And there is the repertoire of formal impulses and procedures associated with a postmodern aesthetic—
COLLAGE
1. Robert Rauschenberg: “Collage is the twentieth century’s greatest innovation.”
2. The term comes from the French verb coller, “to glue.” And as an art form it was thought to begin with the cubist experiments of Picasso and Braque. One source says that Wyndham Lewis was the first writer to use the term in English, in 1913. One definition—a work of art made by attaching a variety of materials to a flat surface—is a minimal description of what Braque and Picasso did with bits of newspaper and theater and metro tickets.
3. So collage in poetry could mean the inclusion of the verbal equivalents in poems. Williams experiments with this in Spring and All, 1923, in a 1930 poem called “Della Primavera Transportata al Morale,” and, of course, in Paterson. “Della Primavera” includes street signs and a restaurant menu. And one could, presumably, make a verbal collage of entirely found elements to evoke a world or a state of mind, that is, use collage for the purposes of representation.
4. The other definition of collage leaves out the idea of found materials. “An artistic work that is an assemblage of diverse elements.” Which comes nearer to its literary use, but leaves out the experience of heterodox materials put to a surprising use, and it leaves out the sense in some cubist work of something having been broken analytically and reassembled.
5. And assembled on what formal principle? Which brings us to what is involved in using techniques or metaphors from the visual arts to describe literary practices. The difference between them is that form in the visual arts is spatial and in literature it is temporal. A poem has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A work of art—whether sculpture or painting—has edges. (Not speaking of video or event-based conceptual pieces, which are in this way nearer to poetry than to painting.)
A way to come at this formally is to think about poems about works of art. The classic starting point for this subject is Gotthold Lessing’s Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. The classic text for thinking about it is what may be the first ekphrastic poem, Book 18, lines 478–608 of Homer’s Iliad, the passage that describes the forging of the shield of Achilles. It’s a staggering piece of writing (if it is a piece of writing; it may be the record of an oral performance) and you might want to stop whatever you are doing and go read it in the Richmond Lattimore or Robert Fagles translation.
Spatial form and temporal form. Years ago, I heard a Chaucer scholar give a lecture on Troilus and Criseyde. It’s a narrative poem about these lovers, the first part of which is about the way Criseyde’s uncle Pandarus arranges the business of getting the two awkward young people together. In the second part, in the midst of war, they get together secretly, twine around each other, in Chaucer’s metaphor, like woodbine, their hearts, in his metaphor, singing like birds in spring. In the last part, the relationship falls apart and there is an epilogue in which Troilus in heaven repents his sin of passion. The lecturer remarked that temporal forms privilege endings and spatial forms privilege middles, so literary critics wrote as if the point of the poem was Troilus’s repentence. But medieval people, he said, thought spatially. They would have felt that they were standing in the middle of a triptych, and from that point of view Chaucer’s point might be that, though there may have been comedy before and recantation after, there was at the center singing.
In the account of the shield of Achilles, Homer evokes the entire living world in a 120 lines, and he rounds that world, along the outer edge of the round shield, with ocean. The argument—Lessing’s argument—would seem to be that the circle is poetry’s way of making temporal forms spatial. As an exercise, describe a painting or a sculpture. Where do you begin? Homer begins in the center of Achilles’s shield and moves outward in concentric circles. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” begins inside the observer and takes its time moving to the painting, which it begins by seeing panoramically. Rilke begins with the head in “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” proceeds to the loins, and ends inside the observer.
6. One of the formal moves among modernist poets toward turning the temporal form of the poem into a spatial one was nearer to the mobile than collage, or mixed the ideas of assemblage with the idea of the kinetic movement of detached or semidetached elements. Alexander Calder produced his first mobile around 1930. He had spent some time fashioning circus toys, so the playfulness of these new three-dimensional moving sculptures was a natural evolution. The story is that he showed one to Marcel Duchamps and remarked that he didn’t know what to call it. Duchamps shrugged and said, “Mobile.” Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” anticipated this idea by some fifteen years. The trick was, in what he called a series of “impressions,” to connect a series of images through the reappearance in each of a single element—the blackbird—in such a way that it didn’t create an evident narrative or discursive development of that element. All the parts of the poem hovered and related to one another until the last image, which, to make the point, collapsed time: “It was evening all afternoon. / It was snowing / and it was going to snow. / The blackbird sat / in the cedar limbs.” He had invented a form—the poem in parts in which the relation of the parts to each other, because there is no narrative or discursive development, is a little mysterious.
7. Some instances:
Louis Zukofsky: “The Old Poet Moves to a New Apartment Fourteen Times”
Lorine Niedecker: “Paean to Place”
James Wright: “Fear Is What Quickens Me”
Robert Bly: “Three Kinds of Pleasure”
Louise Gluck: “Dedication to Hunger” (though there is a kind of analytic development, an implied narrative about stasis)
Jorie Graham: “The Magic of Numbers”
Further reading: Peter Balakian, “Collage and Its Discontents” in Vise and Shadow, 2015
ABSTRACTION AND DISLOCATION
8. Abstraction: It must be that Gertrude Stein saw the way Picasso and Braque treated the canvas as a flat surface in their cubist work, the way that they had tossed perspective, and proposed to herself to do the same thing in writing. To say to herself, or discover by experiment, that syntax was the formal principle that organized language in the way that perspective organized painting—and—a very rapid second thought—that having a subject matter at all organized both painting and writing. And in that way she got to abstraction, the experiment of abstraction, well before anyone else.
9. So much of what we say about the experience of form in poems is based on or assumes the work done by syntax; syntax is the red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens. It does both the deep and the surface work of organizing words into expressive meanings. The perception of a pattern in a poem sets up one kind of expectation. This is going to be a sonnet, this is going to be in free verse with about four strong beats to a line, and so on. Syntax sets up another. If a poem begins with a dependent clause—
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,
or
Well, if the bard were weatherwise
Who made the grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence,
—you know that a main clause is coming and that it is apt to be coming in a rhythmic pattern proposed by those first lines. And there are ways in which content often creates another strand of expectation. In Michael Drayton’s sonnet that begins “Three kinds of serpent do resemble thee,” we not only expect those three snakes, we expect them to be enumerated in iambic pentameter and with a certain grammatical coherence.
10. Abstraction in poetry honors and subverts syntax. Teases it or removes it altogether. The implicit analogy is painting. If you remove represented objects from the painting, you get colors and shapes and the textures that the gestures that apply the paint make. It’s almost impossible to remove representation from language, because it is representation. The sound and script “apple” means “apple,” the concept we’ve acquired from experiences of the fruit and from the culture at large.
The color magenta has an expressive range, but that’s not the same thing, because words are located (1) in the phrases through which we learn language—children don’t learn “I,” “do,” “not,” “want,” and “to,” they learn “I don’t want to” and (2) in a particular language’s system of syntax. So abstraction in poetry happens by disrupting the work of syntax and/or disrupting the continuities between words and then between sentences that the mind supplies to writing and to spoken language. We supply the connection between the sentences when someone says, “I’m not going. It’s Tuesday.” Abstraction is interested in disarming that habit of the mind which is so much who we are and what we are by putting together a pair of sentences like “I’m not going. Some sentences begin with prepositional phrases.”
11. So experiments with abstraction in poetry have had to do with either disrupting conventional expectations about the syntactical relations among words in a sentence—
amber spike celibate the conduit room
Clark Coolidge writes in “Hot Dark Miles” (from Space, 1970)—or disrupting the conventional expectations around the relation of sentences to one another, as Lyn Hejinian does in The Book of a Thousand Eyes (2012)—
As innocent as rubble in the workshop of oblivion.
At its sunlit bench the stubborn singer holds her breath.
Every stone you lift you owe to destruction.
and in this case one line to another. The effect (at least the effect on me) depends on first automatically thinking that the “its” in the second line has “oblivion” as its antecedent and then, because there is no evident narrative connection between the sentences, deciding it doesn’t, though inside each of the three lines syntax is doing its usual, elegant formal work. Just not between them. A third variation is to create the same disjunctive relation between sentences but to enjamb the lines, creating a tighter weave, as Forrest Gander does in these lines from “Field Guide to Southern Virginia” in Science and Steepleflower (1998):
Swayback, through freshly cut stalks,
stalks the yellow cat. Can you smell
where analyses end, the orchard
oriole begins? Slap her breasts lightly
to see them quiver. Delighting in this.
It’s possible that the question that makes up the second sentence in these verses is addressed to the cat. Cats might very well stalk orioles. And it’s quite possible, once one is used to postmodern habits, that it isn’t. But there isn’t a narrative way to get from the cat to the oriole to the breast.
12. Interesting to me to notice the very different feel of these three uses of the technique. The Clark Coolidge line feels like anarchic play, someone in rubber boots splashing in the puddles of the English lexicon. Hejinian’s lines, also playful, have an intellectual brightness, as if she were interested in the cognitive puzzle of the sentence. Gander’s lines—maybe because the imagery has to do with nature and animals and the body—seem more psychological than cognitive, more like the disjunctions in the syntax of dream. One thinks of the difference between French surrealism, with its impulse to upend discourse, and Spanish surrealism, which wants to mine the unconscious.
13. A further note on syntax and its miraculous presence in our lives. Early morning in summer. My children and their children are visiting. I am up early, sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and reading the paper. My eldest grandson appears, in pajamas, still squinting from sleep, and climbs onto my lap. I read him the comics for a while and—he has just begun to string together whole sentences—he says “Grandpa, when my mom and dad get up, if they decide to go to the bakery, you can come, too.” There are great croissants and muffins in the little town nearby. Not only does he have dependent and main clauses, he has a conditional, that he is using to enlist me as an ally in his plan. The sentence, as it unwinds, winds its way to sugar. And isn’t that rhythmic conclusion perfect? “You can come, too.” Frost used it in one of his early poems:
I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I shan’t be gone long—You come too.
“You come too,” though, as I hear it is a bit more peremptory, or born of a more urgent prompting. “You can come too”—Dah-de-dah-dah—feels radiant with hope.
14. Readings for a quick history of abstraction:
Gertrude Stein: “Portrait of Mabel Dodge” (1912)
“Susie Asado” (1912)
“Preciosilla” (1912)
Tender Buttons (1913)
“Lifting Belly” (1914)
Stanzas in Meditation (1932)
Louis Zukofsky: Catullus (1958–1969)
80 Flowers (1974–1978)
John Ashbery: The Tennis Court Oath (1962)
Rivers and Mountains (1966)
Clark Coolidge: Space (1970)
Solution Passage, Poems 1978–81 (1986)
Lyn Hejinian: Writing Is an Aid to Memory (1978)
My Life (1980)
The Cold of Poetry (1994)
Happily (2000)
Michael Palmer, The Lion Bridge, Poems 1972–95 (1998)
15. John Ashbery’s sense of what Gertrude Stein accomplished: “Stanzas in Meditation is no doubt the most successful of her attempts to do what can’t be done, to create a counterfeit reality more real than reality. And if, on laying the book aside, we feel that it is still impossible to accomplish the impossible, we are also left with the conviction that it is the only thing worth trying to do.”
16. The other thing about abstraction is that it has to do with the texture of writing word by word, line by line, sentence by sentence. It tends not to be a proposal about the formal shape of the poem. A given piece of writing still has, unless one creates an alternative form through typography or vocal performance, a place where it begins, a length it continues, and a place it leaves off. “Susie Asado,” Stein’s early experiment, is a sonnet, roughly, about fourteen lines long, more or less a love poem, and it ends with the line it began with: an expressive and conventional shape. And in Stanzas in Meditation she often begins with beginnings. In Part V, “Stanza LI” begins: “Now this a long stanza / Even though weven so it has not well begin.” And “Stanza LII” begins, “There and been a beginning of begun. / They can be caused.” In Part 1, “Stanza V” begins, “Why can pansies be their aid or paths.” And ends some twenty shape-shifting lines later, “He likes it that there is no chance to misunderstand pansies.” The lyric motion: touching home at the place where you began.
One way with the issue of form is to find methods to resist the sense of an ending. Lyn Hejinian makes this argument in “The Rejection of Closure,” The Language of Inquiry, 2000. Another way has been to roll the dice.
OULIPO AND PROCEDURAL POETICS
17. A young poet at Berkeley brought a poem into a workshop that had been composed in the following way. He had asked a computer to produce a list of all the words in English that could be formed from the letters in the name “Ambrose Bierce” and then determined the length of his lines and the placement of the words next to one another in the lines by throwing dice, the results dependent on an arcane system that had to do with years between 1920 and 1950 when the New York Yankees did not win the World Series, with this exception: In each line the poet could choose one pair of words to put next to each other—like “sere” and “amber” because he liked the effect, so that a little fault line of expressive content ran through the otherwise impersonal display and arrangement of language. And nothing by way of title or note made reference to Ambrose Bierce and his mysterious disappearance or the pall cast over the city of New York on those fall days in the years of the Great Depression and the World War when the Yankees disappointed their fans. There was no invitation, by allusion, to read it as a sphinxlike elegy to the writer or as a melancholic tribute to the national pastime.
18. One of the sources of this aesthetic impulse was Oulipo, a group of French writers, mathematicians, professors, and practitioners of pataphysics—the send-up of metaphysics proposed by the Dadaist writer Alfred Jarry—who came together in the fall of 1960 to explore the possibility of what they called “a potential literature,” using a series of arbitrary constraints on literary composition for the purposes of discovery and invention. Among the founding members were Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, and the poet and mathematician Jacques Roubaud. A way into the movement, twenty years or so on from its origin, is Warren Motte, Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature.
19. Raymond Queneau: “What is the objective of our work? To propose new ‘structures’ to writers, mathematical in nature, and to invent new artificial or mechanical procedures that will contribute to literary activity, props for inspiration as it were, or rather, in a way, aids for creativity.” More Queneau: “Our research is: (1) Naïve: I use the word ‘naïve’ in its perimathematical sense, as one speaks of the naïve theory of sets. We forge ahead without undue refinement. We prove motion by walking. (2) Craftsmanlike—but this is not essential. We regret having no access to machines: this is a constant lament during our meetings. (3) Amusing: at least for us. Certain people find our work ‘sordidly boring’ which ought not to frighten you, because you are not here to amuse yourselves. I will insist, however, on the qualifier ‘amusing.’ Surely certain of our labors appear to be mere pleasantries, or simple witticisms, analogous to certain parlor games. Let us remember that topology and the theory of numbers sprang in art from what used to be called ‘mathematical entertainments.’”
20. The famous example of an Oulipian form is the s+7 method. Queneau: “It consists in taking a text and replacing each substantive with the seventh following it in a given dictionary . . . The results are not always interesting; sometimes on the other hand, they are striking. It seems that only good texts give good results. The reason for the qualitative relation between the original text and the terminal text are still rather mysterious and the question remains open.”
21. This tone, halfway between absurdist and earnest, is characteristic of Oulipian writing. Insofar as it is a send-up, it would seem it was a send-up of two things, related things: romantic expressiveness and the existentialist notion of freedom, or at least of the idea of self in the idea of a self-defining act.
22. Notice—from our point of view, interrogating form, that the s+7 method does not produce the constraints that determine the length of the line or the number of stanzas, if there are stanzas, nor the length of the poem. Those are given by the original text and its very likely conventionally defined set of constraints. Try the method on this line by Shakespeare:
When to the sessions of sweet, silent thought.
Some practitioners have treated adjectives and adverbs as “substantives” and some have not. Possible also to replace every verb. Here is the last line of Baudelaire’s “To the Reader” as written by Raymond Queneau, Richard Howard’s English translation of the poem, and the American Heritage Dictionary:
You, hypoglossal nerve, Reagan, my alignment, my brown bear!
Parody is also Oulipian, and Queneau distinguishes two kinds: autoparody and heteroparody.
23. American practitioners of procedural poetics mostly don’t have this tone at all. Two of the most original, and earliest, were John Cage and Jackson Mac Low.
John Cage, X: Writings ’79-’82:
From the beginning in the late 1930s I have been more interested in exemplification than in explanation, and so I have more and more written my texts in the same way I write my music, and make my prints, through the use of chance operations and by taking the asking of questions rather than the making of choices as my personal responsibility. Or you might say that I am devoted to freeing my writings from my intentions.
Jackson Mac Low on 154 Forties, the set of 154 poems (the number of Shakespeare’s sonnets, as his editor Anne Tardos points out) he wrote between 1990 and 2001:
Each of the Forties poems is written in the following “fuzzy verse-form”: Eight stanzas, each comprising three rather long verse lines followed by a very long (typically occupying more than one typographical line) and then a short line. What “rather long,” “very long,” and “short” means varies from poem to poem and stanza to stanza. The words, phrases, etc., in the poems’ first drafts were “gathered” from ones seen, heard, and thought of while I was writing the first drafts, which have been revised in many ways, lexical and prosodical.
Much of the rest of his note discusses how the poems were to be spoken, for they were intended to be performed. Mac Low began in the 1950s writing pieces based entirely on chance procedures. And then poems that his editor describes as “mixes of chance and choice,” and then in the 154’s poems of pure choice (once the stanza and line length constraints were established) in strings of language gathered by someone who formed his ear on the chance collisions that a taste for randomness and surprise had cultivated in him. The effect is ebullient, sometimes rhapsodic, an antiexpressive aesthetic brought round to a fullness of expression. Here is the last stanza of the last poem:
Two packages-like-Chrístmas presents Martin-Luther-King the Power-Structure
Panther a weekend-house the-Four-Seasons a hillock of stone in-the-same-breath
swatting-out-mosquitoes luck or habit the ending fire a rainbow the scenery
encased in the clouds with the birds in-the-middle-distance a coal-stove existence-that-escapes-years-after-we’re-gone just-a-little-bit-sentimental-in-German
beside a lake without a name
In his note to the poems, Mac Low notes that “there are two kinds of compounds” in the poems, “‘normal compounds’ and ‘slowed-down compounds,’” which are “indicated respectively by two kinds of hyphens, spaced and unspaced.” Hence the look of the poem. The hyphens indicate how slowly or quickly to read the compound words and phrases.
Like most constructivist work, I find the aesthetic pleasure here is like the pleasure of watching someone build something rather than the pleasure of having someone tell you something. Though one might well say they have something to tell the reader or listener about the sheer plentitude of both language and the world it names.
24. A few readings for Oulipo, chance operations, and the arbitrariness of constraints:
Warren Motte: Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature (University of Nebraska Press, 1986)
Raymond Queneau: “Potential Literature” in Motte
Jacques Roubaud: Poetry, etc, Cleaning House (Green Integer, 2006)
John Cage: Silence and Lectures (Wesleyan, 1961)
X: Writings ’79–’82
Jackson Mac Low: 154 Forties (Counterpath, 2012)
Representative Works, 1935–85 (Roof Books, 1986)