Of all of writing’s illusive qualities, none invokes more magic – at least in the sense of requiring a leap of imagination that transcends all immediate physical evidence – than does depiction. It was a dark and stormy night. You looked into my eyes. Inside his vest, the bomb exploded, shrapnel, blood, bone and flesh spewing about the plaza. The apple rested on the table, next to the wooden mallard. All of the homilies put forth by various library and publishing trade groups as to the ability of literature to “transport the reader” to new & unimagined places are predicated upon this capacity of language not merely to refer to a world of objects, but to do so in a manner that is socially internalized (learned behavior) as an equivalent for the process & experience of sight.

If sight would be language’s privileged sense, it has also been a dimension hotly disputed. It was Zukofsky’s thesis in Bottom: On Shakespeare that the Bard of Avon was responsible for the deep cultural linkage between the two:

Writing after Shakespeare few remembered: eyes involve a void; eyes also avoid the abstruse beyond their focus. Today the literary theologian reads Shakespeare and oversees his own spruce theology. There is also the latest derivative verbalism after Shakespeare’s savage characters – forgetting while it curses others’ intellect, in behalf of eyes, that the curse has become the feigning eye of the black dog intellect. Clotens and Calibans, Shakespeare’s tragic theme that love should see flows around their words and shows them all the more their sightless tune which does not find its rests so as to draw breath or sequence.

Note that “rests” is plural.

Today, there exists one literature on the gaze, that penetrating look that entangles desire with power, another on the spectacle, on all the roles of reification. & from Stein onward, a new literature of opacity, of the immanence of the signifier, has offered an alternative vision.*

“Starred Together” is a three paragraph prose poem by Jena Osman that looks intently at the process of looking & the concomitant phenomena of perspective & point of view. The position it stakes out is unique & worth examining. That it stakes out a position is itself noteworthy. Osman, as with her Chain co-founder Juliana Spahr, is a writer intensely concerned with a poetry that has a critical function & edge, the sort of text most likely to bring out snarling from “black dog intellect” intent on saving poetry for the feigned purity of uncritical emotion.

But it is the role of the person that is in fact at stake. The poem telegraphs the core of its concerns in a terrifically condensed first sentence: “A glance hits an object or person and pins it down like a star.” This sentence itself could be taken as a model for the poem, as so many of the larger text’s devices and strategies are employed simultaneously here. The most obvious is a Brechtian device that I want to be especially careful in discussing, as it’s just the sort of thing that a “dog intellect” would be most apt to misconstrue, perhaps even willfully. Let’s call this device depersonification. The agent or noun phrase that is the literal subject of this sentence, “A glance,” has been removed from any human (or otherwise sentient) context, abstracted precisely so that it can be examined as a process without our being distracted in the most literal sense by some charming (or not) foible-ridden setting, the person. The implicit question – who glances? – is not answered because it is exactly not the point. The verb, or rather the first verb, is notable for its implicit violence – “hits.” Now one finds the person tucked into the conjunction that is the object of the sentence: “an object or person.” It is no accident which item comes first in that pairing. After the conjunction comes the send verb phrase, “pins it down,” one that will invoke butterfly collecting for some readers, wrestling for some and target practice for others. The final analogy, however, is completely unpredictable given what has come before: “like a star.”

Like a star. Incongruous as the phrase is in the context of the first sentence, it returns us to both the title and to the Cecilia Vicuña epigraph:

A constellation of darkness
another of light

A gesture to be completed
by light

Light is what enables sight to be embodied. In this poem, Osman will use the stars as light, as constellations, as mapping tool and as repository of human narrative. She will write, near the very end of “Starred Together,” “When you look at a constellation, you draw the points together with your own lines.” But the problem of the poem is that, as the second sentence states, “The actual moves.” Between these two poles, Osman brings in other tropes: cinema, homelessness. The poem constantly constructs the possibility of seeing only to undercut via another perspective already inherent in what has been laid out.

The result is a remarkable text, remarkable in part for its sheer density – Osman can get more complexity into two pages than most poets get into 20. Reading it, I find two aspects that push my own thinking further than it has previously gone. First is a concept for which Osman makes claims:

The narrative drive is what clings to the actual moves; the narrative drive persists through the fragmentation in which seeing occurs.

The narrative drive is a concept that invokes psychology, but not one that I personally recognize from that field. If accorded the status of a drive, narrative in this sense of joining elements together to create coherence is much more  (or perhaps much deeper) than the parsimony principle of cognitive linguistics. Is it eros, the death wish, some combination? I’m not certain, but the way Osman puts the concept out there in this poem makes me want to mull it over in more depth than I have done before.

The second aspect is Osman’s strategy, implicit but clear enough even in the first sentence of the work, of deliberately avoiding any personification of the text. The word “I” never occurs, replaced most often by “you” and occasionally “we.” In fact, the only instance in the text in which we do “hear” the narrator function self-reflexively, it’s in both quotation marks and French: “’Voyeur? – C’est Moi!’”

Here Osman is working through the problem of sight, the gaze and that mutual penetration that is recognition, but recognition in the Althusserian sense of ideology**. That last sentence I quoted about “drawing the points with your own lines,”***  leads directly to the end of the poem:

But when someone catches your eye in a direct grip, there are no more stars. You might shake your hands at the sky as the light crashes in, we’re pinning you down. You might shake your head to clear it, then step inside.   

“Starred Together” refuses to escape the problem of Others. It’s a testament to Osman’s integrity, that the poem doesn’t evade the problem. Nor does it offer us a way out, easy or otherwise. “Inside” is exactly not a solution. The word “Together” in the title is not there by accident.

I suspect that Osman’s intellectual integrity on this question of the person is part of what creeps out Seattle Times reviewer Richard Wakefield. Characterizing “Starred Together” as “a belabored amalgam of clichéd ideas and limp prose,” Wakefield quotes the first four sentences of the poem, including “While sitting in the box, images from a window are stolen from the street.” He comments:

She doesn't, apparently, have the taste to delete an excruciating line like that last one: What is "sitting in the box"? Her grammar seems to say it is "images," but how can they be "stolen from the street" WHILE "sitting in the box"?

Osman’s poem is hardly “limp prose,” though Wakefield’s phallic trope is worth noting. Working through the problems of representation within ontology could only be seen as “clichéd ideas” to someone for whom the idea itself is off limits. In addition, the objectification of interiority (housing, rooms, theaters, “the box” – Osman seems to omit only Plato’s cave) is hardly the readerly conundrum that Wakefield pretends it to be. The idea that Wakefield cannot understand how images can be “stolen from the street” – let alone recognize how delightful its play on scale is – suggests that he will find “The perversion of your own observation,” the reference to voyeurism, & “the corruption of your own detached look” later in the poem equally opaque.

It is true that “Starred Together” may confound the willfully illiterate reader, so there is a perverse poetic justice in Wakefield selecting it to demonstrate “why there are so few poems here … (in The Best American Poetry, 2002) that are even readable.” The poem is focused right on the problems of taking responsibility for the pragmatics of reference. Blaming the poems displays Wakefield’s position well enough.

Part of me wants to take Wakefield to task for such critical malpractice. But another part would love to understand what it must mean to live inside a worldview that could come to these conclusions, finding complexity more or less the way the Amish do electricity, as though it were something unintelligible & threatening.  To claim that such work is unreadable is to concede that you cannot read it. Some of the contributors of the writers in this “unreadable” collection include Rae Armantrout, John Ashbery, Amiri Baraka, Charles Bernstein, Anselm Berrigan, Tom Clark, Clark Coolidge, Diane Di Prima, Ted Enslin, Elaine Equi, Clayton Eshleman, Ben Friedlander, Gene Frumkin, Forrest Gander & Peter Gizzi, just to pick from the top of its alphabet.+ So what is Wakefield saying? If you take him at his word, here is a professor of literature who also is the poetry reviewer for a major American daily newspaper who proclaims in print his own inability to read. His sad situation invokes the very issues that Osman’s poem addresses.

* My own essay, “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World,” in The New Sentence can be read as a contribution to the history of this debate.

** Tho Shakespeare might call it love.

*** I can imagine another reading of this work in which I would push much harder on the idea of one’s “own lines,” given my own sense of how helpless most of us prove to be in the context of our socio-historical positioning.

+ Truth in advertising: I’m also a contributor.

The fourth issue of The Electronic Poetry Review is now live and includes a talk that I gave a couple of years ago at the annual confab of the Modernist Studies Association, “The Desert Modernism,” focusing in part on the question of why William Carlos Williams would have chosen to write a poem in 1951 that would lead to the famous, if somewhat abashed, affirmation of

                                             I am a poet! I
am.  I am. I am a poet, I reaffirmed, ashamed.

As I so often do when thinking about the history of poetry, I try to articulate a social context for Williams’ sense of isolation, which I do partly in terms of Objectivism:

The early 1950s was the nadir of Objectivism. Zukofsky, completing “A” 12 in 1951, would not touch the poem again until 1960. Some Time, Zukofsky's gathering of his shorter works between 1940 and 1956, contains just 33 poems for its seventeen years. In her bibliography of the composition of these works, Zukofsky's wife Celia notes that, in 1954, the only poetry he wrote were two sections of “Songs of Degrees,” one a nine-line valentine, the other “William / Carlos / Williams // alive!” George Oppen hadn't written anything since 1934. Charles Reznikoff was self-publishing and the collection Inscriptions: 1944-1956 takes up only 30 pages in his Complete Poems. Lorine Niedecker had published just one book and that with a publisher in Prairie City, Illinois; she would not publish another until Ian Hamilton Finlay brought out My Friend Tree in Scotland in 1961. “The Spoils,” which Basil Bunting wrote in 1951 was his first major piece of poetry since 1935 and last until 1965. He wrote just three odes, as he called his shorter poems, in the 1940s and none in the 1950s.

The talk in general and this passage in particular provoked a most interesting and thoughtful email from Eliot Weinberger, which he has kindly given permission for me to reprint here. I don’t agree with everything he says but he’s got me pondering the need to re-vision the 1950s in particular beyond the canonic box that is Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry. Here is Weinberger’s perspective:

Along with the silence/invisibility of the “objectivists,” you should add Rukeyser, who published no new books between 1948 and 1962. WCW told a depressed Reznikoff to keep writing, no matter what, so Rezi wrote the novel “Manner Music.”

I think you underestimate the presence of Pound who, though locked up, was writing a zillion letters a day and entertaining endless visitors. It's also a period of the first standard editions of Ez: 1948, Cantos; 1949, Selected Poems; 1950, Letters; 1953, Translations; 1954, Literary Essays. Then in 1954 you have the Confucian Odes and in 1955 Rock-Drill. He couldn't be more visible, however immobile.

I also wonder about WCW's isolation. If you look at his letters and essays from the time, he's praising (and is in contact with) a lot of poets: Lowell, Eberhart, Roethke, Rexroth, Harvey Shapiro, MacLeod, etc-- besides the New Americans you mention (Creeley, Olson, Ginsberg) and the honorary New American, Corman.

Also in the period you have Rexroth’s “Signature of All Things,” “Dragon and the Unicorn” and “Beyond the Mt” (reviewed by WCW). And Patchen had books from ND, Jargon, and the first City Lights pocket pamphlets.

I'm as guilty as everyone else, maybe more guilty, but I increasingly wonder whether we're all not prisoners of the Don Allen taxonomy. The problem is that Allen overlooks a (small) sort-of generation between the objectivists and the New Amers: Rexroth, Rukeyser, Patchen, etc. And the anthology wars c. 1960 obscured genuine affinities, at least in the early 50's. Lowell considered himself a Poundian; he loved WCW; everyone remembers his famous “raw and the cooked” as referring to him and Ginsberg, but in fact, RL thought he was one of the “raw,” compared to Wilbur etc. WCW and Roethke are not in opposition, etc. It is forgotten that Origin was pitched on two poets: Olson and Bronk, whom no one would put together any more. And the Allen obscured genuine hostilities: Joel Oppenheimer used to tell about Beats and Black Mountaineers getting into fistfights at the Cedar Tavern.

Is WCW in 1950-55 more isolated aesthetically/personally than anyone else, or himself at any other time? Snyder says somewhere that in the spiritual wasteland of the 50's one would hitchhike a thousand miles just to have someone to talk to. Outside of a few small groups-- like the SF Ren and the Black Mteers who were actually at Black Mt (unlike the Blk Mt group in Allen) and the inner-circle Beats-- how much physical community was there anyway?

Could the proverbial Martian be able to sort the poems c. 1950 of Levertov, Eberhart, Roethke, Duncan, Rexroth, etc into “avant-garde” and “establishment”? Maybe there's a new history to be written.