Migratory Meaning The Parsimony Principle in the Poem
Ron Silliman combines key concepts of cognitive linguistics—“frame,” “envisionment,” and “schema”—with the Russian Formalists’ account of the literary “device” in his reading of Joseph Ceravolo’s abstract lyric “Migratory Noon.” Silliman wants to know exactly how this poem, as a communicative act between speaker and hearer, poet and reader, makes meaning (or nonmeaning) by refusing to cohere in literal terms, even as it offers a meaning, for one reader, “beyond the experience of words.” He shows how the poem constructs a series of “frame shifts” between schemas and envisionments through its use of grammatical and poetic devices—the play of phrase and sentence in the poem’s lineation. What is necessary for interpretation is either a shared experience of these envisionments or a sense that their coherence does not depend on them: a second-order envisionment of coherence itself. Silliman draws on linguist Paul Kay’s concept of the “parsimony principle,” where the mind restricts interpretation to the smallest framework possible to make sense, proposing a cognitive mechanism that reduces rather than multiplies interpretation when faced with linguistic indeterminacy. His reading challenges the common theory that the reader can make any meaning she wants from abstract poetry, connecting the interpretation of poetry to theories of ideology where the demand for coherence is precisely the ideological effect that radical writing seeks to undo.
In the Spring/Summer 1981 issue of Parnassus, Peter Schjeldahl has this to say of Transmigration Solo, by Joseph Ceravolo:1
Ceravolo is a lyric poet of such oddness and purity that reading him all but makes me dizzy, like exercise at a very high altitude. I rarely know what he is talking about, but I can rarely gainsay a word he uses. Nor do I doubt that every word is in felt contact with actual experience beyond the experience of words. […]2
Schjeldahl’s vocabulary and tone are strategic, both with regard to the audience to which it is addressed, and to that ultimate editorial arbiter, space. I doubt that he intends to be read quite as literally as I am about to suggest. Nevertheless, his piece seems to advocate that not comprehending what a poet “is talking about” should not be an impediment to appreciation and response to the writing as such. And, further, that Schjeldahl’s reaction to at least this poet is founded on his trust that there exists “beyond the experience of words” a unified, unitary signification—he calls it “contact with actual experience”—which motivates the individual poem’s impression of coherence.
These two assertions reflect the current situation in much of American poetry. There persists the lack of an adequate shared vocabulary with which to think and speak of the poem as we find it. […] To the degree that someone as thoroughly qualified and predisposed to read a poem as Peter Schjeldahl is prepared to praise in public work in which he admits not knowing what the poet “is talking about.”
The absence of such a vocabulary obscures precisely what is at risk in those writings which I find most compelling. This issue is the nature of meaning itself, and its status in the poem. Specifically, this issue is a question as to the place of meaning and its alleged capacity to unify a work of writing, to create and endow coherence, whether or not this be conceived of as “beyond the experience of words” or within them.
I want to proceed by offering a partial reading of a specific text, focusing on: (1) what it is about a poem that would cause such a reader to not know what the poet “is talking about,” and (2) what it is about a poem that would cause such a reader to not “doubt that every word is in felt contact with experience beyond the experience of words.” […]
The text, as given by Schjeldahl in his review of Ceravolo, is:
MIGRATORY MOON
Cold and the cranes.
Cranes in the
wind
like cellophane tape
on a school book.
The wind bangs
the car, but I sing out loud,
help, help
as sky gets white
and whiter and whiter and whiter.
Where are you
in the reincarnate
blossoms of the cold?3
“Migratory Moon” can be said to consist of five parts, a title and four sentences, no two of which coinhabit the same line. By focusing on the sentence, the poem can be described as a series of devices, both simple and complex. Device is used here in the Russian Formalists’ sense: any part of the writing which perceptibly alters, and thereby shapes, an individual reader’s experience of the text.4
The title is not a sentence, but simply an alliterative noun phrase, neither term of which occurs in the body of the text. “Migratory Moon” could be either the subject or predicate of a sentence which does not appear, but can be said to have been evoked. The phrase performs the work of both grammatical functions, doubling the sense of density or opacity to a reader.
It’s important to discern whether the title functions as such or, following a distinction first made by Walter Benjamin,5 is really more of a caption. A title proper points or refers to the body of the text as a whole, whereas the caption penetrates it, highlighting certain elements within. This often occurs in poems where the title anticipates or repeats in advance key terms or phrases.
A more complex use of the title-as-caption is to be found in this work from Robert Grenier’s Oakland:
THREE
legged dog6
The title “Three” integrates grammatically with a potentially incomplete noun phrase, “legged dog,” to form a full image, specifically one of imbalance. “Three” also foretells the number of syllables in the one-line text, again an instance of imbalance as the ear hears the stress given to the final syllable in “legged.” This title penetrates the text not simply to foreground one element, but to combine with it for the total organization of the poem. Implicit within such a strategy is an assertion that “meaning” does not conveniently stop at the borders of the text.
Contrasted with this would be those titles which at least appear to have no inner role within the corpus of the text. Examples include Barrett Watten’s “Mode Z,” my own Tjanting, and Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” These headings can only be read as though relating to the body of the work as a whole, so that the reader experiences them as orienting and contextualizing, if not actually naming, the “subject” of the ensuing text.
“Migratory Moon” would at first seem to be such a title. There are no explicit references to the moon within the text, and the reader has only her own authority on which to rely if the moon is to be identified with the “you” of the final sentence. Nonetheless, at this stage of our reading we may respond to the first of the two questions negatively, stating that we do know what Ceravolo “is talking about”: the moon. This represents a leap of faith from what it is about a poem that causes a reader to experience a cohering unity. For “Migratory Moon,” as we shall see, is partially, if not entirely, a case of the title-as-caption.
Like the title, the first sentence is grammatically incomplete, being a noun phrase, “Cold and the cranes.” If we follow speech act theoretician John Searle in stating that the characteristic of a subject is its capacity to intend, or refer to, a unique object, and that the characteristic of a predicate is the ability to “describe or characterize the object which has been identified,”7 we still lack any mechanism by which to ascertain which, if either, function “Cold and the cranes” should be understood as fulfilling. This coordinative nexus could be read as a concise formulation of a specific object or state, yet its proximity to “Migratory Moon” permits a reading as an attribute of that, understood as a subject.
The sentence which is incomplete because of the lack of a “main” verb, be it one of action or some necessitated conjugation of to be, has long been a part of American literature. One tradition which is close to the use Ceravolo makes of it here descends principally from Imagism, particularly the work of Ezra Pound, whose “In a Station of the Metro” has no main verb. […]
In “Cold and the cranes,” the verb omission serves to ambiguously situate what little information is divulged. The important terms are nouns, one of which is plural (a disagreement in number that may suggest that more than one verb is absent). Both nouns have more than one feasible denotation, and nothing in the text clarifies whether these cranes are mechanical arms that lift and carry, or birds. This indetermination is a crucial element in a reader’s not knowing what Ceravolo “is talking about,” yet, at another level, it makes no difference: what does is that (with the exception of a model, such as a child’s toy) neither is apt to inhabit the indoors. This outdoorsness is an example of what some linguists call a frame or schema, and “represent(s) the knowledge structures with which our experiences with the world are held together,”8 what we know and can associate with cranes or with the cold, head colds, and the like. The structure of such frames is not identical with what we have traditionally learned as linguistic paradigms, to the degree that such structures are dependent on (determined by) a domain that is not wholly linguistic—experience—and, as Raymond Williams argues,
experience is … the most common form of ideology. It is where the deep structures of the society actually reproduce themselves as conscious life.9
Outdoorsness is also a schema in which the term “Cold” can participate, and this association, if it is made and not later rejected, significantly narrows each noun’s range of connotation. “Moon” likewise fits this frame, so that without having arrived at a single verb, and before reaching even the second line, a sensitive reader is well on the way toward the construction of what linguists Charles Fillmore and Paul Kay call an Envisionment,
some coherent “image” or understanding of the states of affairs that exist in the set of possible worlds compatible with the language of the text.10
Harboring a metaphor of sight that needs detailed examination, Envisionment is a less than ideal formulation of such a critical concept. Yet it does approximate that state of coherence which is the basis for our second question: what is it about a poem that would cause a reader to not doubt that every word is in felt contact with actual experience beyond the experience of words. For our text such unity might be nothing more than an Envisionment, and at this moment in “Migratory Moon” there is no cause to refine it beyond outdoorsness, an Envisionment resulting less from “felt contact” than from a series of devices operating in the work. This is not to denigrate the text, but to suggest that “beyondness” is not without its explanations, and that coherence itself might be just an effect.
A further distinction needs to be drawn out of the concept of Envisionment, that between active and reactive construction. This distinction presumes a bias in our consumption of language signifying states that might be observed directly by our senses, particularly through sight. Terming one mode of Envisionment representation and the other thought, Manfred Sandmann says,
Representation is essentially an automatic process, that is to say, given our sensorial apparatus and those parts of the brain responsible for its control, we cannot under certain conditions avoid representation. Thought, on the other hand, is essentially creative and constructive; it consists of purposeful acts in contrast to a mere train of associations. […] There is no concept without conception, that is without a position being taken up by the thinker and adapted to his [sic] purpose.11
The form of this essay can demonstrate the difference. To the degree that you fail or refuse to grant me the presumptions which underlie each of the words I introduce, to that degree you withhold their frame. Yet these schemata are essential if any linkage beyond syntax is to take place. Withhold some presumptions because they seem unwarranted and what will emerge are my mistakes. Withhold enough and this piece will be gibberish. Such resistance—critical, active frame construction—is far more difficult when the language being processed is on the order of “The arctic sun passed over the horizon causing darkness.” Substitute a few terms which do not participate in the same visual frame-structure, however, and even this must be read actively, the presence of a composing intelligence, an Other, readily felt. For example, “The arctic honey blabbed over the report causing darkness,” the first line of Ashbery’s “Leaving the Atocha Station.”12
To the extent that this distinction parallels Searle’s differentiation of subject and predicate, and because of the place of the verb within the function of the predicate, it can be seen that a strategic function of sentences which omit verbs, such as “Cold and the cranes,” is to enhance the reactive (integrative) rather than the active (resistant) mode of Envisionment. This is the essence of “Show, don’t tell.”
This absence in the title and first two sentences of “Migratory Moon” sets up the verb “bangs” and the word “I” in the third to be experienced as major semantic shifts. Unlike the verbless sentence, the semantic shift is not a device, but an effect, the result of one or more devices. […] A semantic shift can take place either within a reader’s perception of the language and/or at any level of integration above that of the linguistic, that is, at the level of Envisionment. Thus Viktor Shklovsky’s classic example of the phenomenon is a story by Tolstoy in which the narrator is a horse.13 Regardless of the level, what is shifted is the element’s relation to the reader’s expectation, something constructed out of that “most common form of ideology,” experience. A theory of Envisionment thereby offers above the level of the sentence what more traditional forms of linguistic analysis offer at or below this horizon: identification and description by function of those devices which create meaning. At all levels meaning is built on expectation, and that on experience, be it as large as “life in general” or as localized as the title and first line of “Migratory Moon.”
By displacing expectation, the semantic shift renders the element “strange” and therefore perceptible. Shklovsky’s own account of this is:
In our studies of the lexical and phonetic composition of poetic speech, of word order, and of the semantic structures of poetic speech, we everywhere came upon the same index of the artistic: that it is purposely created to deautomatize the perception, that the goal of its creation is that it be seen, that the artistic is artificially created so that perception is arrested in it and attains the greatest possible force and duration, so that the thing is perceived, not spatially, but, so to speak, in its continuity. These conditions are met by “poetic language….” Thus we arrive at the definition of poetry as speech that is braked, distorted. Poetic speech is a speech construction.14
Shklovsky’s emphasis on the dimension of time, contrasted with the spatial, reflects the importance of expectation in the creation of meaning in writing, whether such meaning unifies the text “beyond the experience of words” or does just the opposite. The effect of a semantic shift is therefore both experiential and temporal, lying at the crux of the problem of the status and nature of meaning as such.
The semantic shifts which exist in the title, “Migratory Moon,” are modest and result from devices well known to students of poetry. Alliteration, for example, foregrounds the sound structure of the noun phrase, directing attention away from its orientational or nominative function. More problematic is the adjective “Migratory,” a term for which plausible frames do exist which could integrate with those of “Moon.” To what degree can a reader believe that these are the ones intended, let alone sort amongst such variants as the moon’s daily cycle, its drift north and south in the sky, its phases, the effect on tides, the mythos of wanderlust, lunacy, etc.? Charles Fillmore identifies what he terms levels of confidence in the Envisionment, confidence the reader can have as to the extent her interpretation is that, and only that, intended by the author, so as to have, and put store in, her expectations. Fillmore delineates four levels:
(1) That which is “explicitly justified by the linguistic material of the text”;
(2) that which comes “into being by inferences which the text is seen as clearly inviting”;
(3) “interpretations which result from schematizations brought to the text to situate its events in common experience”; and
(4) “ways in which the world of the text has been shaped by the idiosyncratic experiences and imaginings of individual readers.”15
The degree to which Envisionments in poetry depend on these different levels of confidence, which are in fact levels of importation of detail and nuance, that is, of integrating frame-structure or schemata, from extraneous, extraliterary, experiential sources, has not yet begun to be investigated.
An anecdote here may convey some sense of their power and function. In my seminar at San Francisco State, we were discussing a work by Rae Armantrout, “Grace,” a short poem in three sections, each of which, for the purposes of this discussion, can be said to embody the title concept. Here is the first:
a spring there
where his entry must be made
signals him on16
Three differing Envisionments were offered to account for this passage, a process close to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s proposition that “meaning is what an explanation of meaning explains.”17 In the first, a diver was about to enter a swimming pool, the spring found in the resilience of the diving board. In the second, an actor was about to go onstage, and the spring in his first step was vital in creating the spirit, the literal, physical rhythm of the role. In the third, a person was attempting to enter a forest or climb a mountain, but was blocked, unable to make progress until a spring opened up a path. All three present narrative scenarios, schematizations imported into the reading so as to contextualize its terms, particularly “spring” and “entry” (the subjects, respectively, of the host and embedded sentences). Note that the third Envisionment, which seems fanciful, defines “spring” as a flow of liquid, rather than as a bouncy quality. This parallels Armantrout’s own authorial Envisionment, which was that of vaginal lubrication. That her Envisionment should be no more “explicitly justified” by the text is not surprising. […]
What renders the phrase “Migratory Moon” problematic [and] accounts for the varying Envisionments in “Grace” […] is the Parsimony Principle. Like Envisionment, frame, and schema, this is a concept appropriated from the work of linguists concerned with elaborating a theory of ideal readers, one of whom is posited to exist for each given text,
someone who knows, at each point in a text, everything that the text presupposes at that point, and who does not know, but is prepared to receive and understand, what the text introduces at the point.18
The Parsimony Principle converts the latency of the text and the ideological dimensions of presupposition into the actual Envisionment, combining frames always to a maximum of unification with a minimum of effort. It can be defined thusly:
Whenever it is possible to integrate two separate schema into a single larger frame-structure by imagining them as sharing a common participant, the reader will do.19
The Parsimony Principle is what enables some readers to discover narratives in poem after poem of Bruce Andrews. It is the process through which, to adopt the terminology of Alan Davies and Nick Piombino, we “connect the dots.”20 It governs the trope of anaphor so essential to any reading, described in “The New Sentence”21 under the figure of the syllogism, and which Charles Bernstein has termed “projection.”22 […]
With the Parsimony Principle in place and some differentiation as to levels of experiential importation (or “confidence”), we can return to the problem of “Migratory” and proceed through the remainder of the text. There is no device which explicitly determines the appropriate frame for “Migratory.” Insofar as whooping cranes do migrate, the title proposes, momentarily, that Envisionment. However, industrial cranes are a part of urban lifestyle, a schema that can incorporate “cars” and “cellophane tape / on a school book” as Grus americana cannot. The Envisionment is both set up and countered, each step in this process displacing expectation, a shift, literally, at the level of semantics. Not only does “Migratory” resist any final fixity, but when it comes to “cranes,” the reader has no means of knowing what the poet “is talking about.” […]
A major device of “Migratory Moon” is to be found in all the terms which conjoin, “and” in the first sentence, “like” in the second, “but” and the multiple occurrences of “and” in the third. Just as conjunctions bring lexical items together, so do prepositions. In nine of the thirteen lines of this text one or the other is used to express the relationship between terms. These categories ascribe such relations even in the absence of verbs, enhancing a reactive Envisionment.
“Like cellophane tape / on a school book” may be the first semantic shift so pronounced as to be noticed as such by the reader. The term of comparison, “like,” is the most active of coordinate words, marking as does no other conjunction the presence of a point-of-view being asserted. In this sense, it carries that shadow of a speaker within it that is found also in any verb. To the degree that it enables the reader to better resist the granting of the frames introduced, it impedes the Envisionment. In “Migratory Moon,” the impediment is intended: the schema to which the reader is being led will not integrate into any frame that could have been constructed from the information thus far received. The purpose of “like” is to render the very constructedness of this dissonant moment perceptible.
This event is not instantaneous, but occurs instead in time, in the continual re vision of expectation. At “cellophane tape,” the reader must recognize the shift demanded of her Envisionment, yet the prepositional phrase “on a school book” transforms the instant, yielding a new and competing Envisionment of much greater specificity than that of the first three lines plus title.
This new Envisionment’s function lies in its frame structure, the reader’s experience of “cellophane tape / on a school book.” The meaningful aspect of this schema, the engine of its humor—and it is funny—is to be discerned in its “triviality.” The social sources of this are several. First, such tape on a book is apt to be nearly invisible, an opposition to its sharpness as a verbal construction. Second is a social convention which holds that what is important about a book is not its binding, and even less so a patchwork repair. Third is the social place of a text specifically intended for use in school and the individual reader’s response and associations to such an object. This element of the schema will vary with each person, thus contributing to the density and “authenticity” of the Envisionment. For example, it could be read as signifying books which are large, physically heavy, poorly written, and costly, therefore better purchased in a “used” condition. Fourth is a much more controversial social convention holding that students themselves are an unproductive, thus trivial, segment of society. […] It is in precisely this way that ideological conflicts are inbuilt into even the most apolitical of images “like cellophane tape / on a school book.”
By the time the reader reaches “The wind bangs,” she should be so oriented to the undulating, convoluting sequence of semantic shifts as to viscerally feel the poem’s first verb. “The wind” returns us to an earlier stage of the work, skipping back over the new Envisionment to recall the suspended previous frame of outdoorsness. The repetition of the noun implies that each sentence is so separate as to make any backwards-pointing anaphoric use of pronouns pointless. Foregrounding the sentence-as-unit renders the language more braked and distorted, while setting up the coming use of reiteration in the last line to be perceptible as the moment of completion.
As a device, “the car” adds to (and revises) the earlier Envisionment. It follows the frame of outdoorsness, but does so within a context of human use, with no relation to whooping birds, yet capable in itself of a migration.
A transformative moment in the poem, this line is different from those which came before, continuing beyond a comma and through a conjunction. “But” is also a kind of negation, and of what could have been a complete sentence in itself. A narrator is introduced, as is a new schema, that of singing out loud. The acknowledgment of the speaking subject, “I,” comes in the precise middle of the middle line of the poem, equidistant from either use of the term “cold.” Structurally elegant though it is, a more important device occurs in “but,” which serves to throw (right at the instant of the manifestation of humanity, or at least subjectivity) the entire relation of cause-and-effect in this text-world into a state of strangeness. At this point the reader may begin to suspect that she will never know what the poet here “is talking about.”
And “help, help” doesn’t, contrasting a cry for assistance with the frame of singing. Whether this formal inappropriateness is a part of the device or not is problematic, insofar as the punctuation surrounding this embedded cry also ascribes quietness, an equally unsuitable (or semantically shifted) quality. Nor, without knowing the date of composition, is it possible to know whether an allusion to the Beatles may be intended, with its potential for impacting on the total Envisionment of the work.
The following line returns us to the outdoors. “Sky” is a frame which can include the moon, an object perceived as white. It is here, and only within this and the next line, that the narrower, more “concrete” schema moon seems fully warranted. In this penetration of the text we see the title functioning as a caption. It links up with these lines to develop a frame suggesting that what is addressed and identified as “you” might be the moon. Again, however, there are as many reasons to conclude that this is not the case. The schematization moon is weak in comparison to the more consistent outdoorsness. The radical separateness of previous sentences and the shift in form of address here undermine any confidence in the continuity of focus. Finally, the question posed is senseless if asked of the moon while the “sky gets white / and whiter and whiter and whiter,” unless the reader superimposes some imported schema such as snow. Like “cellophane tape / on a school book,” the intervention of the title in the text at this point sets up a competing Envisionment not to be resolved by the work as a whole.
That the “you” has no identifiable signified, that “you” is, literally, absent, is the thrust of the question: where, under such circumstances, are you? Beyond the moon, one possible response might be that “you” is an Other, specifically a lover. While this interpretation situates the poem well within a subgenre of the “lover’s lament,” note that it requires an importation of meaning that rests entirely on a knowledge of literary conventions extraneous to the text.
If the poem is read as turning on, or even completing itself within, the word “you,” the remaining lines serve only to provide closure. Yet the enjambed phrase “reincarnate / blossoms” goes well beyond such a modest function. Like the bird “cranes” and, in another sense, “the car,” “reincarnate” is a term that fits a “Migratory” schema. It also contains the word “car,” the long a of “cranes,” and even an allophonic scramble of the word “crane.” The noun “blossoms” adds one last complicating supplement to the frame of outdoorsness, stressing a pastoral Envisionment which recalls that of the poem’s first three lines. Even if “reincarnate” were linked directly to “Migratory” (violating the integrity of these adjectives’ nouns), no narrower frame than the seasons would result. Rather, “reincarnate” functions more as a tease, and “blossoms” as a final component to a complex, unstable whole not equal to any single Envisionment.
What, then, is there about this text such that a reader like Schjeldahl might not know what the writer “is talking about”?
(1) An unstable—or, better, destabilized—total Envisionment;
(2) key terms which resist final definition or specificity, such as “cranes” and “you”;
(3) evidence that the title does not “name” the poem as a whole, but functions instead as a caption;
(4) a seeming rejection of anaphoric connection between sentences.
Given this, what is there about this text that a reader might not “doubt that every word is in felt contact with actual experience beyond the experience of words”? The outdoors schema combined with the perceptible determination of every device. Even those elements, such as “cellophane tape,” which resist totalization into the dominant frame-structure, bear by their very opposition a relation to it, “felt contact,” so that the whole can be said to determine every device, specifically with the function here of insinuating unity and closure.
Yet the degree to which this coherence is a direct consequence of the Parsimony Principle acting within the mind of the reader and not the simple determinism of the text can be gauged by the fact that “Migratory Moon” is not the title of Ceravolo’s poem, but the result of a typographical error. The word in Transmigration Solo is “Noon.” A single letter transforms the work. The implications of events such as the cold or the whitening of the sky are changed radically, while “Migratory” itself takes on a new spectrum of possible connotations, that of time passing and of the difference in hour from zone to zone. Yet, like the competing Envisionments of the first section of Armantrout’s “Grace,” there is a limit. Of the four answers given to the first of our questions with regard to the text in Parnassus, only one need be altered: “Migratory Noon” is not a caption. The two versions arrive at very dissimilar unifications, but each argues a totalization easily felt by a reader.
What can be drawn from this as a contribution toward an eventual shared vocabulary for poets and readers of the contemporary poem? First, that essential to such a lexicon would be a theory of the device. Such devices can best be determined and described by function, by the shifts which they create in the semantics of the poem, so as, in turn, to demonstrate the contribution of each part to the construction of the whole, whether that be the single Envisionment of a vulgarly “realist” text or something more problematic and complex. Without a theory of the device, there can be no rhetoric or listing of those actually in use.
Central to such a theory would be a description of what occurs, both on the page and within the reader, within the infinitesimal space of a semantic shift in relation to the Parsimony Principle, restated here for its broadest application:
Whenever it is possible to integrate two separate elements into a single larger element by imagining them as sharing a common participant, the mind will do so.
One area of further articulation of the Parsimony Principle would be to establish at a finer level of discrimination the degrees of experiential importation which are required at any moment in a text, and to develop the relationship between this process of applying social frames to linguistic material and the still embryonic theory of ideology.23 […] The ideological component within a given work of written art needs to be discussed within three separate frames: the instrumental one of “content”; the more dynamic frames of form, genre, and écriture; and that of the social construction of experiential schema. […]
One distinction which needs to be made before a roster of existing devices can be elaborated is the degree that a procedure can be said to be the same or different when it occurs at different levels of integration, particularly above and below the linguistic level of the sentence. For example, the device by which “cellophane tape / on a school book” resists linkage with the dominant outdoors schema is its lack of an experiential participant shared by the other frame. This device functions much like Tolstoy’s narrating horse which is consistent throughout that story, but for which readers do not “in real life” possess an experiential frame. […]
Even if we were to grant all three above examples the status of a single device, we could in turn distinguish it from a procedure equally based on resistance to integration, but not because of some failure to share experiential frames. This is a distinction which Noam Chomsky attempts to make when he contrasts “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” a string he describes as “grammatical,” but “thoroughly meaningless and nonsignificant,” with the same words in reverse order, “furiously sleep ideas green colorless.” According to Chomsky, “a speaker of English,” confronted with the first string,
will normally read it with the standard intonation pattern of an English sentence. But given some permutation of the words … from back to front … he will read it with the intonation pattern characteristic of a list of unrelated words, each with a falling intonation.24
Chomsky’s example of reversed syntax has some close cousins in recent poetry. Bob Perelman’s “Alone” in “Cupid and Psyche” reverses “Pleasure” from the same sequence.25 Charles Bernstein’s “So really not visit a remember to strange …” is partly a reversal of “As If the Trees by Their Very Roots Had Hold of Us.”26 The resistance to normal syntactic integration occurs because syntax, like time, is essentially unidirectional. Chomsky’s explanation is that
the only thing we can say directly is that the speaker has an “intuitive sense of grammaticalness.” (95)
But is this “intuitive sense” not also an experiential frame?
Is the device of reversed syntax the same as the juxtaposition of larger non-integrating syntactic units, such as occurs in Lyn Hejinian’s Writing Is an Aid to Memory?27 Is it the same or different if the point of non-integration takes place at a linebreak as when it happens in the middle of a traditionally punctuated paragraph, as in Kit Robinson’s “Fast Howard”?28 In fact, isn’t non-integration and the shifting of semantics at the level of grammar precisely what punctuation attempts to articulate, perhaps even to obliterate, through convention? Can we say that this device of the reversed text is the same when, as with Perelman, the mirrored poems are separated by only one page within the same sequence, yet in Bernstein’s case do not even appear within the same book?
The answer to these questions concerning the status of the device is to be found in how we conceive of the part:whole relations of the poem. As I noted above, each part or device is determined according to its relationship to the whole. This might be called the first axiom of the poetic device, to which we must now add a second, this based on the implications of the very privilege given to expectation, to the process of experiencing, in the generation of semantic shifts at all levels. There is no such thing as a whole. This is because time divides the poem: it can never, even on completion, be experienced “at once.” The reader is always at some point with regard to the reading. Conversely, point-of-view or position is always a part of the semantics, whether or not it shifts. It is a recognition in the change of point-of-view that is most often felt by the reader as the perceptibility of any device.
In collapsing the poem to the privilege of the static text, New Critics and other advocates of an incomplete formalism lose sight not merely of the contributing participation of any reader’s experience, but also the dimension of an everpresent and never stable temporality. It is only in the light of a triangulation of these three dimensions—text, time, reader’s experience—that we can begin to ask, let alone answer, the question: is coherence only an effect?
By coherence I do not simply intend to indicate referentiality, as poets have come to use that word. Lyn Hejinian’s My Life is as powerful an argument for coherence as can be imagined, yet the text resolutely problematizes narrative constructions.29 The deliberate artificiality of its repeated phrases, true captions, is a necessary component in the book’s vision of self-valuable constructedness. So that even if few of the sentences “follow” one another, a total Envisionment of a unified presence is carried forward to the nth degree. […]
If, as “A Sentimental Journey” demonstrates, coherence is just an effect, the first task in elaborating a new rhetoric of poetic devices currently in use would be to identify those which motivate the semantic shift of closure. The tyrannical privilege of totality and those devices which can be utilized to counter this “unity effect” need also to be explained. […] I have suggested, through a crude synthesis of Russian Formalism, recent linguistics, and the Althusserian theory of ideology, that the reading of any simple poem must involve the domains of all these disciplines. The Parsimony Principle is the point at which they connect.30
NOTES
1 Joseph Ceravolo, Transmigration Solo (West Branch, Iowa.: Toothpaste Press, 1980), in Collected Poems, ed. Rosemary Ceravolo and Parker Smathers (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2013), 2–24.
2 Peter Schjeldahl, “Cabin Fever,” Parnassus (Spring/Summer 1981), 297 (emphasis mine).
3 Ibid.; original in Collected Poems, 17.
4 Viktor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), 190–91.
5 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 276.
6 Robert Grenier, Oakland (Berkeley: Tuumba Press, 1980).
7 John Searle, Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 119.
8 Charles J. Fillmore, “Ideal Readers and Real Readers” (unpublished paper), 16.
9 Raymond Williams, “Marxism, Structuralism and Literary Analysis,” New Left Review, 1st ser., no. 129 (September–October 1981): 63. This is a restatement of the Althusserian view.
10 Fillmore, “Ideal Readers,” 13. Cf. also Paul Kay’s “Three Properties of the Ideal Reader” (unpublished).
11 Manfred Sandmann, Subject and Predicate (Heidelberg: Winter, 1979), 70.
12 John Ashbery, The Tennis Court Oath (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan, 1962), 33.
13 Viktor Shklovsky, The Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Elmwood Park, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 1990).
14 In Theory of Prose, but cited in this translation in The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics, by Pavel Medvedev and Mikhail Bakhtin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 89.
15 Fillmore, “Ideal Readers,” 13 (emphasis mine).
16 Rae Armantrout, Extremities (Berkeley: The Figures, 1978), 13.
17 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, trans. Anthony Kenny (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 69.
18 Fillmore, “Ideal Readers,” 7.
19 This follows the definition given in Kay, “Three Properties.”
20 Alan Davies and Nick Piombino, “The Indeterminate Interval: From History to Blur,” L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E 4 (1981): 31–39.
21 Ron Silliman, “The New Sentence,” in The New Sentence (New York: Roof, 1987), 63–93.
22 Charles Bernstein, “Writing and Method,” in The Difficulties 2 (1982), reprinted in Guide, 46–54.
23 Cf. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy (New York: Monthly Review, 1971); and Goran Therborn, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology (London: Verso, 1980).
24 Noam Chomsky, The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (New York: Plenum, 1975), 94–95.
25 Bob Perelman, 7 Works (Berkeley: The Figures, 1978), 87, 89.
26 Charles Bernstein, in Controlling Interests (New York: Roof, 1980), 37–38; and Senses of Responsibility (Berkeley: Tuumba, 1979), respectively.
27 Lyn Hejinian, Writing Is an Aid to Memory (Berkeley: The Figures, 1978).
28 Kit Robinson, Down and Back, (Berkeley: The Figures, 1978), 11.
29 Lyn Hejinian, My Life (Providence, R.I.: Burning Deck, 1980).
30 This project has had a lot of help. The students in my seminar at San Francisco State first posed the basic issues. George Lakoff introduced me to the work of Fillmore and Kay. Aaron Shurin, David Levi Strauss, and Kimball Higgs gave me opportunities to try out drafts on audiences. Jean Day first caught the typo in Parnassus. Barrett Watten closely read one version, offering hundreds of ideas.
PUBLICATION: Excerpted from Close Reading (1982), 2:27–41.
KEYWORDS: linguistics; New York school; critical theory; readings.
LINKS: Ron Silliman, “Composition as Action” (PJ 3), “The Dysfunction of Criticism: Poets and the Critical Tradition of the Anti-Academy” (PJ 10), “‘Postmodernism’: Sign for a Struggle, Struggle for the Sign” (PJ 7), with Leslie Scalapino, “What/Person: From an Exchange” (Guide; PJ 9); Fanny Howe, “Silliman’s Paradise” (PJ 6); Jed Rasula, “What Does This Do with You Reading?” (PJ 1); Rae Armantrout, “Silence” (PJ 3); Andrew Benjamin, “The Body of Writing: Notes on the Poetry of Glenda George” (PJ 4); George Hartley, “Jameson’s Perelman: Reification and the Material Signifier” (Guide; PJ 7); Lyn Hejinian, “Hard Hearts” (PJ 2); Ted Pearson, “The Force of Even Intervals: Toward a Reading of Vernal Aspects” (PJ 2); Andrew Ross, “The Death of Lady Day” (Guide; PJ 8); Reva Wolf, “Thinking You Know” (Guide; PJ 10); Barrett Watten, “The Politics of Style” (Guide; PJ 1).
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY: The New Sentence (New York: Roof, 1987); In the American Tree (ed.; Orono, Me.: National Poetry Foundation, 1986); Crow (Ithaca, N.Y.: Ithaca House, 1971); Mohawk (Bowling Green, Ohio: Doones, 1973); Nox (Providence, R.I.: Burning Deck, 1974); Ketjak (San Francisco: This, 1978); Tjanting (Berkeley: The Figures, 1981); BART (Hartford, Conn.: Potes & Poets, 1982); The Age of Huts (New York: Roof, 1986); Under Albany (Cambridge: Salt, 2004); The Age of Huts (Compleat) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); The Alphabet (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008); Revelator (Toronto: Book Thug, 2013); with Bruce Andrews et al., Legend (New York: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E/Segue, 1980); with Rae Armantrout et al., The Grand Piano; with Michael Davidson et al., Leningrad.