LANGUAGE POETRY AND THE LYRIC SUBJECT: RON SILLIMAN'S ALBANY, SUSAN HOWE'S BUFFALO by MARJORIE PERLOFF |
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--Lyn Hejinian, "The Person and
Description"
One of the cardinal principles-perhaps the cardinal principle-of American Language poetics (as of the related current in England usually labeled "linguistically innovative poetries") has been the dismissal of "voice" as the foundational principle of lyric poetry. In the preface ("Language, Realism, Poetry") to his anthology In The American Tree, Ron Silliman famously declared that Robert Grenier's "I HATE SPEECH" manifesto, published in the first issue of the San Francisco journal This (1971), "announced a breach--and a new moment in American writing"--a rejection of "simple ego psychology in which the poetic text represents not a person, but a persona, the human as unified object. And the reader likewise." From the other coast, Charles Bernstein similarly denounced "voice" as the "privileged structure in the organization and interpretation of poems." And in his early essay "Stray Straws and Straw Men," Silliman is Bernstein's Exhibit A for a constructivist poetry, a poetry that undermines the "natural look," with its "personal subject matter & a flowing syntax" (CD 41). "Ron Silliman," Bernstein writes, "has consistently written a poetry of visible borders: a poetry of shape"--one that "may discomfort those who want a poetry primarily of personal communication, flowing freely from the inside with the words of a natural rhythm of life, lived daily" (CD 41). And the essay goes on to unmask "Official Verse Culture," with its "sanctification" of "authenticity," "artlessness," "spontaneity," and claim for self-presence, the notion, widely accepted in the poetry of the 1960s, that "The experience is present to me." Although Bernstein doesn't explicitly say so, the critique of "voice," "self-presence," and authenticity, put forward in Content's Dream, as well as in such related texts as Ron Silliman's own The New Sentence (1987) or Steve McCaffery's North of Intention (1986), must be understood as part of the larger post-structuralist critique of authorship and the humanist subject, a critique that became prominent in the late sixties and reached its height in the U.S. a decade or so later when the Language movement was coming into its own. It was Roland Barthes, after all, who insisted, in "The Death of the Author" (1968), that writing, far from being the simple and direct expression of interiority, is "the destruction of every voice, every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing." "Linguistically, " Barthes declared, "the author is never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language knows a 'subject', not a 'person'." And he famously concludes:
We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the message of the Author-God). . . . The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. The writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others. . . . Succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt: life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred. Here Barthes anticipates Foucault's equally famous pronouncement, in "What is an Author?" (1969), that "The writing of our day has freed itself from the necessity of 'expression'." In Foucault's words:
Writing unfolds like a game that inevitably moves beyond its own rules and finally leaves them behind. Thus, the essential basis of this writing is not exalted emotions related to the act of composition or the insertion of a subject into language. Rather, it is primarily concerned with creating an opening where the writing subject endlessly disappears. What matter who's speaking? Beckett's question, as recharged and transmitted by Foucault, was to be historicized, along Marxist, and specifically Althusserian lines, by Fredric Jameson in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of late Capitalism (1991). Whereas Barthes, Foucault, and the Derrida of Writing and Difference were essentially talking about How To Read, how, that is, to construct an existing text without taking its author's intentions as normative, Jameson takes the Death of the Author, or rather, the Death of the Subject, quite literally, that death being no more than one of the symptoms of the social transformations produced by late global capitalism. "The very concept of expression," Jameson posits, "presupposes indeed some separation within the subject, and along with that a whole metaphysics of the inside and outside" that characterizes great Modernist artworks like Van Gogh's Pair of Boots or Edward Munch's The Cry. Postmodernism no longer recognizes such "depth models" as inside/ outside, essence/appearance, latent/manifest, authenticity/ inauthenticity, signifier/signified, or depth/surface. The "alienation of the subject is displaced by the latter's fragmentation," and indeed by the "death" of the subject itself--the end of the autonomous bourgeois monad or ego or individual." Coupled with that end is the end of a "unique style, along with the accompanying collective ideals of an artistic or political vanguard or avant-garde." The result is the now axiomatic "waning of affect" that manifests itself in an ability to produce satire or even parody, the latter giving way to "blank parody" or pastiche. "As for expression," writes Jameson, ". . . the liberation, in contemporary society, from the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean not merely a liberation from anxiety but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling." In his first formulation of this "new depthlessness" or "waning of affect" (1984), Jameson voiced some regret over the passing of Modernism. But by 1990 (the date of the "Conclusion" to Postmodernism), he seems to find the passing of the Modernist Giants--Picasso, Kafka, Proust, Frank Lloyd Wright--the occasion of at least some satisfaction:
[I]f the poststructuralist motif of the 'death of the subject' means anything socially, it signals the end of the entrepreneurial and inner-directed individualism, with its "charisma" and its accompanying categorical panoply of quaint romantic values such as that of the "genius" in the first place. Seen thus, the extinction of the 'great moderns' is not necessarily an occasion for pathos. Our social order is richer in information and more literate, and socially, at least, more "democratic" in the sense of the universalization of wage labor . . . .this new order no longer needs prophets and seers of the high modernist and charismatic type. . . . Such figures no longer hold any charm or magic for the subjects of a corporate, collectivized, post-individualistic age; in that case, goodbye to them without regrets, as Brecht might have put it: woe to the country that needs geniuses, prophets, Great Writers, or demiurges. (FJCG 306, my emphasis). I cite this passage at some length because its argument has been so thoroughly internalized in our own "advanced" discourses about the place of the aesthetic in our culture. The demise of the transcendental Ego, of the authentic self, of the Poet as lonely Genius, of a unique artistic style: these, as we have seen, are now taken as something of a given. In their group manifesto "Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry" (1988), for example, Ron Silliman, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Steve Benson, Bob Perelman, and Barrett Watten concur that "our work denies the centrality of the individual artist. . . . The self as the central and final term of creative practice is being challenged and exploded in our writing." And, given the tedious and unreflective claim for the unique insight and individual vision that has characterized so large a portion of mainstream poetry, the case for an "alternative" poetics remains compelling. At the same time, now that the exploratory poetries associated with the Language movement are more than twenty years old, Jameson's formulations (and related theories of the postmodern) have lost much of their edge. For, even if we set aside the work of mainstream poets like the American laureates Robert Pinsky and Robert Hass, Mark Strand and Rita Dove, even if we restrict ourselves to the poets of the counterculture represented in, say, Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris's new Poems for the Millenium (1998), differences between the various poets now strike us as more significant than similarities or group labels. Such counters as "asyntacticality" or the "disappearance of the referent" or even the "materiality of the sign" cannot alter the simple fact that we can easily tell a Charles Bernstein poem from one by Steve McCaffery, a Tom Raworth sequence from one by Allen Fisher, a Maggie O'Sullivan "verbovisivocal" text from one by Susan Howe. More important: the breakdown of the High/Low distinction, accepted as a cornerstone of postmodernism by the theorists of the seventies and eighties, is coming under increasing suspicion as common sense tells us that all artworks are not, after all, equally "valuable" (whatever "valuable" means), and that when, for example, Frank Sinatra is called, as he has been in the wake of his recent death, "one of the great artists of the century," this statement is not really equivalent to the proposition that John Cage is one of the great artists of the century. For one thing, the two assertions call for different speakers. For another, they posit different contexts. The word "great" in any case, means something different in the two cases, as does the word "artist." Even "One of" is unstable: Sinatra fans were comparing their idol, not only to other "great" singers and movie stars but to tycoons of the American record industry, those savvy entrepreneurs who know how to market a given label. In the case of Cage, on the other hand, "one of" would refer to the international avant-garde market-- the Hörspiele heard on German radio as well as the Zen art of Japan. Then, too, contemporary poetics has not satisfactorily resolved the relation of what Jameson calls the "new depthlessness" to the "genius" position now occupied by those evidently "deep" (read "complex," "difficult") theorists, whose word is all but law. Indeed, even as Jameson rejects the image of the "great demiurges and prophets" like "Proust in his cork-lined room" or the "'tragic,' uniquely doomed Kafka" (FJCL 205), he cites, on page after page, names like Adorno and Althusser, Freud and Lacan, Hegel and Nietzsche, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Ernesto Laclau, not to mention the book's presiding deity who is, of course, Karl Marx. If genius theory is passé, if there is no such thing as unique style or authorial presence, why are these names so sacred? If Foucault has pronounced so definitively on the death of the author, why are we always invoking the name of the author Foucault? Again, if in the current climate we dare not claim canonical status for Samuel Beckett or Bertolt Brecht, why does Walter Benjamin enjoy that status so readily? In a recent essay for Charles Bernstein's collection Close Listening (1998), Ron Silliman speculates on this phenomenon. Silliman begins by restating his opposition to "the poem as confession of lived personal experience, the (mostly) free verse presentation of sincerity and authenticity that for several decades has been a staple of most of the creative writings in the United States." But, in reevaluating what he calls, Barthes's "ritual slaying of the author" (RSCL 364), Silliman wonders whether Barthes's theory of text construction hasn't gone too far. The insistence, in "The Death of the Author," that "the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted," is finally unsatisfactory: "The idealized, absent author of the New Critical canon has here been replaced by an equally idealized, absent reader. All that remains are the reports of other readers--call them critics--whose texts endlessly read textuality itself, whose claim to authority lies precisely in the self-knowledge of their texts as infinitely deferred, deferring, acts" (RSCL 365). And where do these acts take place? Where else but in the university? As Silliman speculates:
Perhaps it should not be a surprise, that while postmodernism in the arts has been conducted largely, although not exclusively, outside of the academy, the postmodern debate has been largely conducted between different schools of professors who agree only that they too dislike it. Thus the characteristic strategy of the ambitious critic and anxious graduate student alike is not the opening of the canons, but rather the demonstration of a critical move upon some text(s) within the already established ensemble of official canons. . . . Once incorporated into an institutional canon, the text becomes little more than a ventriloquist's dummy through which a babel of critical voices contend. (RSCL 365, 368). Barthes could not, of course, have foreseen that the privilege he accorded the reader ("We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning") would so easily turn into the form of ventriloquism Silliman describes. But, as those of us in the academy know only too well, this is precisely what has happened. "We know now: ("On sait maintenant"): we who are critics can practice our virtuosity on this or that poem which is consequently accorded secondary status. Hence the elevated status of Benjamin or Deleuze vis-à-vis Beckett or Kafka. What matter who's speaking? Perhaps it is time to reconsider the role of the subject in lyric poetry. "The relation between agency and identity," writes Silliman, "must be understood as interactive, fluid, negotiable" (RSCL 371). It is a "relation between the poet, a real person with 'history, biography, psychology,' and the reader, no less real, no less encumbered by all this baggage. In poetry, the self is a relation between writer and reader that is triggered by what [Roman] Jakobson called contact, the power of presence" (RSCL 373). I find it interesting that Silliman, once an outspoken detractor of formalism, here invokes the name of the great Russian Formalist critic. A similar shift may be noted in the work of Charles Bernstein. In the mordantly funny essay "The Revenge of the Poet-Critic" (1998), Bernstein examines the issues posed by the poetics of cultural construction. "In the 1990s," he remarks, "the problems of group affiliation pose as much a problem for poetry as do neolyric assertions of the individual Voice. If poems can't speak directly for an author, neither can they speak directly for a group. . . . Each poem speaks not only many voices but also many groups and poetry can investigate the construction of these provisional entities in and through and by language. If individual identity is a false front, group identity is a false fort." And in the related essay "What's Art Got to Do with It? The Status of the Subject of the Humanities in an Age of Cultural Studies," Bernstein gives a devastating critique of the current critical orthodoxy which treats literature as no more than "symptom" or "example," even as the theorist is taken to be above and beyond the fray. Isn't it possible, asks Bernstein, that Bourdieu's Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste is itself a "commodity whose status is determined by its role in the professional habitat to which he belongs?" Or again, "Is Fredric Jameson's writing on postmodernism a symptom of postindustrial capitalism?" (MW 62-63). "Behind every successful artist," Bernstein declares, "is a new historian who says it's all just a symptom. Behind every successful new historian is an artist who says you forgot to mention my work--and, boy, is it symptomatic!" (MW 67). Of course, as Bernstein would be the first to insist, there's no going back to earlier models. The workshop term voice, for example, a term that implies, quite inaccurately, that speech is primary and prior to writing and that hence a poem is simply the outward sign of a spoken self-presence (as in the ubiquitous cliché, "She's really found her voice") is not adequate. Neither is the fuzzy term style, a term now thoroughly co-opted by the media and commodified in such titles as "Life and Style" (a daily section of the Los Angeles Times). Perhaps a more accurate term to refer to the mark of difference that separates one identity from another, no matter how fully the two share a particular group aesthetic, is the word signature. In its original definition (1580), from the Latin signare, to sign or mark (OED), a signature is "the name (or special mark) of a person written with his or her own hand as an authentication of some document or writing." "The fatal signature," we read in Robert Southey's All For Love (1829), "appear'd / To all the multitude, / Distinct as when the accursed pen / Had traced it with fresh blood." A subsidiary meaning of signature, now obsolete (OED 4) was "A distinctive mark, a peculiarity in form or colouring, etc. on a plant or other natural object, formerly supposed to be an indication of its qualities, especially for medicinal purposes" (1613). A signature thus came to mean "a distinguishing mark of any kind": in 1626, Lancelot Andrewes wrote in one of his sermons, "The saviour . . . taking on Him "Abraham's seed" must withal take on Him the signature of Abraham's seed, and be . . . circumcised." And in his translation of the Odyssey (1725), Pope writes, "Vulgar parents cannot stamp their race / With signatures of such majestic grace." In the seventeenth century (this meaning is now obsolete), signature was used to designate a naevus or birth-mark (OED 5b). A second category of definitions comes from the discourse of printing: a signature, let's recall, is "a letter or figure, a set of combination of letters or figures, etc., placed by the printer at the foot of the first page (and frequently on one or more of the succeeding pages) of every sheet in a book, for the purpose of showing the order in which these are to be placed or bound" (OED 6). And thirdly, there is the musical designation of signature: from 1806 on (OED 7), it has meant "A sign, or set of signs, placed at the beginning of a piece of music, immediately after the clef, to indicate its key or time." The common thread of all three of the above categories is that of the signature as identifying mark. As such, it is not surprising that, like its cognate term, author, the word signature became suspect in poststructuralist theory. In Les Mots et les choses (1966), Foucault writes movingly of signatures as the key element in the system of similitudes that dominated the pre-Modern world. As "the visible mark of invisible analogies," the signature was, for centuries, the external sign of a hidden but present interiority, and the world was "read" as a large open book, whose signs, characters, numbers, symbols, and hieroglyphs demand interpretation. "To find the law of signs," as Foucault famously puts it "is to discover things." Les Mots et les choses traces the historical dissolution of this Renaissance "episteme," a dissolution considered from a hermeneutic perspective by Derrida in "Signature Event Context" (1972). "A written sign . . . ," writes Derrida, "is a mark that subsists, one which does not exhaust itself in the moment of its inscription and which can give rise to an iteration in the absence and beyond the presence of the empirically determined subject who, in a given context, has emitted or produced it." But since the written sign inevitably breaks with its context, "with the collectivity of presences organizing the moment of inscription" (SEC 9), "the absolute singularity of signature as event" (SEC 20) can never fully occur. Thus writing "is not the site, 'in the last instance,' of a hermeneutic deciphering, the decoding of a meaning or truth"(SEC 21). From a hermeneutic perspective, this is no doubt the case. But even Derrida, posing the question, "Are there signatures?", responds, "Yes, of course, every day. Effects of signature are the most common thing in the world" (SEC 20). And he ends his essay with the "counterfeit" signature "J. Derrida" (SEC 21). The implication is that, however conscious we must be of the basic instability of a given signature, in practice, we do take signatures seriously as markers of a particular individual, a cultural practice, an historical period, a national formation, a convention, and so on. Indeed, if our purpose is to understand specific writing practices, individual as well as generic, we can hardly avoid noting their individual "stamp" or mark of authorship. The new Bilbao-Guggenheim Museum, for example, may bear witness to any number of postmodern architectural traits (and some modernist ones as well: witness the côté Frank Lloyd Wright of the building), but its indelible signature is that of its highly individual architect Frank Gehry.
This brings me back to the question of the
lyric subject in the ostensibly "de-authorized" work
of the language poets. In what follows, I want to look at signatures
in two poetic texts, both of them written by what are nominally
Language poets and both charting, in very specific ways, the geography
of childhood. The first is Ron Silliman's own "Albany,"
the second, Susan Howe's "Frame Structures." "SIGNATURES OF ALL THINGS I AM HERE TO READ"
"Albany" is a long prose paragraph made up of one hundred "New Sentences," to use Ron Silliman's own term, defined in a now well-known (and hotly debated) essay by that name. The "new sentence" is conceived as an independent unit, neither causally nor temporally related to the sentences that precede and follow it. Like a line in poetry, its length is operative, and its meaning depends on the larger paragraph as organizing system. Here, for example, are the first twenty sentences of "Albany":
If the function of writing is to "express the world." My father withheld child support, forcing my mother to live with her parents, my brother and I to be raised together in a small room. Grandfather called them niggers. I can't afford an automobile. Far across the calm bay stood a complex of long yellow buildings, a prison. A line is the distance between. They circled the seafood restaurant, singing "We shall not be moved." My turn to cook. It was hard to adjust my sleeping to those hours when the sun was up. The event was nothing like their report of it. How concerned was I over her failure to have orgasms? Mondale's speech was drowned by jeers. Ye wretched. She introduces herself as a rape survivor. Yet his best friend was Hispanic. I decided not to escape to Canada. Revenue enhancement. Competition and spectacle, kinds of drugs. If it demonstrates form some people won't read it. Television unifies conversation.
And here the last twenty:
Client populations (cross the tundra). Off the books. The whole neighborhood is empty in the daytime. Children form lines at the end of each recess. Eminent domain. Rotating chair. The history of Poland is 90 seconds. Flaming pintos. There is no such place as the economy, the self. That bird demonstrates the sky. Our home, we were told, had been broken, but who were these people we lived with? Clubbed in the stomach, she miscarried. There were bayonets on campus, cows in India, people shoplifting books. I just want to make it to lunch time. Uncritical of nationalist movements in the Third World. Letting the dishes sit for a week. Macho culture of convicts. With a shotgun and "in defense" the officer shot him in the face. Here, for a moment, we are joined. The want-ads lie strewn on the table. As in his long poems Ketjak and Tjanting, both written a few years earlier, "Albany" relies on parataxis, dislocation, and ellipsis (the very first sentence, for example, is a conditional clause, whose result clause is missing), as well as pun, paragram, and sound play to construct its larger paragraph unit. But it is not just a matter of missing pieces. The poet also avoids conventional "expressivity" by refusing to present us with a consistent "I," not specifying, for that matter, who the subject of a given sentence might be. Who, for example, says "I just want to make it to lunchtime"? Or "Talking so much is oppressive"? Who believes that "Music is essential," and, by the way, essential to what? Whose "carelessness has led to abortion"? Whose "best friend was Hispanic"? And so on. At the same time--and this has always been a Silliman trademark--indeterminacy of agent and referent does not preclude an obsessive attention to particular "realistic" detail. Despite repeated time and space shifts, the world of Albany, CA. is wholly recognizable. It is, to begin with, not the Bay Area of the affluent-- the Marin County suburbanites, Russian Hill aesthetes, or Berkeley middle-class go-getters. The working-class motif is immediately established with the reference to "My father withheld child support, forcing my mother to live with her parents, my brother and I to be raised together in a small room." And this is the white working class: "Grandfather called them niggers." Later, when the narrator is living in a part of San Francisco where, on the contrary, many ethnicities are represented, we read that "They speak in Farsi at the corner store." The poet is a political activist: he participates in demonstrations and teach-ins, is briefly jailed, avoids the draft, and so on. There are many explanations of everyday things the activist must deal with: "The cops wear shields that serve as masks." But the paragraph is also filled with references to sexual love: couplings and uncouplings, rape, miscarriage, and abortion. And finally, there is the motif of poetry: "If it demonstrates form they can't read it." And readings: "It's not easy if your audience doesn't identify as readers." Writing poetry is always a subtext but one makes one's living elsewhere: "The want-ads," as the last sentence reminds us, "lie strewn on the table." "Silliman's work," observes Jed Rasula, "may be read as a grand refusal of the chronic strategies of authorial domination." Here Rasula echoes Silliman's own early Language manifestos, with their emphasis on the avoidance of what Charles Olson called the "lyrical interference of the individual as ego," the refusal to create a consistent or controlling "self," whose construction of events as of verbal forms controls the material in question. The "realism" of "Albany," Rasula would no doubt argue, is properly understood, not as personal expression, but as elaborate network of signifiers in which conflicting vocalizations and linguistic registers come into play. But must it be either/or? And is it really the case that Silliman eschews "authorial domination"? I find myself increasingly uncomfortable with such formulations. For who, after all, controls the specific language operations in the text before us? There is, to begin with, not the slightest doubt that Albany is a man's poem: a man, aware of the sexual needs and difficulties of the women in his life, but centrally caught up in the political: the need for demonstrations, the abuses of the cops, the "bayonets on campus," the question of "nationalist movements in the Third World." "How concerned was I," we read in sentence 11, "over her failure to have orgasms." Evidently not overly concerned, since the very next sentence reads "Mondale's speech was drowned by jeers." Even such seemingly neutral statements as "My turn to cook" give Albany away as a man's poem: woman's "turn to cook," let's remember, is not an item of interest for most women since it's always our turn to cook. The signature of Albany is a "normal" declarative sentence ("I can't afford an automobile"), or part of a sentence (""To own a basement," "Died in action"), sometimes commonsensical, sometimes aphoristic, sometimes an item in a newspaper or on television. In their curious collisions, these "casual" sentences point to an author who is matter-of-fact, street-wise, and largely self-educated; his is the discourse of a working-class man (as even the first name Ron rather than Ronald suggests) who has slowly and painfully learned the craft of poetry, a man who's been around and has had to put up with quite a bit, beginning with his father's withholding of child support. Pain, violence and injustice are the facts of his life: sentence after sentence refers to murders, shoot-outs, abortions, riots, asbestos poisoning and the like. And even at the trivial level, difficulty dominates: "It was hard to adjust my sleeping to those hours when the sun was up." "Becoming to live with less space." "I used my grant to fix my teeth." And so on. Yet Silliman's characteristic formulations are by no means gloomy: on the contrary, his "voice" emerges as sprightly, engaged, curious, fun-loving, energetic, a voice that loves the word-play of "They call their clubs batons. They call their committees clubs." Or "Eminent domain. Rotating chair." Or "There were bayonets on campus, cows in India, people shoplifting books. I just wanted to make it to lunch time."
No individual signature? Let's compare the prose of Albany to the following extracts: All three of these passages come from poetic works by San Francisco poets associated with the Language movement: they are, respectively, Leslie Scalapino's "hmmmm" from Considering how exaggerated music is, Michael Palmer's "Autobiography" in At Passages, and Barrett Watten's "City Fields" in Frame (1971-1990). All three poets would insist, I think, that theirs is not an "expressivist" poetry, that, in Palmer's words, "He regards the self as just another sign." And it is true that, read against, say, a lyric by Mark Strand or Louise Gluck, there is no doubt that Scalapino, Palmer, and Watten are trying, in the words of Jasper Johns, to "do something else" with language, true that they have no interest in the closural first-person metaphoric model of mainstream poetry. But to group these texts as "Language poems" tells us very little. Scalapino's nine-line paragraph has a perfectly consistent angle of vision, quite unlike Silliman's collage-prose. It is part of a longer sequence on the uncanny and terrifying substrate of ordinary life. Scalapino's empiricist "flat" narrative purports merely to describe what happened, but what did? The scene, as so often in Silliman, is on a bus: the poet is sitting next to an unknown woman. When the bus lurches, this woman, evidently to keep her balance, grabs the poet's arm and pinches it. The incident couldn't be more trivial but the narrator is convinced that the woman is pinching her on purpose, that somehow she is telling herself, I wish that I could make you yelp just once. There is no evidence for this malice, but no evidence against it either: we only know that the woman's "lips were parted slightly, with her snout breathing softly," the word "snout" for "mouth" connoting a malignant, animal quality. But of course the real focus of this paragraph is not on the stranger but on the "I," who reads these sinister motives into the most ordinary of incidents. Somehow--how?--her mind's not right, or is it that her suspicion is merely the emblem of the larger, depersonalized, tooth-and-claw survival of the fittest that characterizes the postmodern metropolis? Scalapino's prose, in any case, far from being disjointed like Silliman's, moves seamlessly from beginning to end, from the question "How was I to know..." to the projected words of the stranger presented in italics. Silliman would never describe a woman as having a snout; indeed, his eyes would barely take in her person and quickly, impatiently, move on to something else--a memory, perhaps, of what he did with her, or a description of a boarding house, or an amusing pun that occurs to him. His jaunty utterances, upbeat despite the constant difficulties he faces, are quite unlike the just barely controlled hysteria of "Hmmm." Michael Palmer's lineated poem is called "Autobiography" but the poet's tone is more impersonal than either Silliman's or Scalapino's. His short sentences, separated by large areas of white space, are enigmatic and parabolic, his images equivocal. Some of his aphorisms--"A and not-A--are the same"; "The world is all that is displaced"--allude to Wittgenstein, the latter a nice twist on "The world is everything that is the case" (1.1. of the Tractatus). Some sentences contain literary allusions: "My dog does not know me," for example, inverts Gertrude Stein's, "I am I because my little dog knows me." In this context, "My dog does not know me" is equivalent to saying "I am nothing." "All clocks are clouds" brings to mind a Magritte painting; and such lines as "Winter roses are invisible," and "Late ice sometimes sings," are written under the sign of André Breton's Nadja and related Surrealist dreamworks. Unlike either Silliman or Scalapino, both of them insistently urban poets, Palmer is given to references to "roses" and "ice," to "the crescent beach, a drowned deer." And these nature images are underscored by references to foreign (usually European) locales, as in "Apples in a stall at the streetcorner by the Bahnhof, pale yellow to blackish red"). One thinks here of Apollinaire 's "Zone" or Cendrars's "Panama, or My Seven Uncles." Altogether, Palmer's imagination is more visual and literary than Silliman's; his memories more hallucinatory and dreamlike. His is the anxiety, not of the malignant, faceless crowd, as in Scalapino's piece, but of the empty room: "Violins, like dreams, are suspect." "There is," David Levi Strauss has remarked, "a quite identifiable first person running through [Palmer's] books. It is usually male, neurasthenic, doubtful, by turns cheerful and morose: a reluctant survivor. If it had a visible companion, the other might be called Didi or Clov or Camier. This first person is trepidatious and apologetic, constantly undercutting its own authority." In "Autobiography," not surprisingly, Silliman's sturdy resilience gives way to "Shortness of breath, accompanied by tinnitus." And although, like Silliman, Palmer writes a poetry of parataxis, his is a juxtapositioning of poetic and , philosophical fragments rather than the phenomenology of everyday life characteristic of Silliman. Yet another kind of psychic drive can be found in Barrett Watten's prose poem, again part of a longer sequence. Unlike Silliman, Scalapino, and Palmer, Watten uses the third person, but his narrator, who becomes "a lens on a room inside," functions as a kind of Jamesian register, through whom all "events" and items perceived are filtered. It is he who is "in possession of what he sees," first from outside the room and then from inside. He who feels cut off from the "fragments of their talk". Yet he is more confident than Palmer's self-critical "I," more assertive about "imagining a better place to live." Anxiety, for Watten, is socially constructed and hence to be overcome by social change: "All words resolve this matter like a huge weight balancing on a single point." For the moment, however, there is no escape: "A cyclone covers the surface of the ceiling with wavering lines." In Watten's account of displacement and possible reconnection, each sentence leads to the next. If Silliman were writing this, "The window is off the kitchen," would be followed by a sentence like "Net income is down 13%" or "They photograph Habermas to hide the hairlip." Watten's prose is more chaste, consecutive, linear; his vocabulary less exuberant and varied. And even though his narrator never speaks in his own person, a voice--measured yet urgent, direct yet highly "educated"--comes through. Again, no one would mistake this passage for a work by Silliman. The poet's "naevus" or "birthmark," it would seem, is not so easily eradicated. It is interesting that when, in 1997, Gale Research invited Silliman to contribute an autobiographical essay to their Contemporary Authors series, he used, as he explains in a letter (10 January 1998) to me, the sentences of "Albany" "to tell me what to write, where to focus, that moment in the essay. The whole premise of 'Albany' (or at least a premise) was to focus on things that were both personal and political, so when Gale called, it seemed like the right place to begin. That poem always has been my autobiography, so to speak" (my emphasis). The resultant text, in which each of the one hundred sentences is printed in boldface, followed by a paragraph of varying length, is called Under Albany-"under," no doubt, because the poet now tries to get inside, behind, and under his earlier statements so as to make some sense of their psychological and social trajectory. Not infrequently, the "under" entry contradicts or qualifies the original sentence. For example (sentence 3):
Grandfather called them niggers. In the context of "Albany," the first sentence is taken at face value. Followed as it is in the original poem by "I can't afford an automobile," it gives us a sense of the bleak deprivation and petty racism of white working class Albany, CA. But in Under Albany, the meaning of what is now a title shifts: perhaps, the reader here surmises, "calling them niggers" wasn't equivalent to simple racism, for, as Veterans of World War I, black and white men may well have had interacted more fully than have their grandsons. I have discussed elsewhere the complex relationship of title to paragraph in Under Albany, a text that is deeply moving in its account of the poet's empty childhood-a childhood that paradoxically paves the way for the remarkable resilience and optimism of Silliman's maturity:
I look forward to old age with some excitement.
In the context of Silliman's account of his
day-to-day difficulties and trauma, the upbeat ending of this
paragraph comes as a real surprise. His is a complex and engaging
autobiography, but then "Albany," the prior text that
supposedly exhibits what Jameson calls the "waning of affect,"
was always already autobiographical. Hinge Pictures/ Dividing Lines
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