“A Form of Assumptions”
Ted Pearson’s close reading of a single poem from Robert Creeley’s Pieces was presented at the 1990 Poetry Project symposium in New York. Nothing less than a “politics of the person”—the title of our lead symposium in the special issue titled The Person—is entailed in the relentlessly autobiographical focus of Creeley’s work. Pearson revises Creeley’s account of personhood as univocal and continuous by insisting on reading his poem (“When he and I …”) for its partial and gendered account of subjectivity—namely, masculine subjectivity. For Pearson, Creeley’s poems “are thematically saturated by a discourse on masculinity”; he demonstrates precisely how by unpacking the poem via linguistic, psychoanalytic, and feminist theory to account for its gendered poetics. In his reading, Pearson sees a dissociation of pronouns between “I” and “he” that both depends on and excludes an objectified other, the feminine/“she.” Masculinity is split at the moment of sexual encounter; the poem exists to bring together the parts of that shattered moment. Pearson’s reading works against the claims of a stable, consistent identity that, through the vehicle of the poem, makes experience knowable and tellable. Rather, the poem presupposes a politics of gender that necessitates that we read it critically, apart from its own terms.
Robert Creeley’s poems, among their other insistences, are thematically saturated by a discourse on masculinity—a discourse derived from a culturally determined nexus of identity politics and lyric self-fashioning. I want to begin my analysis of that discourse with two citations which may suggest, respectively, the context in which I first read these poems, and the context in which I continue to read them.1
The first citation is from Gilbert Sorrentino: “I loved that bright sense / of his responsibility to some abstract demonology / we both understood to be manhood.”2 And the second is from Virginia Woolf, whose reflections on the encounter between modernist male writers and feminism led her to suggest that “virility has now become self-conscious.”3 As Peter Schwenger notes in “The Masculine Mode,” this is not to suggest that
these writers only question the received images of maleness, [but that] often they set out to validate those images or, through such images, to validate themselves. Their explorations of maleness are not abstract but intensely individual. They are not straightforward but are riddled with contradictions and paradoxes…. Always knowledge is rooted in experience and inseparable from it. The masculine mode is above all an attempt to render a certain maleness of experience. (102)4
I submit that the construction of masculinity in Creeley’s work is thoroughly interwoven with that of the “person” as such and the “domestic” as a site of gender conflict. Though the task of sorting these strands is beyond the scope of this essay, I hope to suggest the parameters of such a project by reading in some detail the final poem in Pieces. Let me start by recalling the book’s epigraph, which is taken from a poem by Allen Ginsberg: “yes, yes, / that’s what / I wanted, / I always wanted, / I always wanted, / to return / to the body / where I was born” (378). It is the interrogation of that “I,” that “want,” and that “body” that leads me to the following poem:
When he and I,
after drinking and
talking, approached
the goddess or woman
become her, and by my
insistence entered
her, and in the ease
and delight of the
meeting I was given that
sight gave me myself,
this was the mystery
I had come to—all
manner of men, a
throng, and bodies of
women, writhing, and
a great though seemingly
silent sound—and when
I left the room to them,
I felt, as though hearing
laughter, my own heart lighten.
•
What do you do,
what do you say,
what do you think,
what do you know.
(CP, 445–46)
I want first to consider the poem’s personae. “He” and “I” are grammatically bonded and linguistically distinct figures: a single nonspecific “male” Other and a speaking “subject,” also “male.” Julia Kristeva’s gloss of Emile Benveniste proposes that
[an] author envisages subjectivity as “the capacity of the speaker to posit himself as subject.” “Now we hold,” writes Benveniste, “that that ‘subjectivity’ … is only the emergence … of a fundamental property of language. ‘Ego’ is he who says ‘ego.’” This is the foundation of subjectivity, which is determined by the linguistic status of ‘person.’ (34)
In Creeley’s own words, “as soon as / I speak, I / speaks” (294). But to whom? Throughout his work, it seems that whenever the “person” addressed is not specifically identified as “female,” and indeed not always then, the addressee and/or reader is assumed to be “male” and is also assumed to share and have a stake in “a certain maleness of experience.” In the poem at hand, I would argue that “he,” formerly and implicitly a you, is, as Benveniste suggests,
situated outside I/you and indicate[s] someone or something about which one speaks, but without necessarily being a specific person…. The ‘third person’ is not a ‘person’; it is really a verbal form whose function is to express the non-person. (Quoted in Kristeva, 34–35)
The status of this “non-person” is ambivalent: on the one hand, by placing its specificity under erasure, the third person’s identity is abrogated, allowing its subjugation by or subordination to I/you; on the other hand, the contingency of its formation relieves it of the vicissitudes of constructing and maintaining its specificity.
The undecidability, then, of the boundaries between, and the disjunctions within, both “he” and “I” is crucial—not only to the unfolding of events within the poem, but also to the (assumed male) reader’s identification with “he and I,” an identification toward which the rhetoric of the poem is deployed. In brief, the anxiety to consolidate an identity contests the desire to return to an undifferentiated totality. Encrypted in this undecidability is an existential dread, or horror vacui, that Georges Bataille, for example, figures as the context in which
there exists … a unique moment in relation to the possibility of me—and thus the infinite improbability of this coming into the world appears. For if the tiniest difference had occurred in the course of the successive events of which I am the result, in the place of this me, integrally avid to be me, there would have been ‘an other.’ (130)
To elicit the relation between this “moment”—or rather such agency as extemporizes “successive events” as “unique moments” and therefore as tropes of identity—and its anxious reinscriptions in Creeley’s poems as the originary if problematic site of the “speaking subject,” let me cite several instances from work anterior to Pieces. Early in The Charm, for example, we find these lines from “Poem for D. H. Lawrence”: “I would begin by explaining / that by reason of being / I am and no other” (7). In the preface to For Love, Creeley sketches a process “wherewith a man … contrives a world (of his own mind)” (105). And in the epigraph of Words, he invokes, via Williams, “a counter stress / born of the sexual shock / which survives it … to keep its own mind” (260).
Insofar as the loci of these instances are initial to the collections in which they occur, their discursive “subject,” and its insistent “subjectivity,” are no less initial to the poems Creeley writes to think with. It is this “insistence”—itself a metonymy for the limited agency of the “subject”—by which “the goddess or woman / become her” is “entered” and enters the poem.
There is, of course, a latent prosodic ambiguity attendant on the verb phrase “become her,” such that a transfer of agency from “he and I” to “the goddess or woman” emerges as a possible reading. My own inclination, however, is to read the passage grammatically, and thus to construe the “goddess”/ “woman” relation as an equivocally hieratic inflection of gender which continues to foreground the “masculine.”
In either case, readers familiar with Creeley’s work will recognize the goddess, in her sundry guises, as an importantly recurring figure in the poems. The confluence of Creeley’s proximity to Robert Graves when the latter was writing The White Goddess, the role of “the goddess” in the conventions of lyric poetry, the heterosexist formation of the goddess/drudge variant of the virgin/whore dyad, and the rhetorical deflection of the reader’s gaze into a visionary realm where such apparitions are taken to be more real than real is not, I would argue, happenstance.
So we’ve got these two guys, drinking together and talking. And after a while, a “goddess or woman // become her” appears, and they approach her. And one of these guys, the one called “I,” insists that they enter her. They do, etc. And therein lies a tale. But first we must establish who she is, noting that the phrase “become her” transforms the “goddess”/“woman” into the third, or linguistically non, person.
Now if it is a “woman” who is “entered,” whatever else that may imply, it does imply that they fuck her. The manner and intent with which they do so remains unspecified, and perhaps irrelevant; but that her agency, desire, and status as a person are also unspecified, and unremarked, is not irrelevant, because, lacking agency, this nonspecific “female” figure is reduced to her object status, her use value, and very little else. And if her use is not a form of rape, it very well might be—unless of course the reader is willing to assume a too familiar form of illogic that equates her very presence with her sexual availability. This connection between rape and (male self-)knowledge is, of course, one of literature’s most durable tropes: Homer, for example, equates the rape of Helen with the beginning of history as such.
If, on the other hand, the figure “entered” is a “goddess,” one might imagine her an avatar of the “great mother,” who both literally and figuratively accommodates “he and I” in a conflation of sexual intercourse and the return to the womb. In this variant, the circuit from the epigraph’s express desire “to return to the body where I was born” is completed. There is, however, yet again no clear ascription of agency to the goddess—she remains both functionally and linguistically a nonperson, subject to such uses and modes of violence as might attend that role.
It is at this “unique moment” that a transformation occurs—from the quotidian realism of a scene of “male” camaraderie, via the entry of the “female” figure, to the magical realism of a “male” subject’s singular visionary experience. Thus, “in the ease / and delight of the // meeting I was given that / sight gave me myself.” It could be argued, of course, that these lines ameliorate the otherwise subjugated status of the “goddess or woman,” but only if the forms of assumption I’ve been detailing still obtain, such that the “female” figure is assumed to willingly partake of the “ease and delight” (given that, throughout the poem, the reader has only “I’s” word to inform and direct such assumptions).
Although “he” and “the goddess or woman” are both required for “I” to achieve the status of “person,” these figures are by no means equivalent. The construction of “I” as a masculine “subject” is determined by his capacity to recognize (both within and beyond himself) an Other “male,” who is met in the “woman,” and who, in witnessing “I” perform as a “male,” confirms him as such. It is no great secret that “males” tend to measure their masculinity against other “males” and, in the domain of heterosexist relations, that a “woman” as such can be little more than the medium within or upon which the construction of an arguably homosocial masculinity is inscribed. Anthony Wilden notes that
the Other is … the locus of the ‘law of desire,’ the locus of the incest prohibition and the phallus. According to Lacan, the Other … is the only place from which it is possible to say “I am who I am.” The paradox of identity and autonomy which this involves—identical to or identified with what?—puts us in the position of desiring what the Other desires: we desire what the Other desires we desire. (Quoted in MacCannell, 131)
Having performed their assigned roles, “he” and “the goddess/woman” depart the poem, and the implied womb becomes an explicit “room” in which we find “all / manner of men, a / throng, and bodies of women, writhing.” Note the contrast between “all / manner of men, a / throng,” which encodes an implicitly hierarchical sampling of “men” subsumed to an essentialized “man’s world,” and “bodies of women, writhing,” which continues to specify and to delimit women’s “function.”
Note also the extraordinary weight that “writhing” brings to the text: at once horrific and ecstatic in its shadings, it is far too polysemous and overdetermined to call forth anything other than “a great, though seemingly silent sound”—which may be the very echo or trace of the literal production of the word, its “writing”—after which “I” takes leave of this visionary company and feels his “own heart lighten.”
“I” does not, however, take leave of the poem, but stays to deliver, in the final quatrain, an envoi that serves as coda to the poem, and to the book. The strategy here is to recuperate four common phatic phrases and through them to interrogate the agency, articulation, cognition, and epistemology by which his own or any subjectivity might gain a purchase on the world: “What do you do, / what do you say, / what do you think, / what do you know.”
“I” speaks, and again we ask: to whom? “All manner of men,” perhaps; but then perhaps not all—and what of “women”? Given that “I” to be “I” requires a “you,” this particular “I” seems to require an interlocutor inscribed within a no less particular masculine discourse. According to Judith Butler,
Signification harbors … ‘agency.’ The rules that govern … [that is] enable and restrict the intelligible assertion of an “I” … are partially structured along matrices of gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality…. When the subject is said to be constituted, that means simply that the subject is a consequence of certain rule-governed discourses. (14)
In closing let me cite Lacan, who said, “Love is a sign that we are changing discourses.”5
NOTES
1 I am indebted to Mark Seltzer and Barrett Watten for their careful reading and discussion of this essay, the final version of which has benefited in several particulars from their comments.
2 “Apple Scrapple,” 26. Although Creeley is not the “subject” of this poem, the register of its concerns is clearly congruent with his own articulations of “the masculine mode.”
3 A Room of One’s Own, quoted in Schwenger, 102.
4 Also see “Convivio” in Williams, Collected Poems, 2:199.
5 Quoted in MacCannell, 167.
WORKS CITED
Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939. Minneapolis: University of Minnosota Press, 1985.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Creeley, Robert. The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Cited as CP in the text.
Kristeva, Julia. Language: The Unknown. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
MacCannell, Juliet Flower. Figuring Lacan. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986.
Schwenger, Peter. “The Masculine Mode.” In Elaine Showalter, ed., Speaking of Gender. New York: Routledge, 1989.
Sorrentino, Gilbert. Corrosive Sublimate. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1971.
Williams, William Carlos. Collected Poems. Ed. Christopher MacGowan and A. Walton Litz (New York: New Directions, 1991).
PUBLICATION: The Person (1991), 9:159–64.
KEYWORDS: New American poetry; gender; subjectivity; readings.
LINKS: Ted Pearson, “The Force of Even Intervals: Toward a Reading of Vernal Aspects” (PJ 2), “Some Remarks on Method” (PJ 3), “Things Made Known” (PJ 10), “Unit Structures” (PJ 5); Françoise de Laroque, “What Is the Sex of the Poets?” (PJ 4); Jerry Estrin, “Penultimate Witness: On Emmanuel Hocquard” (PJ 8); Jackson Mac Low, “Sketch toward a Close Reading of Three Poems from Bob Perelman’s Primer” (PJ 2); Laura Moriarty, “The Modern Lyric” (PJ 7); Nick Piombino, “Towards an Experiential Syntax” (PJ 5); “Robert Creeley and the Politics of the Person” (PJ 9); Ron Silliman, “Composition as Action” (PJ 3); Barrett Watten, “The Politics of Style” (Guide; PJ 1).
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY: The Grit (San Francisco: Trike, 1976); The Blue Table (San Francisco: Trike, 1979); Soundings (Blue Bell, Pa.: Singing Horse, 1980); Ellipsis (San Francisco: Trike, 1981); Coulomb’s Law (San Francisco: Square Zero, 1984); Mnemonics (San Francisco: Gaz, 1985); Catenary Odes (Oakland: O Books, 1987); Evidence: 1975– 1989 (San Francisco: Gaz, 1989); Planetary Gear (New York: Roof, 1991); Acoustic Masks (Tenerife, Spain: Zasterle, 1994); Songs Aside: 1992–2002 (Detroit: Past Tents, 2003); Encryptions (San Diego: Singing Horse, 2007).