Douglas Messerli
Reprinted from Douglas Messerli, ed. "Language" Poetries: An Anthology (New York: New Directions, 1987).
with a 2003 afterword
with a 2003 afterword
In a decade in which so many poets and
critics have expressed dismay over an ever-shrinking audience for contemporary
poetry and have decried what they see as a decline in the cultural and
political vitality of poetry and poetics, we have also witnessed something
else: an almost meteoric rise in the publications and readership of the poets
associated with what has come to be called "Language" writing, and an equal
rise in the critical attention paid to them. Since 1976 [until the date of this
essay, 1987], poets associated in one way or another with this group have
published over 150 books of poetry and criticism--demonstrating a
resourcefulness and energetic rethinking of the nature of poetry both in social
and aesthetic terms. Such an output would be astonishing in any literary
period, but is nearly miraculous in light of the doomsayers' predictions of the
death of poetry as we know it.
Admittedly, the readership for many of these publications is small,
sometimes verging on the coterie. But dozens of these books here reached a
larger audience, and several of these poets can find their works in bookshops
from Boise, Idaho to Coral Gables, Florida, and in classrooms from the
University of Maine to the University of Alabama. And as a publisher of and
poet associated with this group, I have increasingly encountered general
readers, students, and professors who, cornering me, ask: "But tell us, what is
'Language' poetry?"
That question, whether friendly or hostile, delivers to the muscles of
my back and shoulders a slight flinch. How much it presumes!--that there is a
single definition or a unified complex of ideas which applies to "Language"
poetry, and underlying that assumption, that there is an identifiable group of
poets who can be described as writing whatever one defines "Language" writing
as being.
It may be tempting to begin an answer to such a question by taking the
familiar historical approach and describing certain general influences and
sources of several "Language" poets. Certainly the work of Gertrude Stein and
the writings of the Russian Futurists and zaum poets like Velimir Khlebnikov
and Alexei Kruchenykh immediately come to mind as touchstones for the work of
"Language" writers as diverse as Charles Bernstein, Peter Inman, Bruce Andrews,
Barrett Watten, Hannah Weiner, and Lyn Hejinian. But other than recognizing
that Stein and the Futurists grounded their work in the notion of language as
the engenderer of experience and often structured their poetry in terms of a
linguistic play of words and ideas, this history really doesn't tell us much.
If we probe any further, we find that, while for some "Language" poets (Susan
Howe, for example) a major figure may be Emily Dickinson, others (such as
Bernstein) may claim models in the poetry of Robert Creeley, Louis Zukofsky,
and Thomas Campion! Add to this the fact that for the "Language" poets in
general major sources of inspiration have been found in politics and social
theory, philosophy, psychology, painting and sculpture, film, and dance, and one
perceives that any definition by association becomes ridiculous. Encyclopedic
in their interests, these poets are likely to be as "influenced" by the work of
their peers and cultural events as by any one "literary" tradition.
Still, quite naturally, one seeks a shared aesthetic, a body of ideas
about poetry and poetics that has shaped these far-embracing poets into a group
of sorts in the 1970s and 1980s. And certainly there are values and attitudes
toward poetry that these poets share. These poets have all foregrounded
language itself as the project of their writing. For these writers, language is
not something that explains or translates experience, but is the source of
experience. Language is perception, thought itself; and in that context the poems
of these writers do not function as "frames" of experience or brief narrative
summaries of ideas or emotions as they do for many current poets.
Communication, as Bernstein writes, is seen not as a "two-way wire with the
message shuttling back and forth in blissful ignorance of the (its) transom
(read: ideology)," but as "a sound of language from the inside, in which the
dwelling is already / always given" [Bernstein, "Language Sampler," Paris Review, No. 86 (Winter 1982), 75].
What I call "Portmanteau poetry"--poetry that, revealing its message to the
reader, is used up and closed until the reader again seeks such feelings or
knowledge--is rejected in favor of the production of a living document of the
author's engagement with the reader and the world through language as the agent
of their shared thinking. The poem, accordingly, exists, as Bernstein has
observed, "in a matrix of social and historical relations that are more
significant to the formation of an individual text than any personal qualities
of the life or voice of an author" [Bernstein, "An Interview with Tom Beckett,"
Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1984 (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1986), p. 408].
While these writers thus participate in the climate of the poetics of
Charles Olson's' process-oriented writing ("one perception must must must MOVE,
INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER!") [Charles Olson, "Projective Verse," in Donald M. Allen
and Warren Tallman, eds. The Poetics of
the New American Poetry (New York: Grove Press, 1973), p. 149] and the
disjunctive procedures of the poets associated with the New York School, they
have eschewed the myth-making and personalization of poetry practiced by these
and other modern poets. Writing, rather, becomes for most of them a political
action in which the reader is not required merely to read or listen to the poem
but is asked to participate with the poet/poem in bringing meaning to the
community at large. As Craig Watson has concluded, such writing serves as "a
performance in which the reader is both audience and performer" [Craig Watson,
"The Project of Language," Credences,
III (Fall 1985), 160].
The demand that the reader function less as a sounding board than sound
with the poet upon and inside the poem, requires, in turn, a new kind of
reading. The poets of which I am speaking ask for a reading in which meaning,
whether understood as a curative or entertainment, is not self-contained like a
cold capsule or jellybean, but is inseparable from the language in process--the
transformation of phoneme into word, the association of one word to the next,
the slip of phrase against phrase, the forward movement and reversal of the
sentence--the way one experiences life itself.
Beyond these generalizations, however, these poets and their works
resist categorization as to how and what specifically the language means.
Surely one might expect to find that Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews, the
co-editors of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E--the magazine that helped to name this
"movement"--share basic notions about how language functions in their work. And
in fact there are a great many ideas shared by the two poets. Bernstein argues,
for example, that such writing, "rather than making the language as transparent
as possible," moves toward denseness and opacity in order to "actually map the
fullness of thought and its movement" [Bernstein, "Thought's Measure,"
Content's Dream, p. 70]. One recognizes a similar position in Bruce Andrews'
call for a poetry in which signifiers "provide echoes, harmonies, overtones,
but not the principles of organization"; for a "...confusion of realms,
profusion of events and interplay on the surface"; for a poetry in which the
"subject" disappears "behind the words only to emerge in front, or inside them"
[Bruce Andrews, "Text and Context," The
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1984), pp. 31-38].
Both Andrews and Bernstein work for a poetry that, while mapping
consciousness, does not appear as a "trace" (Bernstein) of the self upon the
text or an individual "ownership" (Andrews) of the text. Instead, the poem is
understood as a social "work for the reader's...projection/construction'
[Bernstein, "Writing and Method," Content's Dream, p. 233]: "Language work,"
writes Andrews, "resembles a creation of a community and of a world-view by a
once divided-but-now-fused Reader and Writer" [Andrews, "Text and Context," p.
35].
Yet even here, in discussing some of the basic premises of "Language"
writing, Bernstein and Andrews can point in different directions. Andrews argues
consistently for sense emerging from an "interplay on the surface" of the poem
rather than along a "vertical axis" in which meaning takes place largely "below
the plane, out of sight, or earshot." Bernstein--while agreeing with Andrews'
disdain for imposed symbols and "hidden layers"--speaks just as consistently for
a sound in poetry approaching music, which, in turn, allows the poem a depth of
meanings. If Andrews positions himself as a writer who would make his poetry a
public production, creating in "plain sight (and plain-song)" a writing that
moves "along a surface with all the complications of a charter or a town
meeting," ["Text and Context," p. 33], Bernstein advocates a concept of privacy
for writing that
allows the formal requirements of clarity and exposition to drop away. To speak intimately is to be free to speak as one will, not as one should. Confusion, contradiction, obsessiveness, associative reasoning, etc., are given free(er) play. A semblance of coherence--or strength or control--drops away. In contrast to this, or taking the idea further, the private can also seem to be the incommunicable. As if I had these private sensations (or thoughts or feelings) that no one can truly know as I know them.
[Bernstein, "Thought's Measure," p. 80]
Indeed, Bernstein argues that this concept of the incommunicable is
illusory because "language itself is communality, a public domain." What this
foregrounding of the private actually does, he posits, is to reveal the public.
Andrews, on the other hand, believes that "a hollowing out of lower depths" and
"labyrinthine caves of signification" can occur "within the gaps." Nonetheless,
Andrews' search to discover "How communal can you get?" leads his poetry and
theory in a very different direction than Bernstein's call for a dramatization
of a "far-inness" [Bernstein, "Three of Four Things I Know About Him," Content's
Dream, p. 29]. There is behind most of Andrews' writing a brilliantly
aphoristic voice, a showing of the way--as labyrinthine or "far-out" as that
path may be--as opposed to a more ruminative and sophistical one (in the sense
of arguing publicly for a kind of private logic) manifested in much of
Bernstein's writing.
Thus while they may share the social project of foregrounding language
as the medium of consciousness, Andrews and Bernstein create very different
kinds of poetries which may begin with similar premises but produce quite
different results.
Similar distinctions might be made between the poetry and poetics of the
co-editors of the San Francisco-based Poetics Journal, Barrett Watten and Lyn
Hejinian. In his book of criticism Total Syntax, Watten argues less for a
particular aesthetic point of view than for a "discussion of writing that leads
to what can be done." Accordingly, Watten's essays do not focus on the poet's
ideas or psychology but on presenting a variety of ways in which twentieth-century
authors and artists--with whom Watten and, by extension, his audience feel some
sympathy--have dealt with such problems as method, style, technique, and social
scale. The self of Watten's criticism (much as he describes in his essay on
"The Poetics of Poetry" the two techniques used by the contributors to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine) is mediated by
"the common sense functionalism of a professional role" (in Watten's case, this
is expressed in his summaries of literary history) and by an "exploded self," a
self that is subsumed in the language and theory he treats. And in this sense,
there is a presumptive quality--in the best sense of the meaning--in most of
Watten's critical writing; as a "kind of thinking...done in front of a
community of writers" [Watten, Total
Syntax (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), p. ix]
Watten's critical pieces presume and solicit a certain range of shared values.
Thus, a side-by-side presentation of two different approaches can itself
function as a pointing; there is no need for an "explanation" that evaluates.
Much like Andrews' horizontal presentation of information "with all the
complications of a charter or a town meeting," Watten's criticism--often first
presented as "talks"--finds its meaning not in a plumbing of the private self
and its values but "within the gaps" filled in by the actively thinking
community.
This opening up of the signifying process directly affects his poetry,
in that the structure of many of his works, as he notes in his essay "On
Explanation," is based upon a method of laying out different techniques and
ideas side by side. In "Artifacts," for example, Watten presents different
languages "in terms of the essential conflicts within and between them' [Total Syntax, p. 222]. Thus, he
contends, "various explanations on widely different scales interact, forcing
language to a new scale of discourse that includes all the possible
conflicts...." The "self" of this poem--as in many of Watten's poems--as the
engenderer of the structure is given over to and "exploded" by the collision of
forms through which language and meaning is reconstituted.
To produce myself,
a dialogue....
Fixing a
voice as it coheres
On the page,
to be adjusted
I go away and return later
A
distance that equals results....
(from Progress, p. 118)
In "If Written Is Writing" (1978), Lyn Hejinian, Watten's co-editor,
appears to share his notion of the "exploded" self: "In such are we obsessed by
our own lives, which lives being now language, the emphasis has moved." And in
a short piece, published one year later in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E,
Hejinian, paralleling Watten's thinking, writes of her interest in a structure
of "putting things together in such a way as to enable them to coincide.
...Like the natural order elsewhere, things can't be seen in ones alone, make
twos. Twos and more, too. I am interested in that" [Hejinian, "Smatter," L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, No. 8 (June 1979),
(17)].
For Hejinain, this coincidence produces a new relationship, which is at
once the heart of communal sharing and a movement toward the centric; by giving
up the self to language, one discovers in the language of the community a new
self, a notion quite similar to Watten's "going away" to "return later."
Yet, for Hejinian, there are different sources of centricities. For one,
in which bibliography becomes text, "the writing emerges from within a
pre-existent text of one's own devising or another's," in which "the process is
composition rather than writing." We can trace this distinction to Gertrude
Stein's "Composition as Explanation," in which Stein develops the idea that
what is interesting to people in writing is not what is "inside" them but lies
in what is seen, which, in turn, is dependent upon the community that
determines the context.
These ideas are very close to Watten's as expressed in the structure of
his essays, in which evaluation does not emanate from the "inside," from the
author, but from the listeners/viewers, who contextualize and (re)constitute
the value of experience.
But Hejinian also projects another source of centricity in writing that
is, in fact, closer to Stein's and Hejinian's own work. In this other source,
"one locates in the interior texture of such language as is the person
composing from it, personal and inclusive." This is not necessarily "self-revelatory,"
she argues, but is built up through patterns of language, "relevant quirks,"
"concentration, condensation, deconstruction, and such as association by, for
example, pun and etymology provide: an allusive pyscholinguism" ["If Written Is
Writing," L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book,
p.30].
Here, in fact, one perceives an aesthetic closer to Bernstein's
"privacy" and "far-iness" than to Andrews' outward social horizon or Watten's
compositional presentation of different languages.
Again, a similar focus yields quite different results. While she uses
programmatic procedures in several of her poems, Hejinian's poetry often
presents a linguistic self so private that it forces the reader to enter the
poem and (re)construct meaning.
Even within a shared focus, one recognizes a bewildering variety of
aesthetic possibilities, of methods to bring reader and writer through language
to experience and reconstruct meaning together. When one further puts this in
the context of several dozen writers actively involved over a span of more than
a decade, the identity of "Language" writing itself is less a fixed point than
an "exploded self." In short, as Charles Bernstein explains in an interview
with Tom Beckett, "'Language' writing is not a movement in the traditional art
sense, since the value of giving an aesthetic line such profile seems
counterproductive to the inherent value of the work."
It is to the social context, then, that one must turn to find any real
coherence in this "group." Particularly in San Francisco, and to a somewhat
lesser degree in New York and Washington, D.C., the "Language" poets--despite
obvious differences in aesthetics--came together out of what Lyn Hejinian has
called "motivated coincidence" to provide each other the dialogue and stimulus
necessary to create vital and intelligent poetry. Through readings,
discussions, seminars, personal friendships, and magazines (such as Tottel's, Hill, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, A Hundred Posters, This, Roof, The Difficulties, and Poetics Journal), they have built up a
true community of thought that must be the desire of any poet not writing a
hermetic verse for his or her eyes alone.
Obviously, there are problems here as well. As Charles Bernstein has
suggested in his essay "The Conspiracy of 'US,'" every "we" creates the danger
that the "task" will be avoided by setting up "boundaries" that shield or
insulate rather than challenge [Content's Dream, p. 344]. In every such group,
moreover, there are those who would speak for the others, those who would
define restrictions where previously there were none. A great danger--one now
increasingly facing the "Language" poets--is that once identified with the
group, individual poets can be classified--praised or dismissed--simply on the
basis of their affiliation. Within the context of the aesthetic differences,
this is a particularly disturbing phenomenon with which any "Language" poet
must struggle.
But despite these dilemmas, such social gathering has helped not only to
gain an initial readership for the individual poets, but also to create an
atmosphere in which thoughtful and serious writing, an emotional and powerful
poetry, could be created. In truth, poetry "as we knew it" perhaps will not
survive. A poetry that functions as a sort of narrative snapshot of experience
by the poet who sees himself or herself, as Louis Simpson recently described
his position, as a worker separated from ideas (the abstract), who creates a
primary product (like a coalminer digging coal) which when brought to the
surface represents "real" experience [based on comments by Louis Simpson,
presented at the 11th Alabama Symposium on English and American Literature,
collected in What Is a Poet?, Hank
Lazar, editor (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama, 1986] will find less and less
of an audience in the new century. Perhaps it does take a community of
concerned thinkers to keep poetry/language alive as the substance of
experience, of meaning.
Los Angeles, 1987
The
essay above was written as an introduction for the anthology I edited, "Language"
Poetries, published by New Directions.
That anthology and surrounding events contributed, over a period of years, to
the end of various "Language" groups.
As a writer/editor in Washington, D.C.,
and, in later years, commuting to Philadelphia, I became involved with
"Language" writing first through attending a reading in Washington by Charles
Bernstein which changed my own writing, and later by participating in a
discussion/reading group with poets such as Diane Ward, Joan Retallack, Peter
Inman, and Tina Darragh. Soon after deep friendships with Bruce Andrews and
Charles Bernstein evolved. Over the years, as I began to write more and more poetry
myself, I also developed relationships with James Sherry, Ted Greenwald, Ray
DiPalma, and Hannah Weiner; and the earliest books of poetry I published in my
Sun & Moon series were books by these authors. At the time I felt--and I believe others felt similarly--that this was
not a tightly knit group, but rather a loose gathering of poets who shared some
basic interests in and approaches to contemporary poetry. Moreover, many of
these poets had themselves experienced the negative effects of ostracization
from the New York School poets centered around St. Mark's Church.
We heard rumors, however, of a tighter
grouping of the poets in San Francisco, and it now seems, in retrospect, that
many of Bernstein's warnings expressed in his "The Conspiracy of US" should
have been heeded not only, as it was, by his own friends, but by the San
Francisco "Language" poets, of whom I had met only Silliman--on a visit to the
University of California at San Diego, where he was temporarily teaching--and
Bob Perelman. A short while after, I would discover just how pernicious such a
tightly organized community could be.
In 1985, shortly after I moved to Los
Angeles, I was asked by New Directions whether I might be interested in editing
a book on "Language" writing. What they envisioned was a collection of poems by
four or possibly five poets who would "represent" the larger "Language" scene.
I had long considered a "Language" anthology myself, and had also been sent a
proposal for such a collection by Ron Silliman; but I had backed away from my
own project and Silliman's because I felt that it would delimit and narrow the
issues surrounding "Language" writing if it was taken out of the context of
American poetry in general. What I felt was needed was a larger anthology in the
manner of Donald Allen's The New American Poetry incorporating the whole of contemporary innovative poetry; indeed I
began work on such a volume, which was ultimately published as From the
Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990 by my press in 1994. Accordingly, I told New Directions that, although
I understood the good intentions of their project, I could not edit an
anthology with only five poets; since the aesthetic was far less important than
the broad sense of community in "Language" writing, such a volume would
misrepresent the issues and the poetry itself.
After some further discussions, and their
agreement to allow me to include several more poets, I decided to take on the
project, feeling that a book by such a noted publishing house would help draw
attention to the poetic values and achievements of my poet friends.
There is no question that I was naive in
my approach. In a telephone conversation with Barrett Watten I mentioned the
anthology, presuming that it would be useful to get the word out to the San
Francisco group. I was startled by his response: that he did not see any reason
to have his poetry published in such an anthology, particularly since Ron
Silliman was attempting to find a publisher for his own anthology.
I'm a born pluralist; I believe in many
voices, many realities. Accordingly, I wrote a letter to Barrett stating that I
saw no problem with there being two--or possibly even more--anthologies
published. Wouldn't it help the community as a whole to have a number of such
publications? And certainly, I argued, my anthology would be a very different
one from Ron's. First of all, mine would be more discrete, less inclusive,
simply because New Directions did not want a large book. I saw no issue of
"competition," and perceived no reason why one shouldn't want to be represented
in both publications.
A long letter from Ron Silliman soon
arrived. The letter began with a seemingly reasoned voice, responding to
comments I had made and statements of disagreement with viewpoints I had
expressed about poetry in various writings. But the letter gradually
transformed into a diatribe, an open attack, and a call to all "Language" poets
not to participate in my anthology. Moreover, without even discussing it, Ron
had Xeroxed my letter and with it mailed his to dozens of poets--in short anyone
who might even possibly be considered for my anthology. I was, to put it
mildly, nonplussed since I felt that I was attempting to do something for the
good of the poetic community.
After tears and a few hours of
soul-searching, I decided that it would be a mistake to write another letter,
for that would simply mean that I would be open to yet further abuse. I quietly
called poets who I wanted to include, and spoke to them as friends. Many
admitted they did not want to become involved in a battle between the two of
us; but I reassured them that there was no battle, just Silliman's reaction,
and that I was still planning to proceed with the book. Fortunately, reason
prevailed. After making my selections of poems, I encouraged each poet to
comment, recognizing that, with intense criticism already leveled against me,
if I attempted to choose the poems myself, it would probably result in further
dissatisfaction.
As I continued working, I suddenly heard
from New Directions that they had received word of what had occurred, and they
now, despite a signed contract, threatened to cancel the title. I don't deal
well with bullying, so I determined to move ahead with the project, and publish
it myself if need be. Fortunately, friend and mentor Marjorie Perloff spoke to
James Laughlin, and the book continued on its course.
Months later, after everything had
seemingly settled down, Susan Howe visited Los Angeles, and at a party at
Dennis Phillips' reported that she had just been in San Francisco, where they
were holding meetings in an attempt to decide "what to do about the Messerli
anthology." At this point I could only perceive the affair as a comic event;
what possibly could they do--block the highways so that the book could not be
delivered to San Francisco? All but Ron had agreed to be in the volume, and
their poems were about to be typeset. With her usual dramatic emphasis, Susan
suggested that I had to do something about the situation that I had to respond.
"I shall remain quiet," I insisted,
breaking into an impassioned reply: "There is no arguing in such a situation;
engaging in such a ridiculous discussion can only be an admission that there is
something to be argued. I'm publishing an anthology that has nothing at all to
do with Ron's own anthology, and I have no interest at all in attempting to
define the canon. It merely represents an opportunity to present poetry that I
think is worth reading in a context that might help elucidate it."
Later, it became apparent that the San
Francisco group felt under siege from many different sources; the upstart from
Southern California I represented had been only one of many perceived attacks
against their "sovereignty"--although the idea that poets would seek out or,
more especially, attempt to find power through their writing I perceived (and
still do) as utterly appalling.*
There were obviously many who agreed with
me. For after the publication of "Language" Poetries and Ron's larger In the American
Tree (which, incidentally, Sun & Moon
Press distributed), people began to resist identification as "Language"
writers. As generally happens with such temporary "groupings," things
disintegrate, and individual poets begin to see themselves less as part of a
group than as individuals writing poetry; a few no longer write.
*We know this, however, to be the
history of poetic groups: the Imagists, the Vorticists, the Italian and Russian
Futurists, the Surrealists, as well as other poetry groupings throughout the
20th century not only sought to exclude others, but saw poetry as a political
and social dynamic of power--for good reasons [see my essay "The future of
Poetry Publishing" in My Year 2007: To
the Dogs].
Los
Angeles, December 4, 2003