Constellations I Practices of Poetics

Boone, Bruce. “Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations.” One of the principal early proponents of New Narrative, Boone offers a confrontational yet celebratory review of Kathy Acker’s “shameless” novel. Acker’s transgressive emotional content “NAMES NAMES” and results in a direct personal connection that reinserts subjectivity into postmodern writing.

PUBLICATION: Women and Language (1983), 4:77–82.

KEYWORDS: New Narrative; postmodernism; sexuality; readings.

LINKS: Boone, “A Narrative Like a Punk Picture: Shocking Pinks, Lavenders, Magentas, Sickly Greens” (PJ 5); Kathy Acker, “Ugly” (Guide; PJ 7); Michael Amnasan, from Joe Liar (PJ 10); Dodie Bellamy, “Can’t We Just Call It Sex?: In Memory of David Wojnarowicz” (Guide; PJ 10); Steve Benson, “Personal as Social History: Three Fictions” (PJ 7); Robert Glück, “His Heart Is a Lute Held Up: Poe and Bataille” (Guide; PJ 2); William McPheron, “Remaking Narrative” (PJ 5); Laura Moriarty, “Sex and Language” (PJ 8); Larry Price, “Harryman’s Balzac” (PJ 4). Bromige, David. “Philosophy and Poetry: A Note.”

Bromige compares the abstraction and redundancy of philosophical language against poetry as “philosophy sensuously apprehended” and enmeshed in the multiplicity of experience. Contemporary examples of poetry from the Language School demonstrate uses of language that are irreducible to concepts.

PUBLICATION: Poetry and Philosophy (1983), 3:20–24.

KEYWORDS: philosophy; Language writing; critical theory; language.

LINKS: Bromige, “Alternatives of Exposition” (PJ 5); Charles Bernstein, “Writing and Method” (Guide; PJ 3); Mikhail Dziubenko, “‘New Poetry’ and Perspectives for Philology” (PJ 8); Allen Fisher, “Poetry, Philosophy, and Difference” (PJ 3); Erica Hunt, “Beginning at Bottom” (PJ 3); Jackson Mac Low, “Some Ways Philosophy Has Helped to Shape My Work” (Guide; PJ 3); Ted Pearson, “Things Made Known” (PJ 10); Joan Retallack, “Blue Notes on the Know Ledge” (PJ 10); Barrett Watten, “On Explanation: Art and the Language of Art-Language” (PJ 3).

Burke, Carolyn. “Without Commas: Gertrude Stein and Mina Loy.” Carolyn Burke’s scholarship on Mina Loy spurred a revival of interest in her poetry and her radical feminism. Burke demonstrates Loy’s theoretical interest in Bergson, Freud, and Otto Weininger and cites her stylistic indebtedness to Stein as crucial for her poetics of “consciousness.”

PUBLICATION: Women and Language (1983), 4:43–52.

KEYWORDS: feminism; modernism; psychoanalysis; readings.

LINKS: Charles Bernstein, “Professing Stein/Stein Professing” (PJ 9); Ben Friedlander, “Laura Riding/Some Difficulties” (PJ 4); Susan Bee [Laufer], “Kahlo’s Gaze” (PJ 4); Leslie Scalapino, “Re-Living” (PJ 4).

Davis, Lydia. “Coolidge’s Mine.” In her review of Clark Coolidge’s hybrid “prosoid” work Mine: The One That Enters the Stories, Davis admires Coolidge’s “almost perfect” ear and the stylistic density of his turn to language, but she criticizes his relation to narrative as overly self-conscious and not fully in control of his experimental impulses.

PUBLICATION: Poetry and Philosophy (1983), 3:91–96.

KEYWORDS: Language writing; nonnarrative; genre; readings.

LINKS: Davis, “Some Notes on Armantrout’s Precedence” (PJ 6); Edie Jarolim, “Ideas of Order” (PJ 5); Pierre Alferi, “Seeking a Sentence” (Guide; PJ 10); Bruce Campbell, “‘But What Is an Adequate Vice to Limit the Liquid of This Voice’” (PJ 9); Alan Davies, “Language/Mind/ Writing” (Guide; PJ 3); Carla Harryman, “Toy Boats” (Guide; PJ 5); Bill Luoma, “Astrophysics and You” (PJ 9); Jackson Mac Low, “Pieces o’ Six—XII and XXIII” (PJ 6); Alice Notley, “Narrative” (PJ 5); Travis Ortiz, from “variously, not then” (PJ 10); Bob Perelman, “Plotless Prose” (PJ 1); Leslie Scalapino, “War/Poverty/Writing” (PJ 10); Diane Ward, “The Narration” (PJ 5).

de Laroque, Françoise. “What Is the Sex of the Poets?” De Laroque focuses on the concept of poetic “work” in Claude Royet-Journaud’s anthology of French experimental writing, Travail de poésie (1980). Poetic work is gendered both masculine and feminine, active and passive; in her close readings, she deliberates on its manner of “working.”

PUBLICATION: Women and Language (1983), 4:109–17.

KEYWORDS: French poetics; avant-garde; gender; readings.

LINKS: Pierre Alferi, “Seeking a Sentence” (PJ 10); Jerry Estrin, “Penultimate Witness: On Emmanuel Hocquard” (PJ 8); Lanie Goodman, “Georges Perec: Life Directions for Use” (PJ 3); Emmanuel Hocquard, from The Cape of Good Hope (PJ 8); “Télégrammes: Recent Québecois Writing” (PJ 8).

Fisher, Allen. “Poetry, Philosophy, and Difference.” U.K. poet Allen Fisher charts a necessary distinction between poetics and philosophy. Poetics is more open to a speculative construction of new ways of making meaning extended from poetry (which may not yet exist), while philosophy, however methodologically open, is descriptive of what is made.

PUBLICATION: Poetry and Philosophy (1983), 3:17–19.

KEYWORDS: philosophy; U.K. poetics; language; genre.

LINKS: Fisher, “Postmodernism as Package” (PJ 7); Andrew Benjamin, “The Body of Writing: Notes on the Poetry of Glenda George” (PJ 4); cris cheek, “… they almost all practically …” (PJ 5); William Corbett, “Harwood/Walker and Raworth” (PJ 2); Paul Green, “Literate Tones: On John Wilkinson” (PJ 8); Peter Middleton, “The Knowledge of Narratives” (PJ 5); Ted Pearson, “The Force of Even Intervals: Toward a Reading of Vernal Aspects” (PJ 2); Gavin Selerie, from Roxy (PJ 8).

Fraser, Kathleen. “Overheard.” A founding editor of the feminist journal of experimental poetics HOW(ever), Fraser reviews three collections by “women poets of great privacy”: Gail Sher, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, and Fanny Howe. She sees a common concern of these poets with feminist modernism in “the prizing of uncertainty as legitimate content.”

PUBLICATION: Women and Language (1983), 4:98–105.

KEYWORDS: lyric poetry; feminism; modernism; readings.

LINKS: Rae Armantrout, “Silence” (PJ 3); Beverly Dahlen, from “The Tradition of Marginality” (PJ 6); Jean Day, “Moving Object” (PJ 9); Barbara Guest, “Shifting Persona” (PJ 9); Susan Howe, “My Emily Dickinson, part 1” (Guide; PJ 4); Pamela Lu, from “Intermusement” (PJ 10); Jackson Mac Low, “Persia/Sixteen/Code Poems” (PJ 4); Lisa Samuels, two poems (PJ 10); James Sherry, “Dreyer’s Step Work” (PJ 4); Chris Tysh, from “Dead Letters” (PJ 10); Barrett Watten, “What I See in How I Became Hettie Jones” (PJ 10); Hannah Weiner, “Other Person” (PJ 9); Ellen Zweig, “Feminism and Formalism” (PJ 4).

Hunt, Erica. “Beginning at Bottom.” In a lucid and condensed summary, Hunt describes the overarching concern of Louis Zukofsky’s Bottom: On Shakespeare as the primacy of visual evidence for knowledge. The relation of “love:reason::eyes:mind,” however, is positivist and finally conservative; skepticism and distortion are equally necessary for knowledge.

PUBLICATION: Poetry and Philosophy (1983), 3:63–66.

KEYWORDS: modernism; philosophy; knowledge; visuality.

LINKS: Lyn Hejinian, “An American Opener” (PJ 1); Bob Perelman, “Good and Bad/Good and Evil: Pound, Céline, and Fascism” (Guide; PJ 6); Ron Silliman, “Composition as Action” (PJ 3); Barrett Watten, “Missing ‘X’: Formal Meaning in Crane and Eigner” (PJ 2).

Mandel, Tom. “Codes/Texts: Reading S/Z.” In S/Z, Barthes demonstrates the relation between “work” and “text” in his reading of overlapping textual codes dispersed throughout the work. Mandel’s critique of the reading of Balzac’s “Sarrasine” is that it is nondialogic and assumes an automatic “textual processing” of a presumed linguistically competent reader.

PUBLICATION: Close Reading (1983), 2:49–54.

KEYWORDS: French poetics; narrative; intertextuality; readings.

LINKS: Bruce Campbell, “‘Elsewhere’: On Artaud and Barthes” (PJ 8); Beverly Dahlen, “Forbidden Knowledge” (Guide; PJ 4); Félix Guattari, “Language, Consciousness, and Society” (PJ 9); George Hartley, “Althusser Metonymy China Wall” (PJ 10); Lyn Hejinian, “The Rejection of Closure” (Guide; PJ 4); Bernard Noël, “Poetry and Experience” (PJ 3); Delphine Perret, “Irony” (PJ 3); Herman Rapaport, “Poetic Rests: Ashbery, Coolidge, Scalapino” (PJ 10).

Plotke, David. “Language and Politics Today.” Plotke, a former editor of Socialist Review, assesses the status of “language” for Marxist theory in the early 1980s and with the emergence of revisionist modernism. “Language” for Marxism reflects the dispersion of the political throughout culture; it is both “heterogeneous” and resistant to “totalizing.”

PUBLICATION: Introduction (1983), 1:35–48.

KEYWORDS: language; Marxism; politics; modernism.

LINKS: Kathy Acker, “‘Culture doesn’t account …’” (PJ 7); Michael Amnasan, from Joe Liar (PJ 10); Daniel Davidson, “Bureaucrat, My Love” (PJ 10); Michael Davidson, “The Poetics of Everyday Life” (PJ 9); Allen Fisher, “Postmodernism as Package” (PJ 7); Félix Guattari, “Text for the Russians” (PJ 8); George Hartley, “Jameson’s Perelman: Reification and the Material Signifier” (Guide; PJ 7); David Lloyd, “Limits of a Language of Desire” (PJ 5); Steve McCaffery, “And Who Remembers Bobby Sands?” (PJ 5); Kofi Natambu, “The Multicultural Aesthetic: Language, ‘Art,’ and Politics in the United States Today” (PJ 9); Kit Robinson, “Time and Materials: The Workplace, Dreams, and Writing” (PJ 9); Andrew Ross, “The Oxygen of Publicity” (PJ 6); Rod Smith, from “CIA Sentences” (PJ 10); Lorenzo Thomas, “The Marks Are Waiting” (PJ 10); Barrett Watten, “Social Space in ‘Direct Address’” (PJ 8).

Rasula, Jed. “What Does This Do with You Reading?” In an early review of Ron Silliman’s Tjanting, Jed Rasula points to the constructivist aspects of the work, citing the importance of the reader and the linguistic exchangeability of “subject” and “object”: “The sentences are workers. All parts are studios. Silliman’s is a study in assembly relationships.”

PUBLICATION: Introduction (1983), 1:66–67.

KEYWORDS: Language writing; critical theory; performance; reading.

LINKS: Rasula, “Rodefer’s Lectures” (PJ 3), “On Rothenberg’s Revised Technicians of the Sacred” (PJ 6); Steve Benson, “Close Reading: Leavings and Cleavings” (Guide; PJ 2); Alan Davies, “Close Reading Close Reading” (PJ 2); Johanna Drucker, “Close Reading: A Billboard” (PJ 2); Steven Farmer [Roberts], “Reading Eye Lets” (PJ 3); Lyn Hejinian, “Hard Hearts” (PJ 2); Fanny Howe, “Silliman’s Paradise” (PJ 6); Stephen Ratcliffe, “How to Reading” (PJ 6); Barrett Watten, “The XYZ of Reading: Negativity (And)” (PJ 6); Reva Wolf, “Thinking You Know” (Guide; PJ 10).

Ross, Haj. “Poems as Holograms.” A post-Chomskyan linguist who sought alternatives to generative grammar, Haj Ross looks at lyric poetry using methods developed by Roman Jakobson’s structuralist poetics, to show how sonic patterning and semantic framing can be conjoined in poetry seen as going beyond “the conduit metaphor” of communication.

PUBLICATION: Close Reading (1982), 2:3–11.

KEYWORDS: linguistics; lyric poetry; meaning; readings.

LINKS: George Lakoff, “Continuous Reframing” (Guide; PJ 1), “The Public Aspect of the Language of Love” (PJ 6); Yulia Latinina, “Folklore and ‘Novoyaz’” (PJ 9); Ron Silliman, “Migratory Meaning: The Parsimony Principle in the Poem” (Guide; PJ 2); Barrett Watten, “Missing ‘X’: Formal Meaning in Crane and Eigner” (PJ 2).