesiveness: the stylus, in this light, is a source of sexual friction arousing a voice. In Whitman’s other great seashore poem, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” the scene of poetic calling is one of interspecies vocalism, animal vampirism, as the youth hears the mockingbird calling his lost mate and is poetically infected by the lamentation. “O you singer solitary,” the adult poet responds across the years, “singing by yourself, projecting me . . . never more shall I cease perpetuating you” (393).12 This Liebestod aria culminates in the answering sea that “Lisp’d to me the low and delicious word death . . . / Creeping thence steadily up to my ears and laving me softly all over, / Death, death, death, death, death. // Which I do not forget, / But

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fuse the song of my dusky demon and brother” (393). This poem is not so simply about death and inspiration, but about the death involved in expiring from one state and assuming another, shedding the human in order to be empowered as a poet. Osip Mandelstam notes a similar becoming-bird on the part of Pasternak, in whose poetry he hears “a direct mating call” and “the direct consequence of a special physiological structure in the throat.” “To read Pasternak’s verses is to clear one’s throat, reinforce one’s breathing, renovate the lungs” (83). Reading Dante’s Italian, he discovers a “peculiar labial music” distending the lips into a proboscis (34). The entirety of the Commedia becomes, for Mandelstam, a challenge to “imagine how it would be if bees had worked at the creation of this thirteen-thousand-faceted shape, bees endowed with instinctive stereometric genius, who attracted more and still more bees as they were needed” (15). Such perceptions confirm Franz Cumont’s attribution to Orphism of an “hallucinating literature” that culminates in Dante (Eliade 192, n. 26). The discovery of the world as animate and eloquent is euphorically enabling, but it can result in a paralytic arrest as well (indelibly depicted by Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man, as Trueblood recounts his incestuous coital paralysis as being “just like a jaybird that the yellow jackets done stung ’til he’s paralyzed—but still alive in his eyes and he’s watchin’ ’em sting his body to death” [63]). The phonographic needle, resembling and thus equating bee-stinger, pen, and hypodermic, identifies writing with inoculation, or subdermal descent.13 If the voluble world can share the burden of voice with the poet, it can also usurp the poet’s role. Rilke’s boyhood fascination with the phonograph portends a chattering environment that strikes the poet dumb with amazement. Eye and voice—attraction and distraction—converge in that peculiar animation which is poetic reverie, in which the voices of others vibrate inside the head, inducing a “vision” the poet is said to compose. The voice-over turns the body into a vanishing point. All of this is dramatized in the Eurydice myth, in which Orpheus suffers an uncharacteristic lapse of confidence in auditory cues and turns to look at his wife before surfacing from the underworld. His distraction is manifested as a scopic compulsion, and this becomes the first of a series of losses that culminate in the ritual sparagmos, his dismemberment by the Maenads. In any event, there is either too much to look at (or look for), or too much to listen to; there’s a sensory overload, resulting in an imbalance that fatally usurps one sense by the demands of another sense. The ensuing fiasco is, in several senses, senseless: a sensory euphoria of immersion in detail which Alan Liu identifies in Romantic transcendence as “a goto routine of the imagination that goes nowhere,” “the stuff of under-allegory, under-symbol . . . the most hallucinatory of all simulations, ‘context’ ” (77).


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We’ve seen how Hesiod’s voice is occupied by—filled up with—the Muses. He is the Muses’ medium. The poet is the medium, the raw material instrument through which the poem is transmitted, and also a “control” in the mediumistic sense (at a seance the control is the person transmitting spirit voices), a proxy for phantoms. There is a final, more recent sense of control, which Norbert Wiener derived from the Greek word for steersman: cybernetics. Hesiod—putting his voice at the mediumistic disposal of the Muses—points poetry toward cybernetics. As a theory of control in systems behavior, cybernetics has always been poised at the prosthetic interface, that juncture at which the tool may become an extension of the person, or the person an extension of the tool. The swarm of voices clinging like bees to the media web arouses connotations seemingly remote from Hesiod. Instead of oracles we now have artificial intelligence, an heir of cybernetics. Cognitive science has modeled language on neurology, and language in turn has become a paradigm of codes and systems. Poetry emerges from the technological menu as a vestigial residue of the primitive, as the very elements that initially made poetry appear dangerously progressive and autonomous—as the Muses’ headgear—have migrated into other media. The voice-over function is now more likely to emanate from the charged tensions of video, film, or photography; so we see Jorie Graham integrating cinematic techniques like lap dissolve and slow motion into her poems, not to mention the diligent anachronism of Anne Carson’s “TV Men” sequences. Poetry for the most part is serviced by retreads of Enlightenment humanism. But of course the Enlightenment ideal has become today’s cyborg, or recombinant person who has left poetry behind, discarding it as unfit for its long-range instrumentality like a booster-rocket ejected on liftoff. In the atmosphere of the voice-over, most of the voices we hear no longer remember, nor do they display, their paths to and from (adult14) bodies. Instead, they are variables in an infantile laminar flow; free-floating tourniquets marking the interface between anxiety and authority, frightened less by dark than by silence. We hanker after the reassuring sound of a voice, no longer attending to what it says. After the Second World War the Swiss philosopher Max Picard wrote: “By taking it away from silence we have made language an orphan. The tongue we speak today is no longer a mothertongue but rather an orphaned tongue” (41). An orphanage is the institution of proxy parenthood. Norman Bates (in Hitchcock’s Pycho), although adult, is still an orphan, desperately intent on speaking the (m)other(’s) tongue, much as it makes him stutter, gagging on the words as they protrude through his mouth, a surrogate vaginal envelope preserving in its mummy embryo the hieroglyphic papyrus of a ventriloquialized muse voice. A similar musehaunted case is that of Louis Wolfson, an American so traumatized by the

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maternal voice that he developed a frantic polyvocality, lurching between English words and homophonic solicitations from other languages: each offending word spoken by the mother could be dissolved in the recuperative bath of foreign substitutes. But in Wolfson’s inspirational trauma we find another figure altogether, a “Medusa-mother with a thousand penises” as Deleuze puts it (Essays 17)—an unlikely Muse, but not impossible as we’ll see in chapter five. Parasensory Competition We haven’t pondered enough on the basic causes of the generalized evolution of technology: miniaturization, reducing to nothing or next-to-nothing the size of every machine, is not only to furnish replacement parts to the organism by placing them on the scale of the human body, it is also to create inside the person a parasensory competition, a duplication of being in the world. —Paul Virilio (Aesthetics 67) The Muses, having been born of Mnemosyne—inciting divine madness and poetic furor—now pass by the names Database, Hypertext, and World Wide Web. Metrical regulation is no longer necessary for poems once poetry has ceased to be the encyclopedic register of the culture; so, instead of metrics, we have programming languages, and the sonnet has been bypassed by COBOL and ASCII. In the process, the instructive gendering of the Muses (see chapter four) has been forgotten, or reconverted to the masculinist dream of pure thought, calculation without expenditure, noise free channels: a regained paradise of unity without strife or division. Inspiration as computation, with RAM capacity as the virtual index of the rational soul. The parameters of poetry’s voice-over are now beyond reckoning, since every definition of poetry necessarily excludes something that returns, in the mobility of our communications environment, like the unforeseen siren call of an unacknowledged Muse, summons to a prodigal prosthetic congress in which the “power” and “authority” of the voice can no longer be traced to a plausible speaker. The beguiling mobility of voices in this vast spectacle of dissociative turbulence cocoons us in a surrogate multiplicity. If the oral rhetoric of print culture aspired to do the police in different voices (from Dickens to Eliot), the compulsion today is to homogenize the proliferation of voices—and internalize the police. The affable imperative strokes the canon like a cat, reciting command-control dicta in a litany known as The March of Time.15 Despite Eliot’s demurral, The Waste Land was anointed “a poem totally concerned with the breakup of a civilization—not, to be sure,


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the physical breakup, with buildings crashing into the street or government offices burning, but a spiritual breakup” (Brooks and Warren 306). The poet’s own voice is requisitioned as talking head, voice-over for a civilization “gone in the teeth” as Pound (another fabricator of wasteland voices) put it (Poems 552). Confronting the stern tone of the Brooks/Warren commentary, one can only go whimpering back to Kant, to plead the case for subjective satisfaction: “If we judge objects merely according to concepts”—like “the breakup of a civilization”—“then all representation of beauty is lost. Thus there can be no rule according to which anyone is to be forced to recognize anything as beautiful” (50). In the presence of The Waste Land, of course, beauty is beside the point, so Brooks and Warren have no inhibitions about reasserting concept, concept at the service of meaning. If we’re haunted by the loss of beauty as aesthetic criterion, however, it’s not because beauty is the insignia of transcendent election, but because it’s our only buffer against the incessant voice-over of the concept. In the cinematic origins of voice-over, the primary distraction of the visual element absorbs and effaces the subordinate labor of an off-screen voice. In the earliest film exhibitions, a century ago, lecturers addressed the audience as a sequence of short films was screened. These living vocal accompanists were replaced by subtitles (or intertitles between scenes), a graphic foreground of voice-over. In its pre-sound era, film was busy knitting a shroud of compensations for the missing voice. In silent movies, Mary Ann Doane suggests, “The absent voice reemerges in gestures and the contortions of the face—it is spread over the body of the actor” (335). When the talkies came, voice-over migrated to documentation and newsreels, bonding the (inevitably male baritone) voice to a transcendent authority. The important thing to note is that voice-over initially developed as compensation for a lack. (It’s fitting that Hollywood’s most consistent use of voice-over for fictional narration is in film noir, a genre obsessed with lack, disorientation, and loss.) For some time now we’ve been citizens of a cybernation, occupying a mental homeless shelter that harbors politicians, porn stars, and pundits in a composite body politic, a new Laoköon. If Looney Tunes return (in Ashbery’s “Daffy Duck in Hollywood”) as tour de force of the American sublime, it is altogether relevant to compare Pound’s “news that stays news” with network news and the way the voice of the “anchor” underwrites the braille of the daily Real. The voice-over of the concept stipulated by Aristotle and reaffirmed by Kant continues in the compulsion to hear individual voices as components of a ventriloquial mimicry, the “voice that is great within us” in Wallace Stevens’ phrase.16 In this cybernation, subjectivity is simply the most acutely engineered of all our technologies—voice activated, setting in motion a

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replay of generic cultural “memories,” belonging to everyone and no one. Such simulated memories are more effective for being customized, like those provided for the “replicants” in Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner for whom the one-size-fits-all snapshot supports a reverie of intimacy that cannot be contradicted by experience because there is no distinction between the subject and the semiotic cue. The primordial cue given the poet by the Muses is a reminder of Friedrich Kittler’s dictum that aesthetics are always preceded by media. The aisthesis preparatory to performance is subject to the bandwidth of the medium, and “Our sense perceptions are the dependent variable of this compromise” (Gramophone 2). Fiber-optic network of the databanks and strategic defense programs, Kittler contends, are beginning to do away with the residual signals of the human sensory matrix. “Sound and image, voice and text are reduced to surface effects . . . Their media-produced glamor will survive for an interim as a by-product of strategic programs” (1). In the primacy now accorded mass media, our physical natures acquire a supplementary, exotic aura—“dependent variables” to be ascertained on our own initiative. The senses have become “theoreticians,” as Marx put it, which is to say: witnesses to their own nomadic dispersal, industrial byproducts of parasensory competition. I offer the preceding diagnosis in the spirit of literary anthropology, about which Wolfgang Iser has a lucid account of the role of the fictive. His is a neo-Kantian perspective, comprehending literature as anthropic rather than social, although the latter is readily inferred from the former. “As literature does not allow the imaginary to be absorbed into the pragmatic applications of the real world,” he writes, “it enables us to concentrate our attentions on the nature of our human resources” (224). It’s a play of the faculties Iser tracks in literature and the arts in general, a staging of options, a delay or slowdown by means of which our libidinal resources can be scrutinized. The mimetic impulse is thus not invested in repetition: repetition simply becomes the means to test the cycle of appearance, disappearance, and reappearance (as Freud elucidates in his concept of the fort/da). But in Iser’s view “the recurrence of particular worlds in the literary text has always taken place on the prior understanding that it is a mode of staging what is not there, or that which is not directly accessible” (227). This also happens to be the sense in which the “Language poets” have maintained, in Barrett Watten’s formulation, that “Distance, rather than absorption, is the intended effect” (64). The literary is a staging ground for anthropological methods of deterrence. Because the senses themselves are instantly and continually absorptive, the arts arise as a means of holding sensory provocation at bay. The arts constitute an extracurricular periphery condensing into itself the body’s attributes, permitting us to stand aside and regard these attributes from a distance.


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Perhaps the most memorable images for this relay/delay of the arts, from an anthropological perspective, are to be found in those anatomical diagrams of the Renaissance in which portions of evidently living bodies are raised up, giving a glimpse of corporeal recesses like a congestion of mute tongues packed tightly beneath the flesh. These medical diagrams suggest that the sciences must pass through a perilous threshold (Dickinson’s “Tissue Door” [Poems 437]) on their way to cognitive security. This suggests in turn that language, aspiring to scientific certainty, must also pass through a medium of distressing exposure, a poetic flaying. The ego, as defined by the logic of market equivalence, is autistic, substituting the seriality of consumption for the laborious recursive integrities of autopoiesis. Auto-simulation is autism and eludes the symbiotic domain of “structural coupling,” of the symbiotic interaction of organisms necessary for a “linguistic consensual domain” (Maturana and Varela 121). Because the voice is always shadowed by a voice-over, a split not in but prior to the subject, marking the spot where the subject is indubitably embodied, the subject is hounded and ridiculed by the trickster impertinence of voice as phantom double. Voice is not a clothing of the naked body of language (though that is always a claim of voice-over); language does not recall itself as bodied forth in speech, adding voice to itself as a supplementary coloration. Quite the contrary: voice primordially calls the body to its acoustic materiality, its hollows and ducts and tubes, its respiration. The interweaving of voice with language is thus much more complex than anything that can be generated out of Saussure’s binary, langue/parole. Voice includes, and is included in, laughing and crying, grunting and gurgling and moaning, none of which can be thought of as pre-articulations, much as an utterance may mimic these bodily pulsations. Philosophical anthropology (in the German school) describes a vital dissymmetry in the biological template of the Homo Sapien: Adolf Portmann’s concept of an extrauterine prematurity (or neoteny), Max Scheler’s “world-open” precondition of human instinct, Arnold Gehlen’s insistence on our unspecialized biological nature—these all point to an ontogenic opportunism, a congenital indeterminacy, in which development is experimental, not teleological. The entirety of human development is regulated by something like Vaihinger’s philosophy of as if. Helmuth Plessner’s work in philosophy of biology makes it clear that human existence is ambiguously grounded, occupying an “eccentric positionality.” “As an eccentrically organized being, the human must make itself into what it already is” (309). In Plessner’s view, culture is a collective mode of self-recuperation, a reservoir absorbing and stabilizing the ungrounded energy churned up by eccentric positionality. “Man would overcome the unmanageable eccentricity of his being, and

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would compensate for his divided existence, yet can only achieve this by way of things that are weighty enough to serve as counterweights for this existence” (311). Language is foremost among these counterweights: it is a detached bodily function orbiting as a paradoxical individuating and collectivizing impulse outside the body. Language, as biocultural artifact, is a pooling of the resource Whitman addresses in “Vocalism” (“O what is it in me that makes me tremble so at voices?” he wonders [509]). Where vocal emissions of other creatures are unmediated (and evaporate instantly)— human vocalism derives from an eccentric positionality in which vocal expression is never complete. Voice is a biological countenance seeking semiotic discharge, continuously shunted into those relays and junctions servicing the semantic reservoir we know as language. For humans there is no end of utterance; speech is teleologically open. Heidegger’s title Unterwegs zur Sprache captures the import: we do not possess or subsume language, but are always “on the way to language.” The sound-poetry expectorations of Raoul Hausmann, Hugo Ball, Antonin Artaud, and others are neither pre- nor post-linguistic, but vocalizations at a tempo different from that generally permitted by the semantic assignments of the speaking subject. Kurt Schwitters’ grand Ur-Sonata is not preparatory to linguistic function, but a kind of counter-love, a reciprocal comportment of voice on the way to language but without any particular incentive to arrive. Heidegger regarded language as a power, a force in which we awaken, not a tool. This is the thrust of his inversion of the customary formula that poetry is a language art, when he says that “poetry never takes language as a raw material ready to hand, rather it is poetry which first makes language possible” (Existence 283). This is also the Viconian perspective of language as a residue of primal matter, Urstoff of creation, coevolving with humans. Voice-over is thereby predicated on a biological unrest—whether or not we call it, with Plessner, eccentric positionality—a turbulence that animates voice and sets it wobbling along its path toward language, which is also where it overlaps with the human, not as substrate but as palimpsest. Language is a residual capacity, and poetry is that specific residue alerting us to the leakage, the “creaking of the word,” the “discrepant engagement,” the improbable condition that like “a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting” (Frost 778). Voice “precedes the subject, which means, of course, that it is intimately linked with the subject . . . voice frays a path for the subject. But it is not the subject’s voice” (Nancy, Birth 240). Also relevant here is Slavoj Žižek’s exposition of Lacan, via classic Hollywood cinema, regarding ways “the voice functions as a foreign body, as a kind of parasite introducing a radical split” (Enjoy 2). Žižek draws on Michel Chion’s concept of the uncannily


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displaced voice, la voix acousmatique, as the auditory form of what is more famously referred to as the gaze: “the superegoic voice, for example, addressing me without being attached to any particular bearer . . . functions again as a stain, whose inert presence interferes like a strange body and prevents me from achieving my self-identity” (Looking 126). The uncanniness of such doubling is an ancient disposition of poetry since Hesiod. But modern poetry has tended toward a more casual confidence in the unitary principle of voice. An extreme but instructive instance may be found in Wallace Stevens’ scenario, “Of Modern Poetry,” with its deliberation on “The poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice” (Palm 174). Stevens’ poem disturbingly merges war and woman as constituent elements of what the modern poem “has to face.” But facing here stops short of intersubjective exchange. In his consolidation of monoglossias, the poet’s consolation lies in the homology of respective solitudes. Like an “insatiable actor” the poem must . . . slowly and With meditation, speak words that in the ear, In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat, Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound Of which, an invisible audience listens, Not to the play, but to itself, expressed In an emotion as of two people, as of two Emotions becoming one. (Palm 175) The final state of this merging is a paralytic arrest, as the “twanging” sounds become lodged in sublime mentation, “wholly / Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend, / Beyond which it has no will to rise”—an anesthesiologist’s mantra. The splitting Stevens imagines leads to an embryonic arrest of the communicative function; but in the isomorphism of its stunted exchange, it also divests poetry of its animal vocalism, because the “mind” is perpetually entertaining the image of an auditor (an Other) just out of reach. It’s not surprising to find Stevens affirming Narcissus as the “principle that we expect to find pleasure in resemblances” (Necessary 80). This is not, of course, a reliable indicator of Stevens’ own practice as a poet, but it serves as an unacknowledged admonition to the pervasive and confounding legacy of Muse as well as murmur. Speaking of “Owl’s Clover,” Stevens concedes, “While there is nothing automatic about the poem, nevertheless it has an automatic aspect in the sense that it is what I wanted it to be without knowing before it was written what I wanted it to be.” Narcissism is

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automatism: “If each of us is a biological mechanism, each poet is a poetic mechanism. To the extent that what he produces is mechanical: that is to say, beyond his power to change, it is irrational” (Opus 219–220). Because so much contemporary verse practice presumes the equivalence of subjectivity and authenticity, we’ve become paradoxically estranged from what Viktor Shklovsky dubbed “defamiliarization,” forwarding or baring the aesthetic/technical device. The primal scenes of poetic inspiration I’ve surveyed in this chapter suggest the unnerving realization that voice is alien. Poetry thus becomes the “practice of outside” in Robin Blaser’s phrase, the art of othering. “It is within language that the world speaks to us with a voice that is not our own,” Blaser writes (Fire 121). Along the same lines Shklovsky holds that “Art removes objects from the automatism of perception” (13). Art reanimates objects from sensory anesthesia—a state imposed by language, that repeating machine. Shklovsky’s views are frequently cited, but few retain his additional observation that “I personally feel that defamiliarization is found almost everywhere form is found” (18). Form is most useful as instigator of deformation, disrupting pattern-recognition to expand the scope of pattern. In Braque’s artistic equation: “The senses deform, the mind forms” (Harrison and Wood 215).17 “The language of poetry is, then, a difficult, roughened, striated language,” says Shklovsky; and “we can define poetry as attenuated, tortuous speech” (22, 23). Poetry is language pulverized. Poets have been traumatized by any intimation that “the voice that is great within us” has gotten into us by forces outside our control. The device that is great within us, then, is the swollen sum of our erasures. So the compulsion is to retrieve the present in a medium (in this case print) that facilitates fantasies of the unmediated. Voice has been nominated as the icon of this fantasy, but the wish-fulfilling association of voice with the speaking subject’s authenticity (also known as phonocentrism) has exacted a price: poets have lost touch with the archaic parables of voice-over, which instruct us in the ways in which inspiration always divests us of that security we so desperately crave as the sign of an empowerment we forever wish was ours alone, not a sport of the gods or a bewitchment by the Muses.

CHAPTER FOUR

Gendering the Muse

In a bracing rendition of a primal scene in “Route,” George Oppen writes: Imagine a man in the ditch, The wheels of the overturned wreck Still spinning— I don’t mean he despairs, I mean if he does not He sees in the manner of poetry. (Poems 198) The equivocation preceding Oppen’s affirmation (“I don’t mean . . . I mean”)—like Mackey’s “discrepant engagement” and McHugh’s definition of poetry as being of two minds (discussed in the Introduction)—points to an entitlement gained through dispossession or loss. In Jacques Lacan’s version of a primal scene, the logos, the Word of God, is the inauguration of lack. Lacan calls this predicament the Symbolic order. Succinctly: “the subject depends on the signifier,” says Lacan, and “the signifier is first of all in the field of the Other” (Four 205). We’ve heard this story before from Hesiod. The dissimulation of the Heliconian Muses (their ability to tell both true and false things) is an earlier model of the Symbolic order, in which we can never altogether coincide with what we mean. It’s as if, by inhaling language, the psyche is hypnotized by grammar, dispossessed of any prelinguistic sapience (Wittgenstein worries, avant la lettre, the Lacanian Symbolic); as if, beginning a sentence, you were traumatized that grammatical necessity will compromise all you want to say. A capricious Other rules that dominion from which the inaugural speech act emanates. Wallace Stevens knows

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the place: “a muddy centre before we breathed” he calls it, “a myth before the myth began” (Palm 210). The field of the Other hovers out there in the Platonic world of ideal forms (or “Pussycat Triple X / where all biographies come to an end” [Palmer, Promises 90]). Disembarking from this land of unlikeness, “Ecstasy / affords / the occasion and expediency determines the form” (Moore, Poems 97). To be expedient with ecstasy has long been a primary labor of poetry—to incorporate the strange and the other into its procedures; to speak “otherwise” (alieniloquiam); to be visited by Muses, those agents of otherness. Reflecting on such a visitation, Whitman writes: “I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits, grains, esculent roots, / And am stucco’d with quadrupeds and birds all over” (217). It may be symptomatic of Whitman to radiate solipsism as a masculine prerogative; but to take into account the features of poetic “inspiration” or Muse endowment is to restore to solipsism a singularly unshareable and distinctly gendered experience, giving birth. Poetry may be the most persistent channel by which the ecology of reproduction is transmitted from female to male in its scenarios of poetic empowerment involving the figure of the Muse. If the phallus is understood as symbolic capital (“Meaning is only ever erected,” in Jacqueline Rose’s stark formulation [Lacan, Feminine 43]), we might be prepared to consider corollary modes of signification involving pregnance. A woman feeling her own singularity enhanced by the growth in her womb finds this singularity is utterly contingent on the progressive enlargement of the absolute other she bears within her. Masculinity, by contrast, is troubled by a reproductive discord; biologically speaking, fatherhood requires no awareness whatsoever. That men don’t give birth is one of the more thoroughly repressed of traumas at the crossroads of nature and culture. In Jung’s typology of the contributing personae of individuation, “The inferior function is always associated with an archaic personality in ourselves . . . There we have an open wound, or at least an open door through which anything might enter” (Redgrove and Shuttle 316). For men the inferior function (all too susceptible of expiatory projection and reassignment outside and elsewhere, literalized in women) is the birthing complex. Gary Snyder speaks of the Muse tradition as affording a glimpse of “archaic matrifocal roots”: “It is likely that men become creative when they touch the woman in themselves, and women become creative when they touch the woman in the man in themselves” (“Foreword” xi). This asymmetrical formulation reflects an historical disproportion; one that’s distended by subjectivity as the default setting of lyric. Rachel Blau DuPlessis considers the prospective formula “male muse for female poet = female muse for male poet” and immediately notices the imbalance: “Simple reciprocity? No. Wrong valence. Unbalanced equation. For everywhere the grave social

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and cultural asymmetry between the sexes impedes this simplicity” (36). While Snyder indulges the asymmetry—“As Vak is wife to Brahma (‘wife’ means ‘wave’ means ‘vibrator’ in Indo-European etymology) so the voice, in everyone, is a mirror of his own deepest self” (Earth 125)—in the end he recognizes the informing alterity: “The voice of inspiration as an ‘other’ has long been known in the West as The Muse. Widely speaking, the muse is anything other that touches you and moves you. Be it a mountain range, a band of people, the morning star, or a diesel generator” (124). The male poet, pregnant with words, willingly submits to the gnosis but is at the same time traumatized by the maternal posture. The Muse (before being reduced to simple helpmate of inspiration) retains the “monstrous”—that is, demonstrable (monstrare = show, disclose)—link between inspiration and pregnance, masculine speech and maternal prompting. One of the more compelling figures in the constellation of male/Muse relations is Hans Bellmer, or should I say Bellmer’s doll, a recombinant figurine widely regarded as a fetish object, but classed by Bellmer in the domain of “poetic stimulators” (59). Bellmer was explicit about the psychotropic resources that led him to fabricate his nubile female grotesque: “it must be noted that, as in dreams, the body can capriciously displace the center of its own images’ gravity, and does so constantly. As a result, it is able to perform ‘condensations,’ ‘superimpositions,’ ‘proofs of analogies,’ ‘ambiguities,’ ‘puns,’ and canny and uncanny ‘calculations of probability’ with these images. This accords completely with the way the body unconsciously creates symbols” (68–69)—and symbols, in his estimation, have their corollary in the clenched hand compensating for a toothache, displacing the pain in a prototype of “our expressive life as a sequence of liberating transferences that progress from a malady to its image. Expression together with its concomitant pleasure is a transposed pain, a liberation” (106). By the same token, the entire male contribution to poetry (and, for that matter, art in general) consists of a surrogate clench, displacing birth contractions with sublime fetishes, “poetic stimulators.” As outlined in the previous chapter, three of the primal episodes of poetic empowerment in Western typology are the Pythagorean harmony of the spheres; the Orphic singer hypnotizing beasts; and Hesiod’s encounter with the Heliconian Muses. From the Pythagorean prospect, confronting the exasperating incommensurability of our senses with the extrasensory waveband of the cosmos, we infer a language exceeding the scope of words. The Orphic perspective awakens a sense that language is both a glorious and a menacing supplement to the world; and Orpheus’ decapitation is a grisly reminder that somewhere along the continuum of words there is a fatal disjunction. The Orphic breach is sewn up in the (somewhat monstrous) form of Hesiod, who bears traces of a prosthetic rearticulation of

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the human. Before Hesiod, poetry in its Orphic demeanor rambunctiously adds to, and awakens echoes throughout, the world at large. With Hesiod the world itself is compacted into a single compelling (yet alien) voice inside the head—and it’s only a matter of time until Descartes condenses even the figure of the human to a glistening mote of ego, in which a voice persists, if only as a technical simulation. Poetry henceforth develops an alliance with subjectivity, requiring compulsory speech from a world (of “muses”) that had hitherto resounded freely, but which now begins to endure its lengthy subjugation to the human subject, and in its subjugation develops that sullen demeanor that its masters read as evidence of a brute, unresponsive nature (Caliban to Prospero). Cartesian subjectivity demands of the voice-over that it offer compelling evidence of its resources and its identity—that it submit testimony of its credentials. Voice-over (from which the gendered Muse and maternal ambiance has been effaced) is to be the authentic, inspired version of the voice as such. Any experience of voice that resists alignment to the baritone March of Time is proof of demonic intervention, neurosis, or technical malfunction, and gender has been the generic fate of these malfunctions, from material disarray to psychological malady. It’s difficult to overlook the role of gender in mythopoetic primal scenes: the female Muses enable Hesiod’s theogony, Echo fixates on Narcissus, Orpheus goes to the underworld for Eurydice and is subsequently torn apart by those female devotees of Dionysus, the Maenads. These episodes involve a transition from bíos to technē in the matter of voice-over, in which gender is more than a material detail; it is, rather, a qualifying feature of the ambiguous transit between nature and culture, biology and tool. In Judith Butler’s influential definition in Gender Trouble: Gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pregiven sex (a juridical conception); gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established. As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts. (139) This surface is not only politically neutral but politically neutralized in a tawdry domestic drama immortalized as the Fall (Put the blame on Mame). Laura Riding picks up the pieces in, or as her title suggests, Though Gently: To be particularly this or that is nature. Nature is man broken up. Man is nature put together. When integration occurs woman is revealed

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and man justified. When integration fails and man is conscious of the failure . . . [h]e is either terribly ashamed of himself or terribly irritated with woman. He works off his wounded vanity by making a disintegration, begging the question with scientific diffidence; or he separates woman from the notion of finality, putting himself on his worst behavior with her and his best with it. (20) In context, Though Gently is a book overrun with binary terms, a riot of dichotomies that masquerades as sober adjudication of rival claims and claimants. Riding flaunts binaries with the manic industry and cunning of M.C. Escher. Such boat-rocking helps gender performance make seasick sense. Bearing in mind that gender is construed as prediscursive or mute facticity, Hesiod’s relation to the Muses illustrates the process by which the male voice of poetic authority is underwritten by a female voice-over: his poem is not so much “inspired” (in the convention to which we’re accustomed) as it is prearticulated inside him, in a differently gendered voice.1 To experience voice as inner—that is, as unvoiced—is to be initiated in the emergence of gender, particularly gender understood in affiliation with genius. The Muses fulfill the role later attributed to Genius in the middle ages. The legacy of catabasis or infernal descent memorialized in the Orphic myth, in the Odyssey, and in the Aeneid, was reconfigured in late antiquity (most influentially by Macrobius) as the descent of the rational soul into the snares of a sublunar material world. Hellenistic sources relate catabasis to a wisdom tradition, in which the hero undertakes a ritual descent for oracular consultation in the underworld. In Christian renditions the infernal aspect was emphasized, inflecting catabasis with transgressions of the black arts. In late antiquity and the middle ages the embodiment of this power was Genius, a “god of human nature” and “external double” susceptible to good and evil influences (Nitzsche 3, 4). As cosmic messengers (Di Manes, Greek daemones) these commanding spirits were Latinized as the genius of the individual; and, as adapted to Christianity, genius bifurcates into the beneficent angel and the renegade angel (for Milton, evil demon for Descartes). The significance of Genius for my purposes has to do with the persistence of Orpheus as a Genius figure. In his commentary on the Aeneid (c. 1145), Bernardus Silvestris deploys the familiar medieval concept of the soul descended into the body in order to discriminate “vicious” from “virtuous” descents, exemplified by Eurydice and Orpheus respectively. Eurydice disappears permanently into the underworld, unrecoverable by Orpheus, much as her spirit may be said to live on in his commemorative song—a song redemptive of sin in the Christian transposition of pagan script. The Muses likewise

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are subsumed into Hesiod’s inspiration. I don’t mean to reduce these tales to varieties of the sexist dictum that behind every successful man there’s a good woman, but the structural parallel is obvious and notable. In the primal scenes of Western poetry the voice-over is female (Muses, Echo) or the voice of the poet is indebted to a vanished woman (Eurydice). The lure of the female voice is nowhere more powerfully configured than in another primal scene, Odysseus’ encounter with the Sirens. Odysseus has his crew stuff their ears with wax so as not to hear the Sirens (wax being a substance linked with bees and thus also with the Bee Maidens of the “Hymn to Hermes”: cf. chapter three). Odysseus, opting to hear the enchanting voices, has himself lashed to the mast of his ship (the mast, being wood, is a sort of marine Ygdrassil or world tree). The scene has all the elements of an electrical generator, with positive and negative charges involving different sorts of conductivity (wax and wood), both of which require contact points (the sailors and Odysseus). The voices of the Sirens, then, which represent an overpowering lure to destruction, are mediated by this sophisticated technical intervention. Like the Muses, the Sirens offer the bewitching assurance of panoptic vision and encyclopedic wisdom. This enticement is congruent with that expeditionary compulsion in man to ferret out the secrets of nature-as-woman. No man’s poem (Odysseus being, in his subterfuge, ’outis or “No Man”) can successfully embody the heroic ego unless it emancipates itself from the female voice-over, a prospect addressed by the dual maneuver of fastidious attention (Odysseus lashed to the mast) and denial (the restraints themselves). Pietro Pucci interprets the scene as a commentary on poetics. “No text,” he says, “can incorporate the titillating promise of a song as sublime as the Sirens’ without implying that this same sublimity resides in the incorporating text itself.” Consequently, “The Sirens’ song is thus the negative, absent song that enables its replacement—the Odyssey—to become what it is” (Odysseus 212). Pucci fails to recognize the clear gender distribution of advantage and enterprise suggested by his reading—which is all the more astounding given the vocabulary he uses to describe Odysseus’ plight as it “oscillates between (innocent) titillation and destructive intoxication,” and Odysseus’ solution as one combining “the fascination of an endless song and a restraining prudence.” We have to go back to The Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno for a recognition of the patriarchal legislation instigated in Odysseus’ twofold subjugation: of his sailors, who “cannot enjoy their work because it is performed under compulsion, in despair, with their senses forcibly stopped,” and of the Sirens themselves, who are driven to suicide should anyone hearing their song pass by undistracted (27). The sailors “know only of the danger of the song, not of its beauty” (27), while

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enforcing Odysseus’ self-imposed exposure to the Sirens’ song while lashed to the mast. The technical solution Odysseus devises to deal with the Sirens’ temptation is taken by Horkheimer and Adorno as a “prescient allegory of the dialectic of enlightenment,” in which “The curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression” (27, 28). That is, enslavement of the workers makes for industrial progress; but the masters stunt their own libidinal natures by means of such wily constraints as Odysseus devises for himself, so he can voyeuristically entertain the Sirens’ song without committing to it, a paradigmatic form of regression. Odysseus is infantilized by his own reverie of technical achievement: the ruse by which he bypasses the Sirens takes place alongside all the other ruses that are the mementos of his voyage and commemoration of his survival skills, in a kind of gallery or grand concourse of fantastic escapes (escape as invention, Odysseus as Houdini). The Sirens become the voice-over of his progress, formally denied even while their very existence becomes a goad to superhuman sublimation and productivity. Horkheimer and Adorno find an uncanny prescience in this tale, one that testifies in advance to the derangements of the heroic ego as it develops into that bourgeois stratagem (subjectivity) for calibrating human nature to the myth of rational progress. “In the bourgeois economy the social work of each individual is mediated by the principle of the self,” they write (23). “Humanity had to inflict terrible injuries on itself before the self—the identical, purpose-directed, masculine character of human beings—was created” (33). The gendering of their formulation is precise. Sensory ravishment, associated with women, promotes masculine rectitude if sublimated. Enlightened productivity works, then, by framing episodes of feminine allure as incentives to masculine selfregulation. The result is a simple homeostatically regulated machine (with woman as servomechanism) in which Horkheimer and Adorno rightly see an allegory of industrial bourgeois society, a society that clings to its primal scenes only in sanitized versions, fearful of the prerational imagination that invests these scenes not only with an “obsolete” worldview, but an alternative mode of social production. To glimpse the alternative latent in the Sirens’ song, it’s necessary to delve into a broader range of associations than the Homeric account deploys. The name “Sirens” may derive from the asiatic “sîr” or fascination. But seirenes in its masculine form designated a strain of bees (cf. Kerényi, and Pollard, passim). Unlike the Muses, whose activities are consecrated to father Zeus, the patrimony of the Sirens is unclear. In one genealogy the Sirens were offspring of Chthonos and Persephone; in another version one of the Muses bore them to the sea god Achelöos. Most tantalizing is the version in which Herakles breaks off one of Achelöos’ horns, and the Sirens are sired by blood spurting

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from this rupture. Not only are the Sirens typologically assimilated to something like the birth of Athena from Zeus’ head, then, but the phallic/menstrual paradigm is explicit as well. As if this blurring of gender were not enough, there are visual representations of the Sirens as bearded women. The link with Persephone affords the Sirens a special conductivity to the underworld and the queen of the dead, who is notably affiliated through her daughter Demeter with vegetal cycles of resurrection and replenishment. The names of individual Sirens are variable, or unstable, clustering around certain connotations: “enchantress” (Thelxiope and variants), “the seductive” (Peisonoe), and “she of the glorious voice” (Aglaope). There are also Himeropa (“she whose voice awakens desire”), Leucosia (“the white goddess”), and Ligeia (“she of the bright voice”). While there’s no sibling allegiance suggested by the lineage, the Sirens share with Orpheus a maternal link with the Muses, and their names explicitly refer to voice—just as Orpheus is derived from orea phone, meaning best voice, optima vox (Nitzsche 106). Finally, a passage in Plutarch attributes a positive rather than negative role to the Sirens’ association with the underworld. The power of their song is not destructive, he says—in terms related to what by Plutarch’s time was a no longer orthodox Pythagoreanism diffused in the Roman world—but is rather an echo of that harmony of the spheres from which souls descend into matter. The ears of most souls, however, are plastered over and blocked up, not with wax, but with carnal obstructions and affections. But any soul that through innate gifts is aware of this echo, and remembers that other world, suffers what falls in no way short of the very maddest passions of love, longing and yearning to break the tie with the body, but unable to do so. (Pollard 141) While not exactly beneficent, then, for Plutarch the Sirens are bewitching to the degree that they offer an expanded cosmological resonance, lifting those who hear them above the limited circuit of mortal attachments. In the Homeric version, by contrast, the Sirens are contagious, infecting the hero with performance anxiety—in a sense suggested by Blanchot’s provocative reading: What would happen . . . if Homer’s story were nothing but the movement Ulysses enacts in the space created for him by the Sirens’ song? If Homer could only tell his story in so far as he journeyed, in the name of Ulysses—an unfettered yet predictable Ulysses—towards the point where he may perhaps acquire the ability to speak and to narrate, on the one condition that, at this point, he vanish? (Siren 62–63)

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Note the motif of effacement here that evidently links the Sirens’ song with the parable of Orpheus and Eurydice in Blanchot’s imagination. He sees in this tale the goad that enables a leap from ode to episode, from song or lyric to narration: “Every narration secretly resists the encounter with the Sirens,” he intuits (61). The closing lines of John Ashbery’s poem “The Explanation” suggest that the most durable incentive for such resistance is the power of self-replenishment: What am I doing up here? Pretending to resist but secretly giving in so as to reappear In a completely new outfit and group of colors once today’s Bandage has been removed, is all (Houseboat 15) Narrative is masculine cross-dressing (in which a nursing function is implicit in the “bandage”). Blanchot’s hunch about the Sirens is in accord with Teresa de Lauretis’ theory of narrative as the mythical structuring of differences, foremost of which is the gendering of (male) protagonist and (female) matrix of resistance. De Lauretis’ antinomies, most succinctly, are “malehero-human” versus “female-obstacle-boundary-space” (121).2 The Sirens could easily be accommodated to de Lauretis’ observation that “Medusa and the Sphinx, like the other ancient monsters, have survived inscribed in hero narratives, in someone else’s story, not their own; so they are figures or markers of positions—places and topoi—through which the hero and his story move to their destination and to accomplish meaning” (109). In keeping with Judith Butler’s admonition that gender is performative, not innate, I want to convert this primal scene into a scenario in which voice (specifically poetry’s voice-over) is both engendered and engineered. Odysseus’ ship is a factory (Horkheimer and Adorno) that industrially processes the raw material of ecstatic celebratory song into the prophetic and agonistic material of narrative (Blanchot), the reagent being monstrously feminized in the process (de Lauretis). Narrative is a foundry, in which narratological (and I should stress the logical) techniques filter out and set aside the female prima materia, without which there is no engendering heat, but the presence of which requires purification (“rites” in antiquity, “procedures” in modernity). As Butler proposes, “the question of agency is not to be answered through recourse to an ‘I’ that preexists signification. . . . Language is not an exterior medium or instrument into which I pour a self and from which I glean a reflection of that self” (143–144). In the primal scene of poetic inspiration, the volatility of the medium itself is indistinguishable from a cauldron of

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subjectivity that can only be tamed or quenched in part, by the special linguistic and cultural technique of gender. The issue of the gendered voice is not so simply a matter of authority, then. The archaic resources of language vex authority even before it establishes itself: the Odyssey is an epic of erotic vocations that disturb the man who would be king. The narrative that engenders his triumph must submit to an itinerary of other voices, a polyphony that is sampled and synthesized, as it were, into an access code. The voice of heroic epic is masculine, reverberating in compassionate timbre with the voice of the hero since the hero is merely a figure for the engineering triumph that has generated the tale and at the same time gendered it. The Odyssean legacy holds firm for several thousand years until the ventriloquism involved is exposed in the figure of Molly Bloom (on whose affirmative gasps entire legions of critics have expired in the line of duty, like the bones of sailors at the feet of the Sirens): “yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes” (Joyce, Ulysses 782). James Joyce, the ostensible transformer of female ecstasy into text, appears to yield his tongue to a womanly satisfaction (which is figured, in turn, as amatory yielding). But this famous episode is the culmination of a dizzying spiral of manipulations, and the attribution of male authorship to a monologue enshrined as a paradigm of femininity transforms aesthetic gratification into an anxious, if not paranoid, euphoria. What is at issue is never so simply the right to speak, but the timbre of the voice that finally does speak, especially when the “universal” is at stake. The semantic sense of the words may be abstracted from the sensory provocation of the voice, but the primal scenes of poetry compel attention to the dismemberments implied by such abstraction. “Few artists,” notes George Steiner in a prescient lament in After Babel, “have rendered the genius of women’s speech” (46). (Impassioned by a sense of injustice he went on to devote an entire study to the figure of Antigone.) But it’s a speculative aside that interests me: “The alleged outpourings of women’s speech, the rank flow of words, may be a symbolic restatement of men’s apprehensive, often ignorant awareness of the menstrual cycle” (43). The reproductive matrix of biology is manifested as a speech disturbance. The staging of voice as an autonomous register of subjectivity is not innocently biological or natural, but a cultural technique. Steiner’s speculation suggests that a demonstrably natural process impinges conceptually on culture: reproduction precedes “production” in a semantic reversal that the tautological predications of narrative strive to overcome. Poetry, in its autoinscriptions of inspiration as natural endowment, preserves the menstrual signature while at the same time concocting elaborate techniques for ventriloquizing

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the female into a male voice. What this struggle reveals, even while testifying to gender asymmetry, is the inexorable chiasmatic intertwining of voices sustaining any act of inspired articulation. Without exceptional techniques of effacement, there is no indubitable male or female voice: each is pervaded with its voice-over, layered with patterns of articulatory stress and modulation. Language engenders humans before humans gender language (and in the declension of pronouns the most vital distinctions are not male and female, but self and other, singular and plural). Insofar as language brings with it the technological impetus to discriminate and recombine, to focus and then dissipate the focus, language is a hominid perturbation.3 Jan Zwicky has identified in lyric a recuperative venture, consequent upon her definition of humans as creatures “on whom the ontological alienation inherent in tool-use weighs so heavily that they must try to rescue themselves from it” (230). Lyric is not a tool but a desire that asserts itself as counter-tool, like Frost’s “counter-love”: “Lyric springs from the desire to recapture the intuited wholeness of the non-linguistic world, to heal the slash in the mind that is the capacity for language,” Zwicky writes, adding that “as language-using creatures, it is of our essence that that gap cannot be permanently healed. The recognition that it cannot is the source of lyric’s poignancy.” The cognitive gap that can’t recover from technological traumatization pivots on sexual difference, which is as it were the place where the pressure of technē is most acute—a condition memorably rendered in Siegfried Schmidt’s illustration under the tantalizing heading “original is just the copy” (fig. 4.1). Sexual difference, then, may be regarded as a biological datum, which it is the labor of culture to manifest—albeit in a manger scene called Nature. Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove have charted the mythic resonance of such connections in The Wise Wound, and it’s clear that primal scenes of poetic initiation are not incidentally, but primarily, gendered; and that menstruation marks a site from which the force called “Muse” may emanate. In Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, Giorgio Agamben elaborates a tacitly gendered thesis in his advocacy of a Sphinxian over an Oedipal linguistics, although he offers no explicit concept of sexual difference. Every linguistics dedicated to transcending or healing the split between signifier and signified adheres to the Oedipal paradigm, in Agamben’s view; while “under the sign of the Sphinx must be placed every theory of the symbol that, refusing the model of Oedipus, focuses its attention above all on the barrier between signifier and signified that constitutes the original problem of signification” (138–139). Agamben wants to overcome the view of metaphor and of signification in general as transfer or cartage across the divide, so he favors instead a double positioning, an alignment on both sides

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Figure 4.1


Siegfried J. Schmidt, “original ist nur die kopie,” (1993).

Source: Reproduced by permission of Prof. Dr. Siegfied J. Schmidt.

of a barrier. The barrier (“S/s,” although ostensibly situated between signified and signifier, recuses Sphinx from sign) necessarily remains in place. Instead of a model of signification predicated on equivalencies, encodings, transparencies, the linguistics of the Sphinx marks a distribution of obstacles, dangers, powers. The barrier must remain, in part because to remove it is to consign one of the agents of the communicative circuit to the role of surrogate barrier. The status of woman as matter, matrix, impurity (as in titles like Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty’s Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts and George Lakoff’s Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things) derives from a collapse of the barrier, and a corresponding insistence on the primal Edenic transparency of a sign that is subsequently troubled by Eve. Without the barrier, the function of power and danger is invested in woman, who is aligned with equivocations purportedly constitutive of her own divided nature (human/ animal, insider/outsider, spirit/body). But what is this “barrier” Agamben

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speaks of? It is, obviously, the Saussurean “bar” (“S/s”) that signals the expressive unity of signifier and signified; but it’s also reiterated in Greek metaphysics as the distinction between essence and appearance, presence and absence, the one and the many, and other such binaries perpetuated by distinctions between content and form, text and interpretation. Whether the relation indicated by the barrier is in fact conceived as a conventional substitution or as the amorous aesthetic embrace of form and signified, in either case what remains obscured is precisely the abyss of the original division of presence over which signification installs itself. The question that remains unasked is the only one that deserved to be formulated: why is presence deferred and fragmented such that something like “signification” even becomes possible? (Stanzas 137) To ask the question is to see that the split is not merely descriptive of a given condition but constitutive of an ongoing one. Citing an “originary apotropaic stage of language in the heart of the fracture of presence” (139), Agamben draws attention to the enigma of the Sphinx, to the fact that “[t]he ainos (story, fable) of the ainigma is not only obscurity, but a more original mode of speaking” (138). Oedipus would dispel the enigma of being and language by solving riddles, disposing of the barrier by insisting on its transparency. However, “Like the labyrinth, like the Gorgon, and like the Sphinx that utters it, the enigma belongs to the sphere of the apoptropaic, that is, to a protective power that repels the uncanny by attracting it and assuming it within itself.” (Apotropaic: apo- means lack, separation, departure, thus compounding the sense of trope as turning away, abandoning. An apotropaic configuration, like the visage of the Sphinx, is at once a personification and a depersonalization.) The bar is the face of saying, the mask of signification; and the monstrosity of its apparition is not separable from the utterance. This is the sense behind Heraclitus’ reference to the Delphic oracle who neither says (legei) nor conceals (kryptei), but signifies (semainei) (Kirk and Raven 211). I read “semainei” in the strong sense as incarnates. Signification requires paying a carnal debt to the Sphinx, that hybrid creature who exacts the toll of enigma from language. Enigma, in the domain of words, is what the monster is in society. To psychologize the encounter between Oedipus and the Sphinx is to mistake the hermetic dispensation of the myth, particularly by attributing to the Sphinx a suicidal mortification at the solving of her riddle. Rather, we should say that the assertion of Oedipal priorities destroys the apotropaic resources carefully measured out in the “monstrosity” of the Sphinx. That the Sphinx is feminized is in part the measure of the monstrosity of

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Oedipus’ own discovery about his relation with a woman. After all, he discovers nothing horrifying about woman as such, but about himself. That a woman is the bearer of the riddle of his misfortune is of course sufficient ground for Teresa de Lauretis’ repudiation of the fundamental misogyny of Western forms of narrative and the gendering of the hero as male. But I would caution against too simple an equation of Sphinx with woman. DuPlessis for instance distinguishes external from internal cultural zones. “A woman outside the gates of culture is called a sphinx, inside called a heroine” (36). The Sphinx is outside, but it is an outside specifically endowed with power and autonomy. It is also the site in which woman gives way (through monstrous metamorphosis) to something not altogether human. The Sphinx is a threshold to another dimension, the apprehension (not the “essence”) of which has something to do with womanliness—ominously so for phallocentric prerogatives. The feminization of the apotropaic principle suggests something not only about gender but about generation. Language, insofar as it’s associated with a womanly aspect, is inducted into a fecund or generative region: an honorific association of woman with generation revisited in Henry Adams’ vision of the Virgin as the incarnation of “the greatest and most mysterious of all energies” and “the greatest force the Western world ever felt” (1070, 1075). But I’d add a qualification by which the root gn (or gen) puts us in touch with knowledge as well as sexual power. “This [Indo-European] root is so prolific,” writes Joseph Shipley, “that some scholars divide it in two. It defies partition. For its two meanings, to know and to beget, continue to entwine through the linguistic changes” (129). It’s by means of this root that English retains its peculiar spelling of know. This is an instance of etymological retention, and the begetting of cognates (in which the gn is instructively embedded) participates abundantly in this retention: gnosis, cognition, ignite, kindle, kin, lingam, cunning, cunt, genital, generation, and pregnant are a few of the English residues of this ceaselessly fertile linguistic egg. I’d like to supplement this with the research by Bethe Hagens into the “venus figurines” so prevalent in Cro-Magnon sites. Hagens discovers, from a bio-semiotic perspective, that characteristic forms like the famous Venus of Lespuges are not so simply interpretable as fertility emblems. A survey of the extant set of such figures reveals a basic geometric proportion that is isomorphic with the lateral views of animal brains. That the brain of a frog or a rabbit is as eligible a visual prototype for the Venus figurines as the body of a human woman Hagens takes as evidence of the psychotropic/shamanistic orientation of early hominid cultures. The extensive archaeological network constituted by these figurines suggests that “They constitute the remains of an ancient transportation network, both non-polluting and non-material. They are the essence, the ‘elite

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power base,’ of shamanic spirit travel” (57). The point here is not the veracity of Hagens’ speculations, but the archaeological affirmation of an etymological link between gender and genius. This is not to say that intelligence is gender specific, of course, but to recognize that generation (or generativity) is a labor of “love” only if such labor includes mind, psyche. That is, from a shamanistic, and perhaps a Paleolithic, perspective, meaning and being are indissolubly linked. Genesis and genius coincide. In this ancient legacy every creative act is empowered to the degree that it is constituted in and by the enigma of gender. The insight can be extended in a radical opening of the lens of gender performance: womanliness, performed, not only convenes a law of aesthetics—a law that insists on the comeliness of sexual relations—but is also an ecological commemoration of cosmos as a cosmetic event, a shapely apparition. Inasmuch as the Sphinx propounds a linguistic riddle as the condition of life (those who fail the test are doomed), language itself is revealed to be caught up in a productive emanation. The monstrosity of the Sphinx is an apotropaic impingement on the dream of autonomous speech, unfettered articulation, uncoerced meaning; and, by the same token, it insists on the prodigality of creative emanation: meaning and being are not so easily retained within the prophylactic contours of Oedipal and Odyssean quests. The apotropaic is the mark of excess, of unmanageable proliferation manageably revealed: human-becoming-animal, sense-becoming-nonsense. Polymorphously perverse, as Norman O. Brown proclaimed in Love’s Body (1968), but which he came to reconsider in 1990 under the tutelage of Bataille: “meaning is always surplus meaning,” under the sway of “a universal principle of biological life that growth leads to excess: and excess leads to laceration and loss” (Apocalypse 193, 194). Brown affirms exuberance, but insists on a Dionysian overflow, exuberant excess. Contra Lacan, lack is culmination, not beginning. It is that discharge or leakage that punctures security, related to that onset of the final stage of labor when the sack of amniotic fluid bursts. But it’s a puncture the swollen state of security yearns for. The infant wants to be born, just as “an animal with claws wants to have to use / them” (Moore, Poems 178). Brown flamboyantly concluded Love’s Body with the affirmation: “there is only poetry” (266). He was tardy, perhaps, in recognizing the need to understand how we go from bíos or embodiment to the specific cultural staging of embodiment that is poetry, or as I’ve been considering it here, poetry as a technē of Muses. In “Dionysus in 1990,” Brown returns to Freud, specifically to the Freudian hypothesis of an instructive link between femininity and masochism. “Erotic mysticism has always known that the wound is the woman, and we are all not made whole until we are first wounded” (Apocalypse 195). Woman as origin and as destiny. (Menstruation constitutes

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the ultimate blood rite, a somatic purification that serves as a living injunction from nature to culture, a provocation to regulation, regula, measure. Is it too much to imagine poetic meter or even mathematics as an elaboration of menstrual computation? We have yet to see a history of numbers that positions communities of gynopractitioners in any founding relation to the subject.) To be “wounded” is to be womanized—a term instructively contrasted with the “humanities,” with those cultural forms that are said to humanize us; for the humanities are indeed a mode of masculinist self-assertion, a strategic denial not simply of women but of what woman signifies; and, in the terms with which I’ve been considering the inaugural gestures of poetry, of the waywardness of signification itself as the chiasmus of knowledge and generation, where “gn,” not “x,” marks the spot. The Muses and the Sirens and the Sphinx are names for an incentive to attend the pain of knowing, and in the specification of a gender the pain is named.4 “Genius,” says Emerson, “is the activity which repairs the decay of things” (457). The monstrosity of the Sphinx is that genius; and, as such, is not an obstacle to be overcome but a sign of labors and trials to which we repair. In Jean-Joseph Goux’s stimulating reconceptualization of the entire Oedipal trajectory, Oedipus represents “a tragedy of failed initiation” (54). In this version, the Sphinx is an agent of liminality, demanding the sacrifice of the secular ego in an initiatory submission to radical alterity. Goux detects in the power of the Sphinx a cultic intervention in which, following Freud, that which is properly located at the threshold of maturity is relegated to infancy. Castration, for Freud, was an infantile threat that could never be properly resolved. But Goux reverses this to suggest that the Oedipal “solution” of the castrating riddle of the Sphinx is precisely the gesture that inaugurates this perpetual deferral of castration resolution. Oedipal man thus endures a lifetime of “deferred initiation”: “Modern man’s destiny will be one of prolonged liminality, experienced in an uncompletable, open, undecidable process of auto-initiation. Modern filiarchal subjectivity is one of liminality that has become an endless process rather than a passage. All of existence has become the critical threshold” (203). Oedipus installs rationality as a tactical coup over an older regime that specifically required the sacrifice of reason, a sacrifice intended to instruct the initiate in the ratio of an order within which rationality might assess its own limits. The Sphinx enforces an ecological humiliation of self-assured reason, potentially unbounded in its hubris unless checked by humility (“castration”). Without such measures, there’s a perpetual deferral of reckoning with limits, and the hubristic madness of Oedipal autonomy becomes nothing less than the paradigm of Western reason and its commitment to progress as unlimited growth (phallic pipe dream and pregnancy without term, combined).

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Oedipus, Philosopher portrays philosophy as the filiarchal banishment of preOedipal forms of a patriarchal/matriarchal initiatory wisdom.5 The Oedipean structure of pathos and knowledge is thus the distinctive feature of the post-traditional world in which the dramaturgy of transmission has entirely disappeared as an established social practice and in which the passage through castration (separation, severing) remains free, individual, self-generated, and in a sense deferred, permanent, indefinite. The historical world would thus be not so much a world in which the process of initiation has disappeared as a world in which no one is ever done with it—a world of the son, who structurally, fundamentally, cannot stabilize himself in the knowing posture of the father: a world of prolonged liminality. In short, a world of (permanent, provisional, repeated) auto-institution, thus of history. (205–206) This auto-institution imposes on the philosopher-king an impossible double obligation: to incarnate rational sovereignty, but at the same time to be unmarked by disfiguring trauma, and thus always paranoiacally sensitized to the trauma yet to come, the trauma of succession, revolution, overthrow. If “history” is the permanently unstable world of “auto-institution,” then pre-history would consist of an aptitude for regulating catastrophic dispossession, incorporating loss into the life-cycle rather than projecting it into the aleatory numbers game of History. The wound of reason, not admitting impediment in itself, nor conceding the need for excess (whether as performativity in gender, Dionysian madness, etc.), feels the very atmosphere pregnant with omens of rupture and downfall. The other wound—the “wound” of the other—is not catastrophic but strophic or tropic, tropologically generative. It’s tendentious to confine woman to a symbolically bifurcated position of subordination; but what I’ve been outlining here is a trauma fixated on the correspondingly claustrophobic confinement of male rationality to that proverbial “waiting room,” outside and insulated from the primal scene of birth. The anxiety of male inspiration (facilitated by Muses) has to do with contamination and loss of control; exile from the theatre of operations; initiation into lack. We still feel the lack, but have forgotten the drama of initiation, the ceremonial induction into another (a numinous) order. DuPlessis’ insistence on exploring the structure of donations incumbent on women caught between the roles of muse and poetess reveals, in the case of H.D. at least, a curious turn: the muse as “emotional institution” compels a female assertion of order in a matrix oppressively charged with orders. So H.D. derives, from the complex layering of family and social romance(s), a “multiple family muse,” a way of transforming contending Muses into a

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structure of filiations (25, 37). Persuasive as is the case of H.D., it still relies on the family romance, the Oedipal complex, the nuclear stronghold of phallocentrism. What remains to be considered is induction into an order truly strange, not recuperative like H.D.’s, but involving un coup de dés, in which inspiration is fully at the disposal (the dispersal) of the initiatory momentum: not only making the device strange, as in Russian Formalism and German Expressionism, but making oneself strange as well, until the stranger in our midst is us. One by one, each by each. The menstrual substrate of the Muse tradition speaks of discharge as regeneration—an instance of “unproductive expenditure” well in advance of Bataille’s theorizing—but it also confers this acknowledgment as praxis. As praxis, the Muse (with the Sphinx) is liberated from the gender assignment of raw matter as enabling impediment, obstacle for the hero to overcome, or the poet to stylistically abate. As enigma, a word in which the primal “gn” root embeds wisdom and pregnance, reproduction is not a tautology that woman embodies but a ritual technē invoking initiatory measures, ratios, and pragmata; a liminal threshold of mesmerizing and confounding generativity, an image of which might be the incarnate perplexity of Jerome Rothenberg’s “female jesus”: my holy lady misery I reach to in her dream whose substance is her beard a tuft of hair around her wet mouth where the shaman crosses a blood river tufts of hair are floating in queen jesus I have become this singer minstrel thy young bard (Khurbn 45) Although this example perpetuates the familiar scenario of male supplication before inspiring female, the androgynous portrait is in thrall to the real, perpetually other, primal scene, a scene of “lascivious revelation” as Mina Loy puts it (6), in which I am knowing All about Unfolding (7)

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In sum, at least the sum Loy envisions: “We splinter into Wholes” (72)— “humble indivisibles in this grand continuum” in Finnegans Wake, “the nucleus of a glow of a zeal of soul” (Joyce 472). But beyond the allure of such delectation, in which all and nothing spin dervish like in cosmic (and comic) concord, human lives confront and negotiate human outcomes, where in Adrienne Rich’s vision . . . something hangs between us older and deeper than ourselves like a translucent curtain, a sheet of water a dusty window the irreducible, incomplete connection between the dead and the living or between man and woman in this savagely fathered and unmothered world (122)


CHAPTER FIVE


The mirror that delivers Quod backward in time, and the mirror that reflects the present upon him, are one and the same. Then there is the mirror of the future which, because of its extreme age, has lost its tain and thus became incapable of harboring images. —Michael Palmer (Promises of Glass 53)

P

ostmodernism has become a paradoxically dated term. Because it had its greatest currency during an interlude when modernism was presumed defunct, the “postmodern” was a concept invested in getting over, going beyond, superseding a “modernism” unfit for further scrutiny. In the past decade, a boom in scholarship has revealed unsuspected dimensions of modernism. Post-modernism, meanwhile, seems to have foundered at the dead letter office. “What was postmodernism, and what is it still?” wonders Ihab Hassan, one of its earlier theorists, who characterizes it as “a revenant, the return of the irrepressible; every time we are rid of it, its ghost rises back” (1). Although he concedes it’s an Oedipal concept, ineffectual without modernism breathing down its neck, Hassan clearly favors retaining it for conceptual application while more or less conceding its collapse as a periodizing referent (8). But even if we admit the futility of attempts to fabricate a reliable mirror of this or any other age, there’s still something to be learned from the urge to narrate beginnings and ends, to distinguish one sort of time from another. While periodization can be fickle, it also provokes the imagination. Hesiod’s division of the ages into gold, silver, bronze, and iron suggests that

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to periodize is the prerogative of poets, as Pound intuited when he said “The Renaissance is not a time, but a temperament” (Spirit 166). “Poets light but Lamps— / Themselves—go out,” wrote Emily Dickinson. “Each Age a Lens / Disseminating their / Circumference” (Poems 419). But, as is readily apparent from the contents of old anthologies, poetic temperament can be helplessly collective. This apparition of uniformity is just what historians look for as they probe the temper of an age, trying to estimate the typical against which to contrast the unique. If, as Croce maintained, periodization is largely “an affair of imagination, of vocabulary, and of rhetoric” (Ritter 315), to refer to a period is a way of exercising imaginative control over something otherwise out of reach. For poets, such an exercise transforms the historians’ fallacy of essence into patterns of incidence (narrative) and coincidence (trope). This is tantamount to saying that historical periods are poetic visions, constellations of images: imaginary gardens with real toads in them. In Thomas Carlyle’s pungent characterization, history “is an everliving, ever-working Chaos of Being, wherein shape after shape bodies itself forth from innumerable elements” (60)—or in strictly human terms, “the Message, verbal or written, which all Mankind delivers to every man” (104). Carlyle objected to the tendency to parse this message along progressive or narrative lines: “Narrative is linear, Action is solid,” he cautioned (60). So he favored terms like palimpsest to evoke the density of history, “a real Prophetic Manuscript” that “can be fully interpreted by no man because such interpretation would be “more suitable for Omniscience than for human science” (60). Carlyle sensibly reckoned that the profusion of evidence, where history is concerned, is unwieldy. Ironically, “History, then, before it can become Universal History, needs of all things to be compressed” (108–109). Compression is an art; “Dichtung = condensare,” Pound insisted (ABC 36). Even so simple an exercise as “stating the facts” relies on the rhetorical devices involved in making sentences. Facts may be reported, but sentences are made, and the honorific model of the maker is poet. “History” is the term we use for vast collective forms of life that are literally inscrutable, beyond the grasp of an observer except in figurative or poetic terms; and foremost among such terms are period concepts like the middle ages, enlightenment, romanticism, modernity. To approach the volatile fusion of history and poetry, it’s useful to glean what we can from Dante, whose traversal of heaven and hell was instructively calibrated to the history of his time—a constant reminder that to imagine another life means bearing down on this life with the full weight of imagination.1 Charles Williams calls Dante’s quest the Way of the Affirmation of Images, proposing that “All images are to excite qualities in us” (231). Williams points out that Beatrice (Dante’s guide once he ascends

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to the Heavenly spheres) repeatedly insists, “look, look well.” As for Dante, “Attention is demanded of him and her expositions are the result of his attention. She is, in a sense, his very act of knowing” (231). Beatrice, then, is the voice of guidance emanating from the vision itself—after all, Dante’s glimpse of the prepubescent Beatrice triggered his entire mission as a poet. It’s as though Dante wondered: What if events could speak? What would they say? Whom would they indict? In what figure should they be personified? The same concern applies to the Purgatorio and the Inferno, in which the pagan poet Virgil is guide. In Book IX of the Inferno, Dante encounters an instructive counterpart to Beatrice’s exhortation to “look, look well,” in the figure of the Medusa with her serpentine hair and ghastly visage. Medusa, the Gorgon, is a reprimand to sight, the opposite of vision. Most do not survive her gaze, but the myth makes an exception for those like Perseus who survive by the mediating apparatus of a mirror or reflective shield. The figure of Medusa is pertinent to any situation in which the pilgrim (poet and historian alike) cannot see the material. Wherever obscurity prevails, Medusa looms up as a paralyzing threat to lucidity. Adopting Medusa as mythopoetic shorthand for what’s encountered when perspective is impaired or imperiled, I’m proposing in a strictly heuristic way to adopt this figure as a way of approaching an historical episode involving poets. I take a hint here from Walter Benjamin’s proposition that “the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation” (Illuminations 240). Benjamin contrasts contemplation—or untroubled absorption in an image—with perception in the mode of distraction, or haptic assimilation, the way we experience architecture, weather, and much else. In the instance to which I now turn, it’s as if a generation of poets was alarmed by the Medusa of historical circumstance—the grim insistence of the Cold War and its paralyzing kinship with an apocalyptically hot nuclear alternative—and, inching closer to Benjamin’s haptic distraction while remaining fixated on the optic image, sought a way in poetry to purge the reflective shield of any reflection at all. With narcissistic determination, in fact, they tried to turn the shield into a pool in which, before the appearance of their own desiring gaze ruffled the surface, there was nothing but replenishing darkness, archetype on archetype of darkness all the way down. Deep Image A suitable epigraph for the episode I’m about to document might be: “An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties” (D. Barnes 111).

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This geometric paradigm, with its substantive center and diffuse limits, may owe something to the Parisian milieu in which Djuna Barnes conceived Nightwood. Several years earlier, in his journal of literary Cubism, Nord-Sud, in an issue containing poems by future Surrealists Soupault, Aragon, and Tzara, Pierre Reverdy published a few pages of reflections on the image. “L’Image” was one in a series spanning the run of Nord-Sud; other topics included emotion, space, syntax, tradition, and cinematography. L’Image est une creation pure de l’esprit. Elle ne peut naître d’une comparaison mais du rapprochement de deux réalités plus ou moins éloignées. Plus les rapports des deux réalités rapprochées seront lointains et justes, plus l’image sera forte—plus elle aura de puissance emotive et de réalité poétique. (The Image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born from a comparison but by bringing together two more or less distant realities. Insofar as the relationship between the two realities is distant and exact—the greater will be its emotional power and poetic reality.) (3) This is the passage from Reverdy’s ruminations André Breton cited in the first manifesto of Surrealism, accompanied by enigmatic remarks about the author from whom Breton had become estranged. In 1952, he looked back on Reverdy with respect: “Once you knew him, nothing seemed as important as his theses on the image in poetry”—which, with his other pieces in Nord-Sud, “put forth several lasting principles and major themes on the subject of poetic creation” (Conversations 30, 22). For the adventure of Surrealism, Reverdy offered a salutary provocation, foremost of which is the suggestion that the image is a pure creation of the mind. Mind (l’esprit), not eye. Furthermore, “poetic reality” demands that the bipolar forces conjoined in the image maintain their separation. There is no blending or merging, but rather a sustained tension in the electromagnetic sense. “It is, as it were,” wrote Breton, “from the fortuitous juxtaposition of the two terms that a particular light has sprung, the light of the image” (Manifestoes 37). Trusting the inexhaustible “murmur” (see chapter one), Breton sanctioned a practice in Surrealism that forfeited the poem to a potentially mechanical function as image-machine, its libidinally inspired lists becoming as formulaic as the libertine catalogue of Marquis de Sade. But this liability proved acceptable, even desirable. Affirming the “depth of the dream,” Breton

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concedes that it’s all about submersion: “I prefer to fall” (Manifestoes 11n.). The poem is tethered to reality by its incompleteness; its disappointments and inertia force a way out, a return to that point “where construction and destruction can no longer be brandished one against the other” (124)—and, by inference, where good and bad poems can no longer be meaningfully distinguished. If the lyric effusions of Surrealist poetry rarely lived up to the incandescence of the image, the palpable sense of depth in Surrealism was achieved in visual art, despite the constant risk of pictorial anecdote. This success was not strictly optical, considering the tactile provocations of Meret Oppenheim’s Objet surréaliste (a fur-covered teacup), Man Ray’s Cadeaux (“Gift,” a clothing iron studded with tacks), not to mention the whole domain of the poème-objet. By 1950—after the exiled Surrealists had baptized Abstract Expressionism and gone back to Europe—Surrealism seemed decidedly “pre-War,” outdated. For young poets mistrustful of the prevailing formalism, however, the European avant-garde was news that stayed news. From about 1961 to 1965, “deep image” reflected a conviction that a replenishing subconscious evident in poets like Lorca, Neruda, Vallejo, Trakl, and others could serve simultaneously as spiritual intoxicant and technical device: “To strip to the least,” Robert Kelly later recalled the fundamental initiative, “& the least was: image” (Statement 6). The coordinates of deep image are most accessible by way of Gaston Bachelard rather than the poets themselves (for a detailed recapitulation, see Rasula, “Deep Image”). It’s not clear that any of them knew his work, although his cycle of books on the imagination of matter appeared in the 1940s. In L’Air et les songes (1943) Bachelard wonders, “Can the study of fleeting images be a subject?” (13). Differently applied, the question is: Can a deep image poem be composed? “We always think of the imagination as the faculty that forms images,” he writes. “On the contrary, it deforms what we perceive; it is, above all, the faculty that frees us from immediate images and changes them” and, in this capacity, the imagination is “the human psyche’s experience of openness and novelty” (1). To imagine, then, means nothing less than “to launch out toward a new life” (3). The theorists of deep image— Jerome Rothenberg and Robert Kelly—certainly felt the tug of this liberating potential, but they failed to detach the created image sufficiently from perceptual material, as is evident from the reactions of David Antin, Robert Creeley, and others at the time. Nevertheless, I suspect Kelly or Rothenberg would have been pleased to offer so clarifying a definition as this: “Both at the time of its birth and when it is in full flight, the image within us is the subject of the verb to imagine. It is not its direct object” (Air 14)—to which might be added Aby Warburg’s preoccupation with movement or rhythm in

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the image (“for Warburg the question of movement became associated with the subject’s entrance into the image, with rites of passage, and with the dramatizations affecting his or her appearance” [Michaud 32]). With hindsight, Rothenberg admitted that, as far as deep image was concerned, the images “were probably in a Poundian way viewed as energy clusters” (Alpert, “Rothenberg—An Interview” 142). If Pound’s vortex was the tacit model, it was the image of Imagism that all too easily prevailed, despite repeated protests and disavowals. “The poetry we have now is a poetry without the image,” Robert Bly complained (American 20). In 1959 he declared the Imagists “misnamed: they did not write in images from the unconscious, as Lorca or Neruda, but in simple pictures” (“Some Thoughts” 8). Of course it might seem ludicrous to malign the Imagists for something they never attempted, but Bly’s charge duplicates Pound’s own shift in allegiance from image to vortex—which in turn has an intriguing historical parallel with Aby Warburg’s critique of iconology, proposing that images in art might be better approached as “dynamograms” (Gombrich 244, 248). Creeley shared Bly’s concern that deep image could subside into mere pictorialism. He took that to be the trouble with Imagism, caught up in “the psychology of reference” and quickly becoming “a machine of manner” (“Exchange” 28). Creeley was aware of a deviant inflection of the image in Surrealism, but thought that this tendency, implicit in deep image, could “make sensational reference overvalued” (28)—as it did in the work of the Confessional poets. In fact, in the history of poetry it’s hard not to find abundant examples of image as anecdotal illustration. In “Frost at Midnight,” Coleridge offers such an image precisely so as to question its grip on the mind as “a toy of Thought”: . . . Sea, and hill, and wood, With all the numberless goings-on of life, Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not; Only that film, which fluttered on the grate, Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing. Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature Gives it dim sympathies with me who live, Making it a companionable form, Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit By its own moods interprets, every where Echo or mirror seeking of itself, And makes a toy of Thought. (63)

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To what degree, then, are putatively “deep” images nothing more than “puny flaps and freaks”—suppositions of an “idling Spirit”? Deep image theory was haunted by the tautology its name insinuated. Like the emperor’s new clothes, an image could be hailed as deep just because it was a “deep image.” The liability was compounded by the terms most often used to evoke it: unconscious and visionary. Rothenberg aspired to a poetry in which “the unconscious is speaking to the unconscious” (Ossman 31). He suggested that a Zen koan was a more sensible analogy for the deep image poem “driv[ing] the mind into a cul-de-sac, in which it can only cry, ‘Ah, this!’ ”—confronting “the perilous point where meaning is held in a tension on the sheer verge of meaninglessness” (“Deep” 52). Oscillating between blankness and revelation, deep image was consistently thought to appear in a flash—sharing perhaps the messianic impulse, but not the historical dialectic, of Walter Benjamin’s famous dictum, “The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again” (Illuminations 255). An aesthetic of suddenness tends to dissolve continuity (provoking Karl Heinz Bohrer to ask, “Is the utopia of the moment a negative utopia?” [226]), but Kelly recognized in deep image a search for something determinate, like sonar scanning from a submarine. Deep image was not simply the 1912 Imagist image with depth as added value. So Kelly spoke of “a kind of poetry not necessarily dominated by the images, but in which it is the rhythm of images which form the dominant movement of the poem” (Ossman 34); and this dominant movement is disclosed as a kind of hologram, or some multidirectional force identified by José Lezama Lima: “everything the image is based upon is hypertelic” (107). Andrei Bely, the Russian Symbolist, evokes the elusive domain sought by deep image theory: “In poetry the words are grouped in such a fashion that their totality gives the image” (97). The original provocation behind Kelly’s “Notes on the Poetry of the Deep Image” was the film, and film theory, of Sergei Eisenstein. Eisenstein was keen on the cinematic possibility of a “montage of attractions”—that is, the mobilization of “emotional shocks” deployed in “a free montage with arbitrarily chosen independent . . . effects” (Selected 35). The important thing, from a poetic as well as a cinematic viewpoint, is the rhythmic dynamic correlating emotional intensity with images. “Image is the rhythm of poetry,” Kelly declared, attributing the insight to Nicolas Calas (Ossman 37). Calas, a Greek poet initiated into the Surrealist circle in Paris in the 1930s, established himself as an art critic in New York after the war. In his first American book, Confound the Wise (1942), Calas discusses the “crisis of automatism” facing the Surrealist use of images drawn from the unconscious—a crisis typified by Rothenberg’s early work, making it difficult in 1961–1962

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for readers to distinguish deep image from Surrealism. Does Rothenberg’s “rain that falls through my needle” qualify as one or the other, or both? Multiplied through the poem—with “an egg full of hours,” “the rain of wet dollars,” conveyed by burning eyes and hair taking root “like red trees” (White 30)—the potential of deep image collapses back into Surrealist dirge. In Calas’ useful diagnosis, “The application in poetry of the great Freudian discovery of the role of the unconscious has helped Surrealism to understand all the poetic import of the image but it did not help us to grasp immediately the rhythm of the free association of words” (27). In the case of automatic writing, there is no structural distinction between beginning, middle, and end, so the reader has no basis for absorbing the cadence of images. However charged with the dynamism of the unconscious, the images remain static, an indifferent glimpse of a perpetual vibration—like Henri Michaux’s “conveyer belt in motion” experienced on hashish (see chapter one). “What was audacious in 1925 gave the effect of unbearable repetition”—resulting in what Calas calls “the crisis of rhythm” (28). In the second issue of Poems from the Floating World, in which Rothenberg first ventured the term “deep image”—not as a theoretical platform, but as an evocation of the magazine’s name—two epigraphs printed inside the covers evoke the field, one by Buber (“What can be learned does not matter; what matters is the self-abandonment to that which is not known”), another by Calas (“The laws of the combination of images constitute the form of poetry; the movement of images is rhythm”). Supplementing the technical implications of Calas’s proposition, Buber’s exhortation to submit to the unknown established the mystical side of deep image. Pursuit of the unknown may mean pursuit of the unknowable, and deep image may not be an image at all, but a “sound” provoked by, or in attunement with, a rhythm. So Kelly imagines deep image not in retinal but in auditory terms: “the image, after its first appearance as dark sound, still lingers as resonance” (“Notes” 15). “Sound is image. Touch is image” (In Time 8). It was “dark sounds” that, for García Lorca, defined duende, the otherwise unnamable force he associated with flamenco, bullfighting, and poetry at their perilous extreme. Duende is the dark side of creative endeavor. “Every image has its field of force, its shadow moving darkly through the poem, with which the poet must contend” (“Notes” 16). As with duende, deep image is a way of recognizing that ineffable point at which the work of creation joins the work of destruction; and Kelly’s hope was that deep image “restores the poetry of desperation” (16). In a 1973 interview, Robert Kelly discussed his earlier attraction to deep image in terms that suggest why it stalled: “I was concerned to find the image in the imageless,” he recalled. “Deep image to me was the image

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that was not perceptible to the senses, and that could be arrived at finally only syntactically” (Alpert, “Kelly—An Interview” 20, 21). The syntactic contribution to the apprehension of images as such was crucial to Creeley’s resistance to putative depth where image was concerned: “there is an ‘image’ in a mode, in a way of statement as much ‘image’ as any reference to pictorial element” (“Exchange” 26). Syntax means putting together; syntax is the arrangement of the parts, or rhythm in the sense Kelly drew from Calas. In his exchange with Creeley, Rothenberg singled out the older poet’s “The Door” as a consummate example of deep image. At three pages, “The Door” is one of Creeley’s longer poems; and I recall Kelly saying, in an appreciative reverie in 1973, that if you don’t consult the clock “The Door” is an epic. Creeley’s poem deftly intertwines a rudimentary image with alternating passages of self-scrutiny and emerging dream vision, until “The Door” rivals the work of the medieval Pearl poet. If by deep image we mean “The Door,” then deep image is a rarity. Despite the lucid image of “the door / cut so small in the wall” (Collected 199), there’s nothing uncanny or deep about it except through its cumulative effect in the poem, in which it operates more like a musical refrain than an enhanced or augmented image. To pursue deep image, in light of “The Door,” meant superseding the optical image in what Rothenberg called a “pattern of the movement from perception to vision” as in visionary—a tradition of venerable apprehensions of imageless images. The sense of transfiguration implied is handsomely accessible through a cognate term, imago: an insect in its sexually mature adult stage after metamorphosis. A butterfly. Another aspect of deep image was identified by David Antin, who resisted inclusion in the deep image portfolio his friends Kelly and Rothenberg presented in Nomad. As he recalled it in 1975: The idea was that the image was a kind of primitive psychological semantic construct. A kind of instant response that wasn’t contaminated by a conventional syntax that tended, because of its orthodox structure, to assimilate all experience to what we used to call a “legislated reality,” that was built up out of a handful of conventional cultural metaphors. At least that’s the way I used to describe what we meant by an “image,” and I think there was some agreement among us that that’s what it meant. (Alpert, “Antin—An Interview” 5) As it happened, the issue of Nomad featuring deep image included poems by Jackson Mac Low along with his essay “Poetry, Chance, Silence, &c.” Mac Low was involved in the lower east side scene, and his performance work along with his chance generated compositions had a liberating effect

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on Antin, particularly in the linguistic turn signaled by “definitions for mendy.” Antin recalls a public reading: “it must have sounded very aggressively remote from anything like ‘deep image’ poetry . . . I know from others that it sounded kind of fierce and antipoetic” (Alpert 16). The poem was an elegy, so its tactical submission to a technical definition of loss (from an insurance manual) cut loose any trace of deep image. loss is an unintentional decline in or disappearance of a value arising from a contingency a value is an efficacy a power a brightness it is also a duration (Antin, Selected 59) Nonetheless, the third page of the poem, which is blank except for two lines, seems to indulge in deep image as promoted by Kelly and Rothenberg: “is there enough silence here for a glass of water” in the middle of the page, and at the bottom: “is it dark enough for bread” (61). These are not the only images in “definitions,” but the silence and darkness recall aspirations of deep image to reach into, and engage, the unimaginable in the image. Of Mendy, Antin said, “It was his death and there was something about it I didn’t understand and I knew I didn’t, and the one thing I believe a poet ought to do is respect what he doesn’t understand, respect its unintelligibility” (Alpert, “Antin—An Interview” 17). But where deep image was the pursuit of unintelligibility by means of images, Antin was primarily exploring the uncanny resources of linguistic banality drawn from professional jargons and common speech. In 1965 Rothenberg and Antin launched their journal Some/thing. In the inaugural issue, Antin provided a text in full caps that might be construed as its manifesto, “Silence/Noise.” The modernist aspiration to purify the language of the tribe is reaffirmed, but with a shift of emphasis symptomatic of the Cold War/Vietnam era. “       . . .              ” (“Silence/Noise” 60). Antin affirms a reinvigorating embrace of the full potential of language, including its supposedly antipoetic aspects: “                  ” (60). Rothenberg’s agreement with this position is reflected not only in the procedural compositions he embarked on at this time, but in his later assessment of the danger for deep image “that one might move into a limited poetic vocabulary (a new set of image conventions as culturally controlled as the old) without ever exploring the full range of language that might also lead to the deep image” (Power 141). Still, deep image was not altogether withheld

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from Some/thing. Antin’s concluding remarks link the magazine’s title to utopian aspirations for something beyond reach, or deep: “   /                               ” (63). By a coincidence of chronology, Some/thing was launched the year Jack Spicer died. Spicer and Antin are among the poets most responsible for the subsequent linguistic turn in American poetry. While Antin was clearly uncomfortable with the deep image theorizing of his friends, he concurred that poetic practice needed to submerge itself in prima materia in the alchemical sense, to achieve a new distillation of its resources—resources Antin thought of as language itself in its broadest capacity. Perhaps not coincidentally, Chomsky’s theories of deep grammar were taking shape at this time, although Wittgenstein had had an impact on Antin much earlier. Wittgenstein also evoked unfathomable depth: The problems arising through a misinterpretation of our forms of language have the character of depth. They are deep disquietudes; their roots are as deep in us as the forms of our language and their significance is as great as the importance of our language. —Let us ask ourselves: why do we feel a grammatical joke to be deep? (And that is what the depth of philosophy is.) (Philosophical 41) Jack Spicer’s work is a veritable carnival of grammatical jokes, stress marks of a surface irreverence that are also “deep disquietudes”—a poet for whom “pathology leads to new paths and pathfinding. All the way down past the future” (179). Going down is an Orphic obligation; and Spicer’s fixation on Cocteau’s Orpheus provided him with the functional mythology of his work, the generative grammar of a poetics of fracture he called “disturbance” (55). In the project initiating his cycle of composed books, After Lorca (1958), Spicer’s gnarled receptivity to the Spanish poet is playful but also anguished, as if he’d glimpsed the prospect of deep image in its larval struggle with duende. “I would like the moon in my poems to be a real moon, one which could be suddenly covered with a cloud that has nothing to do with the poem—a moon utterly independent of images” (33). But the moon and the cloud are images, and “I would like” remains a wish—unless it’s elevated to theory as it was for Goethe, for whom “The highest thing would be to grasp that everything factual is already theory. The blue of the sky reveals to us the fundamental law of chromatics. One would never search for anything behind the phenomena; they themselves are the theory” (Buck-Morss 72). Such pan-semiosis risks sudden reversal from plenitude to poverty: all things

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signify something, or they signify nothing. The zero-sum game is implicit in Mallarmé’s wager. Spicer rolled those dice and lost—a gamble addressed by Robin Blaser in “The Practice of the Outside,” included in his edition of Spicer’s Collected Books. “It is within language that the world speaks to us with a voice that is not our own” (Spicer 279), Blaser writes in an insight germane to the developing poetics of his own “Image-Nations” sequence, in which the “strange unfamiliarity / of the familiar” (Holy 138) resonates between the lure of the hermetic and the imperative of public discourse. Deep image theory, in light of linguistic considerations germane to American poetry prior to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine—exemplified by Antin, Mac Low, Spicer, and Blaser—suggests aspirations alien to the practice and legacy of Robert Bly, unless Jungian archetypes are taken to be a kind of tribal deep grammar of the imagination (Bly was keenly receptive to the universal cipher of nature in Jacob Boehme’s doctrine of signatures). Certainly for Rothenberg, as for Bly, the potential of the image had archetypal resonances. Rothenberg thought deep image “carried the hope, like poetry in general, of ‘finding the center,’ which is an activity the ancestors in the old myths of founding engaged in at the outset & that we have to learn to do again with all means at our disposal” (Power 143). After Some/thing, Rothenberg went on to edit the anthologies Technicians of the Sacred and Shaking the Pumpkin, and the ethnopoetics journal Alcheringa—all manifestly concerned with mythopoesis; and he would also be instrumental in facilitating contacts between key participants in what emerged as “language writing.” And while language writing inherited the procedural orientation of Mac Low and Antin, and expansively took in the challenge of Wittgenstein and Gertrude Stein, the issues surrounding deep image were left far behind. Or so it seems. Should deep image be restricted to period connotations, and understood as the selective integration of surrealist-tinged duende into American poetry, as Edward Hirsch assumes? Assimilating Lorca, Neruda, and Vallejo into the politically charged American milieu, deep image—“an image saturated with psyche that was both archaic and new” (210)—came to fruition, according to Hirsch, in the work of Bly and Wright, as well as in The Lice by W.S. Merwin, The Book of Nightmares by Galway Kinnell, They Feed They Lion by Philip Levine, and The Sorrow Dance by Denise Levertov. Certainly there’s a familiar obsession with darkness: Merwin’s “There are still bits of night like closed eyes in the walls” (Lice 79); Kinnell’s “I, too, have eaten / the meals of the dark shore” (Book 29); and Levine’s young wife with “a gift / for the night that is always rising” (8)—not to mention the tone set, definitively, by Bly in “Snowfall in the Afternoon,” the final poem in Silence in the Snowy Fields: “If I reached my hands down, near the earth, / I could

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take handfuls of darkness! / A darkness was always there, which we never noticed” (Silence 60). Bly’s subsequent turn to political poetry in The Light Around the Body and The Teeth Mother Naked at Last mobilized deep image strategy for political ends, hoping that the unconscious might somehow be shared with an entire population in congregational rapport. In the form of Jungian archetypes it is in fact shared as a sacramental commemoration of images; and Bly went from being celebrated as the author of “newly discovered archetype[s]” (Libby 38) to being accused of practicing a “Jungian evangelism” (Kramer 214). In retrospect, Bly’s advocacy for poets in translation has had a more enduring impact than his own poetry. The steady flood of Neruda in English, the ubiquity of Lorca, the availability of Vallejo, Trakl, Char, and Ponge in a variety of translations: these may seem like symptoms of a healthy interest in foreign poetry in America, but it was Bly who first called for (and often undertook) translations of their work in The Fifties and The Sixties. Only Rilke, among the many poets Bly promoted, had significant presence in English before he took up the cause. In the case of Tomas Tranströmer, Bly encountered a poet whose life work fulfills the mandate of deep image theory, even if he never had any contact with it except remotely, through Bly. In any case, Bly’s wish came true, the wish for an American poetry infused with the “depth” that only image imports could provide. Rothenberg later wondered if “it might not have been better to speak of, say, an open image rather than a deep one” (“Letter” 27). Kelly, too, attempted a terminological correction: “Where we were wrong was to speak of deep image when the word we wanted was depth” (Statement [9]). In 1965 he denounced “phony primitivism and the decades-old search for discordant images,” while conceding, of deep image, “It is deeply painful to me to see its name applied to incompetent bourgeois romanticism” (“Letter” 26). With the proliferation of creative writing programs in the 1970s, deep image (by then understood exclusively with reference to Bly and Wright) became part of an institutional recipe promoting the seemingly motorized production of lyrics emitted from a deep image popgun. A notable exception—attributable in part to the leavening ingredient of kitsch—was the work of the most dominant figure in post-1960s American poetry, John Ashbery. The Double Dream of Spring is resonant throughout with an almost olfactory hint of deep image; and Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror met the challenge of iconographic meditation; but the campy pop cultural foundations of Ashbery’s swelling body of work gives a very different inflection to suppositions about what one encounters in the “sieved dark” (Double 66)—an inflection possibly more attuned to the American psyche than the archetypal panorama of Bly or the episodic homespun Polaroid surrealism of the creative writing

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programs in their first flush. What Ashbery makes available, at least as supplement to deep image, is a complex apparition of “the loose / Meaning, untidy and simple like a threshing floor” (Double 18). Insofar as Ashbery’s readers are disoriented, the patently simple is haunted by some peripheral worry, deep image as shark’s fin—or is it just a trick of light on the waves? Surface or depth? The sense that surface and depth may be snug against one another like two sides of a sheet of paper is even more insistently pursued by Michael Palmer, a beneficiary and agent of the linguistic turn in American poetry. Palmer, like Creeley, bears allegiance to the syntactic rather than the pictorial promise of poetry; and such images as do emerge (“A headless man walks, lives / for four hours” [Sun 59]) are enhanced (or rendered “deep”) by syntactic perturbations rather than by rhetorical enframing. Yet Palmer’s canny imagination, evident in the epigraph to this chapter, has increasingly probed the historical imagination, confronting space-time enigmas commensurate with our own reality rather than some vestigial nineteenth-century version of it. Syntax—that labor of joining or putting together—has turned out to be a more fertile incitement to poetic possibility than the reassuring parade of images. As early as 1965 Rothenberg suspected as much, locating the incentive behind the deep image debate in a “freedom for the mind to move among words and things, to invent . . . relationships without finality” (“Letter” 27). Rothenberg’s explorations of procedural composition (like Gematria) and performance strategies (linking Dada with ritual chant) released him from the trap of deep image as invitation to somnambulistic automatism, coming to fruition in his long poem “Khurbn” after visiting a concentration camp in Poland. The term khurbn—the “dark word” (Khurbn 5)—is a Yiddish alternative to “holocaust”: “too much smacking of a ‘sacrifice’ ” (3). This forty page poem (foreshadowed by “The Presence of the Dead is in Every Corner,” the poem immediately following “Deep Image: Footnote” in Nomad in 1962) consists almost entirely of litanies and lists, but the historical context renders them not only accessible but even suspenseful, unencumbered by any sense of automatism. In contrast to Bly’s tendency to replenish the dayworld with dark archetypes, “Khurbn” is a cry of pure loss, following the hypnagogic instruction “practice your scream” (11): “Let a picture begin to form with every scream / Let the screams tell you that the world was formed in darkness that it ends in darkness” (34). By its exuberantly declamatory means, “Khurbn” emerges as an affirmative encounter with the blackest of black suns, suggesting that deep image continued to beckon Rothenberg for decades after he abandoned the theory. As a concept abandoned by its creators, even as they held on in practice to the hopes it awakened, deep image remains unsettled, a trail of clues leading

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to a deserted worksite. Its short career was plagued by a sense of overbearing advocacy, not because Rothenberg and Kelly were prone to issuing edicts, but because the term was quickly associated with Bly, who was. Nonetheless, an injunction remains in the form of a lesson taught by the Medusa: one can only be aware of deep image in peripheral vision, as it were; thwarting direct scrutiny, it cannot be assimilated to a program. Because deep image was a misleadingly concrete specification of the unspecifiable, Walter Kalaidjian claims that in Bly’s case it was an “essentially conservative aesthetic” draining his poetry of its “discursive power” (197). Bly and Rothenberg both went tribal in their own ways, notwithstanding the irony that the original provocation of deep image was the poetry of cosmopolitan Europeans. Deep image aspired to renew the archaic resources of poetry, and such a quest could not help becoming ontological rather than aesthetic. “The basic enigma of ‘deep image’ poetry,” wrote one critic in 1973, “is that it is not so much a technique as it is a state of being” (Piccione 53). Compounding the ontological riddle, suggested Charles Altieri a few years later, is that deep image is “man’s way of experiencing the nonsubjective depths of his own being alive” (85). The existential imperative that drove deep image—feeling around in the dark for something without predetermined shape or dimension, but which by that very indeterminacy (openness, “without finality”) belongs to the darkness—was an act of faith that it (whatever it was) would be recognizable when it appeared. But recognizable to whom? After all, “the unconscious speaking to the unconscious” eclipses consciousness altogether: so one might be engaged with deep image and know nothing whatever about it, like a sleepwalker’s oblivious indulgence in a nocturnal ramble. In Robert Kelly’s valedictory commemoration of the stream of images lost to the dark: I once had a deep intuition of . . . a place in us in which the images die, in which they mount up and falter to the back, almost literally going over the pons, over the bridge in the brain, back into the back and die, die there, the images die. And our obsessions die there too, the hundreds of thousands of perceptions that we have every minute go there and become washed clean, and some few of them become redeemed along the way. (Erwin and Rasula 135) In the end, deep image is the reader’s share, not the author’s prerogative; the deep image is that one that sucks you under the ongoing flow. In its search for a tropological trapdoor, deep image was clearly a belated episode of Surrealism: not only the surrealism of associative discontinuity and cultivated perceptual puzzle—not only a style—but Surrealism as

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understood by Octavio Paz, whose lucidity on the subject derives from a unique combination of participation and distance. “The surrealist adventure is an attack on the modern world because it tries to suppress the quarrel between subject and object,” he wrote, in a passage that might equally apply to deep image. “The same acid that dissolves the object disintegrates the subject. There is no self, there is no creator, but rather a kind of poetic force that blows where it will and produces gratuitous and inexplicable images” (Bow 153). The mystical assent is ominously at hand in the presence of this gratuitous force, as Paz well knows. “Inspiration is manifested or actualized in images. By means of inspiration, we imagine. And as we imagine, we dissolve subject and object, we dissolve our selves and suppress contradiction” (154); and as Paz infers from Reverdy’s definition, “every image approximates or unites realities that are opposite, indifferent, or far apart. That is, it subjects the plurality of the real to unity” (85). There is much to savor in unity, even when it’s achieved by suppressing contradiction, but there is always the morning after, the new day when contradiction and variety are reborn. This is a world that can, and must, be discussed, not hailed in the narcosis of deep image. We don’t live in our dreams, but (and this is the unchanging allure of deep image, this reminder) our dreams do live in us, after all, loaded with all the darkness we pack into them. Traveling Through the Dark It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent.—Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters them is language. —Walter Benjamin (Arcades 462) The aperture of deep image opens directly onto a tacit charter of 1960s American poetics, its parameters framed by two book titles, William Stafford’s Traveling Through the Dark (1962) and Mark Strand’s Darker (1970). The characteristic pledges and code words of this charter are reiterated with almost obsessive determination in a series of books by Galway Kinnell (Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock [1964], Body Rags [1968], The Book of Nightmares [1971]), W.S. Merwin (The Moving Target [1963],

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The Lice [1967], The Carrier of Ladders [1970], Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment [1973]), and of course Bly (Silence in the Snowy Fields [1962], The Light Around the Body [1967]) and James Wright (The Branch Will Not Break [1963], Shall We Gather at the River [1968]). I’d be amiss in not mentioning the small press titles White Sun Black Sun (1960) by Jerome Rothenberg and The Darkness Surrounds Us (1960) by Gilbert Sorrentino, except that the poets cited above exemplify a more prominent career trajectory. Their titles were published by Harper & Row, Houghton Mifflin, Atheneum, and Wesleyan University Press; received notable awards (the National Book Award went to Traveling Through the Dark and The Light Around the Body, and the Pulitzer Prize to The Carrier of Ladders and Wright’s Collected Poems); and the poets were recipients of numerous fellowships and prizes. Detecting common themes and shared fixations, then, is tantamount to hearing the murmur and catching undertones of the decade’s voice-over. Paul Breslin, in The Psycho-Political Muse (1987), identifies a collective imprint in the work of these and a few other poets (Charles Simic and James Tate in particular), noting “a shared rhetoric that seems, in retrospect, almost like a fixed code” (120). Observing that this poetic initiative “comes from a source beyond the socialized self” (119), Breslin charges it with political escapism. “The desire to recover innocence and faith at any cost, even the abolition of social reality and the conscious self, explains the ubiquity of the most popular key word in the deep imagist’s vocabulary: stone” (129). As Breslin enumerates, there are other key words, and while “stone” may be most symptomatic of the evasions with which he’s concerned, the fixation with darkness reveals an urge, evident in a broader spectrum of poetry, that can in fact be chalked up to “deep image”: to plunge into a replenishing field of erasures—and to draw a blank. Following Bly’s exclamatory eureka (“handfuls of darkness!”), various visitations, acclamations, and paeans to darkness collectively rustle around the cleft through which an inviting emanation from the muse prompts the determined mantra that gives Strand the title of his book: “It is dark and I walk in. / It is darker and I walk in” (Darker 25)—as though Kinnell’s farmhouse rattling in the wind with its “twelve lights of blackness” (Body 24) were the destination, to be entered with eyes closed like Magritte’s famous photomontage of the Surrealists in La Révolution surréaliste (December 15, 1929). Tomas Tranströmer seems to be almost literally greeting the throng in 1973: “Friends! You drank the darkness / and became visible” (124)—and Bly returned the favor, using the title Friends, You Drank Some Darkness for a volume of his translations of Swedish poetry. As I’ve mentioned, Tranströmer emerged from the deep image, dark-obsessed 1960s as its unofficial global laureate. Seeing in

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the Dark (Mörkerseende 1970) is his signature title. Unlike the others, the Swede has persevered with the quest throughout his career and, with their resemblance to the stripped down idiom characteristic of Merwin’s poetry of the 1960s, Tranströmer’s limpid poems may now be the most widely translated body of work by a living poet, clearly meeting some global need for “A book that can be read only in the dark” (159). This darkness is a palliative that returns us to the question of periodization, and its grim attendant, Medusa. I suggested earlier that the Medusa is a threatening animus directed at an observer. To behold, to bear witness, is to embark on the “Way of the Affirmation of Images,” but there are impediments to affirmation, and prevarication about image. Affirmed images afford entrance to the temple, the sacred precinct, while those that cannot be affirmed deflect the gaze outside, to that circumference characterized by T.S. Eliot as an “immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” (“Ulysses” 130). Eliot’s judgmental vocabulary, purporting to be merely descriptive, fits postwar Germany at the time of his review of Joyce (1923), tendentiously implicating the whole planet. Eliot’s squalor is not only panoramic, but immensely so, a characterization that renders it mythic, of the Titans, preceding the reign of the Olympic gods. It is also without foundation— anarchē—a condition Eliot deems futile, yet inescapable. Finally, by specifying contemporary history, Eliot implies that history has an elsewhere and an otherwise, a Shangri-La beyond some lost horizon. Eliot’s terms foreshadow a later postwar gaze encountering that deep zone of the image, where words are ineffectual. The aspiration to poetically compose (or even stumble upon) an “image” that is not an image, in the descriptive or in the iconographic sense, also reflects an old hunger in the arts for synaesthesia. The poverty of the word, accompanied by its paradoxically concomitant power, is rendered in another poem situated midway between Traveling Through the Dark and Darker: David Antin’s “The Black Plague” (1967), in a litany that immediately follows, as if in solarizing response to, the instruction: “attempt to construct a white figure.” pitch black powder black wood black coal black carbon black lamp black stove black ink black smoke black

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jet black sloe black smut black shoe black ivory black Japan black lead black chrome black silver black platinum black tar black tear black road black gas black rat black bag black stone black bone black bone black (Selected 79) The recursive splat of black in each line voids the word of semantic value even as the careful modulation of qualifiers keeps resurrecting it as a privileged term. In the process, a vast domain is conjured exceeding anything intimated by all that figural striving in deep image poems. Darkness sheds its aura of mythopoetic yearning and becomes subject to a precise somatic calculus, fulfilling in its spare numeration Rancière’s thought that lyricism is “a political experiment of the sensory” (Flesh 14). This is reinforced by the passage immediately following Antin’s litany: if the darkness of night is 100 times as dark as the darkness of evening / and a man’s pupil doubles in size in this darkness / the darkness is cut in half if the pupil of an owl’s eye increases 100 times its original size in the same darkness the owl’s eye is equal to the darkness in which it sees as by daylight why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than in the waking imagination (80)

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Antin’s question plunges us into the domain broached by Roger Caillois in Minotaure #7 (1935) in his article “Mimétisme et psychasthénie légendaire,” with its scrupulous attention to the biology of disguise in mimetic camouflage. Mimicry, says Caillois in a definition that seems a weird summation of Antin’s poem, is “an incantation fixed at its culminating point” (“Mimicry” 69), the function of which is not so much deception as it is a derangement of spatial perception (even “une véritable tentation de l’espace” [“Mimétisme” 8]). Caillois finds the closest analogy to such mimicry in the porous spatial boundaries of schizophrenics. His account is an impressive synopsis of the dark dominion of deep image: I know where I am, but I do not feel as though I’m at the spot where I find myself. To these dispossessed souls, space seems to be a devouring force [une volonté dévoratrice]. Space pursues them, encircles them, digests them in a gigantic phagocytosis. It ends by replacing them. Then the body separates itself [désolidarise] from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space. He feels himself becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put. He is similar, not similar to something, but just similar. And he invents spaces of which he is “the convulsive possession.” All these expressions shed light on a single process: depersonalization by assimilation to space, i.e., what mimicry achieves morphologically in certain animal species. (“Mimicry” 72; “Mimétisme” 8) In a kind of stage-fright of the species, the source of illumination and identity is swapped for darkness: “darkness is ‘filled,’ it touches the individual directly, envelops him, penetrates him, and even passes through him.” Therefore, suggests Caillois quoting Minkowski, “ ‘the ego is permeable for darkness while it is not so for light’ ” (“Mimicry” 72). What is at stake in being permeable to darkness? In the psychological terms spelled out by Caillois, it’s a matter of becoming impervious to threat; but insofar as threat impinges on the organism through the senses, becoming impermeable means getting outside the sensory system altogether (“the other side of the senses”), being reconstituted in a dark space where things and sensations can’t intrude. Breslin’s critique of deep image underscores its regressive tendency. Traumatized by political and cultural challenges erupting in the 1960s, well meaning liberal poets found in darkness an escape hatch into a recuperative womb surrogate. But his diagnosis neglects a crucial element best grasped by way of Walter Benjamin’s preoccupation with language as “the

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highest level of mimetic behavior and the most complete archive of nonsensuous similarity: a medium into which the earlier powers of mimetic production and comprehension have passed without residue” (Selected 722). The regressive element in deep image, by this reckoning, is the wish to get hold of some mimetic form preceding language, something (the darker the better) that may be felt to share greater sensuous similarity with its object. Darkness is the figural tautology of this wish. Deep image in its fixation on darkness was the symptom of an insufficiently sublimated mimetic desire for clairvoyance, or instantaneous knowledge without the encumbrance of procedure, assessment, or even syntax: without labor. Effortlessly totalizing, as if deep image shared an ecstasy with the monosyllabic “wow” of an acid trip. If Kelly’s “rhythm of images”—derived from Eisenstein’s “montage of attractions” as the mobilization of emotional shocks—tried to resist the regressive impulse by emphasizing a procedural model of image, Antin raised the procedural stakes, portending a sea change in postwar American poetry commonly understood in terms of its later manifestation as “language poetry,” but which may be seen in broader terms as part of a “linguistic turn” by the humanities in the wake of continental theory. Considering that milieu, I’m haunted by Benjamin’s remark that the “perception of similarity is in every case bound to a flashing up” and therefore “seems to be bound to a moment in time” (Selected 695–696). Deep image, in its insistence on the instantaneous, may not have plumbed depth so much as it preserved the signature trait of suddenness; and as Benjamin intuited, image, and the perception of similarity the image entails, converts the instant into a vertical eruption bisecting the horizontal continuum. In a different vocabulary, this moment is marked by the appearance of the angel. Most famously associated with Rilke’s Duino Elegies (drawing on the Islamic rather than the Christian prototype), the angel is the figure of a prodigious interruption. “In guiding from visible things to invisible ones,” Massimo Cacciari elucidates in Angelo Necessario, “the Angel is the figure of the anagogy, of the sensus anagogicus, that pertains to future life and heavenly things” (4). What’s too readily passed over in references to Walter Benjamin’s angel of history is that it is an angel—which is to say, not “history” augmented by a figure of speech, but angelic (or utopian) animation disclosed in that temporal domain we casually refer to as history. Just as language is the canon of nonsensuous similarity, what Benjamin calls the dialectical image marks the appearance of nonconsecutive history, when changes suggested by chronology appear from an unlikely direction. “To thinking belongs the movement as well as the arrest of thoughts,” he writes. “Where thinking comes to a standstill in a constellation saturated with tensions—there the dialectical image appears”—and it’s tempting here to

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substitute deep for dialectical. “It is the caesura in the movement of thought,” Benjamin adds (Arcades 475). Caesura is a poetic term for a break in the metrical continuity of the line, a continuity marked by beats analogized to footsteps. Marching along, a chasm opens in a flash; above and below, then and now telescopically zigzag in a figure compelling obliquity and evasion. After confronting the Medusa, “The text is the long roll of thunder that follows” (Arcades 456). Darker The poet whose vocabulary was as invested in “stone” and “dark” even more obsessively than the Americans was a figure of almost unimaginable displacements. Paul Celan, a Rumanian Jew who lived and wrote most of his poetry in Paris until his death in 1970, insisted on using German, his mother’s tongue and the language of her exterminators. So it’s with a different inflection that Celan offers his own testimony to darkness, which I cite not to exonerate all that’s been speciously claimed in its name, but as index to a darkness that paradoxically makes visible something the light never picks up at all: “Regarding the darkness of the poem today, imagination and experience, experience and imagination let me think of a darkness of the poem qua poem, of a constitutive, even congenital darkness. In other words: the poem is born dark; the result of a radical individuation, it is born as a piece of language, as far as language manages to be world, is loaded with world” (Selections 5). The refrain recurs in Celan’s poem “Sprich auch du” (Speak, You Too): Sprich— Doch scheide das Nein nicht vom Ja Gib deinem Spruch auch den Sinn: gib ihm den Schatten. (Gedichte I, 135) “Speak— / But don’t split the No from Yes / Give your speech also this sense: / give it the shadow” (my translation). The Holocaust cast a shadow on Celan more menacing than whatever dark times Americans imagined they were living through in the 1960s, so it’s instructive that he avails himself of the Medusa in his 1960 speech on receiving the Büchner Prize. Much of Celan’s address, “The Meridian,” draws on the work of Georg Büchner. “ ‘One would like to be a Medusa’s head’ to . . . seize the natural by means of art!” Celan exclaims, quoting from Lenz. “One would like to, by the way, not: I would,” he adds (Selections 158). The I is shed like

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old skin. “Kunst schafft Ich-Ferne,” Celan says with concise emphasis on making: Art makes I-distance (Werke 193). And “poetry, like art, moves with the oblivious self into the uncanny and strange” (160; “vielleicht geht die Dichtung, wie die Kunst, mit einem selbstvergessenen Ich zu jenem Unheimlichen und Fremden” 193). The uncanny and strange, in this context (Germany, fifteen years after Auschwitz was still operating) are euphemisms, but they open a path for poetry that doesn’t require Celan’s personal background. The poem, he suggests in a striking image, walks on its head (submits to its darkness or obscurity) “for the sake of an encounter” (162). The encounter is not an encounter with an other, since the poem always speaks “on behalf of the other” and possibly even “an altogether other” (163); the encounter in the context Celan spells out is with the Medusa. Delivering a singular twist to the familiar scenario, Celan speaks not of looking aside like Perseus in his shield, but rather of a breath turn. “Poetry is perhaps this: an Atemwende, a turning of our breath” (162). This encounter with the Medusa, forcing a “turn” in the breath, claims the moment qua moment as and in tropes, which are the means by which the image turns on the poem’s spit, turns out, becomes, transposing its forms in the volatile utopia unexpectedly opened under the frightful gaze of the Medusa. “What has been, what can be perceived, again and again, and only here, only now. Hence the poem is the place where all tropes and metaphors want to be led ad absurdum” (166). The “breathturn” gave a title to his 1967 collection, Atemwende, but Celan’s acknowledged debt to Rilke suggests an homage may also be encoded here, as one of Rilke’s most explicit stock-taking late poems is “Wendung” (Turning Point), with its epigraph by Erich Kassner: “The road from inner intensity to greatness passes through sacrifice” (Uncollected 91). This sacrifice too demands a turn, in this case turning aside from vision. Denn des Anschauns, siehe, ist eine Grenze. Und die geschautere Welt will in der Liebe gedeihn. Werk des Gesichts ist getan, tue nun Herz-Werk an den Bildern in dir, jenen gefangenen; denn du überwältigtest sie: aber nun kennst du sie nicht. For gazing, you see, sets limits. And the more intensely gazed-at world wants to flourish in love.

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Work of the eyes is done, do heartwork now on those images in you, those captive ones; for you conquered them: but now you don’t know them. (Uncollected 92/93) Part of a venerable lineage of poetry’s renunciations—of means, of precedents, of life itself—Rilke’s heartwork folds the obligation back into the orphic explanation of the earth, in which understanding limits is potentially limitless. Celan subtracts even this. For him, abject exposure to the horror (the Gorgon) threatens the poem with impending extinction at the very moment of its inception. It can’t begin for already ending. But that ending is endless. The poem is always “a vulnerable body that may yet again slip into oblivion,” suggests Derrida (Celan, Selections 204). To avert that disaster (des-astre, falling away from the stars), rather than averting one’s gaze, the poet seizes an inversion, by becoming the Medusa. The poem itself becomes the recriminatory visage, and Medusa blends into Rilke’s archaic Apollo, from whose petrified gaze emanates the injunction: You must change your life—now become infused for Celan with the impossible demand, You must change your history. Consider again the peculiarity of the formulation given by Büchner’s Lenz: “Man möchte . . . ein Medusenhaupt sein” (Werke 191–192). Not to deflect one’s gaze from, but to be the Medusa. Faced with the fragile integuments of the I-less poem forever on the way to language (Unterwegs zur Sprache: Heidegger’s title, reaching out to Celan), Celan practiced what he called “polysemy without mask” (35). Was this a way “to fall into muteness and simultaneously to find oneself in the same discourse forced into a kind of supreme delirium of discoveries,” as Andrea Zanzotto presumes (Celan, Selections 210)? Celan’s remorseless vivisection of the German language paradoxically reanimates it, as if to admit that protective mimicry saves the victim from the Medusa, but also saves the Medusa. Hyperanimacy poses as paralysis: the only moves are so abrupt as to (almost) escape notice in this supreme delirium in which “the image has become the active, disruptive power of the leap—that of the change of regime between two sensory orders” (Rancière, Future 46). (“Poetry is a centaur,” says Pound. “The thinking word-arranging, clarifying faculty must move and leap with the energizing, sentient, musical faculties” [Essays 52]). The sensory orders to which Jacques Rancière refers here are scream versus slogan—the commanding archetypes of modern art, for the sense of which I’d retain James Hillman’s understanding that the archetypal “refers to a move one makes rather than to a thing that is” (13). Hillman affirms what Vico had worked out in his New Science: “mind is poetic to begin with, and consciousness is not a later,

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secondary elaboration upon a primitive base but is given with that base in each image” (10). Image absconds with thought, plunging into the primitive core from which imaging and thinking are coiled up together in a primary spasm, their serpentine energies ratified in the form of Laoköon, and under threat of being petrified by Medusa. Rancière insists that the image is not only a function of resemblances, but also a “hyper-resemblance” that “does not provide the replica of a reality but attests directly to the elsewhere whence it derives”—a familiar instance being the memento mori (Future 8). Mimesis, then, “is not resemblance understood as the relationship between a copy and a model. It is a way of making resemblances function within a set of relations between ways of making, modes of speech, forms of visibility, and protocols of intelligibility” (73). In modernity, however, these sets of relations, or aesthetic protocols, have dissolved. Taste, decorum, proportionality—the traditional guidelines—no longer apply to an art conceived not only as emancipated from precedent but emancipatory on behalf of its own inconceivable potential. Rancière cites Blaise Cendrars’ prose poem “Profound Today” as inaugural: “the law of ‘profound today,’ the law of the great parataxis, is that there is no longer any measurement, anything in common. It is the common factor of dis-measure or chaos that now gives art its power” (45), oscillating between schizophrenia or consensus: “On the one hand, there is the great schizophrenic explosion, where the sentence sinks into the scream and meaning into the rhythm of bodily states. On the other, there is the great community identified with the juxtaposition of commodities and their doubles, or with the hackneyed character of empty words, or with the intoxication of manipulated intensities, of bodies marching in time” (45). The oscillation provokes not a synthesis but a new measure altogether, “the sentence-image” (45), similar to Walter Benjamin’s sense of the dialectical image. Whatever name it bears, like “deep image” it would preserve in its suddenness, its lightning flash, the vast undifferentiated ground disclosed between raw power and subtle persuasion, between the coercive variables, scream and slogan. “Practice your scream,” Rothenberg heard in the atmosphere while visiting Auschwitz (Khurbn 11). “practice your scream” I said (why did I say it?) because it was his scream & wasn’t my own it hovered between us Hovering between: zwiespalt, Rilke’s term for Orpheus’ crossroads in the heart (Ahead 414); and the heart itself is twofold—empathy and pump, spirit and mechanism.

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T.S. Eliot’s supposition that all ages are contemporaneous reveals an eschatological imagination at work, and The Waste Land is an even more emphatic herald than Cendrars’ “Profound Today” of the great parataxis. The Waste Land is a cauldron of sentence-images, dialectical images, and deep images huddling together: bats with baby faces, finding the measure by echolocation. Periodization is also a form of echolocation for a species sensing itself constrained by historical dynamics too hard to make out, when neither mirror nor lamp will do (though music often bears uncanny witness that eludes the visual). “Change the joke and slip the yoke” was a favorite expression of Ralph Ellison’s (Shadow 45): “fly the coop, take pleasure in jumbling the order of space,” urges Hélène Cixous in “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1098). In a certain sense, the senses are always on the alert for an other, a countertrend, a world apart. Listen closely, and the Medusa is never farther than the aroma of a mirror or the tactile premonition you get when Maya Deren opens her mouth in Meshes of the Afternoon and slides the key off her tongue. Listen closely, and you find yourself in a large house with many windows open running from room to room, now knowing from where to look out first, because the pine trees will vanish, and the mirrored mountains, and the chirping of birds the sea will empty, shattered glass, from north and south your eyes will empty of the light of day the way the cicadas all together suddenly fall silent. (Seferis Collected Poems, 169–170) Like René Magritte’s painting Attempting the Impossible, in which you can’t tell whether the artist is painting or effacing his muse, George Seferis’ poem simultaneously revokes and reinstates a world—an inscription ventured in the presence of the Medusa. For all the panic this figure imposes, flight is not an option according to the myth. The Greek poet writes with a sense of the past Eliot would have envied, because that past asserted itself not only in but as the present moment. The lines above conclude The “Thrush,” written in 1946 in the wake of harsh years for Greece. Commenting on his poem, Seferis asks an intriguing question: “Suppose the light were suddenly to become Orestes? It is so easy, just think: if the light of the day and the blood of man were one and the same thing? How far can one stretch this feeling?” (Style 104). One answer is by Rothenberg, picking up that atmospheric exhortation at Auschwitz: practice your scream. We can identify with

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the scream, but “practice”? If anything, practice pertains to art. We make contradictory demands on art, insisting that it provide images, while also expecting it to offer solutions. History has emerged, in modernity, as the crisis of representation, not only in the democratic sense of who gets counted, and accounted for, but how human affairs enter into that peculiar reckoning we know as art. How do we understand representation as responsibility? Bearing witness and making images are points along a continuum of empathy, but they’re still different points along the way. I posed a question earlier: encountering the Medusa, do we enter history when we raise that deflective shield necessary to survive her gaze? The answer depends on the shield, and on the original provocation. “Medusa” is a mythic term designating the deflection compulsion (“castration complex” is the coercive Freudian category). This has less to do with evasion or repression than with that modern phenomenon, suddenness. Call it instantaneous, ubiquitous interconnectivity, what have you: it’s always now. Immediacy is its only mode (and cinema may be its exemplary medium.) But then it’s over, or deflected. Bringing “history” into the equation, Medusa is the figure that signifies an instantaneous sense of disempowerment when confronting or considering the forces we identify with history—or, after Hegel, History. But what is History? What does it mean? What does it do? How does it work? How are we implicated? Maybe the better question, considering historical reckoning, is: How are we complicated? History, I’d suggest, has become our term for what can’t be assimilated—the share of human activity that increasingly has the status of the informe, the remainder, the vile surplus. Unaccountable depredation. But at least since Hegel—since, that is, the introduction of the future tense to what had hitherto been a category for the past—history has also become the privileged term for managing our collective options. (These options are often desperations, of course.) So what can’t be assimilated, considered, or brought into focus about this improbable future tense of History is available in the form of images—but not optical or even mental pictures. The three kinds of images I’ve considered here are all ways of engaging history while keeping it at bay, and in that sense they’re all in cahoots with the Medusa. Deep image proposes itself as archetypal: that is, before history. The utopian bait and switch appeals to a different temporality; so the dialectical image engages the future as a way of deflecting the present. Finally, the “sentence image” of Rancière introduces the leap, the panic attack, protective mimicry. Rather than take fright and flee, or fight and die, the sentence image encompasses the animation and animosity of the Medusa herself. Aristotle thought poetry superior to history because historical events are unique, while poets address what’s always happening. From once only to over and over again requires only two things, a leap and a mirror.


CHAPTER SIX

“When the Mind Is Like a Hall”: Places of a Possible Poetics

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oetic inspiration was stapled to locality with Hesiod’s memo from the Muses. Place is important: the site of that inaugural visitation is precipitous, not flat. With Hesiod’s fable, poetry is convened as a site-specific art. Consider the specificity of site in the case of the twentieth century’s most famous instance of fraught inspiration: Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Inaugurated in a Trieste castle perched on a cliff over the Adriatic, further work on the Elegies stalled in the miasmic locales of Paris and Munich, and the cycle was only completed ten years later (along with the unexpected bonus, Sonnets to Orpheus) in a tower in the Swiss Alps. (Duino Elegies is a book that needed a passport to reach its altitudes.) The Elegies and the Sonnets, taken together, verify poetry’s legacy of the vertical axis. Rilke belongs to a tradition of encounters with mountains. Petrarch is credited with being the first to reach the summit of Mont Ventoux in France. Neruda’s visit to cloud-swept ruins of the ancient Incas resulted in Las Alturas de Macchu Picchu, and his fellow Chilean Vicente Huidobro wrote an epic invocation to verticality in Altazor, or A Voyage in a Parachute. Eugene Jolas made a program of verticality, first in the vertiginously polylingual Secession in Astropolis (1928), then in the 1932 manifesto “Poetry is Vertical.” Vertical finally blends with integral in his 1936 manifesto “Vertigralism,” drawing on a rich vein of prepositional inversions: to go in is to go out, as above so below. Sidereal motion is terrestrial event. The poetry of the stars is written in geology. So a host of earth-besotted figures (Vallejo, Neruda, Césaire—whose telluric fixations expand their vocabulary) join alchemical hands with the aeronautical poets. When Lorca says “the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles

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of the feet” (43), he neglects to say that it might as well go right up on through the crown of the head. Pessoa’s heteronym, Álvaro de Campos, extends the invitation: “Hop with me in this tribal dance that bumps into stars” (A Little Larger 200). It appears that, viewing Mallarmé’s unique typography in Un coup de dés, Paul Valéry encountered something like an astral duende. “He has undertaken finally to raise a printed page to the power of the midnight sky” (Leonardo 312). In this realm, where up and down swap roles, There is no Space or Time Only intensity, And tame things Have no immensity. (Loy 3) Architectural verticality is usually associated with skyscrapers, but Frederick Kiesler’s design of a horizontal skyscraper is a salutary reminder of the earth’s curvature: the sky can be scraped going out as well as up (Contemporary Art 62).

Figure 6.1

Friedrich Kiesler, Horizontal Sky Scraper (1925).

Courtesy: Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna.

Bruno Taut jettisoned the gravitational field of earth altogether in Alpine Architecture, in which fanciful visions of glass palaces eventuate in Sternbau or star-building. The interplay of terrestrial recess with stellar orbit is fully realized in “Grottenstern mit schwebender Architektur” (cavern star with suspended architecture), culminating Taut’s vision of crystallization as cosmic destiny (Schirren 103). Every pebble is an interstellar medallion. The enigmatic proximity of earth and sky is the scene of George Oppen’s poem “The Forms of Love,” in which the lovers grope their way down a slope in an unearthly light, wondering about its source: . . . our heads Ringing under the stars we walked

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To where it would have wet our feet Had it been water (Poems 106) Oppen seems to have stumbled on that “deep paradox of poetry” defined by José Lezama Lima, “that love is not made caressingly from pore to pore, but from pore to star, where space forms a suspension and the body plunges down and swims at length” (125). Starting from the stars, the poem somehow ends up soaked. But the vertical aspect is preserved. Its most memorable rendering can be found in the Ostyak tale about a golden pole atop the Nail of the North, with a very wise tomcat who climbs up and down the pole. Climbing down, he sings songs; when he climbs up, he tells tales (Santillana and Dechend 96). Here again, poetry is precipitous. Going down in order to sing the song: Orpheus’ descent is a basic trope, magnified by Odysseus and Aeneas, who quicken their narrative progress up the golden pole of epic by dipping down into lyric sufferance. Going home can also mean going down—return as descent. Getting to the bottom of things. The nekyia or catabasis with which Pound initiates The Cantos conspicuously repeats a descent to the underworld from the Odyssey and the Aeneid. But it’s there with less bibliographic fuss in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” as Whitman gazes down at the beatific emblem of his head transfigured in the water. Instances abound: Yeats’ passage to Byzantium; George Seferis’ sunken ship “Thrush” with its primal insect sirens chirping away in the Peloponesian night; Rilke’s Orphic descent; Rimbaud’s season in hell; Lorca’s debt to duende rising up through the soles of the feet with its dark sounds; and Gunnar Ekelöf’s Guide to the Underworld, where “No one can speak my name, no one knows my face / All they know is that I always return” (71). All these poets submit to an initiatory abjection. Georges Bataille considers poetry “the sacrifice in which words are victims. Words—we use them, we make of them the instrument of useful acts. We would in no way have anything of the human about us if language had to be entirely servile within us. Neither can we do without the efficacious relations words introduce between men and things. But we tear words from these links in a delirium” (135). In the delirium of poetry, in the inner sanctum where it confronts the unavoidable sagacity of its cumulative refusals and avowed dispossession, poetry “is the perversion of language even a bit more than eroticism is the perversion of sexual function,” in Bataille’s audacious supposition (150). Flush with the spirit of Eros, poetry plunges language in darkness, with the supplicatory catabasis of the underworld journey as narrative topos and subtext. In the anthropological considerations of Cesáreo Bandera, poetry “deals mostly with error, human error, the kind of error that springs from not

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being able to differentiate the true from the false. Thus, compared with all the other disciplines in the hierarchy of knowledge, poetry appears to be uniquely qualified to explore all kinds of human situations as sources of error” (128). This apparent humiliation is indebted to Vico’s understanding of human institutions as atavistic survivals of instinct and superstition, in which poetry plays a custodial role. Bandera is adamant that there’s no need to defend poetry because it has the strategic advantage of always finding itself on the bottom. Poetry ought to accept this ranking at the bottom of the ladder; that is, it ought to speak truthfully about itself, about its intimate relationship with the countless ways in which human beings can go astray, can err. This truthful discourse about itself will not remove poetic fiction from its position at the bottom of the epistemological hierarchy. . . . poetry is not only located at the lowest point in the hierarchy, it is the lowest point of the hierarchy; of a hierarchy which is only such, insofar as the lowest can still communicate with the highest. (128) Drawing from his thick quiver of taunts, one of Nietzsche’s barbs is that we have art so as not to have to go all the way down to the root of reality. As Blanchot construes it, this means “we have art in order that what makes us go all the way to the bottom not belong to the domain of truth. The very bottom, the bottomless abyss belongs to art” (Space 239). This lowest sanctum harbors a vertigo of attestation, a dizzying reversal in which one encounters “not another world, but the other of all worlds” (228)—just as the image, in Blanchot’s estimation, gives rise to “the other of all meaning” (263)—and Octavio Paz speaks of poetry as “the other coherence” (Children 56), his lexical choice echoing Pound’s rueful admission, of his “botched” Cantos, “it coheres all right / even if my notes do not cohere” (Cantos 797). If Pound appears to touch bottom here, it’s worth sounding the depths to know what that bottom means. The bountifully abounding dissolution of foundations by Thoreau in Walden gives successors—even those as unlikely as Pound—the imperative not to fail but to fall, plummet the depths, take the measure, and live to tell the tale. The other of all meaning, the other of all worlds, the other coherence: these are achieved (if a positive concept like achievement can be retained for Blanchot’s paradoxia) by the poetic descent to secure the bottom or the greatest depth (ultimate inversion of hierarchy) from being colonized by “truth.” To truth Blanchot opposes not falsity but error, with the crucial supplementary consideration that error has a destiny in errantry, an “infinite migration”—which is the only recourse he concedes to poetry in its search


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for primal speech, original utterance, inaugural vision (Space 244). At the root of Blanchot’s ruminations in The Space of Literature is a scenario that renders much of what he has to say accessible in more familiar terms: Art was the language of the gods. The gods having disappeared, it became the language in which their disappearance was expressed, then the language in which this disappearance itself ceased to appear. This forgetfulness now speaks all alone. The deeper the forgetfulness, the more the deep speaks in this language, and the more the abyss of this deepness can become the hearing of the word. (Space 245–246) Such a dizzy compounding of negatives can sound elusive, even evasive, but a smack on the Gallic bottom can turn up an accessibly compensating proposal: “the function of poetry,” says Francis Ponge, “is to nourish the spirit of man by giving him the cosmos to suckle” (109). Ponge continues, expansively: We have only to lower our standard of dominating nature and to raise our standard of participating in it in order to make the reconciliation take place. When man becomes proud to be not just the site where ideas and feelings are produced, but also the crossroad where they divide and mingle, he will be ready to be saved. Hope therefore lies in a poetry through which the world so invades the spirit of man that he becomes almost speechless, and later reinvents a language. Poets should in no way concern themselves with human relationships, but should get to the very bottom. Society, furthermore, takes good care of putting them there, and the love of things keeps them there; they are the ambassadors of the silent world. As such, they stammer, they murmur, they sink into the darkness of logos—until at last they reach the level of , where things and formulas are one. (109–110) From the author of so many “thing” poems—recalling Rilke’s determination, under the tutelage of Rodin, to pursue the chimera of the Dinggedicht (the results were tallied in the two volume New Poems)—Ponge’s ruminations conflate poetry with a primal script in which all things are their own signatures deposited (and posited) directly in nature’s book. A corresponding primal scene subsists in architectural theory as well, with Laugier’s plaintive reminder, “Let us never lose sight of our little rustic hut” (12). But no matter how simple the concept, the exposition adds a froth of animating details. So Vitruvius’ parable of the dawn of architecture tells of a stormy night in which the thrashing trees ignite each other, and in this way our untutored

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ancestors discovered fire and habitation simultaneously. Moreover, by congregating around the fire they began to invent language. It’s a familiar tale (It was a dark and stormy night . . .) that, like all tales, embeds thought in event, and event in concrete particulars. A total package “where things and formulas are one”—and what better definition of architecture could you wish for? Ironically, this is an ideal, not a description. But think of it this way: the ideal is an idea bearing the pretence of the real, as the real material deal. Bernard Tschumi calls this “the paradox of the Pyramid of concepts and the Labyrinth of experience, of immaterial architecture as a concept and of material architecture as a presence” (47). The paradox cannot be resolved, it can only be teased with the chopsticks of divergent expectations. For instance, “Time is not a straight line, it’s more of a labyrinth,” suggests Tomas Tranströmer, “and if you press close to the wall at the right place you can hear the hurrying steps and the voices, you can hear yourself walking past on the other side” (167). Listening closely, you might also hear T.S. Eliot’s garden of forking paths in “Burnt Norton,” where “What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present” (171). In this uncanny mutuality of past and present, the possible and the actual, things acquire a different substantiality. The musical implication of Eliot’s title is memorably realized in Tranströmer’s poem about playing Haydn on the piano, in which The music is a glasshouse on the slope where the stones fly, the stones roll. And the stones roll right through but each pane stays whole. (65) These panes might be walls in a labyrinth, and the labyrinth itself composed of stuff like the mirror in Cocteau’s film Orpheus, in which the poet has only to don a pair of gloves to pass right through the slightly wrinkling glass. The gloves are provided by Heurtebise, who confides to Orpheus, “Mirrors are the doors through which Death comes and goes. Besides, look at yourself in the mirror throughout your life and you will see Death at work like bees in a glass hive” (Screenplays 150). Those bees again! “In man the act of love is a one-room house; in woman it is a beehive” reads one of Malcolm de Chazal’s architectonic aphorisms (87). “Like eroticism,” says Tschumi, “architecture needs both system and excess” (50). Architecture rarely gets concrete realizations of system amalgamated to phantasm, pyramid blending with labyrinth—Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, the postman Chaval’s Palais Ideal in Hauterives near Grenoble,


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and Simon Rodia’s tower in Watts are rare examples—but poets specialize in milking the excess of systems, as in Baudelaire’s “Correspondances” with its vision of nature as a temple, “in which living pillars sometimes utter a babel of words; man traverses it through a forest of symbols, that watch him with knowing eyes” (“La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers / Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles; / L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symbols / Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers” [59/60]). Verticality prevails even here, in the vocalizing pillars and the voyeuristically disposed symbols—trees endowed with flânerie (as if shedding leaves were leave-taking). Rendered architecturally, the forest of symbols becomes Walter Pater’s vision of an interrogative structure: “The very place one is in, its stone-work, its empty spaces, invade you; invade all who belong to them . . . seem to question you masterfully as to your purpose in being here at all” (Frank 37). Not that this can’t be said of poems as well. Poetry can seem to materialize in the somatic unconscious just as a building slinks off into residual flavors deep in the blood. Addressing the potentially anomalous topic of subjectivity in architecture, Robert Harbison evokes the specter of “buildings gnarled like inner experience, even vanishing, like thoughts” (Thirteen 160). He finds in one building that “there can be no rest or relaxation but a kind of mental circling like that of a bird looking unsuccessfully for a perch” (172–173). Henry James anatomizes such an experience in “The Jolly Corner,” in which an architect returns to New York after a life and career abroad, and has the rare opportunity to revisit his childhood home, finding it “immense, the scale of space again inordinate; the open rooms . . . gloomed in their shuttered state like mouths of caverns; only the high skylight that formed the crown of the deep well created for him a medium in which he could advance, but which might have been, for queerness of colour, some watery underworld” (Tales 341). What James depicts is not the usual trope of a haunted house, but a person haunted by a house. “One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted,” said Emily Dickinson, writing out a prescription for James: “Ourself behind ourself, concealed— / Should startle most” (333). In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rilke charts a comparable affliction. “As I find it in the memories of my childhood, it isn’t a complete building; it has been broken into pieces inside me; a room here, a room there, and then a piece of a hallway that doesn’t connect these two rooms, but is preserved as a fragment, by itself. In this way it is all dispersed inside me . . . It’s as if the image of this house had fallen into me from an infinite height and shattered upon my ground” (25). In Dickinson’s conspiratorial domesticity, A Bomb upon the Ceiling Is an improving thing—

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It keeps the nerves progressive Conjecture flourishing (506) George Oppen’s poem “The Building of the Skyscraper” makes a point of aligning the potential vertigo of the worker on the girder, trained not to look down, with the propensity to use “words we have learned / Not to look at,” putting into play the potential civic disaster of an unexamined vocabulary: “There are words that mean nothing / But there is something to mean” (Poems 149). In a notebook, Oppen protested the notion of poem as receptacle: “I do not think that a poem can be filled with meaning by being filled, like a bag or a jug, with words. On the contrary,” he thought, a poem is “the structure of meaning which restores the words to clarity” (Prose 69). He welcomed David Antin’s use of purely “formal expressions” mobilized in the elegiac setting of “Definitions for Mendy” (discussed in chapter five): “Our thirst and our grief, and our cruelty, existing among immaterial concepts, immaterial axioms, insistent koans which formulate the present in reasonable lines arriving again and again at the impossible, the inacceptible [sic], the mind moving outward continually into areas in which we cannot live” (38). These considerations have an acute bearing on the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in Oppen’s native city. The traumatic spectacle of collapsing towers was promptly converted into a feverish worksite of ideological construction. Not since Pearl Harbor has wreckage sprung so nimbly into action as the insignia of political resolve. Diana Agrest identifies the skyscraper as “an empty signifier that can assume and attract different meanings” (87). In linguistics, the category for the empty sign is deixis, consisting of words whose indication is context specific, and the tacit context is a dialogue. But can you enter into an intersubjective exchange with a building? There’s obviously a dialogical rapport established by the very functionality of a building you enter. Points of orientation to interior possibilities are inherently solicitous. But what about a building you don’t enter, and may never even see except in photographs? The deictic summons of the skyscraper was made evident in the collapsing World Trade Center towers, the image of which also collapsed the random and the anonymous into the personal, as if a built structure could only hit the ground, but the interior building might keep on falling unchecked forever. And this is precisely what happens in poetry, a limitless descent to a paradoxically determinate ground. Part of the impact of rereading “Tintern Abbey” or Tender Buttons is to reaffirm an inestimable vertigo, to register the work itself as an event still falling, as a kind of invited catastrophe, a meteor shower. Gaston Bachelard has an applicable theory: “The fall, even before any moral metaphor intervenes, is a constant psychic reality. This psychic fall


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can be investigated as an aspect of poetic and moral physics. The psychic slope changes constantly. The general tonus—that dynamic fact that every consciousness grasps at once—becomes immediately a slope” (11). In the same book, Air and Dreams, Bachelard supplements the model of the “psychic slope”: “The poetic image,” as he defines it, “is a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche” (248). A salience is a highlight, a distinction; it’s also associated with sudden movement, and with something that protrudes at a striking angle. It’s a distress that stresses the point. Image, as such, is disaster (des-astre: star chunk), quite the opposite of Imagism as cod-liver pill for pumping iron in the poem’s bloodstream. Djuna Barnes, in Nightwood (that great castanet of aphorisms), pithily says, “An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties” (111). This evokes for me an image—as if to prove Barnes’s point—and the image is that of a railway station. If uncertainty is motion, image is a station: image marks the spot where you get off or climb aboard the vehicle of your mobilized uncertainty, as in André Breton’s evocation of the Surrealist object: The white disc has made way for the red disc and the platform is becoming crowded with people waiting for the non-stop train to pass, the train that is neither a passenger train nor a goods train. The windows display objectbeings (or being-objects?) which can be recognized by the fact that they are undergoing a continuous process of transformation and manifest the perpetuity of the struggle between the aggregative and disaggregative powers which are disputing the nature of true reality and life. Master-movement! The agglomerate known as “waiter” or “carafe” in the appropriate section of the restaurant-car is traversed by an illuminated sign flashing at regular intervals the message: “Eat them alive.” (Surrealism and Painting 282) Envisioning “psycho-atmospheric-anamorphic objects,” Salvador Dalí appealed to “vertigos of concrete irrationality” to account for his desire to render a table edible and to experience an anamorphic sense of taste (154). The oral impulse is architecture’s confidant: “The most archaic origin of architectural space is the cavity of the mouth,” Juhani Pallasmaa observes of Ruskin who, enraptured with Italy, exclaimed “I should like to eat up this Verona touch by touch” (Pallasmaa 59). The vertical axis and the horizontal axis converge on a railway platform in Party Going by Henry Green. Elliptical as it sounds, here’s how the novel opens: Fog was so dense, bird that had been disturbed went flat into a balustrade and slowly fell, dead, at her feet.

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There it lay and Miss Fellowes looked up to where that pall of fog was twenty foot above and out of which it had fallen, turning over once. She bent down and took a wing then entered a tunnel in front of her, and this had  lit up over it, carrying her dead pigeon. (384) But for the patently English fog, Miss Fellowes might be heading for the same railroad car young Marcel takes to Balbec in Proust’s vivid demonstration of train travel as a species of mobilized architecture. Marcel catches a glimpse of sunrise (“a necessary concomitant of long railway journeys”),

Figure 6.2

Fritz Kahn, “The Surface of One Man’s Bloodcells.”

Source: Kahn Man in Structure and Function.


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but the train rounds a bend, plunging the car back into darkness, and “the morning scene gave place in the frame of the window to a nocturnal village, its roofs still blue with moonlight . . . and I was lamenting the loss of my strip of pink sky when I caught sight of it anew, but red this time, in the opposite window which it left at a second bend in the line; so that I spent my time running from one window to the other to reassemble, to collect on a single canvas the intermittent, antipodean fragments of my fine, scarlet, everchanging morning, and to obtain a comprehensive view and a continuous picture of it” (704–705). To pursue a continuous picture is also to glimpse the fugitive totality of your own life, never present all at once but like Proust’s train curving out beyond one horizon after another in alternating vistas. Yet the tantalizing prospect of biological destiny achieving fruity circumference is realized in another image, this time from Fritz Kahn’s medical textbook Man in Structure and Function. The caption reads: “If the blood corpuscles of a human body (25 million in number) were joined together to form a chain, they would pass four times around the globe. Their surface covers an area of 4,900 square yards” (Man I, 208). A different caption might plausibly specify, in Michael Palmer’s words: “Ariadne’s thread / as the trickling of warm blood” (Promises 72). In another diagram, the labor required of the heart as a pump is illustrated in the vertical field (“In the course of a day the heart is theoretically capable of filling three tank cars with ten thousand litres of blood, and in seventy years it pumps 250 million litres of blood, a quantity sufficient to fill the cubic area occupied by a modern skyscraper” [Man I, 180]). Kahn’s enticing imponderables demonstrate the power of analogy to insist on a habitat, some dwelling space commensurate with the power of thought, in calculable ratios. There are limits of ratio, naturally, and the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers were intent on estimating where sensation vanished, giving way to cogitation—and cogito to agitation. “Whatever occupies time must always be becoming older than itself, and ‘older’ always means older than something younger. Consequently, whatever is becoming older than itself, if it is to have something than which it is becoming older, must also be at the same time becoming younger than itself” says Parmenides as Plato recounts (934–935). Henri Bergson condenses Plato’s Parmenidean sprawl to a formula: “The affirmation of a reality implies the simultaneous affirmation of all the degrees of reality intermediate between it and nothing” (351). Emily Dickinson, whose peripheral vision included Nothing like a household pet, says “You cannot fold a Flood— / And put it in a Drawer” as if passing on basic domestic advice (259). As she knew well, the flood prevails, borne in by the most familiar interface: “You there—I—here / With just the Door ajar / That Oceans are” (318). “The artist creates by imposing limits on

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Figure 6.3


Fritz Kahn, “The Work of the Heart.”

Source: Kahn Man in Structure and Function.

endlessness,” Kiesler proposes (Inside 395). The meltdown of the thinkable is not only a daily event, but an everyday necessity, it turns out. The genius of Plato (and Bergson) inheres in this: we like to think these things—and think this “ liking” to be a need of likeness. In the domain of resemblance, especially under the pressure of Plato’s enigma of a contracting expansion or expanding contraction, the operative principle is multum in parvo, much in little. Regarding vastness, the mind rapidly closes in on particulars; things become blockades against the infinite, and the miniature emerges as an extravagant investment in the power of reduction. In the process something is gained, and something


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else lost, as illustrated in the romance of Orpheus and Eurydice. The condition of Orpheus’ retrieval of Eurydice from Hades is that he must lead without looking to see if she’s behind him. He looks, she vanishes. So it’s not a familiar tale of lost and found, for Eurydice is lost when found. The instantaneousness of it is most poignant, for it suggests a kind of ontological impertinence in the very desire to know with daytime vision what has to stay in the dark—a trauma also visited upon Psyche, holding up the candle to see her beloved Eros. You can know, but you can’t see, the parables say; and yet we go on equating knowing with seeing (“I see what you mean”). “Puzzle creatures to ourselves, we are visitations of inexplicability” (Arakawa and Gins xii). Joseph Cornell’s boxes can be thought of as labyrinthine models of Orpheus’ descent, inviting a gaze into bewilderment as if that were the name of a specific site. In these wonder cabinets, to be lost is to risk being found out—that is, to have one’s desires put on parade in a box. Congregation and supplication are somehow expansively compacted into workbench caverns dangling from the stars. The boxes, filled with fetishistic relics, are like portals onto a space paradoxically vast with narrowness, in which “The hands want to see, the eyes want to caress,” in Goethe’s words (Pallasmaa 14). The mind darts around, leaving the body behind like Eurydice in the underworld. So pregnant is the implied dynamic between the inanimate objects that they practically thump with cardiac potential. They could be three-dimensional love letters tipping over like a jug of milk into the galaxy, except that the falling or draining is stationary, arrested in, or as, a scene. The word for this enchantment is vertigo, and it has to do with the bloodtide spoken of in antiquity as the Ouroboros, the serpent biting its own tail (and going around in circles brings on dizziness: “If your Soul seesaw— / Lift the Flesh door” [Dickinson 136]). So its “negative capability” (in Keats’s sense [Hazard Adams 494]) kneads you like dough, trusting your heart will keep pouring you into the abyss that is your life, the beginning and end of which are lost in obscurity, so that it seems to be poured into the middle and spreads outward into past and future at once. In any case, it’s a capacity of the heart to split in the imagination (as a conceptual reminder of the physical organ’s bivalve chambers?) into the physical agitation in the chest— the pulse of emotion—and the calm, nurturing visage of compassion. The heart makes places work. The heart works contrasts up into the open in an ongoing pulmonary manifesto. As James John Garth Wilkinson memorably says, “the heart is a self-supplying knot of affirmations”—at work “in a bed of structural desire,” no less, as “the heart love[s] its own blood, which it squeezes hot and naked with its ruddy fingers” (172, 175, 178). “For the heart is a proposition that never goes beyond a bare statement, but pumps

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through us the substance of self-evidence” (183–184). Wilkinson calls imagination “the heart-house,” sedulously worked by desire, “the dilating, opening, or cavity-making facility” (196). To the poetics of ingress and egress elaborated in Wilkinson’s treatise The Human Body—perplexingly subtitled “and its Connexion With Man”—I would add Grant Hildebrand’s anatomical deliberations from The Origins of Architectural Pleasure: Any architectural project worth doing entails, of necessity, decisions about the three dimensions of its spaces, the opening or closing of spaces to one another, the presence and absence of transparent and opaque bounding surfaces, the availability, location, and character of vistas, the composition of paths of movement. . . . Concepts of prospect and refuge, enticement, and peril are simply ways of providing a certain kind of information for such decisions. (147) Hildebrand’s prospect and refuge, enticement and peril are conceptually intimate with Bachelard’s psychic slope. To be in motion is to have an appointment with slippage; every banana skin peels the thought of secure progress; the world comes alive with “Secret staircases, frames from which the paintings quickly slip aside and vanish,” André Breton exclaims in Nadja, “buttons which must be indirectly pressed to make an entire room move sideways or vertically, or immediately change all its furnishings; we may imagine the mind’s greatest adventure as a journey of this sort to the paradise of pitfalls” (112). As this passage reveals, Breton wanted to write a book that could be left “ajar, like a door” (156). Dickinson would agree: “The Soul should always stand ajar” (481). Breton’s aspiration may have been most memorably met in Nightwood, which is like a painting by Remedios Varo or Leonora Carrington achieved in wax (except the wax is words, whose apparent stability perpetuates their melting): a cabinet of curiosities most of which, being words, disclose nothing to the eye but everything to tactile and nasal instincts (“the night is a skin pulled over the head of day” [85]). No wonder the main character ends up on all fours in olfactory reverie with a dog. A book ajar not only allows the reader go into it (the usual experience), but lets emanations from the text creep out. The result is a honeycomb of wandering phantasms, for which prospect, refuge, enticement, and peril are terms rendering palpable the sense that the reader and writer cohabit an apparition. The haunting (the hunting) is mutual. “Curious,” says the narrator of Sándor Márai’s novel Embers, “that in Hungarian our words for killing and embracing echo and heighten each other” (126 [Ölés and ölelés]). Márai’s haunting reciprocity evokes (and isomorphically mimics) Agamben’s


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observation that “poetry possesses its object without knowing it while philosophy knows its object without possessing it” (Stanzas xvii). A text, like a room, is a place of coming and going, embracing and hunting. A poetic stanza is a room, and nobody lavishes more attention on the architectural principles of the stanza than Mandelstam writing about Dante (whose stanzas struck the Russian poet as cavities of a honeycomb): “The step, linked to breathing and saturated with thought: this Dante understands as the beginning of prosody. . . . In Dante philosophy and poetry are forever on the move, forever on their feet. Even standing still is a variety of accumulated motion; making a space for people to stand and talk takes as much trouble as scaling an alp” (6). A stanza accumulates motion, growing as congested as the psyche. Poetry is an architectural site in which the benign and the monstrous can be reapportioned by culinary aptitude. Enticingly, an architect might speak of “a bundle of walls” (Hadid 130) as if broccoli or asparagus left shadowy profiles on the drafting table. Volumetric shadowgraphs emit haptic diversity. Architectural codes can act as surrogate zoning laws—eat here, sleep there, defecate yonder—but the great Freudian discovery confounds this, finding an archaeological law in the psyche stipulating the collapse of every structure in the fullness of time. Gravity has tales to tell, and plenty of narrative time at id ’s disposal. Poetry, the royal infant of psyche, has an archaeological rapport with shards and rubble, its snout full of surmise, sniffing the cream of the sign in its seismic audacity until it nods off and lights up. The Soviet visionary architect Konstantin Melnikov designed a “Laboratory of Sleep” he punningly named “Sonata of Sleep”—or SONnaia SONata, playing on the Russian word for sleep, son (Starr 179). Sleepers were to be assuaged by precisely controlled aromas and sounds, and Melnikov even provided for a gentle undulation of beds. The beds, intriguingly, were arranged in a common space so that the recumbent workers’ dreams would pool together into a socialized collective unconscious. Party planners in Moscow didn’t see how sleep could be a form of labor, so Melnikov’s design was never realized. Architects, like poets, often set to work as if dreaming, visiting a site of overlapping claims, obligations, and potentialities that can only be declared through a congested corridor of sketches and models bearing little resemblance to structures of any sort. (Look at the shapes taken by crumpled paper in an architect’s waste basket and then look at the assemblages on the drafting table: what’s the difference?) Commenting on the role of gesture in architectural design—the calligraphic infusion by means of which a building is the yield of a trace—Zaha Hadid speaks of “chromasomatic origin points for the disposition of the project” (Alan Read 217). Her “Paper Art” installation at the Leopold-Hoesch Museum filled the two-story space below

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the cupola with metallic streamers, as if a rhythmic gymnast’s ribbon might somehow achieve structural integrity in its descent and, rather than crumpling on the ground, retain the arrested poise of zero gravity. Scrutinizing Frank Gehry’s concept sketch for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which Roger Connah calls “one of the most published scribbles of the last decade of the twentieth century,” it’s understandable that the achieved project be regarded as “the Tristram Shandy of twentieth-century architecture” (How 87–88, 161). “By looking at the innumerable Bilbao Guggenheim drawings and models, it seems that the architect designs many buildings in one go. All of these could be smaller or larger versions of yet another building. Knowing when to stop the building and let another come out will be part of the architect’s not inconsiderable talent” (163–164). Connah might just as well be describing Ponge’s exquisite draft tableaux for Le Pre, Ezra Pound’s revisionary labors on The Waste Land, or the “proteiform graph” of Finnegans Wake, that “polyhedron of scripture” (Joyce, Wake 107). As for Gehry’s own description of his process: “I’m looking through the paper to try to pull out the formal idea . . . it’s like somebody drowning in paper” (Connah, How 89). As with certain compositional practices (I think of poets who exude a heap of drafts like entrails), the poet and/or architect “incessantly raids his own departure,” as Connah remarks of Finnish architect Reima Pietilä. “It is a form of writing that balloons out from the gestalt sketch” (Connah, Writing 96)—a formulation that brings to mind Lacan on the gaze: “Imagine a tattoo traced on the sexual organ ad hoc in the state of repose and assuming its, if I may say so, developed form in another state” (Four 88). Elsewhere, Lacan compares instinct to “the ‘messenger-slave’ of ancient usage, the subject who carries under his hair the codicil that condemns him to death [who] knows neither the meaning nor the text, nor in what language it is written, nor even that it had been tattooed on his shaven scalp as he slept” (Écrits 302).1 Lacan might be describing bats, creatures whose architectural destiny is negotiated by echolocation. In one of his Adagia, Wallace Stevens evokes the poetic corollary of echolocation: “When the mind is like a hall in which thought is like a voice speaking, the voice is always that of someone else” (Opus 168). Stevens here revisits an episode from Valéry’s dialogue “Eupalinos, or the Architect,” in which Socrates asks Phaedrus “what is your own thought?” and Phaedrus replies, “I no longer know how to grasp it. Nothing contains, everything implies it. It is within me, like my own self” (Dialogues 77). Implication activates complicity in this dictum by Maurice Blanchot: “To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot stop talking” (Space 27). The echolalia extends to Mayakovsky’s question: “could you / play / right to the finish / a nocturne on a drainpipe flute?” (96). Drainpipes


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are not bagpipes, but they play a tune fit to remind a body of its transient liquid architecture: somatic acoustic momentum. In his little rumination “On the Gradual Fabrication of Thoughts While Speaking,” Kleist suggests that “Speech is not a fetter, then, like a drag chain on the wheel of the mind, but a second wheel running parallel to it on the same axle” (221). But he slips the noose of this particular analogy in favor of another. “For it is not we who ‘know’; it is rather a certain condition, in which we happen to be, that ‘knows’ ” (222). The uncanny dimension most evident in architectural circumstance reflects Kleist’s sense that our placement does much of our thinking for us—almost as if we were there to coax a divulgence from a window, already half surmised by the shadows of a corridor. Poetry and dwelling speak volumes. “When I speak I do so only for the purpose of casting a spell” (Bely 103). Steven Connor, in his cultural history of ventriloquism, observes: “the voice always requires and requisitions space”; but “the voice is not merely orientated in space, it provides the dynamic grammar of orientation.” This is clearly an architectural model, in which implications are echolocations: “As I speak, I seem to be situated in front of myself, leaving myself behind. But if my voice is out in front of me, this makes me feel that I am somewhere behind it.” Connor finds the power of the voice commensurate with its frailty. “My voice can bray and buffet only because it can also flinch and wince. My voice can be a glove, or a wall, or a bruise, a patch of inflammation, a scar, or a wound” (5). To make such a scar visible is an aspiration of Krzysztof Wodiczko’s “Xenology” project—xenology being “the art and science of the stranger” as well as “the immigrant’s art of survival. . . . Xenology is the art of refusal to be fused” (131). Among the several “immigrant instruments” (132) Wodiczko has designed as xenological tools is “Porte-Parole,” a cyborgian mouthpiece that positions a video monitor directly in front of its wearer’s mouth (like a gag, he insists [118]), producing hypergraphic images of the lips, morphing them into rubbery funhouse contortions, turning the corporeal agents of speech production inside out, as it were, so that the lips become an exterior display of the laboring buccal cavity.2 The Porte-Parole is designed to “spread the communicable (contagious) process of the exploration of one’s own strangeness” (120). Wodiczko subsequently redesigned the Porte-Parole so that the mouthpiece could perch adjacent to the face, thereby doubling the volume of available lips. Another xenological instrument is his Aegis, with a set of screens that rise up from the wearer’s back like wings, projecting multiple prerecorded images of his or her face. The Aegis heralds the appearance of the stranger, emphasizing that “contemporary strangers intentionally or unintentionally perform an angelic or prophetic mission in today’s migratory and alienating world” (133).

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Wodiczko’s “Mouthpiece” specifies the point at which poetry and architecture merge—where “Perplexity can only be met with complexity” (133)— much as Luis Fernández-Galiano takes architecture to be an intermediary between construction and combustion, or more evocatively for poetics, “between mud and breath” (3). In doing so, his referential axis accommodates a central problem of architecture, which is the dialectic of creation and destruction. As Valéry memorably puts it, “Destroying and constructing are equal in importance, and we must have souls for the one and the other” (Dialogues 70). “Destroying and constructing,” enthused Wenzel Hablik, participating in the Crystal Chain circle of architects instigated by Bruno Taut, “are the radio stations and aerials of cells with a telepathic, primordial, spatial and temporal volition that creates living buildings.” Accordingly, he declares Utopia “the form nearest to nature of all artistic and architectural energy” (Whyte 133). In this spirit Walden is an architectural manifesto masquerading as a species of truculent yankee poetics. Thoreau claims much more on behalf of subtraction than addition. “No yard! but unfenced Nature reaching up to your very sills,” he enthuses. “Instead of no path to the front-yard gate in the Great Snow,—no gate—no front-yard,—and no path to the civilized world!” (87). With the same animation Whitman exults, “Unscrew the locks from the doors! / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!” (210)—an exhortation that tacitly includes the construction of the very thing it’s then necessary to undo. Agamben adopts a similar principle, envisioning critical investigations that would not discover an object but ensure “the conditions of its inaccessibility” (xvi). Agamben and Whitman converge in Hablik’s credo: “I believe that ‘art’ in every form is the subjective life and death of the millennia in one’s own body—and therefore cannot be taught. One can only practice writing it down, and even that demands the expansive sense of cosmic, innate lust” (Whyte 133). At which point, “the mind is like a hall in which thought is like a voice speaking,” and “the voice is always that of someone else”—to which the final words of Lambert Strether in Henry James’s The Ambassadors lend an air of exquisite deferral to finality: “Then there we are!” (438).

Notes

Introduction 1. Van den Berg’s theory of metabletics understands the unconscious as by no means a universal, transhistorical aspect of human nature, but the byproduct of a sudden population surge in Europe at the dawn of the nineteenth century. This entailed a shift in the texture of experience from what he calls “social density” (in which contacts can be readily placed, either by social station or prior acquaintance) and “numeric density” (the characteristic anonymity of the big city) (Divided 104). The unconscious, in his hypothesis, arises as “the index of nearness or remoteness in one’s relationship with other people” (Changing 177, emphasis in original). 2. After Dickinson, the great expositor of the No is Kenneth Burke, who sensibly points out that “The negative begins not as a resource of definition or information, but as a command, as ‘Don’t’ ”—“though we can’t have an ‘idea of nothing,’ we can have an ‘idea of no’ ” (On Symbols 63, 64). Burke, with his characteristically subversive precision, delivers with almost audible mockery of humanist institutional rhetoric his definition of human being: Man is the symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative) separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order) and rotten with perfection. (On Symbols 70, italics in original)

One The Murmur: Modernist Alchemies of the Word 1. Blanchot dedicated a section of L’Espace littéraire to Breton’s exhortation, “Le caractère inépuisable du murmure” (Space 181), focusing on the point at which power becomes powerlessness, inspiration stasis, wealth poverty. The baroque intricacy of Blanchot’s topoi suggests that his is a diagrammatic practice in which

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Notes pp. 14–20

a number of themes (death, solitude, plural, limit, fragment) intersect with a network of authors (Kafka, Rilke, Mallarmé, Hegel, Nietzsche, Bataille, Heidegger) by means of certain focal strategies enabling him to approach authors and themes simultaneously but from different directions. The periodic encounters with Breton, in this light, are not repetitions of a single topic, but remobilizations of an ars combinatoria or even a cubist criticism. In Foucault’s estimation, “literature is appearing more and more as that which must be thought; but equally, and for the same reason, as that which can never, in any circumstance, be thought in accordance with a theory of signification” (Order 44). Julia Kristeva elaborates: “poetic language has deserted beauty and meaning to become a laboratory where, facing philosophy, knowledge, and the transcendental ego of all signification, the impossibility of a signified or signifying identity is being sustained. If we took this venture seriously—if we could hear the burst of black laughter it hurls at all attempts to master the human situation, to master language by language—we would be forced to reexamine ‘literary history’ ” (Desire 145). Or, succinctly put by Roberto Calasso: “Literature grows like the grass between the heavy gray paving stones of thought” (Literature 183). Détournement is the transference of an object to a new context. It is necessarily “a negation of the value of the previous organization of expression,” Guy Debord says, but its “peculiar power . . . stems from the double meaning, from the enrichment of most of the terms by the coexistence within them of their old senses and their new, immediate senses” (Knabb 55). Parenthetically, Schwitters indicates “Der letzte Vers wird gesungen” (199). But what is it that he says should be sung? Is the “last verse” the final line, “Cigarren”? The word—the only word in the poem—appears seven times in all. The first and last lines consist of the word itself, while the variants in between span several lines each and undergo spelling permutations. Blanchot locates this improbable imperative in Surrealism, for which “literature is not only illegitimate, it is also null, and as long as this nullity is isolated in a state of purity it may constitute an extraordinary force, a marvelous force. To make literature become the exposure of this emptiness inside, to make it open up completely to its nothingness, realize its own unreality— this is one of the tasks undertaken by surrealism” (Gaze 22). Blanchot’s fidelity to Surrealism may seem surprising, but the most affirmative moment in his work is the culminating commemoration in L’Entretien infini of André Breton (who figures significantly in the opening pages of the book as well), where Blanchot exalts the Surrealist quest for its “concepts escaping every conceptualization,” and offers a rare perspective on the Surrealist expulsions and reprisals as something more than literary politics. Rather, it’s an ethical obligation to make way for the discontinuous even when (or especially when) it brings on trauma. Every repudiation or excommunication by which Breton secured the perimeters of Surrealism couldn’t help but disclose a limit, a failure of imagination, on the part of Surrealism itself. But the founding truculence

Notes pp. 21–24

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of Surrealism, to be honored, had consequences: its success made it official, so it had to undermine itself in its own officiating capacity. It had to submit to the drama of every successful revolution in order to face its ongoing revolutionary animus. For Breton, brandishing the arbitrariness of power was a calculated exercise in Surrealist tactics, not a crude administrative necessity. By dividing the Surrealist world into official and unofficial components, Breton energized something that would suffocate itself by being unitary. It’s not enough for Georges Bataille, for example, to be constituted by Breton as one of Surrealism’s excremental discards; he devotes his life to elaborating a theory of the rem(a)inder. In Blanchot’s terms, “The more useless it becomes, the more it needs an end to make something useful out of this uselessness. It is its gratuitousness that makes its placement ‘in the service of the revolution’ inevitable” (Work 94). It’s as if Bataille secretly celebrates his exclusion from the inner sanctum of Surrealism as a gift, a “mode of relating or of holding oneself in a relation . . . where relation is ‘impossible’ ” (Infinite 208). The revolutionary gesture thrives in the insistence on a breach that is not rhetorical flourish but ethical challenge. 6. The translator neglects to indicate that the phrase “rhythmic scansion of life” is by Mallarmé. 7. The equation of “murmur” with spanda is mine, not Foucault’s; nor is it made by Deleuze, who is, however, sensitive to numerous links between Foucault and Blanchot. “Foucault echoes Blanchot in denouncing all linguistic personology and seeing the different positions for the speaking subject as located within a deep anonymous murmur. It is within this murmur without beginning or end that Foucault would like to be situated, in the place assigned to him by statements. And perhaps these are Foucault’s most moving statements” (Foucault 7). In fact, Foucault dreamed of being Blanchot early in his career (“A cette époque, je rêvais d’être Blanchot”) as well as crediting him with having made discourse about literature possible: “Il est vrai que c’est Blanchot qui a rendu possible tout discours sur la littérature” (Gregg 188). 8. Along the same lines, in a striking inversion of familiar assumptions, Leo Bersani suggests that “Mallarmé’s inaccessibility is his most serious claim to social relevance”—a point requiring nuanced elaboration: There is no contradiction between the occasional nature of nearly all his writing and his scorn of the immediate. Mallarmé is perhaps as “activé par la pression de l’instant” as his contemporaries, but he deprives the instant of its immediacy. For immediacy is an ontological error; the immediacy of sense perverts the nature of thought. The opposite of such immediacy is not “profound” or non-contingent sense, but rather the moving sense of a thought continuously proposing supplements to the objects abolished by its attention. (74–75) Bersani’s insight evokes, in effect, the movement of mind transposed to a medium seemingly distinct from text, something more like a sketchpad, in which erasure fertilizes propagation.

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9. In Children of the Mire, Octavio Paz presents a sustained meditation on the role of analogy, “the true religion of modern poetry, from Romanticism to Surrealism” (55). As he elaborates, “If analogy turns the universe into a poem, a text made up of oppositions which become resolved in correspondences, it also makes the poem a universe. Thus, we can read the universe, we can live the poem. . . . The poetic image shapes a reality which rivals the vision of the revolutionary and that of the religious. Poetry is the other coherence, made not of reasons but of rhythms. And there is a moment when the correspondence is broken; there is a dissonance which in the poem is called ‘irony,’ and in life ‘mortality.’ Modern poetry is awareness of this dissonance within analogy” (56). At its level of generality, this may be the most comprehensive theory of poetry produced by a modern poet. 10. Such a prospect has a history, in fact, going back to George Puttenham, who introduced diagrammatic lineation to depict verse forms in his Arte of English Poetry (1589), a procedure taken up again by the eighteenth-century prosodists John Walker and Peter Walkden Fogg, having been proposed for general semiotic theory in the seventeenth century by John Wilkins. After a long dormant period, Ernest Fraenkel resumed the practice in his attempts to graph Un Coup de dès. Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers produced an edition of Mallarmé’s text replacing its lines with lines of his own, printed on transparent pages so that all the lines overlap, inducing a blurred vision of the entire poem seen in a glance. Finally, several literary critics have reactivated Puttenham’s legacy in their heuristic application of geometric lines to lines of verse (John Hollander, Henry Sayre, Stephen Cushman, and Richard Bradford). Insofar as these lines efface the lines of text by standing in for them, the explicit practice of effacement by Man Ray and Bob Brown contributes to this constellation; and, by the same token, so does the overpainting of artist Tom Phillips in A Humument and the erasures of Paradise Lost undertaken by Ronald Johnson in RADI OS and extended by Jen Bervin to Shakespeare’s sonnets in Nets. Cy Twombly’s blackboard graphisms hover nearby, marking that space where the act of erasure leaves its own smudge. The interplay of space and graphic symbol is a feature of Armand Schwerner’s poem The Tablets and artist Najdu’s edition of Heraclitus. The line in drawing is kindled into calligraphic invitation by Masson (“semiograms” Barthes calls them [153]); and the line as staff for musical notation is given a specifically poetic application in the eighteenth century by Joshua Steele, later by Futurist Francesco Cangiullo, and more recently by Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer. For examples of much of this material, see Rasula and McCaffery, Imagining Language. 11. Nevertheless, Nebel was alert to the satirical force of transpositions, using metathesis to pillory a critic: “Der Neffe Adolf verhält sich zum Affen Nedolf wie der Ahne Bedolf zum Adolf Behne”: “The nephew Adolf is to the ape Nedolf as the forefather Bedolf is to Adolf Behne” (Jones 254). As to the title, “unfeig” means uncowardly, but I hear resonances with fig (Feig), so a plausible translation (given poetic license) might be Un-fig-leafed.

Notes pp. 38–50

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12. In the first Canto, Pound renders in archaic English an episode from Homer’s Odyssey via Andreas Divus’ Latin translation of 1538, creating a palimpsest of linguistic options. In doing so, Hugh Kenner proposes, Pound “recapitulates the story of a pattern persisting undeformable while many languages have flowed through it” (Pound 149). 13. “To make two bald statements: There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem I mean that there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant” (256). 14. The context is more complex in terms of Parisian literary politics. When this issue of 391 appeared, André Breton’s post-Dada group was undergoing its vague des rêves, and one of its key members, Paul Eluard, had mysteriously vanished (embarked, it turned out, to Indochina in a ménage-a-trois with his wife Gala and Max Ernst). Surrealism was on the horizon, but under contention. The Alsatian poet Yvan Goll was mobilizing friends of the late Apollinaire, who had coined the term “surréalisme” in the preface to his play Les Mamelles des Tirésias (1917), and the fruits of Goll’s efforts appeared in October 1924, as the journal Surréalisme. Breton’s first manifesto of surrealism also appeared in October, followed in December by the inauguration of La Revolution surréaliste, obliterating any chance for Goll’s less doctrinaire group to retain the banner of surrealism. Back in May, when Picabia issued 391 #16 with “superréalisme” blazoned across its cover, the term was still up for grab; but he clearly recognized the symptoms of a spurious authority in Breton’s penchant for concocting genealogies of predecessors. Accordingly, this issue of 391 depicts the appropriation of the “thermomètre Rimbaud” by the aspiring surrealists, pointedly depicting the abducted poet with a thermometer inserted into his rectum.

Two Drawing a Blank: Episodes in the Poetics of Unworking 1. This poem was Pound’s contribution to 391, edited by his friend Francis Picabia, whose wit he highly esteemed. In 391 the designated translator is “Christian” (with quotation marks), suggesting that Pound himself may have rendered “M. Staïrax” as “possesseur d’un vast domaine et de muscle opulents” (Picabia 84). 2. Inasmuch as Un Coup de dés was inaugurated by the poet as a dispersal, it’s fitting that a century later it achieved multimedia diffusion as an interactive installation, “Red Dice” by Bill Seaman, at the National Gallery of Canada in 2000. As the viewer/reader/user engaged the text (French or English) with an electronic tablet pen: touching a word in the poem with the pen activated navigational icons, prompting in turn video, sound, and musical constellations that effectively submersed Mallarmé’s poem in the milieu of the “desiring machine” theorized by Deleuze and Guattari (Seline 9). 3. Pater’s famous dictum is in a chapter on the Venetian school of Giorgione, in whose work “life itself is conceived as a sort of listening” (96). This synaesthetic remark is predicated on Pater’s view that art always strives for a union

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of subject and form. In music these are inherently identical, while in the other arts “it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it” (86)—the it in question being ostensibly the distinction between form and content, but Pater actually does favor a potential obliteration of “mere intelligence”— which art must surmount in its quest “to become a matter of pure perception” (88). In “Voice Inverse,” Yopie Prins identifies a perceptual equivocation at the heart of such yearnings: “Is the humming of Victorian poetry something we ‘almost cannot hear’ or is it something we almost hear, but cannot?” she wonders (45). At the core of any work that deploys material means to manifest purportedly spiritual matters, the matter persists as residue. In Prins’ summary of Watts-Dunton’s poetic theory: “Instead of giving voice to ‘the poet’s soul,’ poetry articulates ‘the countless shifting movements of the soul’ in abstract metrical form, asking us to read motion as ‘the vibrations of emotion’ ” (56). The contact point between motion and emotion was of considerable interest to Gertrude Stein as well: “the cinema has each time a slightly different thing to make it all be moving. And each one of us has to do that, otherwise there is no existing. As Galileo remarked, it does move” (179). Stein, too, felt the synaesthetic pressure: “I began to wonder at at about this time just what one saw when one looked at anything really looked at anything. Did one see sound, and what was the relation between color and sound, did it make itself by description by a word that meant it or did it make itself by a word in itself. All this time I was of course not interested in emotion” (191)—emotion having been displaced by motion. 4. Hopkins appears to have been refining his observations of hydraulic action at this period. Journal entries of the previous year, 1872, are comparably meticulous: “The shores are swimming and the eyes have before them a region of milky surf but it is hard for them to unpack the huddling and gnarls of the water and law out the shapes and the sequence of the running: I catch however the looped or forked wisp made by every big pebble the backwater runs over” (Journals 223); “The overflow of the last wave came in from either side tilting up the channel and met halfway, each with its own moustache. When the wave ran very high it would brim over on the sloping shelf below me and move smoothly and steadily along it like the palm of a hand along a table drawing off the dust” (225). Again, the world seems eerily silent amidst the tumult of breaking and reforming waves. 5. Edward Dimendberg’s sagacious essay on the film notes the geopolitical backdrop of The Song of Styrene (a primary ingredient in napalm, among other things), suggesting the political stakes by quoting Queneau’s definition of OuLiPo: “Oulipians: rats who build the labyrinth from which they propose to escape” (88). 6. Will Bray was a pseudonym of Matthew Josephson, who duplicates the passage in his 1962 memoir, Life Among the Surrealists: “We must write for our age . . . the poets should be no less daring or inventive than the mechanical engineers of wartime; our literature should reflect the influences of the cinema . . . the saxophone” (125). On the same page he quotes extensively from Apollinaire’s 1918 essay “L’Esprit Nouveau et les Poètes.”

Notes pp. 71–83

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7. Barzun emigrated to the United States in 1920, where he promoted Orphism as an educational program befitting the land of Whitman. In his later years he issued a series of publications documenting his activities, which he represented as a kind of free-floating educational institution. These oversize volumes constitute a substantial alternate history of modernism, as Barzun deftly interweaves his own accomplishments into a familiar panorama of major figures, implying that he was at the center all along. Because they were self-published, Barzun effectively consigned himself to oblivion. Very few copies are in libraries, and all the ones I’ve seen are personally inscribed: clearly these books were Barzun’s calling card, though he never managed to secure a professional affiliation, and in any event his career was played out under the lengthening shadow of his son’s accomplishments. 8. In 1914 Apollinaire wondered why Barzun persisted in claiming as a poetic advance the basic resources of theater. He was by then exasperated with Barzun’s behavior: “he is a very bilious character. His obsession about having invented everything is equal only to the haunting presumptuousness with which he boasts about it” (645). 9. “Art,” declared Pessoa, “is sensation multiplied by consciousness” (Always 35), and multiply it he did by way of his heteronyms. As the contents of his extraordinary trunk in Lisbon have gradually revealed, the heteronyms clamored for a phone book of their own. But the major poets remain Alberto Caeiro (“I’m the Argonaut of true sensation,” he declared, “sailing downriver without permission from metaphysics” [Little 43, 65]), Ricardo Reis (“Let’s construct a voluntary fate / Above ourselves, / So that when it oppresses us, it is we / Who’ll be our oppressors” [92]), Álvaro de Campos (“What an advantage to have a soul that’s inside out!” he exults; “the song is a straight line drawn crookedly inside me” [232, 189]), and Pessoa “himself ” (“A wanderer through my own being,” who sagely advises, sensing the clamor of his heteronyms, “Open your door to the man who doesn’t knock!” [308, 345]). 10. In Book Two of De rerum natura Lucretius introduces his term (adapted from the parenklisis of Epicurus’ Letter to Herodotus) to refer to the minimal swerve of atoms in laminar flow. Lucretius consigns all natural creation to this unprovoked swerve; but most provocatively for our concerns here, he likens atoms in the body to letters in words, commemorating sequential dispersion as the animating principle of language. 11. Ronell’s thesis is more substantial than such a pithy formulation might suggest: At about the same time as Romanticism turned it into the seriousness of oeuvre, literature initiated the experience of its own substance: organized by a concept of work, it soon came to know play’s gravity. Such gravity exposed the work to experiences of peril and experimentation, obligating literature to map out a toxicology—an imaginary place where literature could crash against its abysses and float amid fragments of residual

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transcendency. The engagement with its essence threw literature off any predictably legible course but also created the mirage of a genuine autonomy. (31) In its most succinct form, Ronell’s thesis is that “Drugs make us ask what it means to consume anything, anything at all” (63). In general, Crack Wars proceeds under the cardinal prodding of Nietzsche: “Who will ever relate the whole history of narcotica?—It is almost the history of ‘culture,’ of our socalled higher culture” (3). Allen Ginsberg was appreciative of Olson’s support for Leary, as in the following paragraph from a 1971 flyer, Declaration of Independence for Dr. Timothy Leary: Bay Area Prose Poets’ Phalanx takes note of the public viability of the formulation proposed by the late poet Charles Olson, friend of Dr. Leary, that now “Private is public, and public is how we behave.” We affirm that Dr. Leary has the literary right to make his private opinions known publicly, and to engage unpunished in public literary activity. Poet Olson, 1961 Cambridge, addressing Professor Leary: “When the police come after you, you can stay in my house.” (Prose 116) The passage cited above is from the typescript, reproduced in Olson #3, p. 58. The specification “with mushroom eyes” was removed when it appeared in Maximus IV, V, VI (Maximus 202). My translation contracts the poem considerably for this context. The original, in quatrains, was memorably imprinted on my consciousness by the impromptu recitation of my professor Norbert Fuerst at Indiana University in 1971. It’s important to recall here Benn’s brief association with the Nazis in order to retain some sense of the ambiguous legacy of the archaic with which the model of the phenotype might easily be mistaken. For the historical episode encompassing the proto-Fascism not only of Benn but also writers like D.H. Lawrence and Ezra Pound, Ernst Jünger, Heidegger, and cultural theorists like Ludwig Klages and Carl Jung, the most telling summation can be found in a section title in Ernst Bloch’s book Heritage of Our Times (1935), “Ungleichzeitigkeit und Berauschung,” noncontemporaneity and intoxication. In an auspicious essay, “Nach dem Nihilismus” (1932, on the verge of his illfated alliance with the Third Reich), Benn identified tendencies in psychoanalysis, Expressionism and Surrealism suggesting some biological reawakening of myth (Werke III 402). As if anticipating his disillusionment with political opportunism, Benn emphasizes the regressive characteristics of this “bionegative” drive—by which he means the kinks and quirks of modernist art with its strategies of “Versteigerung und Verdichtung” (enhancement and concentration), its tendency to create by means of destruction or negation (401). By valorizing this bionegative tendency with artists, Benn was effectively removing it from collectivist options, affirming his “primal vision” as an artistic prerogative antithetical to political interests.

Notes pp. 102–117

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Three Poetry’s Voice-Over: Techniques of Inspiration 1. Robert Lamberton describes the “comic and brutal” relationship between poet and Muse in terms of debasement: “This Boeotian hillside is a spiritual landscape whose apparent heirs in the tradition are the plain of La Mancha and the anonymous wasteland in which Samuel Beckett’s marginal tragicomic figures pursue the implications of their humanity. The divine messengers have us at their mercy, and any attempt to see beyond the inadequacy of the world, to perceive anything but the hungry gut, is an act of faith dependent on an act of grace” (58–59). 2. Echo is the nymph besotted with Narcissus. In Ovid’s account, she’s punished by Juno for concealing Jupiter’s trysts. The punishment deprives her of speech; so her attempts at professing her love for Narcissus result in the senseless repetition of everything he says. My synoptic reference above neglects the more nuanced implications Amy Lawrence derives from Echo’s plight as necessarily related to Narcissus, whose self-absorption she sees predicated on the elimination of dialogic exchange. “And so Echo fades away, unable to contact Narcissus once he ceases to speak, sound’s absence established as a precondition for the image’s irresistible allure.” Lawrence takes the tale as an instructive parable about gender hierarchy: “The man’s tragic obsession with the image is more important than the woman’s problems of expression, her death simply preparation for the grand climax of his death. Woman and sound are allied on the ‘weak side’ of the story” (2). 3. The word Fitzgerald translates as “tales” is kléos, a term of some complexity, in that it’s not simply a literary term but a cultural value. “Kléos is that for which the heroes of the Iliad and Odyssey fight,” writes Simon Goldhill, making it “a fundamental element of the intricate competitive value system presented in the Homeric poems, a fundamental aim of both military and other action, a fundamental function of the poetic enterprise” (70, 71). 4. At issue is not simply writing, but all forms of media and mediation, brilliantly outlined by John Durham Peters in Speaking into the Air. For a different primal scene retaining some of the anxious provocation of the Muses, consider the predicament confronting St. Augustine, for whom “the appearance of God to humans is essentially a media problem,” suggests Peters. “For how could God, he asks, ‘appear’ to the patriarchs and prophets when God has no appearance or physical form? If God appeared to appear, he was resorting to deception, donning a disguise to meet the crudity of human sense organs. Theophany is either deception (of humans) or debasement (of God)” (71). 5. Sewell proposes an Orphic lineage investigating two related questions: “What power and place has poetry in the living universe?” and “What is the biological function of poetry in the natural history of the human organism?” (4). The “main people” of this tradition of enquiry, according to Sewell, are Bacon, Shakespeare, Milton, Hooke, Vico, Linnaeus, Swedenborg, Erasmus Darwin, Goethe, Novalis, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Emerson, Renan, Hugo, Mallarmé, and Rilke (5).

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Notes pp. 118–126

6. David Farrell Krell’s remarkable treatise Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing: On the Verge employs the figure of the “verge” as a means of developing MerleauPonty’s hints about accessing a past that has never been present. “His invocation of a ‘hollow’ in visibility and in subjectivity, a kind of space where time is made, and from which we—unlike Augustine—do not dream of escaping; his depiction of the past not as a tableau but as a horizon, margin, or atmosphere of my present; and his insistence that one can approach one’s past only step by step, little by little, like those fledgling weavers, the animal spirits, in accord with a tempo not of one’s own choosing—these were the first rudiments of a new way to think about memory and reminiscence” (103). It’s almost irresistible to characterize these insights as Orphic, particularly in their suggestions (tempo, step by step, and a hollow in space where time is made) of music. An equally fascinating reading of memory as implicated in a musical emplotment of temporal zones is Blanchot’s essay “The Siren’s Song,” which considers that signal event as playing havoc with time while also imposing temporality as measure. 7. Blanchot’s thought in general may be said to constitute a poetics of erasure (as does that of Levinas: “Taken at the level of erasure, the association of ideas thus becomes a thought that lies beyond the classical categories of representation and identity.” [Reader 146]). There’s a chapter on “Forgetful Memory” in The Infinite Conversation venturing the hypothesis that “Forgetting is the very vigilance of memory, the guardian force thanks to which the hidden is preserved”—and that for the realization of this power in poetry “it [must] cease being a function and become an event . . . it must escape our mastery, ruin our power to dispose of it, ruin even forgetting as depth, and all of memory’s comfortable practice” (315, 316). These Orphic ruins verge on divine Dionysian intoxication. 8. By stressing this Orphic dimension of cosmic order, Meschonnic adamantly distinguishes “rhyme” from social convention. “To imitate the manner in which poets of the past had understood and heard rhymes is nothing. But one continues to listen to them as to Mozart” (94). “Modernity is not a simple snag in metrics. A bad moment for the traditionalists to live through” (97). On the contrary, our advantage over the traditionalists, Meschonnic suggests (in what could pass for a summary of Mallarmé), is that “Modern poetry has generalized, diffused rhyme to the entire mass of saying and said. The disappearance of rhyme at the end of a line is a passage toward the rediscovery of rhyme. For poetry and for all language” (95). Accordingly, “Understanding rhyme assumes that one stops opposing poetry to ordinary language” (92). 9. The Dogon myth works in concert with the Greek myth of Psyche’s tasks, a necessarily dark subordination as in Robert Duncan’s “Poem Beginning With a Line by Pindar.” The ants, those paradigms of minute detail, come to the aid of those like Psyche who “must follow to the letter / freakish instructions” (65). Duncan’s insect also responds to Pound in detention at Pisa (“an ant’s forefoot shall save you” [Cantos 533]). 10. Grivel’s link between phonography and death is shared by Adorno in his speculations on the apocalyptic momentum of the artistic impulse. The primitive

Notes pp. 128–132

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

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belief “that artworks only become ‘true,’ fragments of the true language, once life has left them” culminates in the gramophone, a portent “whose formulations capture the sounds of creation, the first and the last sounds, judgment upon life and message about that which may come thereafter” (280). Monitor/Minotaur: the near homonym invites reflection on the sorts of transgression involved in migratory lusts, and Daedalian transpositions. The Minotaur was offspring of an unholy union between Pasiphaë and a bull, a copulation Daedalus arranges by prosthetic means, in which Pasiphaë occupied the hollow interior of a bovine mannequin of sufficient attraction to the bull. The ghost in such a machine, being a flesh and blood woman, gives birth to a monster who ends up being imprisoned in a labyrinth—which is exactly what a microchip looks like. This autoerotic longing is also famously depicted in “Song of Myself ”: “I believe in you my soul . . . the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice. / I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning, / How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me, / And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart” (192). Mandelstam also notes that Dante wrote with a quill, and would have been mindful of the winged materiality of such an implement. “A pen is a small piece of bird’s flesh. Of course Dante, who never forgets the origin of things, remembers this. His technique of writing in broad strokes and curves grows into the figured flights of flocks of birds” (40). As I’ve chronicled elsewhere, we’re all babes in the media nursery. When I wrote “Nietzsche in the Nursery” I was not aware that Wyndham Lewis had preceded me by almost sixty years in The Doom of Youth (1932). In E.W.F. Tomlin’s summary, Lewis predicted that “systematic exploitation of youth was the means to its destruction, and of much else besides. If not merely youth but age too had to be young, then society would be reduced to a condition of juvenility all round, and the world, though grown up, would become ‘a vast nursery’ for which a special amusement industry would cater” (Lewis 234–235). The voice I have in mind is that of Westbrook Van Voorhis, narrator of the Fox Movietone series “The March of Time,” which dominated the 1930s and reached its zenith during the war. Van Voorhis was officially known as “The Voice of Time,” but acquired the colloquial moniker “The Voice of God” (Kozloff 29). Baritone authority was ideologically coded into the technical features of broadcasting equipment. Public distaste for female announcers was prevalent in the early days of radio, the explanations for which ranged from the supposition of a natural inferiority in women’s voices to technical deficiencies in the transmitters (McKay passim). As Amy Lawrence puts it: “Evidently the ‘problem’ of the woman’s voice is always a tangle of technological and economic exigencies, each suffused with ideological assumptions about woman’s ‘place’ ” (32). Interestingly, Adorno identifies woman and mechanism as symbiotic partners in deficiency: “Wherever sound is separated from the body—as with instruments—or wherever it requires the body as a complement—as in the case with the female voice—gramophonic reproduction becomes problematic” (274).

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Notes pp. 133–149

16. “We may now see that in the judgment of taste nothing is postulated but such a universal voice, in respect of the satisfaction without the intervention of concepts, and thus the possibility of an aesthetical judgment that can, at the same time, be regarded as valid for everyone (for that can only be done by a logically universal judgment because it can adduce reasons); it only imputes this agreement to everyone, as a case of the rule in respect of which it expects, not confirmation by concepts, but assent from others” (Kant 50–51). 17. Wallace Stevens quotes this quip by Braque in The Necessary Angel, where it is preceded by a reference to Picasso’s famous formulation: “Does not the saying of Picasso that a picture is a horde of destructions also say that a poem is a horde of destructions?” (161).

Four

Gendering the Muse

1. The difference is at once precarious and foundational. Luce Irigaray in Marine Lover writes an echolalia of Nietzsche, reiterating his charms and in the process unveiling his text: “The most powerful effect of women: to double for men, sublime souls.” Remember that Irigaray here is Nietzsche (her project involves ventriloquism), but with that gendered difference intact. “To give body—and with no difference—to their ideals. And as those ideals are the gods of the language: to give them voice, foundation—material for transcendental productions.” However, “The empire of the word cannot do without the ear and the voice if it is to reproduce itself. But those still fleshly mediums are to be left to woman. Who, since she doesn’t understand much about truth, faithfully doubles the ante, always adding to the pot” (109). 2. “Opposite pairs such as inside/outside, the raw/the cooked, or life/death appear to be merely derivatives of the fundamental opposition between boundary and passage,” in de Lauretis’ view, and “all these terms are predicated on the single figure of the hero who crosses the boundary and penetrates the other space. In so doing the hero, the mythical subject, is constructed as human being and as male; he is the active principle of culture, the establisher of distinction, the creator of differences. Female is what is not susceptible to transformation, to life or death; she (it) is an element of plot-space, a topos, a resistance, matrix and matter” (119). De Lauretis’ thesis derives from a reading of Oedipus and the Sphinx, via Freud, which tempts her to overstress the binary and misconstrue some of its attributes. The power of metamorphosis invested in myth—Greek or otherwise—is by no means an exclusive male prerogative. One might with equal plausibility contend that masculine singularity is balked by a feminine aptitude for transformation. 3. Clayton Eshleman’s poetic investigation of the Paleolithic focuses on hominid perturbation as creative resource. Commenting on an earlier draft of my project, he wondered whether we might regard “breath [as] an upper displacement, a mental appropriation of a conjunction that was initially involved with the lower body?” If the Muse marks the threshold between upper and lower body

Notes pp. 154–160

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functions (Bakhtin), the received account of the Heliconian Muses dictating to Hesiod specifically aligns Muse-resource with consciousness, breath-spiritpneuma, and Christian sublimation. To go the other way into the lower body stratum, however, also means going back in time, to take in the Paleolithic continuum, and also to probe shamanistic traditions in general. One result, as Eshleman insightfully put it, is to see that “A muse is also a bagpipe, a musette, probably related to muzzle, or animal mouth” (personal communication, November 21, 1993). Redgrove and Shuttle cite the the ancient injunction that, “in order to enter the temple precincts one has to be transformed into an animal,” and they link this motif to the catabasis tradition of subterranean descent—specifically the Homeric nekyia involving a blood ritual they associate with menstruation (313–314). 4. Lacan’s late seminars reopen the Freudian question, what does woman want, with a vengeance. He overturns the sense of lack associated with want altogether, putting woman in the position of a jouissance like that inhabited by mystics. “It is clear that the essential testimony of the mystics is that they are experiencing it but know nothing about it” (Feminine 147). To be fully incarnate is to be so coincident with the source of knowledge that it amounts to a sublime unknowing. Lacan ends up seeing the entire Symbolic order suffused with the support of woman (“why not interpret one face of the Other, the God face, as supported by feminine jouissance?”). So deeply are we besotted with dualism, however, that such unities are seen as self-cancelling; or worse, as signs of infamy, which Lacan effectively conveys by means of a pun: dit-femme/diffâme, speaking female/ infamy (156). 5. As Goux points out, filiarchy defies both patriarchy and matriarchy in its disavowal of all forms of symbolic reproduction. This violent detachment from the sanctioning imperatives of the ancestors “is the driving impulse that defines Western civilization as history” (204). Oedipus, then, is the prototype of a “man who creates his own laws in a scandal of autonomy and humanism that at once opens up the possibility of an auto-institution of the social in an absolutely sovereign community (autonomous, autodikos, autoteles) and also allows the emergence of the individual”—albeit as orphan (203, 204).

Five


1. Dante has exerted uniquely insistent claims on modern poets, from Pound, Eliot, Mandelstam, Montale, Borges, and Auden to Lowell, Duncan, Merrill, and many others. In The Poet’s Dante, a four-hundred-page compendium of twentieth-century responses, a compass is provided by Seamus Heaney’s characterization of Dante as “the aquiline patron of international Modernism” (Hawkins and Jacoff xvi). English translations of the Commedia in part or whole, which were plentiful throughout the twentieth century (Norton, Binyon, Sayers, Sinclair, Singleton, Ciardi, Musa, Mandelbaum), have mushroomed in recent years (Pinsky, Merwin, Carson, Sisson, Palma, Kirkpatrick, O’Brien, Durling, Esolen, Hollander).

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Six “When the Mind Is Like a Hall”: Places of a Possible Poetics 1. The exquisite case of neurologist Geoffrey Sonnabend is to the point here. Recovering from a nervous breakdown in the hinterlands of Paraguay, the scientist attends a Lieder recital by Madalena Delani, whose voice was said to be “steeped in a sense of loss” (Museum 58). It’s not clear whether Sonnabend was aware of speculations that the singer “suffered from a form of Korsakov’s syndrome, with its attendant obliteration of virtually all short- and intermediateterm memory, with the exception, in her case, of the memory of music itself” (5). In a sleepless night following her recital, Sonnabend conceived his three-volume opus Obliscence: Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter, setting forth his conviction that memory was illusory, since forgetting was the sole outcome of experience: “We, amnesiacs all, condemned to live in an eternally fleeting present, have created the most elaborate of human constructions, memory, to buffer ourselves against the intolerable knowledge of the irreversible passage of time and irretrievability of its moments and events” (Museum 64). The saga of Delani and Sonnabend is on display (or one could say, given the moral of the tale, under localized curatorial anaesthesia) at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. 2. Wodiczko’s Porte-Parole, especially in its ambulatory applications, suggests a distant kinship with the Bomarzo Gardens created by Pier Francesco Orsini in the sixteenth century (which Robert Harbison thinks was designed “to memorialize an intense disgust,” “to preserve bitter and fugitive sensations” [Eccentric 10]). Long since overgrown, the remaining statuary is all the more monstrous for being obscured by vegetation. Mouth images abound, from the table with teeth for seats to the gaping mouth of the ogre (with steps leading up to it) bearing the inscription “Ogni pensiero vo” (every thought flies) (Naomi Miller 51).

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Index

Abbe Créteil, 70 abstract, see concrete Adorno, Theodor, 40, 144–145, 147, 214 n.10, 215 n.15 Agamben, Giorgio, 42, 149–151, 200–201, 204 Agrest, Diana, 194 Ahab, 82, 89, 104; see also Moby-Dick Alain, 119–120 Albert-Birot, Pierre, 68 Althusser, Louis, 100 Altieri, Charles, 173 analogy, 25–28, 42, 67, 86, 87, 116, 197, 208 n.9 angel, 9, 11, 82, 89, 93, 143, 179, 203 Antin, David, 163, 167–170, 176–178, 179, 194 “Black Plague,” 176–178 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 67–69, 72, 209 n.14, 210 n.6, 211 n.8 Alcools, 68 Apollo, 104, 112, 115, 182 arabesque, 28, 40, 87 Aragon, Louis, 16, 43, 162 Arakawa, 199 Ariadne, 197 Aristotle, 2, 105, 107–108, 116, 125, 133, 185 Arnold, Mathew, 7 Arp, Hans, 17, 61–62, 65 Artaud, Antonin, 80–82, 112–113, 136

Ashbery, John, 12, 108–110, 133, 147, 171–172 “Litany,” 109 Auden, W. H., 46, 217 n.1 Aufhebung, 35 Augustine, St., 105, 213 n.4, 214 n.6 Austen, Jane, 79 Bacon, Francis, 213 n.5 Badiou, Alain, 51 Bahr, Hermann, 113 Bakhtin, M. M., 75–76, 217 n.3 Bakunin, Mikhail, 44 Ball, Hugo, 14–16, 31, 47, 49, 61, 63, 136 Bandera, Cesáreo, 189–190 Barnes, Djuna, 161–162, 195 Nightwood, 162, 195 Barnes, William, 56 Barthes, Roland, 13, 26, 100, 208 n.10 Barzun, Henri-Martin, 69–73, 211 n.7, 211 n.8 L’Orpheide, 70–71 Barzun, Jacques, 70–71 Basso, Ellen, 110 Bataille, Georges, 153, 156, 189, 206 n.1, 207 n.5 Bateson, Gregory, 84 Baudelaire, Charles, ix–x, 4, 5, 6, 34, 86–87, 120, 193 “Correspondences,” 193

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Bays, Gwendolyn, 22 Beats, 83 Beauduin, Nicolas, 68–69 L’Homme Cosmogonique, 69 Beethoven, Ludwig von, 89 Behne, Adolf, 208 n.11 Behrens-Hangeler, Herbert, 64 “Obibi,” 64 Bell, Alexander Graham, 58 Bell, Alexander Melville, 57–61, 63 visible speech, 58, 59 Bellmer, Hans, 141 Bely, Andrei, 31, 38, 165, 203 Benjamin, Walter, 2, 24, 25, 87, 120, 124, 126, 161, 165, 174, 178–180, 183 Arcades Project, 2 Benn, Gottfried, 85–86, 90, 91–92, 113–114, 212 n.15 “Happy Youth,” 113–114 “Novel of the Phenotype,” 91–92 “Provoked Life,” 85–86 Bergson, Henri, 197, 198 Bernstein, Charles, 97–98 Bersani, Leo, 207 n.8 Bervin, Jen, 208 n.10 bíos, 114, 115, 121, 142, 153 Blade Runner, 134 Blake, William, 7, 22 Blanchot, Maurice, 7, 8, 10, 13, 14, 20–21, 28, 42, 73, 120–122, 146–147, 190–191, 202, 205 n.1, 206 n.5, 207 n.7, 214 n.6, 214 n.7 “The Gaze of Orpheus,” 120–122, 146–147 Infinite Conversation, 13, 206 n.5 Space of Literature, 191, 205 n.1 blank, x, 8–9, 20, 38, 44–45, 65, 120, 121, 122, 175 Blaser, Robin, x, 89, 138, 170 Bloch, Ernst, 34, 212 n.15 Bloom, Harold, 77, 78, 109 Blümner, Rudolf, 35 Bly, Robert, 164, 170–173, 175

Boehme, Jacob, 170 Bök, Christian, 64–65, 75, 77–78, 80 Eunoia, 75 Bomarzo Garden, 218 Borges, Jorge Luis, 22, 76–79, 96, 217 n.1 “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” 76–79 Boulez, Pierre, 89 Bowie, Malcolm, 21–22 Bowra, C. M., 68 Bradford, Richard, 29–30, 208 n.10 Brancusi, Constantin, 17 Brand, Stewart, 93 Braque, Georges, 138, 216 n.17 Breslin, Paul, 175, 178 Breton, André, 7, 10, 13, 16, 26–27, 68, 79, 162–163, 195, 200, 205 n.1, 206 n.5, 209 n.14 Bridges, Robert, 52 Broodthaers, Marcel, 208 Brown, Bob, 208 n.10 Brown, Norman O., 153 Browning, Robert, 45–46, 56–57 Bruns, Gerald, 22 Bukatman, Scott, 127 Burke, Kenneth, 205 n.2 Burroughs, William, 83 Butler, Judith, 142, 147 Bynner, Witter, 95–96 Byrd, Don, 108 Cabaret Voltaire, 14–15, 47, 61, 63 Cacciari, Massimo, 179 Cage, John, 26 Caillois, Roger, 178 Calas, Nicolas, 165–166, 167 Calasso, Roberto, 39, 85, 206 n.2 Calliope, 117 Camfield, William, 19 Cangiullo, Francesco, 208 n.10 Carlyle, Thomas, 160 Carrington, Leonora, 200 Carroll, Lewis, 29 “Jabberwocky,” 80–81

Index Carson, Anne, 131 Carter, Angela, 108 Cartesian, 47, 108; see also Descartes, René catabasis, 143, 189, 217 n.3; see also descent Catullus, 49 Celan, Paul, 180–182 “Meridian,” 181 Cendrars, Blaise, 67, 68, 72, 74, 183–184 “Profound Today,” 183–184 Cervantes, Miguel de, 76–79 Césaire, Aimé, 106, 187 chance, 26–28, 35, 62, 75, 98, 167 Char, René, 171 Chaval, Facteur, 192 Chazal, Malcolm de, 192 Chomsky, Noam, 169 Christ, 56, 81, 118–119 cinema, 29, 38, 65–67, 69, 114, 131, 133, 136, 165, 185, 210 n.3, 210 n.5, 210 n.6 Cixous, Hélène, 184 clavis universalis, 22, 27, 28, 67 clinamen, 39, 78, 94–95 Cocteau, Jean, 67, 87, 169, 192 coincidence, 26–28, 40, 76, 78, 80, 160 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 8, 59, 164, 213 n.5 “Frost at Midnight,” 164–165 collage, 26, 72, 74, 109 Collins, Jim, 78 concrete, 16–17, 42, 50, 61–65, 71, 110 Connah, Roger, 202 Conrad, Joseph, 49, 125 Constructivism, 62, 63 Corbin, Henry, 83, 88–89, 93 Cornell, Joseph, 199 Cottom, Daniel, 109 Creeley, Robert, x, 4, 163, 164, 167, 172 “The Door,” 167 Croce, Benedetto, 160

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Cubism, 26, 69, 70, 72, 73, 162, 206 n.1 Cumont, Franz, 130 Cushman, Stephen, 208 n.10 cybernetics, 2, 127, 131 Cyclops, 40 Dada, 14, 16, 18, 24, 26, 31, 40, 47, 61, 63, 65, 67, 69, 72, 73, 172, 209 n.14 Daedalus, 215 n.11 Dalí, Salvador, 66, 195 Dante Alighieri, x, 5, 8, 46, 105, 123, 130, 160–161, 201, 215 n.13, 217 n.1 Darwin, Charles, 3 Darwin, Erasmus, 213 n.5 Daud, Abraham Ibn, 105 Daumal, René, 8, 125 Debord, Guy, 206 n.3 deep image, 163–179, 183, 185 defamiliarization, 3, 29, 51, 138 Delaunay, Robert, 62, 69, 72 Deleuze, Gilles, 103, 132, 207 n.7, 209 n.2 Demeter, 146 Democritus, 94 Deren, Maya, 66–67, 184 Derrida, Jacques, 7, 13, 56, 78, 100, 111, 113, 182 Descartes, René, 142, 143; see also Cartesian descent, 38, 105, 106, 117–118, 120–121, 130, 143, 189, 190, 194, 199, 202, 217 n.3; see also catabasis désoeuvrement, 20–21, 28, 42 detournement, 14, 206 n.3 Dewdney, Christopher, 79–80 Dickens, Charles, 45, 132 Dickinson, Emily, 1, 4, 8, 43, 135, 160, 193–194, 197, 199, 200, 205 n.2 Dimendberg, Edward, 210 n.5 Dionysus, 85, 119, 142, 153, 155, 214 n.7

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Index

Divus, Andreas, 38, 209 n.12 Doane, Mary Anne, 133 Dogon, 123–124, 129, 214 n.9 doppelgänger, 67, 109 Dorn, Edward, 89 double, 10, 15, 22, 34, 35, 76, 82, 98, 102, 135, 143, 149–150, 216 n.1 drugs, 31–33, 83–90, 212 n.11; see also hallucination, intoxication Duchamp, Marcel, 16, 26, 79 duende, 11, 82, 166, 169, 170, 187–188, 189 Duncan, Robert, x, 122, 214 n.9, 217 n.1 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 140, 152, 155 Duse, Eleanor, 43 echo, 9, 32, 52, 54, 55, 102, 103, 108, 112, 122, 142, 146, 164, 184, 202 Echo, 10, 102–104, 105, 142, 144, 213 n.2 echolalia, 103, 202, 216 n.1 echolocation, 184, 202, 203 Edison, Thomas, 45–46, 128 Eggeling, Viking, 65–66 Eisenstein, Sergei, 29, 165, 179 Ekelöf, Gunnar, 189 Eliot, T. S., x, 14, 20, 26, 33, 34–35, 46, 49, 61, 65, 68, 99, 108, 132–133, 176, 184, 192, 217 n.1 Four Quartets, 14, 35, 192 Waste Land, 132–133, 184 Ellis, Havelock, 87 Eluard, Paul, 209 n.14 Elytis, Odysseus, 12 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 3–4, 82, 118, 154, 213 n.5 epic, 148, 167, 189 Epstein, Jean, 44, 67 erasure, 9, 11, 21, 40, 44, 82, 120–121, 138, 175, 207 n.8, 208 n.10, 214 n.7; see also negation Ernst, Max, 17, 23, 26, 66, 74, 209 n.14

Eros, 27, 88, 189, 199 Escher, M. C., 13, 143 Eshleman, Clayton, 113, 216 n.3 Eurydice, 38, 51, 105, 117, 119–120, 130, 142, 143–144, 147, 199 Expressionism, 69, 113, 156, 163, 212 n.15 Exquisite Corpse, 14 extravagance, 20, 21, 90, 99, 198 Fantasia, 66 Fauves, the, 62 Fenollosa, Ernest, 23 Fernández-Galiano, Luis, 204 Ficke, Arthur Davison, 95 film, see cinema Fischinger, Oskar, 66 Flint, F. S., 69–70 Fogg, Peter Walkden, 208 n.10 Ford, Ford Madox, 5, 47 Foucault, Michel, 7, 13–15, 17, 21, 26, 127, 206 n.2, 207 n.7 Fraenkel, Ernest, 24–25, 208 n.10 Dessins trans-conscients de Stéphane Mallarmé, 24–25 free word poetry (parole in libertà), 23, 68 free verse, see vers libre Freud, Sigmund, 16, 26, 29, 76, 99–100, 106, 108, 134, 153, 154, 166, 185, 201, 216 n.2, 217 n.4 “Dora case,” 99–100 Frost, Robert, 46, 103–104, 136, 149 “The Most of It,” 103–104 Fuerst, Norbert, 212 n.14 Fuller, Loie, 67 Gabo, Naum, 63 Gaudí, Antonio, 192 Gauguin, Paul, 62 Gautier, Theophile, 87 Gehlen, Arnold, 135 Gehry, Frank, 202 gender, 100, 142–149, 152–154, 157, 213 n.2, 216 n.1

Index George, Stefan, 23 Gibson, William, 126 Giedion-Welcker, Carola, 17 Gins, Madeleine, 199 Ginsberg, Allen, 15, 83, 84, 92, 212 n.12 Gleizes, Albert, 70 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 5, 169, 199, 213 n.5 Goldhill, Simon, 213 n.3 Goldsmith, Kenneth, 74–75, 79, 80, 128 Goll, Yvan, ix, 209 n.14 Gorgon, see Medusa Goux, Jean-Joseph, 154–155, 217 n.5 Graham, Jorie, 131 Graves, Robert, 1–2 Greatful Dead, 84 Green, Henry, 195–196 Grivel, Charles, 126, 214 n.10 Guattari, Félix, 103, 209 n.2 H. D., 46, 155–156 Hablik, Wenzel, 204 Hades, 33, 38, 105, 199 Hadid, Zaha, 201 Hagens, Bethe, 152–153 hallucination, 3, 31, 86, 94, 127–128, 130; see also drugs, intoxication Harbison, Robert, 193, 218 n.2 Hardy, Thomas, 56 Harris, Wilson, 110–111 Hassan, Ihab, 159 Hausmann, Raoul, 63, 72, 136 Haydn, Joseph, 192 Hegel, G. W. F., 20, 28, 35, 108, 185, 206 n.1 Heidegger, Martin, 92, 98–99, 100, 136, 182, 206 n.1, 212 n.15 Hélion, Jean, 62–63 Heller-Roazen, Daniel, 9 Heraclitus, 151, 208 n.10 Herbert, Frank, 79 Herbert, George, 29 Hermes, 100, 104, 129, 144 Herodotus, 211 n.10

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Hesiod, 2, 81, 98, 101–104, 106, 108, 109–112, 118, 121, 125, 126, 128, 131, 137, 139, 141–144, 159, 187, 217 n.3 Hildebrand, Grant, 200 Hillman, James, 182 Hirsch, E. D., 77 Hirsch, Edward, 170 history, 94, 107, 155, 160, 161, 176, 179, 182, 185, 217 n.5 Hitchcock, Alfred, 131 Hocke, Gustav René, 22 Hollander, John, 208 n.10 Homer, 8, 38, 74, 104, 107, 110, 125, 145–146, 209 n.12, 213 n.3, 217 n.3 Hooke, Robert, 213 n.5 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 5, 47, 50, 51–56, 58, 59, 63, 67, 73, 210 n.4 “Spelt from Sibyll’s Leaves,” 52, 55 Howe, Susan, 107 Huelsenbeck, Richard, 14, 15, 61 Hugo, Victor, 6, 10, 76, 213 n.5 Huidobro, Vicente, 69, 72, 106, 187 Altazor, 72, 106, 187 Huxley, Aldous, 92 Hyde, Lewis, 9 image, deep, see deep image image, dialectical, 174, 179–180, 183, 184, 185 Imagism, 5, 34, 38, 68, 69–70, 95, 164, 165, 195 intoxication, 65, 88, 127, 144, 163, 212 n.15, 214 n.7; see also drugs, hallucination intransigence, 20, 38 Ionesco, Eugene, 98 Irigaray, Luce, 216 n.1 Iser, Wolfgang, 134 Jacob, Max, 72 James, Henry, 5, 45, 50, 193, 204 “The Jolly Corner,” 193 Janco, Marcel, 14, 61

246

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Jarry, Alfred, 43 Johnson, Ronald, 208 n.10 Jolas, Eugene, 71, 105–106, 187 “Vertigralism,” 105–106, 187 Jonas, Hans, 83 Josephson, Matthew, 210 n.6 Joyce, James, 17, 26, 29, 106, 148, 157, 176, 202 Finnegans Wake, 106 Ulysses, 26, 148 Jung, C. G., 83, 140, 170, 171, 212 n.15 Jünger, Ernst, 86–88, 92, 212 n.15 Kabbalah, 22 Kafka, Franz, 24, 129, 206 n.1 Kahn, Fritz, 196–198 Kalaidjian, Walter, 173 Kalevala, 5 Kandinsky, Wassily, 4, 16–17, 23, 34, 35, 39, 51, 61–62, 63, 87 Point and Line to Plane, 34 Keats, John, 46, 199 Kelly, Robert, 12, 122, 163, 165–168, 171, 173, 179 Kenner, Hugh, 72, 209 n.12 Kesey, Ken, 84 Khlebnikov, Velimir, 38 Kiesler, Frederick, 188, 198 Kinnell, Galway, 170, 174, 175 Kittler, Friedrich, 128, 134 Klages, Ludwig, 212 n.15 Klee, Paul, 23, 44 Kleist, Heinrich von, 203 Krauss, Rosalind, 30 Krell, David Farrell, 98, 214 n.6 Kristeva, Julia, 7, 13, 30, 114, 206 n.2 Revolution in Poetic Language, 114 Kruchenykh, Alexei, 4, 60, 61 Kupka, Frantisek, 72 labyrinth, 151, 192, 199, 210 n.5, 215 n.11 Lacan, Jacques, 100, 128, 136, 139, 140, 153, 202, 217 n.4 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 13

Lamberton, Robert, 213 n.1 language, 4–5, 8–11, 13–15, 21, 22, 24–25, 27–28, 30, 35, 53, 65, 75–77, 79–82, 98–99, 102, 110–111, 113–114, 115, 117, 120–124, 127, 131–132, 134–136, 138, 141, 147, 149, 151–153, 168–170, 178–179, 180, 182, 189, 191–192, 206 n.2, 211 n.10, 214 n.8, 216 n.1; see also translation Lanier, Sidney, 50–51, 52 Laoköon, 16, 70, 133, 183 Laughlin, James, 70 Laugier, Marc-Antoine, 191 Lauretis, Teresa de, 147, 152, 216 n.2 Lautréamont, 6, 27, 81, 126 Lawrence, Amy, 213 n.2, 215 n.15 Lawrence, D. H., 7, 212 n.15 Leary, Timothy, 83–85, 92, 212 n.12 Léger, Fernand, 62 Leiris, Michel, 129 Lethem, Jonathan, 74, 78 Levertov, Denise, 170 Levinas, Emmanuel, 121, 214 n.7 Levine, Philip, 170 Lewis, Wyndham, 215 n.14 Lezama Lima, José, 45, 104, 165, 189 line, 29, 32–35, 39, 42, 129, 208 n.10 Linnaeus, Carl, 213 n.5 lipogram, 37, 75, 78, 79, 80 Lissitzky, El, 63 literature, 3, 8, 13–14, 17, 20–21, 51, 83, 134, 206 n.2, 206 n.5, 207 n.7, 211 n.11 Liu, Alan, 130 logos, 22, 31, 52, 81, 102, 139, 191 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 5–6 Lorca, Federico García, 11, 82, 106, 163, 164, 166, 169, 170, 171, 187, 189 Lowell, Robert, 107, 217 n.1 Loy, Mina, 156–157 Lucretius, 39, 94–95, 211 n.10

Index Lukacher, Ned, 100 lyric, 2, 5, 24, 30, 48, 95, 97, 110, 120, 140, 147, 149, 171, 177, 189 MacDiarmid, Hugh, 56 Mackey, Nathaniel, 8, 124, 139 MacLeish, Archibald, 17 Mac Low, Jackson, 26, 167 Magritte, René, 17, 175, 184 Malanga, Gerald, 85 Malevich, Kasimir, 42, 114 Mallarmé, Stéphane, ix, xi, 3, 4, 20–28, 30, 34, 38, 43, 49–50, 63, 65, 67, 70, 73, 75, 106, 121, 126, 170, 188, 206 n.1, 207 n.6, 207 n.8, 208 n.10, 209 n.2, 213 n.5, 214 n.8 Un coup de dés (A Throw of the Dice), xi, 21, 23–24, 34, 42, 49, 70, 73, 106, 121, 188, 208 n.10, 209 n.2 Mandelstam, Osip, 25, 27, 112, 123, 130, 201, 215 n.13, 217 n.1 Manetti, Giovanni, 115 Márai, Sándor, 200 Marinetti, F. T., 7, 68, 69 Marx, Groucho, 19 Marx, Karl, 134 Marx Brothers, 66 Masson, André, 23, 208 n.10 Maud, Ralph, 83 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 7, 29, 202 McCaffery, Steve, 95, 208 n.10 McGahey, Robert, 22 McHugh, Heather, 10–11, 139 McKenna, Terence, 79, 86 McLuhan, Marshall, 128 mechanism, see techne media, 45–46, 101–102, 112, 127–128, 131, 134, 213 n.4, 215 n.14 Medusa, 9, 10, 80, 132, 147, 161, 173, 176, 180–185 Melnikov, Konstantin, 201 Melville, Herman, 82; see also Moby-Dick

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Merrill, James, 217 n.1 Merwin, W. S., 170, 174, 176 Meschonnic, Henri, 122, 214 n.8 Michaux, Henri, 31–34, 42, 86, 87–88, 90, 166 Milton, John, 29, 108, 143, 213 n.5 Minotaur, 104, 215 n.11 Mischgedicht (mixed genre), 39 Mitchell, S. Weir, 87 Mitchell, W. J. T., 22 Mnemosyne, 111, 120, 132 Moby-Dick, 21, 82; see also Ahab modernity, 1–3, 6, 67–69, 120, 147, 160, 183, 185, 214 n.8 Moholy-Nagy, Lázslo, 24 Mondrian, Piet, 43, 50 Montale, Eugenio, 43, 217 n.1 Moore, Marianne, xi, 5, 34, 45, 46, 123, 140, 153 murmur, x, 7, 9, 13–17, 20–21, 28, 30, 38, 42, 44–45, 63, 80, 89, 116, 137, 162, 175, 205 n.1, 207 n.7 Muse, 1–4, 7, 9–11, 81, 91, 95, 96, 98, 100–113, 115, 117–118, 120, 125, 126, 131–132, 134, 137, 138, 139–146, 149, 153–156, 175, 184, 187, 213 n.1, 213 n.4, 216 n.3 Museum of Jurassic Technology, 218 n.1 music, 5, 18, 20, 23, 31, 34, 37, 44–45, 48–52, 61, 63, 64, 66, 87, 101, 110, 116, 119, 130, 167, 182, 184, 192, 208 n.10, 210 n.3, 214 n.6, 218 n.1 mythopoesis, ix–x, 7, 100, 101, 102, 112, 161, 169, 170 Nabis, 62 Nagy, Gregory, 104, 115–116 Najdu, 208 n.10 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 20, 115, 136 narrative, 124–126, 147–148, 152, 160, 189 Nebel, Otto, 35–38, 42, 64, 208 n.11 Unfeig, 35–38

248

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negation, 8–9, 13, 40, 144, 165, 191, 199, 205 n.2, 206 n.3, 212 n.15; see also erasure nekyia, see catabasis neoteny, 31, 32, 87, 135 Neruda, Pablo, 106, 163, 164, 170, 171, 187 Nerval, Gerard de, 6 New Criticism, xi, 17 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 43–44, 85, 100, 126, 190, 206 n.1, 212 n.11, 216 n.1 Nin, Anaïs, 88 noise, 7–8, 13, 86, 124, 129 Novalis, 11, 15, 24, 61, 213 n.5 “Monologue,” 15, 24 Odysseus, 40, 50, 144–147, 189 Oedipus, 159, 151–156, 159, 216 n.2, 217 n.5 O’Hara, Frank, 68 Olson, Charles, 4, 5, 83–95, 107, 109, 110, 121–122, 212 n.12, 212 n.13 Maximus Poems, 83, 84–85, 88–89, 92–95 “Projective Verse,” 4, 5 Ong, Walter J., 47 Onslow Ford, Gordon, 26 Oppen, George, 139, 188–189, 194 Oppenheim, Meret, 163 oracle, 55, 112, 115, 131, 151 ore rotundo, 47, 48 Orpheus, ix, 10, 33, 38, 116–122, 126, 129, 130, 141–143, 146–147, 169, 183, 187, 189, 192, 199 orphic explanation of earth (Mallarmé), ix, 38, 182 orphic legacy, 22, 71–72, 117–122, 129, 141–142, 213 n.5, 214 n.6, 214 n.7, 214 n.8 Orsini, Pier Francesco, 218 n.2 ouroboros, 199 Owen, Stephen, 121

Paalen, Wolfgang, 26 Padgett, Ron, 74 Pallasmaa, Juhani, 195 Palmer, Michael, 140, 159, 172, 197 Pansaers, Clement, 67 Parmenides, 197 Paroxysme, 68–69 Parsifal, 88 Pasiphaë, 215 n.11 Pasternak, Boris, 130 Pater, Walter, 5, 50, 193, 209 n.3 Paz, Octavio, 86, 98, 174, 190, 208 n.9 Perec, Georges, 37, 80 Persephone, 129, 145–146 Perseus, 161, 181 Pessoa, Fernando, 72, 95, 188, 211 n.9 heteronyms of, 211 n.9 Peters, John Durham, 213 n.4 Petrarch, 187 phantasia, 105 phenotype, 91–92, 94, 212 n.15 Phillips, Tom, 208 n.10 Picabia, Francis, 16, 18–19, 39, 209 n.14, 209 n.1 Saint Vierge, 18–19 Picard, Max, 131 Picasso, Pablo, 43, 72, 216 n.17 Pietilä, Reima, 202 Pindar, 111–112, 214 phonograph, 46, 49, 69, 73, 124–126, 129–130, 214 n.10 Plato, 46, 51, 82, 102, 105, 111, 115–116, 125, 140, 197, 198 Plessner, Hellmuth, 135–136 Ponge, Francis, 171, 191, 202 Pope, Alexander, 74 Portmann, Adolf, 135 postmodernism, 159 Pound, Ezra, 5, 6, 7, 23, 26, 34, 38, 46, 48–49, 61, 65, 68, 69–70, 71, 72, 75, 83, 107,109, 125, 133, 160, 164, 182, 189–190, 202, 209 n.12, 209 n.1, 212 n.15, 214 n.9, 217 n.1 Cantos, 26, 189–190, 209 n.12 “In a Station of the Metro,” 38–39

Index primal scene, 2, 73, 98–101, 106, 115, 116–117, 123, 138, 139, 141, 142, 144, 145, 147–149, 155, 156, 191 Prins, Yopie, 210 n.3 procedural composition, 3, 26, 75, 77–78, 80, 81, 128, 168, 170, 172, 179 procedural memory, 44 proprioception, 83, 117, 118, 121 Pucci, Pietro, 102, 144 Pushkin, Alexander, 6 Puttenham, George, 39, 208 n.10 Pythagoras, 116–117, 119, 141, 146 Queneau, Raymond, 67, 210 n.5 Rancière, Jacques, xi, 67, 177, 182–183, 185 rasa, 125 Ray, Man, 39–42, 67, 163, 208 n.10 Space Writings, 40–41 Read, Herbert, 62 Redgrove, Peter, 140, 149, 217 n.3 Reedy, William Marion, 95–96 Renan, Ernest, 213 n.5 repetition, 24–25, 30, 77–78, 94, 103, 105, 122, 123, 134 Resnais, Alain, 67 Reverdy, Pierre, 26–27, 162, 174 “L’Image,” 26–27, 162 rhythm, 5, 21, 30, 33–34, 42, 50–51, 53, 58–59, 86, 87, 89, 99, 110, 114, 121, 122, 163, 165–167, 208 n.9 rhythmic scansion of life, 21, 42, 121, 207 n.6 Ribemont-Dessaignes, Georges, 40 Rich, Adrienne, 157 Richter, Hans, 65 Riding, Laura, x, 17, 142–143 Though Gently, 142–143 Rilke, Rainer Maria, ix, 9, 10, 11, 34, 55, 82, 90–91, 115, 129–130, 171,

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179, 181–182, 183, 187, 189, 191, 193, 206 n.1, 213 n.5 Duino Elegies, 187 “Panther,” 90–91 “Primal Sound,” 129–130 Sonnets to Orpheus, 10, 183 “Turning Point,” 181–182 Rimbaud, Arthur, 6, 39, 46, 126, 189, 209 n.14 Rodia, Simon, 193 Rodin, Auguste, 191 Romanticism, 11, 28, 39, 40, 65, 74, 108, 130, 160, 208 n.9, 211 n.11 Ronell, Avital, 83, 211 n.11 Rose, Jacqueline, 140 Rothenberg, Jerome, 98, 112, 156, 163–168, 170–173, 175, 183, 184 Rukeyser, Muriel, 7 Ruskin, John, 195 Ruttmann, Walter, 73 Sacks, Oliver, 44 Salmon, André, 72 Sanders, Ed, 107 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 11, 26, 135, 151 Sayre, Henry, 208 n.10 Schafer, R. Murray, 208 n.10 Scheherazade, 126 Scheler, Max, 135 Schlegel, Friedrich von, 39, 40 Schmidt, Siegfried, 149–150 Schoenberg, Arnold, 48, 60–61 Schreber, Daniel Paul, 76, 81, 82 Schwerner, Armand, 208 n.10 Schwitters, Kurt, 15, 17–19, 35, 37, 42, 49, 60, 61, 63, 72, 136, 206 n.4 “Cigarren,” 17–19, 206 n.4 Ur-sonate, 15, 35, 37, 60, 63, 136 Seaman, Bill, 209 n.2 Seferis, George, 184, 189 Sewell, Elizabeth, 22, 117, 119, 213 n.5

250

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shadow mouth (ombre d’bouche), 10, 12, 16, 67, 180 Shakespeare, William, 5, 74, 208 n.10, 213 n.5 Shaw, George Bernard, 57 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 6, 213 n.5 Sheridan, Thomas, 29 Shklovsky, Victor, 51, 68, 138 Shuttle, Penelope, 140, 149, 217 n.3 Silvestris, Bernardus, 143 Simic, Charles, 175 Simultanism, 26, 67, 69, 72–73, 74 Sirens, 50, 126, 144–148, 154 Situationism, 14 Snyder, Gary, 10, 140–141 Socrates, 116, 202 Sollers, Philippe, 13 sonnet, 97, 132 Sontag, Susan, 81 Sorrentino, Gilbert, 175 sound poetry, 14–15, 17, 31, 34, 35, 49, 51, 61–65, 73, 136 sound recording, see phonograph Soupault, Philippe, 79, 162 spanda, 21, 111, 207 n.7 Spectra hoax, 95–96 Spenser, Edmund, 47 Sphinx, 10, 147, 149–154, 156, 216 n.2 Spicer, Jack, 11, 169–170 Stafford, William, 174 Steele, Joshua, 48, 208 n.10 Stein, Gertrude, 25, 50, 60, 170, 210 n.3 Steiner, George, 148 Stevens, Wallace, xi, 11, 39, 46, 61, 109, 110, 115, 133, 137, 139–140, 202, 216 n.17 “Anecdote of the Jar,” 39 “Of Modern Poetry,” 137 Stewart, Garrett, 20 Stieglitz, Alfred, 73 Stravinsky, Igor, 49 sublime, 47, 74, 75, 108, 133, 141, 144, 217 n.4

Surrealism, 10, 14, 16, 26, 27, 40, 66, 69, 113, 162–166, 173–174, 175, 195, 206 n.5, 208 n.9, 209 n.14, 212 n.15 Swedenborg, Emmanuel, 213 n.5 Swinburne, Algernon, 7, 49, 50, 51 Symbolism, 23, 26, 68 Symons, Arthur, 43, 87 synaesthesia, 23, 24, 28, 34, 35, 39, 50, 51, 62, 66, 67, 87, 103, 176, 210 n.3 Tate, James, 175 Taussig, Michael, 49, 124–125 Taut, Bruno, 188, 204 techne, 12, 49, 66, 97–99, 108, 112, 117, 124–129, 131, 132, 133–134, 142, 145, 147–149, 153, 156, 215 n.15 Tel Quel, 13 Tennyson, Lord Alfred, 6, 45–47, 49 Thoreau, Henry David, 103, 190, 204 Trakl, Georg, 163, 171 translation, 24, 79, 98, 171 Tranströmer, Tomas, 171, 175–176, 192 Tschichold, Jan, 15, 18, 63 Tschumi, Bernard, 192 Twombly, Cy, 208 n.10 typography, 3, 4–5, 23, 50, 63, 67 Tzara, Tristan, 7, 14, 40, 61, 63, 67, 162 Ubu Web, 74 Ulysses, 45, 146; see also Odysseus unworking/unworked, see désoeuvrement vâc, 21, 111, 141 Vaihinger, Hans, 135 Valéry, Paul, 23–24, 28, 43, 188, 202, 204 Vallejo, César, 106, 163, 170, 171, 187 Van den Berg, J. H., 2, 205 n.1 Van Gogh, Vincent, 62 Varo, Remedios, 200 Venus, 84, 152

Index Verlaine, Paul, 6 Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 112 vers libre, 5, 29, 49, 58, 70, 75 Vico, Giambattista, 136, 182, 190, 213 n.5 Virgil, 47, 105, 161 Aeneid, 38, 143, 189 Virilio, Paul, 127, 132 Vitruvius, 191 voice-over, xi, 9, 47, 67, 81, 96, 98–101, 107–108, 111, 117, 127, 130–133, 135, 136, 138, 142–145, 147, 149, 175 Voorhis, Westbrook Van, 215 n.15 Vorticism, 34, 164 Wagner, Richard, 23, 28, 72, 88 Walker, John, 29, 208 n.10 Walsh, Kenneth, 63 Warburg, Aby, 163–164 Watten, Barrett, 134 Watts, Alan, 92 Wearing, Clive, 44–45 Wershler-Henry, Darren, 79 The Tapeworm Foundry, 79, 98 Whitman, Walt, 3, 4, 6, 7, 34, 71, 72, 74, 97, 118–119, 129, 136, 140, 189, 204, 211 n.7 “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” 118–119, 189

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“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” 129 Wiener, Norbert, 131 Wilkins, John, 208 n.10 Wilkinson, James John Garth, 199–200 Williams, Charles, 160–161 Williams, William Carlos, 5, 39, 46 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 11, 82, 97, 139, 169, 170 Wodiczko, Krzysztof, 203–204, 218 n.2 Wolfe, Bernard, 127 Wolfe, Tom, 92 Wolfson, Louis, 131–132 Woolf, Virginia, 15, 73–74, 81 Wordsworth, William, 3, 4–5, 34, 74, 213 n.5 World Trade Center, ix, 194 Wright, James, 170, 171, 175 Yeats, William Butler, 5, 7, 30, 45, 46, 48–49, 54, 87, 105, 189 Ygdrassil tree, 112 Zanzotto, Andrea, 182 Zeno, 78 Zeus, 102, 111, 145–146 Žižek, Slavoj, 136 Zuckerandl, Victor, 44 Zukofsky, Louis, 49, 110 Zwicky, Jan, 110, 149

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