In an email response to the first of my two blogs on his work, Tom Raworth remarks “I’ve never thought I was reading fast,” commenting also that “I see all those 14 liners as dependent clauses.” Yet in ordinary speech, dependent clauses, precisely because they are usually bracketed by their “independent” brethren, often invoke a slight acceleration in speaking. The return to an independent (or, more accurately, dominant) clause is then marked by a return to the slower pacing of speech.

There is an interesting & rather constant tension between how a poet reads aloud & the text on the page itself. In Raworth’s explanation, there is at least a cause & effect relation between syntax & style. Listening to Louis Zukofsky read aloud from “A” – 12 on Joel Kuszai’s marvelous Factory School website, I note that Zukofsky follows the start of his excerpt with a relatively rigorous pause at every line break for about the first two stanzas (starting with “The best man learns of himself / To bring rest to others,” p. 135 of the UC Press edition). Yet, only a few lines later, following Zukofsky’s own pauses, I would transcribe one stanza as follows:

The time would be too short –

Throw some part of your life after birds –

Eat and drink.

What cry

Tops older fame –

Far-sighted not sure sense?

Heart with mind quick to love,

Look to the real thing unfold it within you

Turned there thru pleasure,

Bound anew.

Sweet thing,

Merry thing

Making your brow half an arch of a bridge

So that all people there facing round quicken their pace,

Fleet and lean

Desire you but to thirst what you have –

On the page, this same stanza appears more regular:

The time would be too short –

Throw some part

Of your life after birds –

Eat and drink.

What cry tops older

Fame – Far-sighted

Not sure sense? Heart

With mind quick to love,

Look to the real thing

Unfold it within you

Turned there thru pleasure,

Bound anew.

Sweet thing, merry thing

Making your brow

Half an arch of a bridge

So that all people there

Facing round

Quicken their pace,

Fleet and lean

Desire you but to

Thirst what you have –

Lineated thus, some portions of the text accelerate while others slow down. Zukofsky’s line breaks often stress his Shakespearean phrasing. Read aloud, he mostly buries these little twists mid-line, rapidly passed by. Thus the page maximizes the potential for torque in Zukofsky’s language, whereas his voice, thin & reedy as it is, minimizes it. Whether this represents a conscious approach to reading aloud or simply reflects Zukofsky relaxing into the moment of the reading itself is open to speculation, but I’m really sure that such a distinction matters.

Beginning in the 1950s, there was some real effort to equate the line with voiced phrasing – “breath” is what Olson called it, even though it is the need to breathe that stops, rather than propels, the line. The poets of that decade found the more casual & seemingly arbitrary approach of some high modernists to the question of the voiced linebreak almost startling to hear. The rather hard line approach of these younger writers would reach its apotheosis in Robert Duncan’s readings around 1970, when he literally whispered a voiced count of three between every single line as he read aloud.

Today, I think most poets treat the text much more as though it were a musical score, the typed line breaks a possible, but not necessarily fixed, index of pauses or timing. Raworth, in focusing on a syntactic type, generates a style. Or does so at least in part. The second longest poem from Clean & Well-Lit, “Emptily,” proceeds in a rather different manner. On the surface, it appears to be a long centered poem rather in the manner of Michael McClure. In fact, it contains 31 “units,” unnumbered & unseparated (& visible as such only due to the formatting, containing two such units per page, an approach that requires leaving a great deal of white space in each page’s header). Each unit consists of three stanzas, consisting of five lines, two lines & one line, in that order. Other rules are visible:

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>the last line of the first stanza consists of two syllables, which may be spread out over one word or two

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>the first line of the second stanza in each unit consists only of one single-syllable word

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>the fourth line of the first stanza, the second line of the second stanza & the sole line of the third stanza will be relatively long

It’s a curious fact about the centered line that, by virtue of having its linebreak visibly marked at the start as well as the end, linebreaks are thereby minimized & any variability in line length is muted, since the “overhang” now juts out only half as far, albeit in both directions.

Combined with the plasticity of the lines themselves, this centered text can be read almost as rapidly as prose & certainly as rapidly as “Survival.” So while there are more subject-verb combinations here than in “Survival,” they do little if anything to slow the propulsion of the reader through the text. Thus it’s no accident that Colin MacCabe, quoted on the O Press site in a blurb for Tottering State, chooses terms such as “quickest” & “mercurial” to characterize Raworth’s writing. “As a reader,” MacCabe writes, “his delivery is the fastest in the business.” Factory School offers evidence in the form of a Raworth reading, although of more recent work.

Dalkey Archive has always been an interesting project. While its track record publishing poetry has been more erratic than not – there is a book Cecil Giscombe, another by Gerald Burns, but mostly it has printed books of poetry written by novelists, even if one is by Harry Mathews & another by his Oulipo colleague Jacques Roubaud – and its record on critical writing even spottier – Viktor Shklovsky’s Theory of Prose is one of the great critical texts – Dalkey’s track record on publishing innovative fiction is unassailable. It is flat out the best publisher of innovative fiction the United States has ever had.

David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress is a novel, a booklength monolog by a woman who might (or might not) be the only surviving person on the planet. It’s an enjoyable book that I would happily encourage you to read. But that’s not really my intent here at the moment. Rather, I want to look at what a book like this tells me about writing & thus about poetry.

Fiction’s primary trick is to convince a reader than the syntax of its sentences integrates up not just grammatically or logically into an argument, but ultimately into an extra-linguistic phenomenon: a character or narrated world. This leap, from syntax to “voice” & through it to “character,” a nebulous concept at best, is the displacement that accounts for much of fiction’s reality effect. The power of grammar is thus transferred and felt by a reader as the power of the world “coming through” the emptied vessel of language.

Wittgenstein’s Mistress plays with these possibilities. For one thing, the narrator suggests that the book is being composed, rather like a letter. She announces the passage of days between paragraphs, many of which are only a single sentence long. Also, right at the end, in ways that I won’t go into here (so as to limit the number of “spoilers” I might inadvertently insert), Markson (or the narrator) also plays around with the possibility of who she in fact is.

But what is most powerful and telling about Markson’s book is that which goes palpably unsaid. In this way, Markson is miles ahead of most other novelists who explicate way too many of the details. Here Markson does just the opposite, raising other characters and contexts that scream out for explication without ever offering any. It’s not sloppy in the slightest – if anything, his consistency is an index of his meticulousness. The result gives Markson’s text the feel of a real person to a degree almost unimaginable in fiction. It’s that old Zen garden trick of making a circle of stones by pulling one out of position so that the displacement forces the viewing mind to cognitively “make the circle.” I’ve never seen it done better in a work of fiction than how Markson does it here.

I bought Wittgenstein’s Mistress after reading some extravagant review of one of Markson’s other novels, then let it sit for awhile, put off I suspect by the idea of that title, given just how the entire world knows Wittgenstein to have been gay. But the title works on multiple levels – it is in fact explained in the narrative, but even more so alludes to the narrator’s painful attempts to be exact with her language, not unlike Wittgenstein’s own books of philosophy. But what for him is an investigative method in a work of fiction becomes a series of extraordinary quirks. It’s remarkable just how well this works. I have a friend back in San Francisco – not a part of the arts scene as such – who is a great deal like this narrator & I ended up hearing her voice throughout my reading of the book.

Reading Markson’s novel made me think of my late dear friend Kathy Acker & how she used to worry during the composition of her early books about such issues as the construction of character. She was always clear in her own mind that character was just that – a construction. Each chapter in her book, The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec, presents a different conceptualization of truth & “the real” might be in fiction, which also includes the concept of character. It’s what Ulysses would have been if Joyce had actually felt some commitment to any of the styles he employed in each chapter. Well, maybe if Joyce had been committed to the idea that plagiarism plus porn equals autobiography.

There is an entire stratum of novels of course written with the idea that readers will identify with a character. A second stratum of novels is written with the idea that the readers will identify not with a character, but as readers & will remain aware of their own presence in front of the text, as though in a conversation with the author.* Finally, there is a tiny stratum of fiction written with the idea that readers will in fact identify with the author, not as a character, but as author. I tend to think that many of the books that I would characterize as fiction for poets – which would include works by Acker, Jack Kerouac, Bill Burroughs, Samuel R. Delany, Gilbert Sorrentino, Kevin Killian, Fee Dawson, Sarah Schulman & Harry Mathews – fall into this final category, or at least waver between it & the second. That border is also where someone like Markson, or W.G. Sebald, seems to fit.

When I read a novel I’m always think about how (or why) the author did this or that. Can Proust get the Madeline into the cup of tea? Can Kerouac really imitate the tape in Visions of Cody? I found myself thinking this way a lot with Markson, whom I’m not sure really expects that in the way these other novelists-for-poets seem to, but for whom it’s a perfectly reasonable & rewarding approach.

All of which made me think of my conversation here on the blog with Daisy Fried. A lot of what I don’t care for in the school of quietude is that presumption of readers falling principally, or only, into the first stratum when it comes to poetry. Most post-avant writing falls into the second category – that’s certainly where I would put Kelly & O’Hara & even Levertov. But much of the writing that compels me most is that which falls into or nearest that third stratum. And that’s where I would put Coolidge & Watten & Hejinian & Armantrout.

* I suspect that Jonathan Franzen’s to do with Oprah had very much to do with a concern on Franzen’s part that his book not be confused with that first stratum of writing.