Contents

How to Use This Guide ix

Introduction 1

Part I: Numbers 1–4

Steve Benson, Close Reading: Leavings and Cleavings 37

Charles Bernstein, Writing and Method 46

Beverly Dahlen, Forbidden Knowledge 55

Alan Davies, Language/Mind/Writing 72

Robert Glück, His Heart Is a Lute Held Up: Poe and Bataille 79

Lyn Hejinian, The Rejection of Closure 87

Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson: Part One 98

George Lakoff, Continuous Reframing 111

Jackson Mac Low, Some Ways Philosophy Has Helped to Shape My Work 119

Viktor Shklovsky, Plotless Literature: Vasily Rozanov 126

Ron Silliman, Migratory Meaning: The Parsimony Principle in the Poem 141

Barrett Watten, The Politics of Style 158

CONSTELLATION I: PRACTICES OF POETICS 169

Part II: Numbers 5–7

Kathy Acker, Ugly 177

Bruce Andrews, Total Equals What: Poetics and Praxis 185

Rae Armantrout, Mainstream Marginality 197

Michael Davidson, “Hey, Man, My Wave!”: The Authority of Private Language 202

Johanna Drucker, Hypergraphy: A Note on Maurice Lemaître’s Roman Hypergraphique 215

Carla Harryman, Toy Boats 225

George Hartley, Jameson’s Perelman: Reification and the Material Signifier 229

Bob Perelman, Good and Bad/Good and Evil: Pound, Céline, and Fascism 240

Poets Theater: Two Versions of Collateral

Kit Robinson: Raising Collateral 257

Nick Robinson: Subtext in Collateral 260

Leslie Scalapino, Pattern—and the ‘Simulacral’ 270

Peter Seaton, An Example from the Literature 282

Warren Sonbert, Narrative Concerns 289

CONSTELLATION II: NEW METHODS AND TEXTS 294

Part III: Numbers 8–10

Pierre Alferi, Seeking a Sentence 303

Dodie Bellamy, Can’t We Just Call It Sex?: In Memory of David Wojnarowicz 313

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, I(s) 320

Jerry Estrin, Cold Heaven: The Uses of Monumentality 326

Harryette Mullen, Miscegenated Texts and Media Cyborgs: Technologies of Body and Soul 335

Ted Pearson, “A Form of Assumptions” 345

Kit Robinson, Time and Materials: The Workplace, Dreams, and Writing 353

Andrew Ross, The Death of Lady Day 367

Leslie Scalapino and Ron Silliman, What/Person: From an Exchange 378

Lorenzo Thomas, The Marks Are Waiting 393

Reva Wolf, Thinking You Know 397

John Zorn, Memory and Immorality in Musical Composition 414

CONSTELLATION III: THE EXPANDED FIELD 420

Acknowledgments and Permissions 427

Indexes

Contributor Index 431

Keyword Index 439

General Index 445