Constellations III The Expanded Field

Barone, Dennis. “A Note on John Smith’s ‘Philadelphia Newspapers Read Crossways.’” Barone introduces his discovery of an early American experiment in compositional procedures, a manuscript poem(?) written between 1767 and 1771 by Philadelphia Quaker John Smith. The poem anticipates the “cut-ups” of Tzara and Burroughs, the use of chance procedures after Cage and Mac Low, and the present-day interest in Flarf and conceptual writing.

PUBLICATION: Knowledge (1998), 10:149–50.

KEYWORDS: Language writing; conceptualism; method; history.

LINKS: John Smith, “Philadelphia Newspapers Read Crossways” (PJ 10); Daniel Davidson, “Bureaucrat, My Love” (PJ 10); Jackson Mac Low, “Pieces o’ Six—XII and XXIII” (PJ 6); Dmitrii Prigov, “Conceptualism and the West” (PJ 8); Kit Robinson, “Bob Cobbing’s Blade” (PJ 1); Rod Smith, from “CIA Sentences” (PJ 10).

Finkelstein, Norman. “The Problem of the Self in Recent American Poetry.” Finkelstein counters arguments he identifies with the differing tendencies of deep imagism and Language writing and defends the ineradicability of self in poetry. Neither alienated nor fragmented subjectivity can silence the expressive undertow that animates any significant poem.

PUBLICATION: The Person (1991), 9:3–10.

KEYWORDS: lyric poetry; subjectivity; postmodernism; identity.

LINKS: Rae Armantrout, “Mainstream Marginality” (Guide; PJ 6); David Benedetti, “Fear of Poetic (Social) Knowledge: Why Some People Don’t Like (Language) Poetry” (PJ 10); Maxine Chernoff, “The Fence of Character” (PJ 5); Norman Fischer, “The Poetics of Lived Experience and the Concept of the Person” (PJ 9); Lyn Hejinian, “The Person and Description” (PJ 9); Kofi Natambu, “The Multicultural Aesthetic: Language, ‘Art,’ and Politics in the United States Today” (PJ 9); “Robert Creeley and the Politics of the Person” (PJ 9); Leslie Scalapino and Ron Silliman, “What/Person: From an Exchange” (Guide; PJ 9); “Symposium on the Person” (PJ 9).

Guattari, Félix. “Language, Consciousness, and Society.” In an essay written for a glasnost-era conference in the USSR, the antipsychoanalytic theorist addresses the production of subjectivity in the global era. He argues for a polyphonic subjectivity circulating around “modules of intensity” or “ritornellos” that are modeled on “the poet’s play of language.”

PUBLICATION: The Person (1991), 9:106–15.

KEYWORDS: psychoanalysis; language; subjectivity; collectivism.

LINKS: Félix Guattari, “Text for the Russians” (PJ 8); Kathy Acker, “Ugly” (Guide; PJ 7); Abigail Child, “The Exhibit and the Circulation” (PJ 7); Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, “I(s)” (Guide; PJ 9); George Hartley, “Althusser Metonymy China Wall” (PJ 10); Yulia Latinina, “Folklore and ‘Novoyaz’” (PJ 9); Harryette Mullen, “Miscegenated Texts and Media Cyborgs: Technologies of Body and Soul” (Guide; PJ 9); Lev Rubinshtein, “Momma Was Washing the Window Frame” (PJ 8).

Howe, Fanny. “Purgatory: All from Nothing.” Howe charts the relation of Purgatory as a metaphysical “nonplace” to the literatures of dispersal and exile, in particular the modernism of Joyce and Beckett. The “turn to religion”—the necessity for considering the religious underpinnings of modernity—intersects the via negativa of poetic representation.

PUBLICATION: Elsewhere (1989), 8:92–94.

KEYWORDS: religion; modernism; metaphysics; space.

LINKS: Fanny Howe, “Silliman’s Paradise” (PJ 6); Mikhail Dziubenko, “‘New Poetry’ and Perspectives for Philology” (PJ 8); Norman Fischer, “The Old City” (PJ 8); Paul A. Green, “Elsewhere” (PJ 8); Inagawa Masato, “For a Biography of the Redeemed” (PJ 8); Jed Rasula, “On Rothenberg’s Revised Technicians of the Sacred” (PJ 6); Nathaniel Tarn, “Exile out of Silence into Cunning” (PJ 8).

Latinina, Yulia. “Folklore and ‘Novoyaz.’” Latinina examines the folkloric aspects of Soviet ideology under Stalin. Premodern Russian folklore, as a “primordially collective” set of representations, intersected with state ideology, which in its formulaic repetition became a kind of folklore in itself. Soviet collectivity occurred as a system of cultural metaphors.

PUBLICATION: The Person (1991), 9:116–26.

KEYWORDS: ideology; linguistics; Russian poetics; cultural studies.

LINKS: Michael Davidson, “‘Hey Man, My Wave!’: The Authority of Private Language” (Guide; PJ 6); Félix Guattari, “Text for the Russians” (PJ 8); George Lakoff, “The Public Aspect of the Language of Love” (PJ 6); Bob Perelman, “Good and Bad/Good and Evil: Pound, Céline, and Fascism” (Guide; PJ 6); Viktor Shklovsky, “Plotless Literature: Vasily Rozanov” (Guide; PJ 1).

“The Poetics of Everyday Life.” The contributors to this 1988 symposium—Lyn Hejinian, Michael Davidson, Norman Fischer, Jerry Estrin, Bill Luoma, Ben Friedlander, and Dodie Bellamy—explore diverse approaches to representing experience in literary form. Everyday life is described in terms of: personhood; ideology; self-reflexivity; unrepresentability; architecture; late capitalism; complex “states of affairs”; lyric presence; and sexual desire.

PUBLICATION: The Person (1991), 9:166–205.

KEYWORDS: experience; subjectivity; postmodernism; time.

LINKS: Ed Friedman, “How Space Stations Gets Written” (PJ 5); “Robert Creeley and the Politics of the Person” (PJ 9); Kit Robinson, “Time and Materials: The Workplace, Dreams, and Writing” (Guide; PJ 9); “Symposium on Narrative” (PJ 5); “Symposium on the Person” (PJ 9); “Symposium: Postmodern?” (PJ 7); Robin Winters, “Landlords / do not …” (PJ 6); John Woodall, “The Maze System” (PJ 9).

Prigov, Dimitrii. “Conceptualism and the West.” Prigov claims there is a fundamental distinction between Western conceptual art and Moscow conceptualism. While the former reflects the ubiquity of the commodity form, the latter reflects a culture from which things have been abstracted, in the absence of the commodity, leaving language in their place.

PUBLICATION: Elsewhere (1989), 8:12–16.

KEYWORDS: Russian poetics; conceptualism; postmodernism; critical theory.

LINKS: Erik Bulatov, I Am Going; Disappearing Clouds (PJ 8); Margaret Crane and Jon Winet, from This Is Your Life (PJ 9); Tina Darragh, “Error Message” (PJ 5); Jerry Estrin, “Cold Heaven: The Uses of Monumentality” (Guide; PJ 9); Connie Fitzsimons, The Oath (PJ 7); Howard Fried, “The Museum Reaction Piece” (PJ 5); Doug Hall, “The Bridesmaid” (detail from Steps of City Hall, San Francisco) (PJ 10); Carla Harryman, “Pedestal/Tulip Chair,” from Chairs of Words (PJ 10); Lev Rubinshtein, “Momma Was Washing the Window Frame” (PJ 8); Fiona Templeton, “My Work Telling the Story of Narrative in It” (PJ 5); Barrett Watten, “On Explanation: Art and the Language of Art-Language” (PJ 3); John Woodall, detail from Gim-Crack (PJ 9).

Retallack, Joan. “Blue Notes on the Know Ledge.” Retallack’s essay on the epistemology of blue, or the blue of epistemology, is a postmodern improvisation employing provocative wordplay and multiple juxtapositions. The result, an instance of “poethics,” is a polysemic indictment of universal knowledge and a polyphonic invitation to a contrary field of play.

PUBLICATION: Knowledge (1998), 10:39–54.

KEYWORDS: philosophy; feminism; knowledge; method.

LINKS: Richard Blevins, “‘The Single Intelligence’: The Formation of Robert Creeley’s Epistemology” (PJ 9); Beverly Dahlen, “Forbidden Knowledge” (Guide; PJ 4); Johanna Drucker, “Women and Language” (PJ 4); Lyn Hejinian, “La Faustienne” (PJ 10); Erica Hunt, “Beginning at Bottom” (PJ 3); Ted Pearson, “Things Made Known” (PJ 10); Reva Wolf, “Thinking You Know” (Guide; PJ 10).

“Robert Creeley and the Politics of the Person.” Five poets/critics—Barrett Watten, Richard Blevins, Alan Davies, Susan Howe, and Ted Pearson—take up the status of “the person” in Robert Creeley’s autobiographical poetry. Imbued with spontaneous dynamics and a skeptical relation to knowledge, personhood in Creeley represents: presentist language; “single intelligence”; emotional immediacy; homosociality; and a defense of authorship.

PUBLICATION: The Person (1991), 9:138–65.

KEYWORDS: New American poetry; subjectivity; lyric poetry; gender.

LINKS: William Corbett, “Harwood/Walker and Raworth” (PJ 2); Alan Davies, “Motor Mouth” (PJ 5); Norman Finkelstein, “The Problem of the Self in Recent American Poetry” (PJ 9); Ben Friedlander, “Lyrical Interference” (PJ 9); Robert Glück, “Fame” (PJ 10); Jackson Mac Low, “Some Ways Philosophy Has Helped to Shape My Work” (Guide; PJ 3); Ted Pearson, “Unit Structures” (PJ 5); Laura Moriarty, “The Modern Lyric” (PJ 7); Ron Silliman, “The Dysfunction of Criticism: Poets and the Critical Tradition of the Anti-Academy” (PJ 10); “Symposium on the Person” (PJ 9); Barrett Watten, “What I See in How I Became Hettie Jones” (PJ 10).

Rosenberg, Jim. “Openings: The Connection Direct.” Rosenberg’s 1991 essay is an early, utopian forecast of the dawn of the digital age. New media’s interactivity and hypertextuality will extend possibilities of writing into unforeseen (but now enacted) possibilities, fully realizing its open, nonlinear potential: “We haven’t yet learned to start writing.”

PUBLICATION: Knowledge (1998), 10:236–43.

KEYWORDS: media; postmodernism; writing; method.

LINKS: Pierre Alferi, “Seeking a Sentence” (Guide; PJ 10); Bruce Andrews, “Total Equals What: Poetics and Praxis” (Guide; PJ 6); Dennis Barone, “A Note on John Smith’s ‘Philadelphia Newspapers Read Crossways’” (PJ 10); Johanna Drucker, “Hypergraphy: A Note on Maurice Lemaître’s Roman Hypergraphique” (Guide; PJ 6); Tom Mandel, “Codes/Texts: Reading S/Z” (PJ 2); Nick Piombino, “Towards an Experiential Syntax” (PJ 5); Joan Retallack, “Blue Notes on the Know Ledge” (PJ 10); Kit Robinson, “Pleasanton/Embassy Suite” (PJ 10); John Zorn, “Memory and Immorality in Musical Composition” (Guide; PJ 9).

Shurin, Aaron. “The Irruptive Text.” As an alternative to the diminished referentiality of postmodern signification, Shurin locates a “romance of the referent” in H. Ryder Haggard’s fiction as a model for his textual encounters with contemporary poets like Ronald Johnson, David Melnick, and Michael Palmer. Texts become erotic landscapes of discovery.

PUBLICATION: Elsewhere (1989), 8:87–91.

KEYWORDS: narrative; queer; meaning; readings.

LINKS: Aaron Shurin, “As Known” (PJ 9); “Orphée: The Kiss of Death” (PJ 10); Leslie Scalapino, “Aaron Shurin’s Elsewhere” (PJ 8); 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); Bruce Boone, “A Narrative Like a Punk Picture: Shocking Pinks, Lavenders, Magentas, Sickly Greens” (PJ 5); Robert Glück, “His Heart Is a Lute Held Up: Poe and Bataille” (Guide; PJ 2); Laura Moriarty, “Sex and Language” (PJ 8); Andrew Ross, “The Death of Lady Day” (Guide; PJ 8); Warren Sonbert, “Narrative Concerns” (Guide; PJ 5).

Toscano, Rodrigo. “Early Morning Prompts for Evening Takes; or, Roll ’Em.” Toscano presents a montage of challenges and hesitations, in a form of dialectical questioning, to demands of poetry and politics. As praxis, the poem works through aspects of negativity that lurk in the poet’s relation to gender, class, community, and work—as an invocation to action.

PUBLICATION: Knowledge (1998), 10:223–25.

KEYWORDS: poetry; critical theory; subjectivity; negativity.

LINKS: Michael Davidson, seven poems (PJ 10); Jean Day, “Moving Object” (PJ 9); Michael Gottlieb, five poems (PJ 10); Pamela Lu, from “Intermusement” (PJ 10); Bill Luoma, “Astrophysics and You” (PJ 9); Travis Ortiz, from “variously, not then” (PJ 10); Lisa Samuels, two poems (PJ 10); Peter Seaton, “An Example from the Literature” (Guide; PJ 6); Gavin Selerie, from Roxy (PJ 8); Hung Q. Tu, “very similitude” (PJ 10); Chris Tysh, from “Dead Letters” (PJ 10).