Hearing is the sense most
favored by attention; it holds the
frontier, so to speak, at the point
where seeing fails.
PAUL VALÉRY, Analects
I would like to term certain effects of indeterminacy in writing, reading, and listening to contemporary poetry, especially in relation to the use of sounds as apparently detached from everyday meanings, the “aural ellipsis.” This term alludes to Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “aura” as well as to some unusual notions concerning listening discussed by Roman Jakobson and Krystyna Pomorska:
Over the centuries, the science of language has more than once addressed the question of ellipsis, which manifests itself at different verbal levels: sounds, syntax and narration. One must admit that for the most part these questions, too, have been elaborated only episodically and fragmentarily. A technique which today receives even less consideration is that of elliptical perception, by which the listener fills in (again on all linguistic levels) whatever had been omitted by him as listener. We have also failed to appreciate properly the subjectivism of the hearer who fills in the elliptic gaps creatively. 1
The listener tends to “fill in” or weave into any elliptical speech act certain elements of his or her internal experience. This new formulation, at that point existing only within, as Jakobson and Pomorska term it, “the subjectivism” of the listener, functions momentarily as a “transitional object” or area of potential space between the listener and the speaker (I will discuss in detail the psychoanalytic concept of the “transitional object” and its application to contemporary poetry in section 2).
The effect of the “aural ellipsis” in poetry allows that, at certain points, the poem may exist within an indeterminate site of significant verbal experience that is simultaneously physical and mental, objective and subjective, heard aloud and read silently, emanating from a specific self yet also from a nonspecific site of identity, coming toward comprehensibility and disintegrating into incoherence. This analysis or representation, we may find on close examination, frequently corresponds to specific moments of everyday experience far more accurately than the fictions of perception proffered under official categories of self/identity determination and factual authentication. Another function of the aural ellipsis in poetry may be to manifest and model an emerging paradigm shift in the combining and layering of languages as the world moves rapidly toward global forms of communication. It is possible that the emergence of the “aural ellipsis” in poetry presages the coming of ever more widely shared forms of language by subliminally teaching us how to intuitively apprehend at least the rough outlines of meanings, both manifest and latent, of verbal constructs, by means of detecting, tracking and decoding their rhythmic presentations alone. This may be achieved in part by further developing, in listening to contemporary poetry, the everyday practice of evaluating the connotations of utterances by means of sensing the speaker’s speech rhythms, whether halting, uneven or tonally nuanced, as, for example, with irony, humor, or sarcasm.
When reading or listening to the words of a poem with an open form of attention, it does appear possible, at times, for the reader to decipher subliminal levels of significance that follow latent streams running apparently parallel to the explicit content, or to sound out encoded message content by tracking meanings primarily through the apprehension of patterns of rhythms and sounds. This effect seems particularly palpable in such works as the avant-garde classic Trilce by César Vallejo:
999 CALORIES.
Rumbbb … Trraprrrr rrack … chaz
Serpentinic “u” engiraffed
to the drums of the biscuitmaker […]
Who like the ices. But no.
Who like what’s going neither more nor less.
Who like the happy medium.2
A clear concern with related issues can be found in as early an American poet as Emily Dickinson:
I felt a Cleaving in my Mind—
As if my Brain had split—
I tried to match it—Seam by Seam—
But could not make them fit.
The thought behind, I strove to join
Unto the thought before—
But Sequence ravelled out of Sound
Like Balls—upon a Floor.3
My earliest awareness of the existence of the aural ellipsis came in reading, for the first time in the middle to late 1960s, certain works of such poets as Jackson Mac Low, Robert Creeley, Bernadette Mayer, John Ashbery, and Clark Coolidge, as well as the writing and early performance works of Vito Acconci, the essays and “nonsite” sculptures of Robert Smithson, and the films of Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard. In the key early works of all of these artists great attention is paid to formal elements that effectively permit these works to be experienced by the reader or viewer as “holding environments” (a term I discuss below), a possibility greatly enhanced by the use of found and invented forms of language and innovative conceptions of the relationships among perception, language, and reality. In contrast, these works are not so improvisatory as to lack significant content, unity, and structure. The relationship or balance between elements of recognizable content and structure and those of semantic and structural innovation create good conditions for the presence of the aural ellipsis. Uses of abstract-expressionist, surrealist, and other innovative techniques foregrounding the juxtaposition of words and images, paradox, ambiguity, and enigma, encourage readers or viewers to bring into awareness and project their own experiences, conscious and unconscious, onto the works, enhancing their usefulness as transitional objects.
In a much discussed review of John Ashbery’s Selected Poems published in Sulfur in 1987, Sven Birkerts wrote: “John Ashbery’s Selected Poems: that forlorn codex, garden of branching paths, termite tree of the late Millennium … The assignment was to review it, and I find I cannot. To review is to have read and to be looking back. I have read at, toward, near, but never with that cinching tug of understanding. I have moved my eyes and felt the slow dispersion of my sense of self. I have been flung back into the boredom and rage of childhood, when the whole world seemed to rear up against me, not to be had or understood.”4 What interests me in this is not only Birkerts’s evident tone-deafness to Ashbery’s remarkable poetic music, but also the fact that Birkerts frequently has many valuable insights to offer and that there may be one buried in this otherwise dismissive diatribe. Note that Birkerts describes with great feeling, and some poetic evocativeness, the experience of being transported back into childhood. He is perhaps unconsciously alluding here to the child’s whole ambivalent experience around symbiosis, the necessary early psychological stage of merging with maternal and paternal figures that can introduce (among many other crucial experiences) feelings of helplessness and depression. He quotes the following passage of one of Ashbery’s poems, “We Hesitate”:
Once they come home there is no cursing.
Fires disturb the evening. No one can hear the story
Or sometimes people just forget
… Like a child.
Birkerts goes on to say “I could go over this a hundred times and it would mean nothing more that it does on a first reading” (146).
Since I have poor Birkerts here involuntarily on a figurative psychoanalytic couch, I might speculate that he is in a state of “resistance.” If this conjecture is correct, the resistance probably is connected with the kind of anxiety Birkerts described earlier as the “slow dispersion of my sense of self.” In psychoanalysis we observe that the reason that people frequently “resist” change in living, and in analysis, is that it can be painful to revive the memories that must be elicited and connected with on a feeling level if one is to ultimately understand the past and move on. Why “dispersion … of self”? Because this is exactly the feeling one has in a state of merging. Does the Ashbery text in fact encourage an experience of merging? I feel that it does. I might even agree with Birkerts that, in a certain important psychological sense, “Ashbery’s poetry works backward along the evolutionary spiral, undoing” (Birkerts, 148). Where I completely disagree with Birkerts is when he asserts that “this is an enterprise that repudiates sense and mocks our faith in the sufficiency of our language structures” (148).
Birkerts’s failure to follow up his own carefully documented responses to Ashbery’s poetry to a point where he might have connected with it more fully can be taken as an exemplary case of a kind of flight from what I believe to be a paradigm shift not only in the style of much valuable poetry being written today, but also in its functions on many planes—social, psychological, linguistic, philosophical, artistic, and cultural. Apparently, what Birkerts wants from his experience of contemporary poetry is the traditional critical opportunity to use close intellectual reading of poetry as a way of interpreting it and ultimately finding that most satisfying of rational experiences, closure. This is primarily an intellectual process. But much effective creative work today, particularly in the field of poetry, cannot be appreciated and enjoyed by reorganizing it conceptually. Perhaps this is because many, if not most, of the innovative artists and poets of our time are less interested in their works being interpreted as representing or reflecting specific ideas and ideologies, than in having their art work provide something analogous to what the British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott called a “holding environment,” a context that makes available to poets and other artists and to their readers, listeners or viewers freely juxtaposed modes of paying close attention to external and internal experience. This opening or freeing of forms of focusing in turn makes possible an intensified collaborative sharing (between a poet and listeners at a reading, for example) in the effort of organizing otherwise anomalous, disparate and incommunicable perceptions into patterns of meaning that can be further articulated, refined, and better understood, in an ongoing process. To understand what Winnicott meant by a holding environment we must first examine his concept of the “transitional object”:
I have introduced the terms ‘transitional objects’ and ‘transitional phenomena’ for designation of the intermediate area of experience, between the thumb and the teddy bear, between the oral eroticism and the true object-relationship, between primary creative activity and projection of what has already been introjected … By this definition an infant’s babbling and the way in which an older child goes over a repertory of songs and tunes while preparing for sleep come within the intermediate area as transitional phenomena, along with the use made of objects that are not part of the infant’s body yet are not fully recognized as belonging to external reality.5
Note that Winnicott here includes sounds, both audible and imagined, as transitional objects.
Winnicott’s discovery of the transitional object resolves, or takes to a new level, an issue in Freudian psychoanalysis that seems to have left Freud in an unclear state as to the reasons why art exists. He could only explain it as a kind of “sublimation” or substitute for the sexual instinct. For him, the artist was a neurotic person who felt the need to substitute fantasies for reality. Winnicott’s understanding of what he termed “transitional objects” comes out of his work as a pediatrician as much as his work as a psychoanalyst, as well as from his participation in the work of a school of psychoanalysts known as the “object relations” school, which includes Melanie Klein, W. R. D. Fairbairn, and Harry Guntrip. In his theoretical work, as well as his technical recommendations to child psychoanalysts, Winnicott greatly furthers our understanding of the continuity between the needs of the child and the needs of the adult in creating, as he called them, “illusions.” A sense of how to apprehend this continuity is exactly what is missing in Birkerts’s understanding of Ashbery’s poetry. Winnicott’s insights not only provide us with a better understanding of the healthy uses of artistic products but also the important and necessary function of art in creating holding environments and “transitional objects” for life long use. Winnicott says of the transitional object (his emphasis) : “Of the transitional object it can be said that it is a matter of agreement between us and the baby that we will never ask the question: ‘Did you conceive of this or was it presented to you from without?’ The important point is that no decision on this point is expected. The question is not to be formulated” (Winnicott, 12). This quality of the indefinite origin of the transitional object for the infant is reflected in the psychological and aesthetic functions of indeterminacy and ambiguity in the art object or in the poem that is appreciated and enjoyed by the adult. Winnicott also states: “It is assumed here that the task of reality-acceptance is never completed, that no human is free from the strain of relating inner and outer reality, and that relief from this strain is provided by an intermediate area of experience … which is not challenged (arts, religion, etc.). This intermediate area is in direct continuity with the play area of the child who is ‘lost’ in play” (13). When Winnicott speaks of an “intermediate area” or a “third area,” what he is speaking about is an area that is neither strictly subjective or objective: “The place where cultural experience is located is the potential space between the individual and the environment (originally the object). The same can be said of playing. Cultural experience begins with creative living first manifested in play” (100). The discovery of the transitional object revealed some of the key social and psychological functions of the contemporary art object in extending psychological development throughout life.
For Winnicott, the experience he calls holding is one provided for an infant by a “good enough” parental “facilitating environment.” During this time the infant is gradually introduced into reality or the “objective” world by means of the parents allowing for the infant’s, and later the child’s, total dependence, gradually shifting into partial dependence, and finally independence. For the child to develop this independence the parental figures must be capable, however, of tolerating the infant’s need for feeling a degree of omnipotence, and to permit and empathize with the need on the part of the infant and later the child, for the use of “magical” transitional objects as an intermediate protection and support during the transition from the merged, omnipotent state, to the more vulnerable and self-reliant independent state. The transitional object facilitates a means by which the child and the parent can paradoxically (and often unconsciously) hold on to each other and let go of each other at the same time. Similarly, the contemporary poem that functions as a mode of providing a holding environment makes it possible for the reader to imaginatively hold on to the poem and to let go of it at the same time, thereby enhancing the listener’s associative filling-in of elliptical gaps (the aural ellipsis).
Winnicott’s application of his discovery of the transitional object identifies, names, and authenticates an area of human experience that is simultaneously physical and mental and not exclusively either, and that does not rely on any notion of “spirit,” as does, for example, the concept of the “talisman.” The need for knowledge, concepts, and principles to enunciate the intersections or boundaries among language, consciousness, objects, and other less apprehensible and specifiable areas of experience has long been struggled with in philosophy and phenomenology by such figures as Plato, Pascal, Hegel, Kant, Moore, Wittgenstein, Husserl, and others. Aspects of the philosophical and literary theories of Walter Benjamin seem to me complementary to Winnicott’s ideas; in particular, his concept of the “aura” and his use of the Paris arcades as physical evidence for his theories about society form important parallels. Benjamin seemed very concerned about finding correlatives in the physical world, types of evidence, for his literary theories. Although there is not sufficient space in this context to explore this at length, a few citations from Benjamin might be enough to suggest a useful connection between the relatively recent work of this important critical theorist and the important “object relations” psychoanalytic theorist, Winnicott, in specifying an area of poetics that in the past could only be adequately encompassed by employing concepts more closely related to religion and mysticism.
In discussing the role of architecture in the life of the private citizen under Louis-Phillipe, Benjamin writes: “The private citizen who in the office took reality into account, required of the interior that it should support him in his illusions … From this sprang the phantasmagorias of the interior. This represented the universe for the private citizen. In it he assembled the distant in space and time. His drawing-room was a box in the worldtheatre … The interior was the place of refuge of Art.”6 What interests me here is Benjamin’s focus on the fact that the need for illusion by the “private citizen” had become regularized in relation to the use of everyday objects. He was able to effectively demonstrate this by his explication of the relation of the place of illusion to the functions and forms of everyday decor in the eighteenth century. This understanding of the process of psychological transformation of everyday objects of human habitation into a stage set for illusion or play is akin to the way Winnicott understood the human tendency to transform sounds, language, and things into psychological environments for human transition and growth. Benjamin’s profound insights into the functions of the “aura” at times come very close to apprehending and characterizing the area of experience that Winnicott later identified and named “the transitional object”: “‘Perceptibility,’ as Novalis puts it, ‘is a kind of attentiveness.’ The perceptibility he has in mind is none other than that of the aura. Experience of the aura thus rests on the transposition of a response common in human relationships to the relationship between the inanimate or natural object and man. The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at us in turn. To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return” (Benjamin, 148).
Benjamin’s acute sensitivity to the human propensity to transpose human qualities into natural objects by means of attentiveness to their auras is uncannily close to Winnicott’s conception of the transitional object. Like Winnicott, Benjamin describes the aura as existing in an intermediate state which is both human and nonhuman, subjective and objective. Benjamin attributed to Baudelaire particular insight into this phenomenon, twice quoting the following lines from “Correspondances,” from Fleurs du Mal: “Man wends his way through forests of symbols / Which look at him with their familiar glances” (Benjamin, 140, 149).7
Benjamin’s apprehension of the “aura” and Winnicott’s elucidation of the “transitional object” provide contemporary conceptual frameworks for grasping an aspect of human experience that previously was essentially the province of religion and mysticism. For thousands of years, shamans in tribal cultures have been chanting at least partially improvised, frequently fragmented, elliptical phrases, often when the shaman was in an altered state, as an important aspect of healing rituals.8 The American Shakers wrote over ten thousand spontaneous hymns in the course of a few decades of prayer meetings. The use of otherwise meaningless syllables of sound (like Om) figures importantly in Buddhism and other religions.
“The Spirit is the Conscious Ear” wrote Dickinson (poem 733, p. 359). While for many, notions of the mystical or spiritual are no longer adequate concepts for evoking certain otherwise unnamable yet powerfully influential effects of the sounds of words in poetry, terms like the transitional object or, in this context, the aural ellipsis can underline how from birth to death particular poetic uses of spoken or sung ellliptical language seem to inspire in us some needed access to otherwise inaccessible and incommunicable realms of experience.
In an unguarded moment of reverie I find that I am not only listening to the Debussy Images for piano but I am simultaneously listening for something that is further to be heard. I think of Rilke:
Voices, voices. Listen, my heart, as hitherto only
saints have listened, so that the mighty call
lifted them from the earth; but they kept on kneeling,
these impossible ones, and paid no attention—
so hard they were listening.9
I encounter this theme frequently in the works of contemporary artists. The poet and filmmaker Abigail Child puts it like this:
Listen! provocatively
that’s your spirit
that’s your fucking consciousness.10
Charles Bernstein’s poem “Substance Abuse” contains a passage that focuses on the key issue of freedom and improvisation in poetic listening. As is frequently the case in his work, the boundaries between critical writing, poetics, personal self disclosure, and poetic revelation are blurred and many of the issues surrounding what I am terming the aural ellipsis are discussed and evoked:
Nothing tires a vision more than sundry attacks
in the manner of enclosure. My thoughts toss
trippingly on the tongue—an immense excuse
for proportion [perforation]. What I am saying
here will only come out in joinings:
but to loosen the mind, limber it for
bounding. What does ear contain
that norming senses lack? A resolution
in the air.11
The stillness within Lynne Dreyer’s call for listening is poignant and resonant:
It was the voice. It was the
voices of people I had known
before. It was my own voice. I
wanted to watch you. The
children are cruel. They find
nothing changed. They find
silence.
Yet something increased in
sound. You sat down and for
the first time in your entire life
you listened and heard something
that had nothing to do with you.12
In certain readings of poetry I am hearing something parallel but otherwise mysteriously inaccessible, compared to what I am listening to when listening to becomes listening for. I can frequently perceive this effect of aural ellipsis when the poetic text accommodates itself comfortably to what I sense to be the actuality of everyday, nondeliberate thought, or what I call “average thought.” Jakobson writes: “Quite fragmentary in the most relaxed thinking, inner language may be only partial even in deliberate cogitation. ‘Sentences,’ says Egger, ‘may be condensed. These words … have full meaning only for the individual who conceives them … Synthetic expressions such as ‘Wretch—! Another—! Never—!’ are sufficient, even without explanatory context, when we’re talking to ourselves.”13 Everyday, nonpurposive thought weaves its way through memories, assertions, emotions, reflections, observations, generalizations, comparisons, ellisions almost instantaneously and frequently with very elliptical uses of language.
Many of the poems of Paul Celan might well illustrate the powerful poetic use of the aural ellipsis. In the poem “And with the Book from Tarussa,” which begins with an epigram from Marina Tsvetayeva—“All poets are Jews”—Celan writes:
… Of the woods
Untrodden, of the
thought they grew from, as sound
and half-sound and changed sound and terminal sound, Scythian
rhymes …
…—into the realm,
the widest of
realms, into
the great internal rhyme
beyond
the zone of mute nations, into yourself
language-scale, word-scale, homescale
of exile.14
It appears that Celan is defining here with great poetic precision what I have been describing as the aural ellipsis and the development of an international language of thought and sound, “the great internal rhyme / beyond / the zone of mute nations.” With this internal access, words and languages can become a shared “zone,” on one accessible scale, where all “exiles” can discover a common “home.”
Works of poetry that can be characterized as effective mediums for the aural ellipsis tend to be works that permit listeners and readers to discover and determine many of the structural elements of the poem for themselves, rather than foreground the narrative or didactic elements that provide the illusion of purpose, realism, or verisimilitude. There is a distinction that can be made between written works that can be appreciated by means of ordinary silent reading and those in which each word should be heard read aloud or individually sounded out aloud in the mind. With the latter works readers are encouraged to experience the poem by sounding it out internally in a process of concentrated, yet freely imaginative listening and reading rather than only hearing it as something closer to grammatically conventional speech that can be fully explicated. It is in this sense that the aural/ oral ellipsis encourages listening to poetry as a holding environment within which the gaps among thought, language, and sensory experience must be bridged by the listener. Rather than only being asked to observe and comprehend a pattern of thinking, here listeners and readers, by means of a process of close, but freely imaginative, listening, are encouraged to actively participate in it.
Certainly, of all the poetry written today, Jackson Mac Low’s work best exemplifies, particularly in its consistency of perspective and literary innovation, the presence of the aural ellipsis. My first readings of the poems from The Pronouns, in 1966–1967, provided my earliest definitive experience of poems wherein the rhythmical, aural, and visual functions of words within the poem were equivalent in significance and aesthetic impact to any literal meanings those words might have had at the time of reading them. This equivalence was extended to the rhythmic structure of the lines and to the movements of the eyes in rhythmically reading the words on the page. I felt that I was recognizing here directly that there was a gap or aporia in the senses among hearing (which includes mental, imagined hearing as much as actual physical hearing), seeing, and touching in everyday life. Here, coordinated or combined sensory experiences replace perceptions that are simply disparate or discrete. The precision of this effect seems to have at least partly resulted from Mac Low’s system of recycling his literary source material, which involves the use of randomizing methods, techniques that he has been evolving and experimenting with throughout his career, and masterfully employs in such recent books of poems as Bloomsday.15
In November 1967 I learned that Mac Low had extended this system of equivalences into the sphere of political action, when I met him for the first time at a demonstration sponsored by the War Resisters League at the Whitehall Street Induction Center. I found an equivalence between the way Mac Low accentuated the transformation of identity in both the subjective and objective realms, in this case, the poetic and the political. In The Pronouns the pronoun itself, as a part of language, becomes an allegorical element of the sociopolitical dynamics of the dances. Mac Low has to date continued to be intensely interested in the performance aspect of his poetry, a fact made abundantly clear in his innumerable poetic and music performances that have remained a crucial aspect in the development of his poetic work for over forty years.16 As he put it in his “Reflections on the Occasion of the DANCE SCOPE issue” (dated 8/29/74): “Since 1954 I have made many pieces—simultaneities for voices &/or instruments, poems, plays, musical works—which call for active creative collaboration of performers and/or audience. My reasons for liking this type of composition has not changed much since I wrote the statement … ‘An “anarchist” does not believe, as some have wrongly put it, in social chaos. He or she believes in a society where there is no frozen power structure, where all persons may make significant initiatory choices in matters affecting their own lives. In such a society coercion is at a minimum & lethal violence is practically nonexistent.’ “17
The aural ellipsis, then, in The Pronouns is that area of the listening/ reading experience that provides a holding environment in which to immerse oneself and participate in the complex, transformative interrelationship between self and other: he = she = they = you = all = I = it = we = one = thou = ye = this = those = these = that = somebody = someone = anyone, and so on, as each of these pronouns replaces the previous one in a collection of poems employing lines all in imperative form to be used as instructions for the dancers. The result is partly one of static/moving simultaneous connectedness with the whole of experience, compared with the limited perspective available from the standpoint of the specific identity of the writer or the reader alone. At this boundary, hearing and seeing, looking and listening are interrelated and are paradoxically, dynamically in tension with one another. Since the reading must take place in time, its music or its performance will trace a trajectory of its own that may or may not be equivalent to one or another of the senses—thus another sense, or mode of perception, is evoked. Hearing Mac Low perform these works, of course, makes these effects all the more accessible and apparent.
It is not only the concept of identity that is being displaced, in this and other works by Mac Low, but it is in the presumption (the sometimes necessary illusion) that identity is, in actuality, completely separate from anything else. We are becoming what our perceptions make of us, and in the aural, elliptical holding environment of the poem we can locate an orientation to experience within which we can let go of the specificity of the self and all of its officially documented narratives to enter into a world peopled by unexpected definitions, determinations and relationships:
You are alone & start out by being a wire,
& you seem to have a purpose,
going about, as you do, being a unit.
Soon you’re doing things to make a meal,
& then you’re doing something as in the West,
as if you were “awaking yesterday when the skin’s
a little feeble”:
you blacken something
while you write with a bad pen,
& smoke,
letting potatoes go bad
before you match a few parcels.
Being earth,
you harbor poison between cotton or go from
breathing to a common form,
testing different things,
touching them,
sponging them,
going under them,
numbering them,
wheeling them,
schooling them,
getting them.
You end up by giving enough of anything to anyone.
(from “4th Dance—Being a Brother to
Someone—11-17 February 1964,” 17)
One of Mac Low’s central concerns is to find ways to write that bypass the limitations of the self. Another innovative and influential poet deeply concerned with displacing the central role of the poet’s identity in the process of writing poetry, particularly by placing close attentions to the rhythms and sounds of language, is Jack Spicer. In his Vancouver Lectures Jack Spicer refers to Cocteau’s film Orpheus in which the poet (as Orpheus) appears to be receiving his lines from a car radio. Spicer wrote about the process of writing poetry as receiving a kind of “dictation,” transmission or “message from Mars.”18 Perhaps another way to understand Spicer’s concerns is to recognize that the poet’s role has changed in contemporary life. While at one time the poet’s central role was to declaim his or her beliefs, experiences, wisdom, and ideas eloquently or adamantly through lyrics and narrations in a kind of public speech or song-making, for many poets these notions of a poet’s essential role are no longer completely apt. Frequently, the poet seems to view his or her expressive function more as a medium or a “conduit” as Barrett Watten has phrased it.19 The poet is a researcher who must listen closely to the sounds and voices of actuality to discover where the poetry may exist within it. In an interview with Joan Retallack, in response to a quote from Theodor Adorno (“The greatness of works of art lies solely in their power to let those things be heard which ideology conceals”), John Cage said: “something that you just quoted leads in another direction as though there were a subject. As though it was about something. Which could be the emotions. Ideology would conceal by relationships. And those things being heard would be, so to speak, speaking the mysterious language of the unknown! (laughs) Which music could be imagined as being able to do. (laughs).”20
One of the clearest contexts in which to identify the efficacy of the poetic aural ellipsis is in the poet’s use of found language. The poem of found language provides for both the poet utilizing it and the listener or reader deciphering it a holding environment in which the poet’s identity, beliefs, and personal ideology are not usually obvious as a central aspect of the content. The poetic impact in such cases arises mostly from juxtapositions, both between the words of the poem and between the words and the poem’s formal devices as well as the listener or reader’s efforts to close the elliptical gaps between the words, ideas and fragments of narrative in the poem. A passage from a recent poem of Joan Retallack may serve as an example:
erratums for the tummy La La tin erratum neuter past errare all history lies behind before Poetique Terrible delete as/like Duchamp as Fred Astaire to read epit ess pref b iv b neut p pple sundry errats’ distended verse to wander err erratic nudging ers root erratum rrroneus erroar The World’s a Book ‘Tis falsely writ … et … cet … era21
Drawing from the content as well as the form of errata slips, Retallack deftly performs the alchemical magic of the found-language artist, at the same time uncovering the potential transformative energy implicit in the recognition of all error and distortion, be it typographical, spoken, philosophical, or perceptual. This energy is released by means of a similar access route to the unconscious discussed by Freud in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Retallack transforms the scraps of language usually hardly glanced at into poetry that contains rhythmically complex music, wit, philosophical sweep, visual grace, presented in a linguistic environment of dynamic compression. Retallack’s method of drawing attention to each letter by means of using the reader’s natural tendency to notice printed errors, to sound them out internally and to associate to them freely, partly in order to detect the unconscious meaning in these parapraxes, or slips of speech, is clear in this passage. Although the reference is not mentioned in a list of source included with the text, I detect some echoes of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, which would certainly be one of the earliest examples of the intentional and frequent employment of the aural ellipsis, and certainly one of its literary origins.22 Although the lines are drawn from various sources, this in no way limits either the ideas or the vibrant lyricism of the language. Errata suite, by utilizing words as they appear to us in the inchoate flux of everyday experience, very much including the experience of silent and spoken reading, as well as associative thinking, creates a kind of music that challenges us to listen to the entire complexity of experience in its full density. This is, of course, difficult poetry to read aloud and to hear read aloud. But the process is valuable because it creates an opportunity to transform what might otherwise remain incommunicable internal experiences into concrete, albeit fluid forms of external expression. This is what Jakobson means when he writes, “The principal vehicle for the displacements of the equilibrium [of language] are the elliptical and expressive aspects of language. The changes that attempt to reestablish the destroyed equilibrium in the system of language play an essential role in the passage from the old order to the new” (Jakobson, 179). At poetry readings where such poems as Errata suite are read aloud, and listened to conscientiously, both poet and listeners are working together collaboratively to expand the boundaries of spoken and written language.
Another poet who has been central in opening up the exploration of elliptical techniques in poetry is Clark Coolidge. His book Space, published in 1970, is a classic in the masterful use of an aural elliptical form of writing and has been broadly influential. It was in reading and rereading this work along with Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath, Mayer’s Story, Mac Low’s The Pronouns and Berrigan’s The Sonnets that I first sensed that a new type of poetry had emerged, one that freely employed linguistic constructs in both a visual and an aural form to evoke and evolve novel metalanguages. The most evident aspect of these new metalanguages for me was that in rereading the poems they seemed to transform themselves right before your eyes, kaleidoscopically refusing to stay in one place, or to be seen from one perspective, and were extremely rich in aural associations. As with the greatest traditionally written poems, returning to them one again and again rediscovers a new poem, only in the case of these works this effect is greatly intensified. The poem “these” from Space illustrates Coolidge’s deceptive simplicity of language and the deft lyricism that persists through the demanding absence of ordinary meaning:
Bers phone the the.
Give showed mail ing.
The on won so.
Ly fetch wonders note.
It’s a gim, a de.
On the know, the on, the don’t.
Back how’s is backs.
To one it, it irons.
Ops a ed, a are any this.
Don.
Trucks one.23
The reader is encouraged to try sounding out these words internally or aloud. A few minutes of relaxed experimentation should make it obvious that it is nearly impossible to focus on listening to these words without attempting to fill in the gaps. Although the end result of the experiment will probably not lead to a grammatically clear sequence of statements, specific and identifiable sound images will emerge. The poem provides a sound and visual structure for innumerable possible variations. It is in this sense that this work is so apt as a holding environment within which the reader may cocreate his or her own version of the poem while sounding it out within the aural ellipses of the given text. To read and particularly to hear this type of work read by the poet encourages the listener or reader to participate actively in the performative aspect of the work. The reader or listener is invited to become a participant in the creation of the poem’s overall aesthetic context and its meaning.
It is no surprise, as was the case in one of the earliest, if not the earliest practitioners of the aural ellipsis, Gertrude Stein, that poets interested in such techniques would be interested in creating works for performance. Fiona Templeton, who is now best known for her on-site performance work in such pieces as You—The City,24 which worked on the novel premise of being presented to an audience of one (each audience member made a separate appointment and the piece took place on site in Times Square), published her work London in 1984. Fiona Templeton was born and raised in Scotland and then lived for several years in London before moving to New York. In this work her writing teems with echoes of her native uses of language and, in its inventive constructions, evolves a rich metalanguage of its own:
Come miss eagle be ladies barking come model by lick
not end hey I burn primary came well hip bone went be
heart be oval be fig madly hermit lamp shakes a curt
comb out prior and we win if cull be a coin mere fit
yell do mere sit red we gate else John come on me
pages me came man’s came combs down in me in deer
hurt chit be he plastic great Marx and fish well silks in 25
In this work, as in Coolidge’s above, each word resounds tellingly with every other word in the piece, not just in a linear sense, but on every plane, in any order or direction you might read it. At the same time, because of the density of the sound and visual images, the passage can echo and reflect innumerable facets of the settings and the actions being evoked. Every reading is unique, densely layered, and the possibilities for reading the work aloud greatly enriched, as the structure as well as the vocabulary allow for many alternative readings on the part of the performer, as well as an imaginative, though demanding opportunity for interpretive and creative participation on the part of the listener. As in Coolidge’s poem, Templeton’s piece uses mostly simple words of one or two syllables that maximize and intensify the rhythmic continuity as well as the overall rhythmic, sonic, and musical structure of the piece.
Other poets who have used found and invented language to create innovative poetry that elicits unique forms of listening include Frank Kuenstler, Armand Schwerner, Hannah Weiner, Don Byrd, Ray DiPalma, Marshall Reese, Madeline Gins, Bruce Andrews, Tina Darragh, P. Inman, Douglas Messerli, Rod Smith, Mark Wallace, Kim Rosenfield, and Robert Fitterman. The poetically sophisticated use of found language by some of the most distinguished experimental contemporary poets suggests that an important function of contemporary poetry is to present readers and listeners with the sites and materials of the poem so as to invite them to coparticipate in its creation. In this sense, the writing of contemporary poetry has a tendency to become a more and more collaborative process, with the creative functions of writers and readers becoming less and less distinguishable from one another, and, in a sense, even from poets and listeners, or writers and critics. These texts point the way to telling us how poems are created and how to listen closely to our reponses in order to discover the experiential sites of the poem’s constituent materials.
The found poem accentuates the physicality of the poem in both its written and heard forms. Hearing the aural ellipses within the poem of found or invented language is also like discovering, by means of internal soundings, openings in an otherwise impenetrable mass. Also, the found poem, like the recent scientific discovery that a meteorite uncovered long ago may contain evidence of previous life on Mars, is a kind of proof that poetic life is “out there,” that it objectively exists and is embedded in everyday life. It is a piece of evidence that is also a site of language as poetry in situ. As in the case of the Martian meteorite, the section of found poetry often looks and feels like a hefty “chunk” of the raw material from which the poetic substance might be mined, in part by sounding out, by listening to where the raw poetic element within the substance might exist. In that sense, the aural ellipsis is the place where the tuning of the mind to the poetic wavelength takes place. And, in fact, for the time that your poetic receiving “radio” remains on that wavelength it seems that it might emanate—at least in small quantities—from many other proximate sites. As you look out at the universe from the vantage point of the aural ellipsis it appears that disparate elements available in many kinds of places, times, and categories might be placed in each other’s proximity to see if a spark of consciousness across the gap might engender the sounds and flash of poetry. By highlighting the possibilities of the poetic process within found material, the poem also accentuates its potential for the listener to experience it as a transitional object because the found material itself has both subjective and objective aspects.
The increased interest on the part of poets and readers in poetic constructions that can serve as transitional objects is an indication that the field of poetry and the culture with which it is engaged are going through a transitional period. As with individuals, transitional periods of culture are characterized by the intensification of conflict around issues of identity and an intensified search via experimentation for new structures. An example in human development is adolescence. Experimentation with values, behaviors, and identities makes possible the discovery of modes of living around which new senses of identity can be crystallized. The same process holds during social and cultural transitions, periods like ours characterized by conflict, the dissolution of old forms, experimentation, and the search for new forms. This includes the creation of new structures, partly by means of incorporating within them a synthesis of the useful parts of existing structures.
The environment of the found poem frequently elicits experiences of sensory overlap or synesthesia where close listening and reading give way to a combinatory apprehension of meanings, associations, and perceptions by all of the senses. One of the reasons that poetry readings are so important in the evolution of contemporary poetry is that the full effect of the poem cannot be experienced until it is heard aloud, preferably in a group context where responses can be shared and discussed among the listeners and often with the poet herself. Since frequently the value of contemporary poetry is not so much in unraveling the thematic aspects of the poem but in offering a holding environment for the evocation and cocreation of innovative modes of language and communication, the poetry reading is one of the key contexts for contemporary poetry to be shared and understood, and for its effects to be disseminated. In this sense, much contemporary poetry is akin to music in that it is one thing to read the musical notations to oneself but it is quite another to hear the music performed. The performance of poetry as a public event formalizes the poem as an artistic object every bit as much as its publication. Just as photography helped to free painting from its traditional function of graphically depicting external reality, the invention of recording techniques has transformed the poetry reading itself into a potential publication event. The aural or video recording of a reading is just as significant as a permanent document of a poem as a printed version. Recording techniques have helped to free poets to become more interested in experimenting with sound just as painters were helped by photography to be free to experiment with image, color, and form. While this is true for the oral performance of any type of poetry, it is particularly crucial in the type of poetry I am characterizing as embodying the aural ellipsis, because it is in hearing the poem read aloud, particularly in the voice of the poet who wrote it, that the listener has the best opportunity to understand the poet’s specific intentions in selecting the sounds of the poem, as well as finding the most apropos, rhythmic interweaving of his or her own inner stream of thinking and language into that listening. Reading the poem later, the listener then has the opportunity of comparing the poet’s manner of visualizing the poem as written text vis-à-vis the poet and listener’s combined realization of the poem read aloud. Listening, of course, always includes the thoughts, feelings, and associations to the poem of the listener.
The complex nature of the relationship between thinking and listening is at the heart of the experience of listening to poetry. The aural ellipses of the contemporary poem ensure that there will be spaces for invention on the part of the listener, and that the reading of the poem will not only be the public presentation of ideas, but will function as a medium for what is otherwise incommunicable between one mind and another. This is all the more important in contemporary life where there is so much talking and so little listening. Not only is listening becoming a lost art, but there are fewer and fewer opportunities to learn how to listen. Listening to nearly any television or radio talk show will prove this in a few minutes. At the same time, this avoidance is understandable, given that we live in a world that pounds everyone constantly with excruciating emotional trauma, much of it frequently presented in the media in an almost unbearably blaring and glaring manner. It should be no surprise to anyone that under these circumstances the failure to communicate, or the wish to find ways of avoiding communication, are pandemic. In such an environment, a key survival skill is the ability to sometimes turn off the external environment—to not listen. There is so much to communicate and so little time and energy available to listen in an atmosphere of constant trauma and anxiety.
Working their way through the poem of found language, or any poem offering the open spaces of the aural ellipsis, persistent readers and listeners have no choice but to take the time to listen to each word as if they were hearing and following the meandering, intuitive steps of Benjamin’s Baudelairean flaneurs finding their ways through the Paris boulevards and arcades. Listeners to such poems must learn to mentally and emotionally weave and bob, to be comfortable hearing and reading both randomly and stealthily, to discover, as if by accident, previously inaccessible areas of language and thought. At times risky or potentially subversive, at other times offering a sense of integration, purpose, and insight, the aural ellipses of the contemporary poem invite listeners to respond with their own inner resonances, to take the poem to its immediate and relative subjective and objective realization. The result is nothing less than a radical transformation in the architectonic topology of the text/sound relationship.
Listening is living in time. It is allowing time for the events of living to register themselves in us. “Stop to listen?
I am interested in the way insignificance transforms itself or is transformed into significance or vice versa, the way specificity is changed into the general and the other way around. Inside an old language we may no longer understand something can be hidden. The smallest fragment of part of the thing we are looking for … language itself is the translation. I wanted to speak in an unknown tongue … in my wildest dreams. But, even now, so soon after, I can’t remember which way it went, it was so long ago … I’m not asleep … whichever way I am going.
Something is wrapped around me like a shell… I wanted to smash things too … I had to figure the story out from so few clues … then I wanted to break off the shell so I could see outside of it… I couldn’t just sit still… It was as if I had to get a glimpse … someway to see outside …
Tapping on the frame I can hear the sound of of it … I listen for the slightest movement… I jump at the chance …
1. Roman Jakobson, On Language, ed. Linda R. Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 172
2. César Vallejo, Trilce, tr. David Smith (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1973), poem 32, p. 97.
3. Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), poem 937, pp. 439-40. Another poem of Dickinson’s which demonstrates her concerns with sound and creation is poem 1048, pp. 478–79:
Reportless Subjects, to the Quick
Continual addressed—
But foreign as the Dialect
Of Danes, unto the rest.
Reportless Measures, to the Ear
Susceptive—stimulus—
But like an Oriental Tale
To others, fabulous—
4. Sven Birkerts, untitled review of John Ashbery’s Selected Poems, in Sulfur, no. 19 (spring 1987), p. 142.
5. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Tavistock, 1989), p. 2
6. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, tr. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1983), pp. 167-68.
7. Cf. Charles Baudelaire, The Complete Verse, tr. Francis Scarfe (London: Anvil Press, 1986), p. 61. The first stanza of poem 4 (“Correspondances”) reads as follows:
La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers.
“Nature is a temple, in which living pillars sometimes utter a babel of words; mankind traverses it through forests of symbols that watch him with knowing eyes.”
8. Henry Munn offers the following example of a Mazatec (Mexican) shaman’s “free associative” recitation: “Thirteen superior whirlwinds. Thirteen whirlwinds of the atmosphere. Thirteen clowns, says. Thirteen personalities, says. Thirteen white lights, says. Thirteen mountains of points, says. Thirteen old hawks, says. Thirteen white hawks, says. Thirteen personalities, says. Thirteen mountains, says. Thirteen clowns, says. Thirteen peaks, says. Thirteen stars of the morning.” “The Mushrooms of Language,” by Henry Munn, in Hallucinogens and Shamanism, ed. Michael J. Harner (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 109.
9. Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, tr. C. F. McIntyre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 7.
10. Abigail Child, Scatter Matrix (New York: Roof, 1996), p. 51.
11. Charles Bernstein, Islets/Irritations (New York: Jordan Davies, 1983), p. 81.
12. Lynne Dreyer, The White Museum (New York: Roof, 1986), p. 101.
13. Victor Egger, La Parole intérieure (Alcan, 1904), p. 70, qtd. in Jakobson, p. 98.
14. Paul Celan, Speech Grille, tr. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1971), p. 209.
15. Jackson Mac Low, Bloomsday (New York: Roof, 1984).
16. Hear Jackson Mac Low, Open Secrets (CD) (New York: Experimental Intermedia Foundation, 1993).
17. Jackson Mac Low, The Pronouns: A Collection of Forty Dances for the Dancers, 3 February-22 March 1964 (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1979), p. 74.
18. Jack Spicer, Vancouver Lectures, excerpted in Caterpillar, no. 12 (July 1970), pp. 177-78: “The third stage, I think, comes when you get some idea that there is a difference between you and the outside of you which is writing poetry … then you start seeing whether you can clear your mind away … and here the analogy of the medium comes in, which Yeats started out, and which Cocteau in his Orphée—both the play and the picture—used a car radio for, but which essentially is the same thing. But essentially you are something which is being transmitted into … It’s as if a Martian comes into a room with children’s blocks … and he tries to convey a message … Now the third step in dictated poetry is to try to keep all of yourself that is possible outside the poem.”
19. Barrett Watten, Conduit (San Francisco: Gaz, 1988), passim.
20. John Cage, Musicage: Cage Muses on Words Art and Music, ed. Joan Retallack (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), p. 176.
21. Joan Retallack, Errata suite (Washington, D.C.: Edge Books, 1993), p. 15.
22. In an unpublished letter to me from Marshall McLuhan, dated November 22, 1966, he offers some advice regarding my request for material for the “ear”: “Here … is prescription for ear with ‘dearth of material’: Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. Has to be read aloud. He says everything I am saying and more, much more.”
23. Clark Coolidge, Space (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 89.
24. Fiona Templeton, You, the City (New York: Roof, 1990).
25. Fiona Templeton, London (Washington, D.C.: Sun & Moon Press, 1984), p. 29.