How to Bag A Jabberwock

Exploration takes extra words

Words qua sentience and thinking

These are spread over a

position – being long and pointed

over

They anticipate an immoderate time

and place

Reality moves around making objects

appear as if they belong

where they are

Then it shifts, say, up

and down, with the sunlight’s

yellow interstitial coloring matter

The sun here is an

exceeding stricture

I’ve yet … I keep thinking …

all open daylit areas carry

to peripheries their yellow floating

ovoid motes

Eggs go out of optical

range, but only ellipsing

This particular attraction empties in

Blown convincing field, it rattles

with brown grass turning

I’m looking, prematurely, for a

particular point of view – that

of one who has already

achieved objectivity

Objectivities and metonymies

But one can’t die

Sex sexes scale and flies

faithful to the ground

October 11, 1986

This is the third section of Lyn Hejinian’s poem sequence The Cell (1992), a series of meditations on the embodied self, partly inspired by the pragmatism of William James and the philosophical observations of everyday landscapes in Henry David Thoreau’s writings, partly by a commitment to avant-garde proceduralism, and partly by interest in the principles of scientific research. Tacit allusions to science are everywhere: in references to methodology (exploration, objectivity); in technical vocabulary (sentience, interstitial, ovoid, optical); and in the style, which emulates the self-correcting precision based on repeated observation typical of reports of scientific research. This evidence might appear to support the interpretation that this is a poem of quasi-scientific inquiry. And yet not only is it a poem and therefore an inappropriate mode of writing for scientific research, what is worse is that this poem does not even offer us the usual solidities of a normative poem. It has very little punctuation and its syntax is sometimes unresolved, its paratactic sentences are often sharply disjunctive, there is no narrative or scene setting for its meditations, and though we can gain glimpses of an argument, it is not sustained and nor are its components obviously affirmed. We therefore cannot easily attribute to the poem or the author any specific engagement with the sciences. Where then, we might ask, is the inquiry that she attributes to her poetry, and what can the inquiry be said to yield here? Admittedly this is only a short section from a long poem, but surely inquiry requires some sustained propositionality, narrative coherence or depiction of a tangible location, and probably stable elements of all three?

Making connections between poetry and science is difficult in any historical period. George Levine (2008, 181) cautions those of us interested in science and literature to ‘keep in mind the variousness and incompleteness of writers’ and scientists’ interrelations’, a caution that is especially needed when investigating the impact of late twentieth-century natural sciences on poetry. In the poetry of the recent American avant-gardes which I shall discuss in this essay there are significant poetic engagements with natural science that simply do not look like earlier types of engagement between poetry and the natural sciences. We can see why if we examine Gillian Beer’s references to literary knowledge in her incisive summing-up of the opportunities and temptations offered by interdisciplinary research that reaches across the wide disciplinary gulfs between science and poetry. In the opening paragraphs of an essay on the strange idea of a ‘missing link’ in evolution, she insists both on the importance of recognising indigenous disciplinary expertise and on the potential insights to be gained when one research culture respectfully engages with another. After all, ‘forms of knowledge do not readily merge’ and what we should be looking for is a productive ‘destabilizing of knowledge once it escapes from the initial group of co-workers’ (Beer, 1996, 115). Beer’s two references to knowledge invoke different epistemic models. The first appeals to a Wittgensteinian conception of forms of knowledge that has been highly influential in the humanities, and provides the foundation for Thomas Kuhn’s influential idea that the sciences develop discontinuously from one dominant paradigm of knowledge to another. (Wittgenstein’s phrase is ‘forms of life’ (1976, 8), which are usually understood to include forms of knowledge, because distinct forms or ways of life generate their own modes of reasoning in language.) The second reference to knowledge tacitly acknowledges that in our society only the results of scientific methods of inquiry tend to be accorded the status of authoritative knowledge. To think in terms of forms of knowledge is to assume from the start that all knowledges have a historical frame; to think in terms of knowledge in the late twentieth century and twenty-first century is likely to entail endorsing what John Guillory (2002, 498) calls the ‘epistemic hierarchy’ dominated by the natural sciences. Forms of knowledge might include literary studies and poetry, as well as the natural sciences; knowledge in itself, however, is usually taken to encompass only facts and truths about a mind-independent world arrived at by rational, especially scientific methods of inquiry, and not the interpretive, hermeneutic or evaluative judgements of literary criticism, let alone the ambiguous affirmations of poetry.

The extreme inequalities that now prevail between different knowledges make it especially challenging for literary critics to go beyond explicit thematic or metaphoric citation of scientific ideas to trace further interrelations between contemporary poetry and the sciences. As Levine says, although ‘literature can be a means to situated knowledge’, researchers into modern poetry’s difficult relations with the sciences do need to recognise that scientific and literary knowledges are very different (2008, 176). Michael Wood suggests in his typically urbane manner how we might start to think about this difference: ‘literature characteristically offers something harder – in the sense of the “hard” sciences – than understanding and something softer than what we often imagine knowledge to be’ (2005, 54). Wood’s knowing nod to psychoanalytic interpretation (is this perhaps what Hejinian intimates in her phrase ‘Sex sexes scale’?) is a way of hinting that we ought to be careful to consider our investments in any sort of knowledge, and especially to reflect on what it is that helps make scientific research appear ‘hard’ compared with poetry. Scientific investigation is highly organised. It is distributed across large numbers of individual scientific researchers, whose publications are heavily coded in an approved scientific discourse; the boundaries of legitimate scientific communication are rigorously policed; and public transmission of scientific findings takes place at a distance from the actual messy practice out at the leading edge. These regularities would be appear to be the antithesis of the cultural work of poetry, however much, as in Hejinian’s poem, it might appear to emulate some features of scientific research.

The difficulty for literary critics studying late twentieth-century poetry’s responses to the natural sciences is that, despite the growth of history, sociology and philosophy of science in the wake of Thomas Kuhn, not only do these forms of knowledge – literary studies and the natural sciences – not merge, but there is almost no common agreement between the two fields about what constitutes knowledge, nor about the distribution of epistemic authority. Methods of research that may work well for the study of science and of literature in earlier periods – methods such as tracing the influence of leading scientists through the reception of their writings, exploring the porousness of scientific research and other intellectual interests, or tracking metaphors as they push across disciplinary borders – when applied to much recent poetry repeatedly run up against seemingly impenetrable epistemic barriers between science and literature. Attempts to create a general theory of the relations between literature and science by treating both as socially constructed forms of discourse have met with dismissive scepticism from the sciences and been subjected to strong critique from within the field of literature.

Another way to approach these difficulties is to reframe them as part of a wider methodological challenge for all interdisciplinary research. Mary Poovey suggests one strategy for dealing with these difficulties in her remarkable study of the interactions between early textual studies and emerging forms of modern finance. She is sceptical that the types of literary interpretation practised by literary critics can provide historical evidence, because textual interpretation of literary forms is much too time-bound to be a reliable hermeneutic indicator of historical change when reaching back across the centuries. In place of the standard critical procedures of close reading, she proposes a more modest pragmatic historicism backed by a more ambitious interdisciplinarity: ‘descriptions of the ways in which various writers tried to differentiate among kinds of writing – so that they could rank them, acquire social authority for some but not others, produce disciplinary norms, and claim for themselves institutional positions (and professional status) – constitute an alternative to textual interpretation’ (2008, 345). Whatever the merits of her argument that using literary forms as direct historical evidence is compromised by the impossibility of reconstructing past reception, her proposal for a historicism based around investigation of the differing authority of genres (and their textual forms) is extremely helpful for negotiating the epistemic issues that arise when exploring the relations between late twentieth-century poetry and science.

In this essay I shall argue that if we follow Levine’s advice and look for new and various forms of interrelation between poetry and science, follow up Beer’s acknowledgement of tensions between different models of knowledge, and ask Poovey-type questions about the social authority conferred by the use of different modes of poetic inquiry, we can locate new modes of literary response to the sciences by focussing less on knowledges of science and more on homologies of method. Hejinian’s poem is an example of one of these innovative modes of response characteristic of a recent American avant-garde, Language Writing (sometimes less accurately called Language Poetry). The Cell’s poetics develops out of a genre of Language Writing known as ‘the new sentence’, which, as I shall explain, makes a bid for social and epistemic authority by transliterating a mode of inquiry characteristic of molecular biology. The result of this bid is an engagement between poetry and science that raises many interesting questions about poetry, science and the role of epistemology in literary critical methodology in an age of ever-growing epistemic authority for the natural sciences.

In 1980, in a talk on poetics to an audience of Bay Area writers, the American poet Ron Silliman named the prose poetry of disjunct sentences that many of them were writing ‘the new sentence’ (1987, 63–93). This branding proved so successful that the poetry of Silliman himself, Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman and a significant number of the much wider group known as the Language Writers has subsequently been read through the poetics of the new sentence. Silliman’s talk was characteristic of the intellectualism of this group: not only informed about linguistics, philosophy, structuralism and political theory but, unlike many earlier American avant-garde movements, keen to align poetic practice explicitly with new ideas in these fields. Almost every possible source of inspiration is mentioned except genetics. In this essay I shall argue that developments in biology, specifically in genetics and molecular biology – developments that had already helped give timeliness and authority to structuralism’s theory that society is structured like a language – were a further source of intellectual inspiration, and helped tacitly support claims for the prose poetry of the new sentence as a mode of creative inquiry.

In fact, Silliman may well have recalled a striking passage in a substantial report in Rolling Stone about a conference of molecular biologists that was held to decide whether what was then called ‘cloning’ was dangerous and whether scientific research into it should be restricted. (At that time, the technical concept of cloning meant inserting a section of DNA from a chosen organism into a virus, which was then encouraged to replicate itself in a special yeast or bacterial host, where many copies of the original fragment were produced, which in turn could then potentially be reinserted into cells of another organism, thus transferring genetic information from one type of organism to another. It did not mean the process of growing an entire organism direct from the DNA of an original, so that the new organism has exactly the same DNA, as later became possible, in such cases as Dolly the cloned sheep.) According to the report, scientists not only knew that the genetic code was a language, they now had the tools to work at the microscopic level of these sentences, and to cut and paste them into new, generative forms: ‘If one knows the grammar, one can begin to make up new sentences’ (Rogers, 1975, 37). Ron Silliman and his peers believed that they did know the grammar, and not just metaphorically, of their society’s new sentences.

This new prose poetry might well need the justification that its linguistic experimentation was a form of cognitive inquiry because this poetry appeared to disavow most of the practices by which poems make claims on our attention: unifying argument, whether made plain or expressed in highly metaphoric or symbolic language; narrative of the author’s own experience or that of a historical or imagined persona; enactment of a speaking voice; reference to a scene or scenes in which the drama of the poem’s passions and reflections takes place; prosody that creates musical patterns that give shape to the entire poem; and affirmations of wisdom and understanding won from experience by the author. These are normative features of modern poetry. The new prose poetry presented itself as disjunctive writing with no rhythmic structure, no pictured scene and no authorial guarantee that what was said in its disconnected sentences was backed by the author. Was it all just flat words and huddled sentences, whose interest the individual reader would have to generate out of whatever play of signifiers and sentences could be found?

An example will help. This is taken from Lyn Hejinian, whose writing will be the primary focus in this essay, from the opening section, ‘A Pause, a Rose, Something on Paper’, of the first version of My Life (1980):

A moment yellow, just as four years later, when my father returned home from the war, the moment of greeting him, as he stood at the bottom of the stairs, younger, thinner than when he had left, was purple – though moments are no longer so colored. Somewhere, in the background, rooms share a pattern of small roses. Pretty is as pretty does. The better things were gathered in a pen. The windows were narrowed by white gauze curtains which were never loosened. Hence, repetitions, free from all ambition. The shadow of the redwood trees, she said, was oppressive. The plush must be worn away. On her walks she stepped into people’s gardens to pinch off cuttings from their geraniums and succulents. An occasional sunset is reflected on the windows. A little puddle is overcast. If only you could touch, or, even, catch those gray great creatures. I was afraid of my uncle with the wart on his nose, or of his jokes at our expense which were beyond me, and I was shy of my aunt’s deafness who was his sister-in-law and who had years earlier fallen into the habit of nodding, agreeably. Wool station. See lightning, wait for thunder. Quite mistakenly, as it happened. The afternoon happens, crowded and therefore endless. Thicker she agreed. It was a tic, she had the habit, and now she bobbed like my toy plastic bird on the edge of its glass, dipping into and recoiling from the water. But a word is a bottomless pit. (5–6)

There is none of the drama of a conventional autobiography; each new sentence is its own catastrophe, for these new sentences have been spliced together in such a manner that they deliberately lack the latent receptors that would allow adjacent sentences to attach themselves as unfolding inferences and consequences. Adjacency has little or no significance.

This work of anti-autobiography – whose nearest traditional antecedents are poems such as Wordsworth’s The Prelude and Browning’s Sordello, accounts of the formation of a poet’s imagination, rather than the prose memoirs that Hejinian’s title might suggest – has been widely taught in university curricula and extensively discussed by critics, who have explored its proceduralism (each section has 37 sentences and there are 37 sections, a number chosen because she was that age at the time of composition – a second, expanded version, with 45 sections of 45 sentences each, was published in 1987), its thematics (each section corresponds freely with that year of her life), its feminism and its aesthetics. (Starting points for further reading include Perloff (1985, 1998) on textual experiment, Fredman (1983) on the wider issue of American prose poetry, Huntsperger (2010) on proceduralism, Spahr (2001) on identity, Marsh (2003) and Vickery (2000) on feminism, and Samuels (1997) on the curriculum.) Here I will highlight just one implication of its avoidance of so many poetic conventions. As we read, we have to struggle to find its significance; we have a problem that is eloquently described by J. M. Bernstein in a discussion of how, in a troubled world, given the demand we make on art that it should be more than a pleasurable, forgettable entertainment, we can possibly assign significant social value to features such as brush strokes in an abstract painting: ‘the disproportion between these two, the unjust ruination of human lives on the one hand and the velleities of some cultural artefacts on the other, is so immense that to consider the latter as a, or the, voice of the former, perhaps even the condition in which the latter has voice, appears outrageous (to mind and sensibility) even blasphemous’ (2006, 46). So, in this vein, a question we might ask about new sentence prose poems is: how can a work of such reduced claims to poetic character be justifiably significant in relation to modern history?

This is a question for which Silliman, himself a political activist who published essays with titles like ‘The Political Economy of Poetry’, is prepared: ‘It is at the level of the sentence that the use value and the exchange value of any statement unfold into view’ (1987, 78). He begins his talk on the new sentence by saying that he is ‘going to make an argument, that there is such a thing as a new sentence and that it occurs thus far more or less exclusively in the prose poems of the Bay Area’ (63). What does it mean, however, to talk about a new sentence? Newness can be an attribute of a specific sentence, but the sentence as a syntactical form would appear to be anything but new, a function of the way languages work and therefore, if not exactly fixed, certainly beyond individual reinvention. Or is he thinking rhetorically? Well known examples of different sentence styles include Ciceronian periods, Jamesian late style and the woman’s sentence espoused by Virginia Woolf, and a long critical tradition attributes fashions in sentence styles to genres and even to cultural moments. For Silliman, changing syntactical melodies are beside the point; they all rely on the integration of sentences into larger patterns, or styles, and his concern is what happens when sentences are disconnected from one another by means of form or topic to the point where the cultural work of supporting ideological superstructures carried out by the invisible net of implied connectives between sentences – cultural work that we ordinarily call narrative, logic or cohesion – is made tangible by its absence. Silliman discerns in the sentences of this prose poetry an aesthetic of renewed attention to the materials of writing:

If ‘language writing’ means anything, it means writing which does focus the reader onto the level of the sentence and below, as well as those units above. Heretofore, this has been accomplished by the deliberate exclusion of certain elements of signification, such as reference and syntax. The new sentence is the first mode of ‘language writing’ which has been able to incorporate all the elements of language, from below the sentence level and above. (1987, 217)

The obvious question is: why might a writer want to ‘focus the reader’ in this way?

I have been stressing the sometimes tacit assumption that it is attention to the wider socio-political entailments of these elements which justifies the aesthetic value of the work. Without such emphasis, the new prose poetry might be taken for a post-modern, aleatory engagement with the symbolic, a playful challenge to the epistemological sentence in which signifiers slide into random if intriguing patterns. Despite her reticence about politics, Hejinian avows wider motives than the hope of astonishing the reader with a striking display of words (though one of her signature poetic phrases in My Life is ‘we who love to be astonished’), as she indicates in an interview:

But am I, in my sentences (and my use of lines to expand their capacity and accuracy), in pursuit of change? Do I want to improve the world? Of course. If so, it will have to be in sentences, not by them. The sentence is a medium of arrivals and departures, a medium of inquiry, discovery and acknowledgement. (Brito, 1992, 91)

The sentence is not only poetry’s equivalent of the brush stroke, it also has promising implications for the world, where the problem that human lives can too easily be ruined appears likely to silence an aesthetics of such textual minima. Hejinian’s belief in the world historical importance of poetic sentences is manifest. On what might it be based?

One clue can be found in her reference to the sentence as a ‘medium of inquiry’, an allusion that evokes the shade of Clement Greenberg and his influential idea that modern painting has pursued an arc of ever-increasing concentration on the conditions of its own media. Greenberg proposes a history of modern art as aesthetic reductionism in his essay ‘Modernist Painting’ (1960), where he argues that:

the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique in the nature of its medium. The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the specific effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. Thus would each art be rendered ‘pure’, and in its ‘purity’ find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence. ‘Purity’ means self-definition, and the enterprise of self-criticism in the arts became one of self-definition with a vengeance. (1993, 86)

Is the new sentence eliminating from the poem everything that belongs to other arts and humanities (pictoriality, music, the voice) and concentrating on one irreducible element of poetry, the sentence, in order to pursue such self-definition? To consider the full implications we need to consider a less frequently cited passage later in the same essay, where Greenberg reflects on the latent emulation of science that such a pursuit of purity requires. ‘That visual art should confine itself exclusively to what is given in visual experience, and make no reference to anything given in any other order of experience, is a notion whose only justification lies in scientific consistency’, because it is scientific method alone that insists that ‘a situation be resolved in exactly the same terms as that in which it is presented’. At first Greenberg seems to pull back from the full implications of this extraordinary claim that modern art aspires to the condition of science, not music, by adding that as far as visual art is concerned this mimesis of science is ‘mere accident’. But then he faces up to the implications of his claim and takes a wider view of the interrelations between the sciences and the arts: ‘What their convergence does show, however, is the profound degree to which Modernist art belongs to the same specific cultural tendency as modern science, and this is of the highest significance as a historical fact’ (1993, 91). If Greenberg is right, then we might speculate that interdisciplinary studies of science and poetry in the later twentieth century should expect to find strong interrelations between science and poetry in work that has little to say explicitly about science, especially if it engages in aesthetic self-definition with a vengeance, as does Bay Area prose poetry, at least according to Silliman, in its pursuit of the new sentence.

This speculation finds further support in a note that Lyn Hejinian appended to a selection of poems from a sequence called ‘The Person’, published in the little magazine Mirage, where she reflects on the wider motives behind this writing, and in particular on its cognitive entailments:

When I am thinking about my work, I am often thinking about that thinking – its quality, motives, motifs, and instruments. Then, for me, poetry is the site of the consciousness of consciousness. The quality may have its analogues in the scientific method, but it is not so much ‘experimentalism’ as a romance with science’s rigor, patience, thoroughness, speculative imagination that informs it. The motives of the thinking spring from intuited necessity and are propelled by something like desire – restlessness, curiosity, anxiety, love. The motifs implode toward a phenomenology of consciousness – I write about what I know (‘reality’), how I know it, and how I know I know it (articulation). (1984)

Phenomenology, knowledge, reality – these are terms of value taken from philosophical arguments about epistemology. Hejinian’s hesitance about arrogating scientific method makes her qualify everything (‘may’, ‘analogues’, ‘romance’, ‘motives’) even as she tries to insist on the responsibilities imposed on her own curiosity. It is also a deft means of acknowledging at once her distance from science and her kinship with it. She places ‘experimentalism’ in scare quotes because this idea that art and literature can be experimental, which has roots in the work of the American pragmatists, notably John Dewey and William James (a thinker for whom Hejinian has avowed respect), has more recently become synonymous with potentially valuable but often ungrounded formalist invention and disregard for wider ethical or political lament. Experiment can be a mode of indifference to the demands of others. Hejinian also attempts to disarm criticism by deprecating her own interest as a ‘romance’, while going on to insist on features of science’s ideals of research that are not always remembered in the standard opposition between the subjectivity of art and the objectivity of science. Each of these ideals is one that need not belong to science alone; each of them is usually linked to the search for truth. ‘Speculative imagination’ is, for instance, a clever expansion of the traditional noun for poetic intelligence to indicate affinities with informed extrapolations from the facts that will be tested by experiment, such as those encouraged in the sciences.

When she collected her essays on poetry and poetics under the title The Language of Inquiry, Hejinian made very explicit in her introductory essay what had been coming into focus over the past two decades in the work of her generation. The new sentence prose poem is fundamentally a poetics of inquiry. Investigation, research, analysis, discovery, observation, reflection and other forms of intellectual curiosity are all relevant as long as they recognize the primacy of the signifier. Just what this entails for writer and reader will require unfolding because, as Stephen Fredman says in a study of the prose poem written some years before Hejinian’s essay, the new sentence of Silliman and others appears to put most responsibility on the reader: ‘The poet casts nets of varying theoretical complexity into the world of language, exhibiting his catch in a text that asks the reader to make his or her own perceptual and ideological discoveries’ (1983, 144). Is the poet a fisherman and the reader the biologist who studies the catch, or are these roles of writer and reader more fluid than a very literal interpretation of the image might yield? Exhibition and discoveries require both the activities of netting or searching out, and attentive perception coupled with intensive cognition; taken together, exhibition and discovery might be a good vernacular way of describing the aims of inquiry. The task for the critic of poetry is to avoid imposing concepts of inquiry too closely identified with the top of the hierarchy of epistemic authority.

Hejinian carefully avoids prescriptive definitions of inquiry by distinguishing poetic inquiry from something that sounds like the phenomenology of an earlier generation of poets, as well as conventional natural science:

Poetry comes to know that things are. But this is not knowledge in the strictest sense; it is, rather, acknowledgement – and that constitutes a sort of unknowing. To know that things are is not to know what they are, and to know that without what is to know otherness (i.e., the unknown and perhaps unknowable). Poetry undertakes acknowledgement as a preservation of otherness – a notion that can be offered in a political, as well as an epistemological, context.

This acknowledging is a process, not a definitive act; it is an inquiry, a thinking on. And it is a process in and of language, whose most complex, swift, and subtle forms are to be found in poetry – which is to say in poetic language (whether it occurs in passages of verse or prose). The language of poetry is a language of inquiry, not the language of a genre. It is that language in which a writer (or reader) both perceives and is conscious of the perception. Poetry, therefore, takes as its premise that language is a medium for experiencing experience.

Poetic language is also a language of improvisation and intention. The intention provides the field for inquiry and improvisation is the means of inquiring. (2000, 2)

Hejinian’s use of the word ‘language’ in the statement that ‘the language of poetry is a language of inquiry’ is deliberately ambiguous, meaning metaphorically that the aims and behaviour of poetry are those of research, and literally that the actual language used in the performance of the poem is the medium of this investigation.

III

Having looked at some examples of the new sentence, and suggested that it deploys a poetics of inquiry based on potential interrelations with contemporary science, I shall now consider the historical character of the natural sciences that might have influenced Silliman, Hejinian and their contemporaries. For the previous generation of poets, the big scientific story was the hydrogen bomb and the quantum physics that made it possible. For the Language Writers, the dominant scientific news was a culminating development in molecular biology widely reported in the press in the mid-1970s that would give further support to their structuralist poetics and politics, and make the idea of carrying out surgical transformations of sentences compelling. But these poets were jettisoning all the features of poetry (and of most writing, including science writing), such as argument, referential content, narrative and authorial endorsement of what is affirmed, that might make an engagement with science possible. Could their understanding of the new sciences of genetics, and its increasingly cultural authority, help them formulate the idea that the sentence in prose poetry could be a medium of inquiry? To explore this question we need to review what was happening in genetics or, as it became known after the discovery of the role of the DNA molecule (and its structure) in the construction of genes, molecular biology.

In 1968, the molecular biologist Gunther Stent reviewed a collection of essays that offered a provisional history of the field and commented somewhat wryly that ‘the first attempts to write the history of a scientific discipline often presage its imminent senescence’. Stent suspected that this early attempt at a history was ‘probably symptomatic of the approaching decline of molecular biology, only yesterday an avant-garde but today definitely a workaday field’ (1968, 390). As it turned out, he was wrong. Evelyn Fox Keller explains why: ‘just a few years later, starting in the mid-1970s, the infusion of new techniques of recombinant DNA (making it possible to target, disrupt, recombine, and clone individual genetic elements) opened up a range of investigative opportunities heretofore undreamed’ (2002, 174). Another avant-garde was about to appear and start the process of mapping genomes by the use of gene splicing or, as it became known, cloning. This highly controversial technique of cutting and pasting gene fragments into new generative forms was made possible in part by the discovery of restriction enzymes, which can slice a section of DNA in two, and then the combination of these clever biochemical scissors with the discovery of other enzymes that can glue the resulting fragments of DNA into new patterns. Soon, scientists were taking full advantage of the splicing technique. David Jackson, Robert Symons and Paul Berg carried out a key experiment in 1972 by suturing together sections of DNA from a monkey virus and a bacterium to create a new and potentially active gene. Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen believed – in the words of James Watson (2003, 91), whose anachronistic use of the terminology of word-processing is revealing – that they had the capacity to ‘cut, paste, and copy’ genetic information. The Nobel-Prize-winning biologist David Baltimore said that ‘it was the beginning of the industrial application of modern biology, medical application of modern biology, and the real revolution in the concept of what you could learn from it’ (Crotty, 2001, 111). The problem was that no one was quite sure what these new active genes they had cloned might create. Rather than mere strokes of a molecular biologist’s scalpel, others were inclined to see cloning as the potential ruination of lives. Many scientists were alarmed when they learned of the breakthrough, fearing where this might lead, even inadvertently, since most DNA research was carried out with potentially lethal bacteria and viruses. Might this research result in monsters or unstoppable pathogens? The resulting debate about gene cloning spilled over into the mass media and left a strong impression that the new biology was both powerful enough to take over the role previously assigned to a deity or to natural selection, and so dangerous that it was, again in Baltimore’s words, ‘commonly analogous to the atomic bomb’ (Crotty, 2001, 112). Paul Berg himself suggested that researchers might observe a moratorium.

Growing concern that cloned organisms might escape from the laboratory and do enormous harm eventually led to a special conference at Asilomar (the site of many earlier biology conferences) in February 1975 to decide the future of this line of research. There was such interest in these developments that Rolling Stone sent a reporter, who produced a remarkably thorough account of the discussions of the way researchers could now isolate small elements of ‘genetic information’, under the deliberately humorous title ‘The Pandora’s Box Congress’ with the subheading ‘140 Scientists Ask: Now That We Can Rewrite the Genetic Code What Are We Going To Say?’, a title which points up the productivity of the emerging metaphorics of this recombinant DNA technology. Not only might all sorts of dangerous new entities be let loose on the world, the scientists are revealed as writers of a new type of text, the genetic materials of living organisms. As the reporter says: ‘If one knows the grammar, one can begin to make up new sentences’ (Rogers, 1975, 37). A new literary avant-garde in the Bay Area just up the coast from Asilomar would also start to make up new sentences; they too knew a grammar of life, the grammar of cultural life.

The metaphorics of information and language is now so embedded in both theoretical and popular understanding of genomics that it is possible to lose sight of just how recent and how radical it is. Horace Freeland Judson, author of a major history of genetics (1979), wrote in Nature in 2001 that ‘the language we use about genetics and the genome project at times limits and distorts our own understanding, and the public understanding’ (2001). The successes of molecular biology combined with the information theory of the 1950s and the structuralist linguistics of the 1960s to create an intellectual paradigm: the idea that one could study the generation of sentences as a way to understand the genesis of everyday life. The Language Writers did not make this claim themselves. Analogies between their new sentence prose poetics and research methodologies based on the splicing of coded sequences of nucleic acids were part of a deep cultural background that increasingly treated molecular biology as a paradigm of what was best about scientific methods of inquiry, so despite a suggestive conceptual analogy between the new sentence and recombinant DNA technology, my contention is that the new science was less important as a source of metaphors for poetry and more important as a model for a new method of poetic inquiry.

Hejinian is scrupulous about the limits of analogy in her discussion of inquiry. ‘Knowledge in the strictest sense’ belongs primarily to sciences that do aim to know what constitutes the world, and therefore display the interest in the unknown that she speculatively attributes to poetry. The natural sciences place a very high value on acknowledgement or observation. Laboratory research requires of its proponents the highest commitment to the acknowledgement of what happens during experiments, and much of the infrastructure of the sciences – the lab notebooks, the records, the peer-reviewed reports and the entire discourse within which these are carried out – is an apparatus for sustaining the networks of trusted communication and ensuring the maintenance of precisely calibrated degrees of certainty and uncertainty. Hejinian makes a crucial implicit distinction between such kinds of observation and poetic observation by qualifying her description of poetry with the point that ‘this acknowledging is a process, not a definitive act’. Scientific reports do aim to be definitive, even though they rarely attain this and even though the definitive statement of today becomes an only partially correct finding in the light of tomorrow’s research. Hejinian’s discussion of inquiry also disavows reliance on ‘the language of genre’, presumably because she understands genre in the context of poetics to be synonymous with a formalism, and wants to insist that although the new sentence might appear to be a stylistic form, its function is heuristic. The new sentence aims to be a test bed, not a fashion.

Hejinian’s idea of a poetics of inquiry is shared by a number of her contemporaries, although they have not made their commitment to it quite as explicit. Charles Bernstein says ‘it is just my insistence that poetry be understood as epistemological / inquiry’, as long as it is also understood that meaning in poetry is much more than a ‘recuperable intention or / purpose’ (1992, 17). Such allusions to a poetics of inquiry by Hejinian and her contemporaries display an uneasy mix of tentativeness, dogmatism, abstraction and generalisation, which is a sign of just how difficult it is to articulate the fundamental point that poetry can be a primary knowledge-producing activity rather than merely repeating existing knowledge and beliefs. This difficulty has two sources: the enormous prestige of modern science as the only serious paradigm of intellectual inquiry; and the lack of any developed poetics, critical discourse or literary theory of the significance of inquiry for the practice of poets and readers. The cultural work of inquiry is expected to be done by science, not poetry.

Scientists and philosophers of science make this abundantly plain. Writing in the 1960s, the philosopher Israel Scheffler calls his ‘philosophical studies in the theory of science’ The Anatomy of Inquiry (the description in quotation marks is actually its subtitle), because he takes for granted that his readers will assume that inquiry is best carried out by scientists (1963). Since he published his study, scientists and philosophers of science have become more cautious in their use of terms such as inquiry, discovery, method, realism, experiment and other basic constituents of scientific theories and practices, but they still identify science with these virtues. The neuroscientist Steven Rose opens his account of the contribution that neuroscience has made to the understanding of memory with an explicit statement of what he believes to be the core of scientific method that is noticeably more cautious than Scheffler’s:

But when I talk about ‘the methods of science’ in this somewhat formal way I certainly don’t mean ‘the methods of nineteenth-century physics’ as if there were only one science – as if a slightly old-fashioned view of physics, actively propagated by traditional philosophers of science and virtually all school teaching, was what every different science – from chemistry to psychology and economics – aimed to become. What I mean by science is something a good deal broader and less restrictive; a commitment to a unitary, materialist view of the world, a world capable of exploration by methods of rational enquiry and experiment. (2003, 4)

Each of these statements about science has distinct resonances with Hejinian’s account of the poetics of inquiry, even though there are important differences. Even when Hejinian says that ‘poetic language puts into play the widest possible array of logics’, which may include ‘logics of irrationality, impossibility, and a logic of infinite speed’ (2000, 3) – an advocacy of the irrational that would seem counter to the ‘rational enquiry’ mentioned by Rose – she is consonant with some philosophers of science, notably Paul Feyerabend, who have argued something very similar about the imaginative processes which make scientific inquiry possible. He infamously said that in the discovery process ‘anything goes’, even irrational speculations, if it helps further the process of understanding (1993, 19 and passim), and though this may sound like a 1960s vision of scientific discovery, it has good antecedents. James Clerk Maxwell famously said that science was about the ‘go’ of things (Mahon, 2004, 3).

Let me return one more time to Hejinian’s My Life and ask: how does it go? Let us put this question to the opening of ‘The Plow Makes Trough Enough’:

Last night, in my dreams, I swam to the bottom of a lake, pushed off in the mud, and rising rapidly to the surface shot eight or ten feet out of the water into the air. I couldn’t join the demonstration because I was pregnant, and so I had revolutionary experience without taking revolutionary action. History hugs the world. To some extent, each sentence has to be the whole story. It is hard to turn away from moving water, where the tiny pebbles are left along the shore. Being colorblind, he could not tell if they were brown or green. Romance says, ‘Come away with me’, but neglects to say whence, or is it whither. Writer solstice. Let’s listen for the last of the autumn frogs. A paragraph measured in minutes doing the sort of thing I can’t do. What you can’t discover is the limit of possibility, which must always remain to be discovered. (1980, 65)

The tone is deflationary, avoiding climaxes and revelations, and while it notes incidentals of experience and the conclusions to be drawn, there is no integrating resolution of the myriad observations, nor any attempt to impress the reader with the power of the poet’s handling of language. What the poem does is model a commitment to discovery, to inquiry, since, as it says, if one could discover the limit of possibility one would in a sense have exhausted all the possibilities of knowledge and therefore would not still have more to discover.

Or does it say any of this? Each sentence is the ‘whole story’, self-contained, and this raises a difficulty about its propositional status, since although many of the sentences have the abstract form of propositions, and textual and reading conventions invite us to treat them as propositions endorsed by the author, their disconnection undermines such attribution. A revolution is taking place but the poet cannot join it because she is pregnant, and the text itself does not join the revolution, or so it would seem, since nowhere is there any sustained revolutionary rhetoric, comment on social injustice or sustained images of transformative possibilities. While the molecular biologists lead their own revolution in biology with their new genetic sentences and in the process generate entire new fields of medicine, archaeology, agronomy and biology, to name just a few of the knowledges that have been transformed, what is this other poetic avant-garde activity doing that might make any claims to significance other than purely aesthetic innovation? Is if after all just brush strokes?

J. M. Bernstein aphoristically sums up the recent dilemma of the arts (in which I would include poetry) when faced with the massive cultural authority of the natural sciences, by saying that there is an ‘unsettled score between art and science that recent debates about postmodernism have led us to forget. Postmodernism is the concession that art lost the argument’ (2006, 29). Can we read the new sentence as an attempt to revisit the unfinished struggle between the arts and sciences? Bernstein wants art criticism to recognise the ‘dignity of particular, indigent things’, and this requires acknowledgement of the ‘materiality of the social sign’, or, as he expresses it vividly using a metaphor drawn from the metal-working labour of modern industry, ‘the riveting together of the social sign with its material bearers’ (2006, 9). Making the sign in an artwork riveting to the audience – this is a goal for both artist and critic. And this is also what poetic works such as My Life attempt, though they do so by offering absences and seeming failures of cohesion or relevance, as well as what we might call ‘poetical’ features. Sometimes ‘History hugs the world’ insofar as the sentence hugs us and the hug is an intense reminder of the limits to our experience that Bernstein too is concerned with. Hejinian’s remarks about colour blindness, about a dream, the tiny pebbles, and even the anecdotal aspects of her memory of the hindrances of pregnancy, all belong to a register of subjectivity that is widely practised in popular verse, and in autobiographical writing, usually charged with sentiment. Here this subjectivity is almost unbearably poignant because it surfaces as a memory of something no longer valid, what Bernstein calls ‘cliched identity’ (2006, 254). Hejinian is cutting and pasting the genes of contemporary American identity. David Huntsperger sees an even wider scope to this work of inquiry: ‘My Life issues an implicit challenge to the commodification of the quotidian, not just by calling attention to the role of commodities within everyday life, but also by exploring the particularity and specificity of objects beyond their exchange value’ (2010, 163). His terminology of challenges and explorations is a further reminder that poetic inquiry presses at the limits of the concept of inquiry, and his suggestion that the poetry studies the materiality of objects takes us back to George Levine’s point: the interrelations of science and poetry are not only various, they are still changing, and may require us to extend our concepts of inquiry and knowledge.

In their new sentence prose poetry, Lyn Hejinian and her Bay Area contemporaries did not set out to write about the new science of cloning, as they might well have done. Instead, this poetry treated the metaphoric discourse which had been adopted by molecular biologists to describe their research into the invisible and anti-entropic genetic matrices within the cellular architecture of all living organisms as a template for other modes of inquiry. Implicit in the use of such extended metaphors of language to represent biochemical processes is the assumption that the semantics are adequate to the task of research. By treating the creation of new sentences by the avant-garde biologists as an invitation to the extension of the conceptual method to language treated as a material medium, this Language Writing was able to raise new questions about the possibility of inquiry in poetry. To paraphrase the opening of the poem from The Cell, this poetic movement took the extra words of molecular biology, and then folded the methodology of genetic research back onto its semantic matrix and generated a prose poetry that opened up new possibilities of poetic inquiry. Borrowing Beer’s idea that it can actually be valuable to let knowledge escape from its home base of co-workers, we could say that the poetry helped knowledge escape from the chromosome and then followed its wayward path back into language.

As critics of literature and science, when reading poems like The Cell we may find ourselves among those ‘who love to be astonished’, as that recurrent phrase in My Life expresses it (Hejinian, 1980, 7), still working out how to conceptualise the results of these strangely new sentences in science and poetry. A future criticism that negotiates the path between literary and scientific knowledges will need to engage with the epistemic claims and counter-claims inherent in these details of poems and the sciences that are ‘making objects / appear as if they belong / where they are’.