Here is the third & final installment of Carl Boon’s questions:

 

7.  "Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World" is your major contribution to the debate over reference in poetry. Some critics see the question of reference as the major theoretical battleground in the wide debate between "Language poets" and the group Charles Bernstein calls "workshop poets." Do you think the question of reference continues to be an important, relevant one? How have your ideas about reference changed, say, since the publication of "Disappearance of the Word" or The Chinese Notebook? 

 

“Disappearance” was really the first serious piece of theoretical writing I ever attempted, so I’m both very fond of it while simultaneously a little appalled at the impact it seems to have had over the 27 or so years since David Highsmith and Carl Loeffler talked me into writing it. I basically just sat down, banged out what I’d been thinking, sent one copy to their publication, Art Contemporary, with a second copy to Alan Davies,\ for his photocopied newsletter, A Hundred Posters. Since then, it’s been in The New Sentence, been reprinted three times in anthologies – one in a collection of pieces on Baudrillard that features a debate he & I had at the University of Montana of all places – and translated into Croatian, German and Dutch.

 

I do think that referentiality continues to be important, not because I privilege the opaque signifier as such, but because I think it reveals a range of phenomena both in writing and in the world that become invisible the instant that language is presumed to be transparent.

 

Whenever I think of Jakobson’s model of the six functions of language, I tend to group them into three pairs or axes: contact & code; addresser & addressee; signifier & signified. I envision the model in my head as a six-sided three-dimensional figure, not unlike a die, although in practice I don’t think it really works like one. Non-referentiality focuses on the signifier, de-emphasizes the signified, tends to ignore addresser & addressee and generally privileges the contact (e.g., the physicality of sound) over code (including, though not limited to, syntax). In practice, individual texts tend to be very complex & interesting when looked at in terms of their relation to these six aspects of the linguistic experience, and the idea that one would want to fixate simply on one of them seems to me inherently narrow & limiting.

 

8.  A related question. In his essay "Poetry as Explanation, Poetry as Praxis," Bruce Andrews engages a roundtable discussion of poets and theorists on the question of reference. (Andrews, as you well know, has written extensively on the question-especially in "Total Equals What" and "Constitution / Writing, Politics, Language, The Body.") But in that roundtable, Jackson Mac Low, Barrett Watten, Nick Lawrence, Andrew Levy, and others discuss the political ramifications (and risks) of "obliterating" reference. In other words, if reference is obliterated (or even "diminished"), political change becomes harder because, in theory, fewer people can be reached. More people can be reached, perhaps, if the language remains transparent. You address this question specifically in The Chinese Notebook when you write:

 

192. A friend, a member of the Old Left, challenges my aesthetic. How, he asks, can one write so as not to "communicate"? I, in turn, challenge his definitions. It is a more crucial lesson, I argue, to learn how to experience language directly, to tune one's senses to it, than to use it as a mere means to an end.

 

If you would expand on that answer, just how do we "experience language directly"? Twenty years later, does your answer to your friend remain the same? Has history altered your answer? Does the current political situation (a conservative administration intent on dominating the world for economic interests) impact it? How would you frame the question today?

 

We experience language directly whenever we sense its presence as embodied, whether it is as a “pure” signifier or just as the embodiment of whatever message might be associated with it. Often, in practice, this is felt as a form of alienation. We hear someone’s accent as “difficult,” recognize a verb phrase as “non-standard,” or are irritated that a comment is sexist, racist or ageist. If the message is transmitted electronically, there may literally be static.

 

There are multiple elements in play with any statement. All six functions come into play and there are many times in which something other than the signified is the most significant. This is most evident in forms of advertising, as when a McDonalds campaign introduced breakfast menus with the tag line “Dawn Good Foods,” the mind literally flipping that “w” upside down, for example, or political ads use omission and innuendo to make their points. But such phenomena present everywhere and at all times.

 

As your question suggests, we’re at an especially dangerous time in human history, but the ability to actually hear & read are skills that are always useful.

 

 

9.  Another related question. Your aesthetic, at least in many volumes of The Alphabet, is considerably more traditional (in terms of reference) than the work of Watten or Andrews. I see this as a departure from, say, Tjanting, which goes further in challenging our perceptions of words and grammatical construction. I think Tjanting is more playful with language than many of The Alphabet volumes. Am I all wrong, or does this perhaps indicate a discord between your theories on reference and your poetic practice? 

 

This goes back to the question of reference you asked in connection with “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World.” Referentiality is not a toggle switch of avant attitude, or even of playfulness. The idea of maximum non-referentiality is every bit as boring as the idea of maximum referentiality. Rather, there is a range, really a series of registers, which move both closer to and further from any idea of unproblematic depiction through language. I have no interest whatsoever in being at either extreme. What does interest me is a full exploration of the range & all the various points along the way.

 

One of the things I wanted to accomplish with The Alphabet was to explore as many different aspects of my poetry as possible. Almost by definition, that desire moved me into a variety of different pursuits. Simply repeating what I had done before would have been the least interesting of possible alternatives. Thus, to pick a pointed example, Ketjak2: Caravan of Affect continues the poem Ketjak per se, but does so without the repetition that was its original organizing device.

 

On the question of playfulness, I hardly know how to gauge that. Jonathan Mayhew’s blog commented the other day on the “earnestness” of my blog as though that were some kind of fault. But there has always been a divergence here between my critical prose and my poetry. Even in the poems, however, I’ve never been that attracted to the New York School mode of humor – from my perspective, it has always been a distraction to the many interesting things I find in their work. Anyone around in the 1970s & ‘80s got to see what the poet-as-standup-comic looked like, just as audiences at poetry slams get to see it today.

 

 

10.  Here is a quote from Gregory Jay's American Literature and the Culture Wars (1997), a book that captures (from the standpoint of pedagogy) the firestorm and subsequent debate E.D. Hirsch stirred up with his theory of "cultural literacy." Jay's book explores what's often sensationalized by the popular media in headlines such as "Berkeley's not teaching Shakespeare anymore" or "Yale doesn't require English majors to read Milton anymore." It's a book about the politics of the syllabus.

 

"What is the aim of teaching 'American' literature?" Is it the appreciation of artistry or the socialization of the reader? The achievement of cultural literacy or training in critical thinking? Can it be all these things without contradicting itself (or hopelessly confusing the student)? (5)

 

I have argued that your work is a better teaching tool than, say, "Sailing to Byzantium" owing to its greater capacity to "socialize" students. In demanding students (especially those new to literature) to be active, inventive, and always thinking critically, Hidden, for example, engages students on more levels than "Sailing to Byzantium," which demands, most of all, understanding. I have had great success teaching your work.

 

What do you think the aim of teaching American literature should be? Is there such a thing as the perfect syllabus? Should "classic," canonized works be taught at all? What would be the point of doing so?

 

There is a presumption here that this has something to do with writing. But the reality is rather the other way around. The question has to do with how poetry  might be utilized for other social purposes that are not really connected to the writing. That famed Martian sociologist might find it strange indeed that historically the basis for what once was the standard educational program, especially at the college level, consisted in good part of the systematic study of works that were produced entirely for other purposes & uses. The poet’s game becomes the student’s midterm.

 

I’m not qualified to pontificate about the broader issues of curricular theory any more than I am to prescribe medications for high blood pressure or provide a recipe for cheesecake.

 

Having said that, I do think that there is a difference between a canon and a classic. Every individual carries around within himself or herself an intuited view as to the works that matter – that is an inescapable part of being human. This intuited map might be characterized as a personal canon, but it is the adjective that matters rather than the noun in that phrase. Further, groups of individuals might share some of the same enthusiasms, such as the ones that have rescued the work of both Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky in the past half century, ensuring that their works stayed more or less in print, or which got Lorine Niedecker really into print in the first place. That is a social canon, and there are literally thousands of them co-existing at any given moment in time. Again, the adjective is more important than the noun.

 

It is when you superimpose one fixed structure over all of the possible ensembles of personal and social canons that you get a “classic,” which is essentially a canon with power. And that’s not about writing or literature or literary value. That’s about power, pure and simple: the power canon.

 

Before the 19^th century, the amount of actual writing in English was little enough so that there really isn’t that much difficulty reading key figures from the various centuries. But with the extension of the English speaking world, fissures seriously do begin to develop & by the start of the 20^th century, they are already pretty deep.

 

 

11.  You have chosen not to pursue a teaching career in the academy, yet professors and graduate students have written about your work extensively. At last count, there have been nine doctoral dissertations about your work and dozens of critical articles and books. Do you find this ironic? Do you find it disheartening that what you have taken a political stand against (the academy) seems to latch onto your work?--that is, at least a few of us.

 

Actually, I think it’s more like two people have written dissertations on my work while another half dozen or so have found it to be a useful terrain for examining whatever issues their dissertations directly addressed. My work hasn’t been so much an object of study as an example.

 

Use in any critical writing targeted toward the academy is always something about which I’ve been ambivalent, partly because that is not where I myself would direct my own energies but also because the actual quality seems so random. Some of the most very positive articles about my poetry have struck me as being the crudest readings imaginable. And I think that one result of that is to reinforce some of the stereotypes of language writing or of my poetry, even when the article was intended in a helpful way.

 

Having said that, though, I’m hardly an absolutist in opposition to the academy or to teaching. I’ve taught at San Francisco State, UC San Diego, New College & the Naropa Institute over the years and enjoyed it every time. There is a genuine value to spending one’s time talking intensely about something you love with people who share that interest. But I am very sensitive to the proclivity of the academy toward abusive relationships, both of faculty and students. And while I’ve declined tenure track appointments, I’ve never been offered an academic position that did not propose to cut my earnings by at least 40 per cent per year. 

 

But if a school were seriously interested in having me teach, I wouldn’t be shocked to find myself doing more of it in the future.

 

 

12.  In her new book, 21st-Century Modernism, Marjorie Perloff claims, as other critics have previously, that Language poetry (she looks especially at the work of Steve McCaffery, Lyn Hejinian, and Charles Bernstein) should be considered "a carrying-on, in somewhat diluted form, of the avant-garde project that had been at the very heart of early modernism" (3). By "early modernism," she means especially Stein and the early Eliot. Do you think Perloff's is a fair assessment? Would you like to elaborate on her position?

 

A year or so ago, somebody posed something very close to the question to P. Inman at Kelly Writers House and several of the students in the audience seemed surprised at his announcement “for” modernism. That is where that sort of stereotyping by one’s advocates comes in, joining language poetry to postmodernism simply because that latter term has, for a period, a certain cachet.

 

But this attraction to the modernist project has been a thread you can find in many, perhaps most, of the contributors to In the American Tree. I’ve never thought of langpo as being post-modern or post-structural, but rather much more in line with Habermas’ argument that we need to return to the modernist project and see how it might be done without the internal contradictions history imposed – totalitarianism chief among them.  

 

 

13.  What do you see beyond The Alphabet? Are there any new long-term, long creative projects on the horizon?      

 

I think I’m finally ready to tackle a long poem. I have some ideas about a project that I found literally on p. 61 of Anselm Hollo’s book Corvus where he writes “alphabet ends    universe begins” and I thought, Aha! So I’ve been making notes, looking a lot at Stephen Wolfram’s book, A New Kind of Science. But I’m a year away from completing The Alphabet – if I’m lucky – and I feel that I’m learning so very much right now that it would foolhardy to get ahead of myself.

 

 

14.  I think The New Sentence was one of the best books of literary criticism to come along in a while. Do you envision putting together any new books of criticism in the future?

 

I’ve had the makings of a new volume more or less ready for some time, but don’t really plan to do the work I need to package it up qua book until I get The Alphabet complete and make more firm arrangements for getting a complete version of The Age of Huts ready.

 

15.  And finally, recently you wrote to me that Bob Dylan is one of the few artists from (near) your generation still doing "relevant new work." I am including a chapter on Dylan in my project, arguing that his songs and liner notes from the mid-1960s constitute a kind of "Language poetry," that he indeed is one of the originators of the school. How would you respond to that? Additionally, why do you think Dylan's new work is "relevant"?

 

Well, as you might imagine from my previous responses, I don’t agree with the premises of your argument. Dylan as a musician has had a serious influence on poets, not just because of the extraordinary concision and use of metaphor in his lyrics, but also because he has been such an example of a person consciously shaping & changing an art form in response to his times. But his liner notes & the novel Tarantula are really imitative Beat fare, sort of adolescent Ferlinghetti as swirled through a blender that would include William Burroughs, Jacques Prevert & the surrealists. At that level, I would pay more heed to Ray Bremser or Charlie Plymell. & I would pose the question of what your argument has to do with either Dylan’s music or the writing to which you might yoke it.

 

In one narrow sense, though, you might be right. Burroughs is certainly the not-so-secret source of much of the imagery one finds in Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde and, in the process, Dylan does demonstrate how such elements might be brought into play in the radically different form that is song. As such, he does demonstrate how any genre incorporates material from beyond its traditional borders, a process that Shklovsky argued was essential to the vitality of any art.** In showing just how far a mainstream medium such as rock & roll can go in terms of its exploration of meaning, he did set a bar, sort of a level of minimum acceptability, for any self-respecting poet, not in terms of style so much as in just how much the writer will require from him- or herself as a functioning artist. One could make the exact same argument – and I have, basically – about the early novels of Kathy Acker. If you aren’t willing to accept this level of risk, why would you expect anyone to want to listen to you?

 

Further, Dylan’s sense of what his style was or means has changed constantly, even restlessly, over the years. When I last heard him live just about a year ago, he was singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” in a style that was on the hard edge of Nashville-type country, closer in tone to the Southern rock group Alabama than to either his earlier versions or, say, Peter, Paul & Mary. And the songs on his last two albums show him as somebody still responding actively and formally to his environment. At a time when most of the other members of his own generation have turned into historical recreators of their own younger selves – viz., the Stones – Dylan & Neil Young (inventor of that neglected genre, folk-metal) seem to be the among the few still pushing themselves as artists. But Roger McGuinn’s decision to resurrect the archive of the cowboy song, which has been the focus of his recent work, out of a concern that the current phenomenon of the singer-songwriter means that traditional songs per se are endangered is itself such a noteworthy project, so it really isn’t about the lyrics in that sense.

 

Similarly, the artist who may be closest in cultural impact to the young Dylan in how he pushes peoples buttons, Eminem, also demonstrates precisely how a form can expand & redefine itself. A song such as “Cleaning Out My Closet” could be examined in the terms that one sets for the analysis of any Dylan song (& its video adds layers Dylan has never achieved) or for the highest order poetry. But that doesn’t make it poetry any more than his extraordinary talent makes Marshall Mathers a nice guy.

 

 

** The absence of which is also the death of a genre, which is precisely what is wrong with the school of quietude.