“Hey Man, My Wave!” The Authority of Private Language
Cultural studies was emergent when Michael Davidson wrote this groundbreaking essay on the social construction of “private language,” presented at New Langton Arts, San Francisco (22 March 1984). The concept of “private language” originated as a thought experiment in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s writings, but Davidson is more interested in public registers of “the language of the heart,” from surfer lingo to graffiti to the “ideoglossia” of aphasic twins to lyric poetry. A nonprofessional but expert surfer, Davidson had an insider’s knowledge of the linguistic markers that identified a surfer both as a member of a group and as a particular individual within it. Extending this model of group reference to individuals, Davidson discusses the signifying practices of graffiti artists in New York and a linguistic microculture invented by aphasic twins. Concluding his discussion of private language with a critique of Emily Dickinson, he refuses to identify lyric subjectivity with hermetic references and opaque meanings. Rather, he sees Dickinson’s rescripting of cultural codes as a direct critique of institutional power. The essay reveals the influence of structural linguistics (the Prague Circle, Mikhail Bakhtin) and American sociolinguistics (Basil Bernstein) in seeing poetry in terms of cultural codes. It makes an important contribution to the theory of the lyric, bridging Davidson’s poetics to his work in disability and globalization studies.
We make up a different language for poetry
And for the heart—ungrammatical.
—Jack Spicer
We may agree with Pascal that the heart has its reasons which reason does not know, but at this point in history we might add that the language of the heart, in order to speak at all, must first deform the language of the reason. In the condensed and displaced language of the dream, in the repetitions and distortions of schizophrenic discourse, in various social dialects within subcultures, even in the trivialized and trivializing banter of public gossip we hear the language of the heart speaking its reasons against the claims of reason. But when we attempt to penetrate the privacy of these private languages we are often faced with the inverted reflections of those public and official discourses against which the heart makes its claim. In the most intimate of secrets shared between lovers can be found a rhetoric as ancient as the Symposium and as public as the afternoon soap opera. How then can we speak of a private language at all? Can a language speak of the heart without first inventing a heart by which to speak?
These are questions that lie at the heart of any sociolinguistics and, I would add, at the heart of literary study as well. In both spheres we rely on the idea of a private language as a zone free of ideology, free of rhetorical and logical constraints. Private languages, in the common-sense usage of the phrase, can be anything from glossolalia (speaking in tongues) in which there is no clear source language, to idioglossia (the language of twins) in which several source languages are combined, to highly ritualized dialects shared by large segments of society. In the arts, private language often refers to the hermetic character of certain works in which meaning is hidden or occluded. Or the phrase may refer to various linguistic strategies of the avant-garde (Futurist zaum language, Dada performance, Surrealist automatic writing) whose impulse is directed toward deformations of “ordinary” or “logical” discourse. It is precisely because the phrase “private language” has so many associations that it loses its potentially subversive relationship to something called “public language,” and it is this relationship that will be my subject.
I should point out that I am not speaking of private language as it is discussed by Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations, where the phrase refers to a private sphere of sensation or experience entirely specific to one individual. Wittgenstein points out that access to this realm would necessitate some form of verification or criteria by which utterances could be evaluated, and these criteria could only exist in a public sphere. I am more interested in private language within that public sphere where the impulse to restrict, contain or sequester a semiotic field represents an attempt to subvert the authority of a public discourse. Criteria are not value-neutral; they exist to validate and legitimize certain kinds of expressions—expressions produced by individuals in their social interaction. The impulse to privacy in such interaction does not represent a rejection of some dominant code so much as a willed transformation of it. The reasons for this transformation are various, lying in the institutions that depend for their existence on the idea of free and unrestricted communication. […]
The most obvious form of private language in social interaction is the argot of subcultures (fraternal organizations, hobby enthusiasts, sports fans, ethnic groups) whose language exists both to restrict participation to members of the group as well as to specify particular features of an activity. In the case of surfing, for example, special words and phrases define particular qualities of wave and weather and describe, in minute detail, the design and structure of surfing equipment. But at the same time, surfing argot is used to represent one’s physical performance in a way that both identifies a particular ride and establishes a peer bond essential to maintaining one’s participation. Thus, when a surfer sitting during a lull between sets turns to his friends and says, “That last right was bogus; I was hauling all over the face—really cranking—thought it would wall up on the inside for a tube, but it backed off just as I cut back and I stalled out,” he means two things: 1) I just had an experience and 2) I am one of us. A translation of this remark might read as follows: that last ride was a disappointment; I went right and was moving quickly all over the face of the wave—really cranking sharp turns; I thought the wave would hold up as it approached the beach and provide me with a tube ride, but the backwash from the shore caused the wave to become mushy just at the point where I was beginning to cut back into the wave, and I was left standing there. The second meaning is more subtle and concerns the fraternal nature of surfing—the macho cult of performance with its perpetual need for verification and assertion. In the case mentioned above, it is clearly not the surfer’s fault that things did not work out, but rather the wave’s. If you are disappointed that a wave “mushed out,” then you are presumably one for whom speed, quick maneuvering, and daring are quite common.
Basil Bernstein calls such a socially coded dialect a “restricted code” since the possibility of predicting its organizing pattern is relatively simple and its potential for unexpected variations restricted. Ritual modes of communication like surfing language are regulated by protocol, and thus much of their meaning occurs at nonverbal levels. The restriction occurs because members of this social group share identifications:
The speech is played out against a background of communal, self-consciously held interests which removes the need to verbalize subjective intent and make it explicit. The meanings will be condensed.1
However predictable the syntax and lexicon of such codes might be, the sources and reasons for their development would seem to vary considerably. In the case of surfing, to continue my example, the lexicon is dominated by terms involved with possession and acquisition that are then applied to inanimate things—like beaches and waves. Surfers refer to “my wave,” “my beach,” and “my ride” the way that some people refer to “my alma mater” or “my pen.” Intruders to “their” spaces are tourists, Vals (people from inland), greasers, kooks, fags, creeps, and, depending on lifestyle preferences, dopers, punks, and longhairs. Right-of-way on waves is established by a complicated pecking order based on one’s proximity to the break, unless the surfer is an aggressive local in which case he has carte blanche, no matter where he takes off. Female surfers have absolutely no right of way and are better off left sitting on the beach. The bumper sticker “locals only” is only the most visible sign of surfing’s pervasive desire to restrict participation and “own” what cannot be possessed.
This assertion of ownership with its attendant verbal claims and challenges stems partly from the fact that surfing occurs in, quite literally, a fluid environment, one that changes from beach to beach. There are no enforceable rules or guidelines to govern the sport other than those asserted by each individual surfer. Most surfers come from middle-class beach suburbs in which possession and acquisition are necessary forms of verification. To move from a relatively static, consumerist demography into an unstructured, changeable environment necessitates the imposition of a grid from the first onto the second. Thus some illusion may be created that a wave “belongs” to someone, that a teenage boy who lives with his parents can find solace at “his” beach among the “locals.” At the same time, he may find some validation of his male status by pulling his “stick” (board) out of a “quiver” (group of different sized boards) and “run over some turkey” where on land his social and sexual identity is still uncertain. The vernacular code he relies on may be restricted, in Bernstein’s sense, but its register of power relations in the larger culture is subtle and complex.
Clearly, surfing vernacular, like the social dialects of other subcultures, represents less an inversion than a replication of the dominant code.2 Sexist and racist attitudes, present in middle-class households, are easily grafted onto the highly encoded rhetoric of those subgroups that might, on the surface, appear to stand in opposition.3 The use of private codes to secure relations of power and dominance in surfing yields only an exchange value; nothing is produced beyond reestablishing the male bond necessary to that culture. Territoriality and position have already been validated in the community, and it is a relatively simple matter to find a parallel, if condensed, social rhetoric. In the case of lower-class private language use, however, territoriality has to be claimed in a much more public way—by assaulting the public space or by producing something within it. […]
We may see a more decisive example of private language as protest in the cases of so-called speech “defects” that occur in the course of language acquisition. Take the case of Gracie and Ginny Kennedy, the San Diego twins who developed what the newspapers called a private language between themselves and what speech pathologists call “idioglossia.” After the twins were born they were diagnosed as being retarded and were sequestered by the family away from childhood friends and activities. The parents, Tom and Chris Kennedy, treated their daughters’ presumed retardation as a scandal to be covered up, and it was only when Tom was forced to go on welfare that the twins’ isolated existence was discovered. Ironically, it was through this severe change in the Kennedy’s economic status that the twins were finally able to get adequate professional help, which led to the discovery of their idioglossia.
In Jean-Pierre Gorin’s film Poto and Cabengo, the subject is ostensibly the twins and their language, but it is equally about manipulation: familial, linguistic, and economic. And since Gorin, as filmmaker, is conscious of his own participation in the twins’ lives, the film is about aesthetic manipulation. What the film makes clear is that Ginny and Gracie’s private speech is actually a pastiche of the two languages present in their household: their father’s rather monosyllabic English and their mother and grandmother’s German. Although the twins’ talk is difficult to translate, it is not impossible; one can quite clearly make out its conflation of Germanic and American words, especially when nonverbal factors are taken into consideration.4 What is ultimately more difficult to define are the causes for their idioglossia—causes that Gorin implies lie not in the twins themselves but in their parents’ failed hopes for success and prosperity in America.
The father, Tom Kennedy, is a tragic figure whose faith in the free-enterprise system is unswerving, despite the dismal state of his nascent real estate business. He seems able to talk only about making money and promoting his interests. He regards his daughters as an unexpected boon to himself, feeling that any publicity brought to his household will ultimately be good for business. His wife, Chris, whom he met in Germany, yearns for the good life: a larger house, more appliances, a swimming pool, a big kitchen. In one crucial scene, Tom and Chris sit on the bed somewhat stiffly before the camera and rehearse a real estate scenario in which he plays the salesman and she, the prospective buyer. She describes her dream house—endless bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchen space—and he, acting the part both of real estate salesman and ideal husband, agrees to each new demand. They act out their fantasies of wealth and power against the backdrop of their meager Linda Vista postwar prefab in much the same fashion as the twins act out stories in their private language. The disparity between their hopes for success and the sad contrary evidence can be felt in all of their interviews and can be seen in the obsessive cleaning and tidying that seem to be the central activities of the mother and grandmother. Given the oppressive atmosphere of the household, it is little wonder that the twins developed a private mode of communication, if only to gain control over a world where control is perpetually uncertain.
Gorin’s interviews with the twins’ speech pathologist provide another frame for viewing the public dimension of their private language. The therapist clearly regards their private dialect as an aberration, something to be treated and corrected by standard behaviorist methods. In several sequences, we see videotaped sessions in which the therapist vigorously rewards the twins for identifying an object by its correct English name. And in interviews, the therapist defines “their” problem entirely within psycholinguistic terms and never in terms of their larger familial and social environment. Gorin’s film explores the way that such limiting and limited definitions of idioglossia ignore the socioeconomic factors that contribute to language acquisition. Clearly the two languages adopted by the girls are German and English, but their reasons for deforming their parents’ languages lie in the uncertain power relations of the household and the ways in which language is used by the parents to establish control and authority and not to establish communication or bestow affection.
In [the two] examples I have mentioned, a private discourse shared by two or more persons exists to subvert a public language. In Bakhtin’s terms, such discourses serve to offset the “centripetal forces in sociolinguistic and ideological life” that centralize and unify a particular class interest.5 Rather than providing a distinctly different language or idiolect, the private code appropriates and deforms the dominant code. What I will call the “impulse to privacy” occurs socially in various kinds of exclusive behavior and linguistically in the transformations of legitimizing discourses, whether in the home or in the culture at large. The private codes of surfers […] or twins depend on a source language not only for exchange of information but for the production of new, potentially subversive information. Such usage is performative in the sense that its function is to do as well as communicate; it authenticates by the context in which it is used as much as by the content of any utterance. And, to continue in J. L. Austin’s terms, such usage is perlocutionary in that it always serves ends beyond those contained in the message. […]
Much of what I have been saying about private language in the realm of sociolinguistics could be said of literature, but with significant modifications. Bakhtin provides me with a transition in the way that he characterizes various forms of social heteroglossia in the novel. According to Bakhtin, the novel is essentially dialogic in that it may present languages, all of which have an ideological character, speaking to each other. Dialogism occurs not only between characters but between various discourses by which characters establish their ideological positions in society and signal their class affiliations and aspirations. Poetry, on the other hand, cannot share in this proliferation of languages since “no matter how many contradictions and insoluble conflicts the poet develops within it, [poetry] is always illumined by one unitary and indisputable discourse.”6 As I have pointed out elsewhere, this consignment of poetry to the monologic is based on a rather narrow view of poetic discourse, one formed largely around nineteenth-century German and Russian works.7 I feel that what Bakhtin says about forms of heteroglossia in the novel could be applied to poetry, even where poetry most appears to retain its monologic character—as in the lyric, for instance.
According to most genre theorists, the lyric is the site of personal self-expression. For Hegel, the subjectivity of the author provides the lyric both with its content as well as its aesthetic raison d’être. But when Hegel attempts to provide a historicized account of the genre’s evolution he uses the rhetoric of authority that we have already applied to social discourse. Unlike the epic,
lyric poetry presupposes for its composition not a primitive but an advanced state of society, where art, having become self-conscious in an increasingly prosaic world, perfects its self-defined sphere deliberately. It is indeed favored to an exceptional degree in times like ours where the prosaic regularity of the social order prompts each individual to claim for himself the right to his own point of view and feelings.8
This claim to one’s subjectivity is based on the individual’s presumed access to a language of unmediated expressivity. But within the lyric announced by Hegel’s aesthetics, there emerges a countertendency away from private states to private rhetorics. We have come to feel in the modern period that all claims to a private perspective must be made by means of the internally cohesive structure of the aesthetic artifact. According to Mukarovsky, the poetic utterance consists of a “maximum foregrounding of the utterance” in which patterns of repetition (rhyme, meter, alliteration) and semantic complexity (paronomasia, metaphor) force attention on the material construct.9 Thus the lyric stands as an “objective correlative” (Eliot), verbal icon (Wimsatt), or “pattern of resolved stresses” (Brooks) for thoughts that live “too deep for tears.” The author thus creates a hermetically sealed world of private (because unrecoverable) meanings.
Both criteria of the lyric mentioned here—its presumed accessibility to subjective states, its foregrounding of the signifier—would seem to contradict each other. The first is based on a theory of language as transparent vehicle; the second is based on language as mediated expression, semantically contextualized by internal organization and distinct from “ordinary” discourse. We could see this opposition as being two perspectives on the same thing: the world of the subject, by its refusal of prosaic or “public” discourse, demands a rhetoric that reflects that difference. Interior states do not admit of words; therefore it is by defamiliarizing language that we may regain that earlier state. By a logic of metaphor or through a forest of symbols the lyric poet may express the inexpressible.
In this conflation of “lyric subject” and hermetic rhetoric, what remains intact is the ideal of subjectivity itself by which the lyric genre may be said to receive some metaphysical legitimation. We know, through the work of Althusser, on the one hand, and Benveniste on the other, that such a state is not so much the source as the product of specific sociohistorical structures. The subject upon which the lyric impulse is based, rather than being able to generate its own language of the heart, is also constituted within a world of public discourse. The lyric “I” emerges as a positional relation. Its subjectivity is made possible by a linguistic and ultimately social structure in which “I” speaks.10 It is by a similar description that Adorno frames the lyric gesture as being social in nature:
This demand, however, that of the untouched virgin word, is in itself social in nature. It implies a protest against a social condition which every individual experiences as hostile, distant, cold, and oppressive; and this social condition impresses itself on the poetic form in a negative way: the more heavily social conditions weigh, the more unrelentingly the poem resists, refusing to give in to any heteronomy, and constituting itself purely according to its own particular laws.11
The Kantian rhetoric of his last sentence notwithstanding, Adorno’s remarks suggest a way that lyric poetry may be given a critical dimension: not by what the poem says about the author’s condition but about the social condition by which that “private” condition becomes a necessity. The ideology of the lyric may be read, as it were, between the lines —in those gestures toward solitude, isolation, and privacy that invert or negate a rhetoric of multiplicity, plurality, and communalism. For Adorno, “the greatness of works of art lies solely in their power to let those things be heard which ideology conceals.”12 […]
Unfortunately Adorno’s lyric poet, like Bakhtin’s, remains monologic, one who remains unconscious of his/her retreat from the social world and bent on fabricating an alternate world as a form of self-protection. This seems like a limited view of lyric discourse in which not only is there interplay between the private individual and failed social plenitude but between the various registers and tones, generic markers, and rhetorical devices by which even the most hermeneutically intransigent poem is made. A great lyric poet like Emily Dickinson, for example, while isolating herself socially and aesthetically from the public eye, retains much of the rhetoric of Protestant ideology and social discourse in her poems—not to insulate herself against them but in order to subvert their authority:
A Word made Flesh is seldom
And tremblingly partook
Nor then perhaps reported
But have I not mistook
Each one of us has tasted
With ecstasies of stealth
The very food debated
To our specific strength—
A Word that breathes distinctly
Has not the power to die
Cohesive as the Spirit
It may expire if He—
“Made Flesh and dwelt among us”
Could condescension be
Like this consent of Language
This loved Philology.13
In this, her most famous poem on the subject of poetic incarnation, Dickinson describes the “ecstasies of stealth” by which poetry speaks where God is absent. Joanne Feit Diehl points out that here the poet “creates an alternative power potentially subversive of any external authority based upon the sovereignty of a male-identified divinity or predicated upon the supremacy of those within the religious fold.”14 I would add that not only is the poem an inversion of orthodoxy, it is also a deformation of the authoritative role of language in sustaining God’s Word. It is the “consent of Language” to allow the individual to speak at all rather than the “condescension” of language to speak for one that inaugurates the poet’s meditation. The process is dangerous, “tremblingly partook,” even though each one of us has “tasted,” like our Edenic parents, the fruits of potentiality and power. Dickinson’s language of stealth, danger, and immanence is powerful because it retains associations with Puritan orthodoxy and scriptural authority. She has not, like Emerson or Whitman, used the rhetoric of individualism and personal assertion but has adopted the rhetoric of the New Testament and placed it, quite literally, in quotes.
It may seem a great and perilous leap from the private dialects of subcultures or the creolized speech of the Kennedy twins to the lyrics of Emily Dickinson. In one case, private languages serve to strengthen group bonds and permit communication; in the other case, private language permits the poet to appropriate and transform social discourse—to “tell the truth but tell it slant.” In both, however, the construction of private codes occurs in some direct relation to the public languages they seek to offset. When Emily Dickinson seeks to choose her own “Society,” she chooses a word as well, one with recognizable cultural and historical connotations. She has not simply chosen a metaphor from others to suit poetic ends. The word exists enmeshed in political and theological contexts that lie at the heart of American institutions. And when she chooses to become, as Mabel Loomis Todd says, the “Myth of Amherst,” speaking to others through a partially open door, she is at last able to have a dialogue with the world on her own terms.15 […]
We come to Emily Dickinson’s lyrics with the expectation that her inner experiences have been translated into a private language of poetry and that our role as readers is to decode those signs back to some original, nonverbal state. That is, we read her lyrics within the conventions of Romantic Idealism by which art is said to transcend concrete historical and spatial limits.16 But literature is discourse, a product of specific signifying practices that exist in the social world and, at the same time, productive of its own structures of signification. The opposition between “poetic” and “ordinary” language is being broken down in various critical arenas (speech act theory, ethnomethodology, discourse analysis), but such research has occurred largely within the field of narrative. Here the competition among ideologemes—socially coded discourse structures—may be dramatized by interaction between specific individuals or types. I would like to see the analysis of discourse broadened to study the nature of the subject itself and the extent to which it is constituted in and by speech situations. […] The twins not only “use” a private language, they create themselves within it as speaking subjects. Emily Dickinson not only “creates” an elliptical and hyperbolic style, she textualizes herself out of the doctrinal and social discourse she finds around her. We may discover the ideological character of these subjective projections not by rejecting “private language” as an idealist fiction but by searching within it for traces of authoritative and authoritarian discourse.17
“We make up a different language for poetry / And for the heart—ungrammatical,” says Jack Spicer,18 and it has ever been the province of poetry to enact that difference. Elsewhere Spicer makes it clear that this language comes not from some internal, private realm but from the outside—from Martians and ghosts for whom the poet is only a medium. I would add that the outside is also a world of social heteroglossia—of class- and gender-based discourses that officiate the terms by which any individual is able to receive its messages. Spicer’s ungrammatical, private language of the heart must first, in order to be received, pass through the defiles of an inherited language—one that, as I have tried to show, is not only grammatical but is also encrusted with ideological concerns. Spicer’s radical orphism provides us with a felicitous model of how ideology works to mediate our private discourse and produce us as subjects. It is not that we remain unconscious of the forms of this mediation—as my remarks on Dickinson should make clear—but that in reading the language of the heart we must be willing to see the public arena in which it takes shape.
NOTES
1 Basil Bernstein, ed., Class, Codes, and Control: Theoretical Studies towards a Sociology of Language, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1971), 1:77.
2 On the term “social dialect,” see R. Hasan, “Code, Register and Social Dialect,” in Class, Codes, and Control, 2:253–92.
3 Consider, for example, a recent profile of surfer Tim Fretz, published in Surfer 25, no. 4, which begins: “Tim Fretz is a perfect example of Hitler’s attempt at a so-called ‘superior race.’ He is a six-foot tall, blonde [sic] haired ball of muscle. The wild look in his eyes is only a hint as to why he’s been nicknamed ‘Taz’ (short for Tasmanian Devil).”
4 Gorin finds a felicitous parallel to the Kennedy twins’ interlinguality in the Katzenjammer Kids comic strip. Much of the humor in the strip is based on confusions of terms between German and English, and Gorin uses clips from old Katzenjammer Kids films as obbligato to the main narrative in Poto and Cabengo.
5 M. M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 271.
6 Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 286.
7 Michael Davidson, “Discourse in Poetry: Bakhtin and Extensions of the Dialogical,” in Code of Signals: Recent Writings in Poetics, ed. Michael Palmer (Berkeley: North Atlantic, 1983), 143–50.
8 Hegel on the Arts, ed. and trans. Henry Paolucci (New York: Frederick Unger, 1979), 163.
9 Jan Mukarovsky, “Standard Language and Poetic Language,” in A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure, and Style, ed. Paul L. Garvin (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1964), 19.
10 See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127–86; and Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary E. Meek (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1971), 217–30. For a good summary of current discussion of the “subject” in critical theory see Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980), 56–84.
11 Theodor W. Adorno, “Lyric Poetry and Society,” Telos 20 (Summer 1974), 58.
12 Ibid. This passage, as well as much of Adorno’s thinking in this essay, is strikingly similar to the theory of literary production put forth by Pierre Machery in A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). See also Jerome McGann’s discussion of relationships between Althusserian thought and the Frankfurt School in his afterword to The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
13 The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), no. 1651.
14 Joanne Feit Diehl, “‘Ransom in a Voice’: Language as Defense in Dickinson’s Poetry,” in Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson, ed. Suzanne Juhasz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Ind., 1983), 157.
15 See Mabel Loomis Todd’s fascinating portrait of Dickinson through her letters and journals, excerpted in Richard B. Sewell, The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1980). 216–28.
16 The problem of reading Romanticism outside of Romantic models and criteria is the burden of Jerome McGann’s Romantic Ideology.
17 Bruce Boone provides me with a model for how one might read “private language” in oppositional terms within the context of gay poetry. See his “Gay Language as Political Praxis: The Poetry of Frank O’Hara,” Social Text 1 (Winter 1979), 59–92.
18 Jack Spicer, “Transformations II,” in The Collected Books of Jack Spicer (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1975), 233.
PUBLISHED: Excerpted from Marginality: Public and Private Language (1986), 6:33–45. KEYWORDS: cultural studies; public sphere; linguistics; lyric poetry.
LINKS: Michael Davidson, “Framed by Story” (PJ 5), “The Poetics of Everyday Life” (PJ 9), seven poems (PJ 10); Steve Benson, “Personal as Social History: Three Fictions” (PJ 7); Robert Glück, “Fame” (PJ 10); Susan Howe, “My Emily Dickinson, part 1” (Guide; PJ 4); George Lakoff, “The Public Aspect of the Language of Love” (PJ 6); Tom Mandel, “Codes/Texts: Reading S/Z” (PJ 2); Kit Robinson, “Time and Materials: The Workplace, Dreams, and Writing” (Guide; PJ 9); Leslie Scalapino, “Poetic Diaries” (PJ 5); Barrett Watten, “The Politics of Style” (Guide; PJ 1).
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY: The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008); On the Outskirts of Form (Wesleyan, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2009); The Mutabilities and The Foul Papers (Albany, Calif.: Sand Dollar, 1976); The Prose of Fact (Berkeley: The Figures, 1981); The Landing of Rochambeau (Providence, R.I.: Burning Deck, 1985); Analogy of the Ion (Great Barrington, Mass.: The Figures, 1988); Post Hoc (Bolinas, Calif.: Avenue B, 1990); The Arcades (Oakland: O Books, 1999); with Lyn Hejinian et al., Leningrad.