The Marginalization of Poetry

Bob Perelman

University of Pennsylvania
bperelme@pennsas

If poems are eternal occasions, then 
the pre-eternal context for the following

was a panel on "The Marginalization
of Poetry" at the American Comp.

Lit. Conference in San Diego, on 
February 8, 1991, at 2:30 P.M.:

"The Marginalization of Poetry"--it almost 
goes without saying. Jack Spicer wrote, 

"No one listens to poetry," but 
the question then becomes, who is 

Jack Spicer? Poets for whom he 
matters would know, and their poems

would be written in a world
in which that line was heard,

though they'd scarcely refer to it. 
Quoting or imitating another poet's line 

is not benign, though at times 
the practice can look like flattery. 

In the regions of academic discourse,
the patterns of production and circulation

are different. There, it--again--goes 
without saying that words, names, terms

are repeatable: citation is the prime
index of power. Strikingly original language

is not the point; the degree 
to which a phrase or sentence 

fits into a multiplicity of contexts 
determines how influential it will be. 

"The Marginalization of Poetry": the words 
themselves display the dominant lingua franca 

of the academic disciplines and, conversely, 
the abject object status of poetry: 

it's hard to think of any 
poem where the word "marginalization" occurs. 

It is being used here, but 
this may or may not be 

a poem: the couplets of six 
word lines don't establish an audible 

rhythm; perhaps they haven't, to use 
the Calvinist mercantile metaphor, "earned" their

right to exist in their present
form--is this a line break 

or am I simply chopping up 
ineradicable prose? But to defend this 

(poem) from its own attack, I'll 
say that both the flush left 

and irregular right margins constantly loom 
as significant events, often interrupting what 

I thought I was about to 
write and making me write something 

else entirely. Even though I'm going 
back and rewriting, the problem still 

reappears every six words. So this, 
and every poem, is a marginal 

work in a quite literal sense.
Prose poems are another matter: but 

since they identify themselves as poems
through style and publication context, they 

become a marginal subset of poetry, 
in other words, doubly marginal. Now 

of course I'm slipping back into 
the metaphorical sense of marginal which, 

however, in an academic context is 
the standard sense. The growing mass 

of writing on "marginalization" is not 
concerned with margins, left or right 

--and certainly not with its own. 
Yet doesn't the word "marginalization" assume 

the existence of some master page 
beyond whose justified (and hence invisible) 

margins the panoplies of themes, authors, 
movements, general objects of study exist 

in all their colorful, handlettered marginality? 
This master page reflects the functioning 

of the profession, where the units
of currency are variously denominated prose: 

the paper, the article, the book.
All critical prose can be seen 

as elongated, smooth-edged rectangles of writing, 
the sequences of words chopped into 

arbitrary lines by typesetters (Ruth in 
tears amid the alien corn), and 

into pages by commercial bookmaking processes. 
This violent smoothness is the visible 

sign of the writer's submission to 
norms of technological reproduction. "Submission" is 

not quite the right word, though: 
the finesse of the printing indicates 

that the author has shares in 
the power of the technocratic grid; 

just as the citations and footnotes 
in articles and university press books

are emblems of professional inclusion. But 
hasn't the picture become a bit 

binary? Aren't there some distinctions to 
be drawn? Do I really want 

to invoke Lukacs's antinomies of bourgeois 
thought where rather than a conceptually 

pure science that purchases its purity 
at the cost of an irrational 

and hence foul subject matter we 
have the analogous odd couple of 

a centralized, professionalized, cross-referenced criticism
                                                         studying
marginalized, inspired (i.e., amateur), singular poetries? 

Do I really want to lump 
The Closing of the American Mind, 

Walter Jackson Bate's biography of Keats, 
and Anti-Oedipus together and oppose them

to any poem which happens to 
be written in lines? Doesn't this 

essentialize poetry in a big way?
Certainly some poetry is thoroughly opposed 

to prose and does depend on 
the precise way it's scored onto 

the page: beyond their eccentric margins, 
both Olson's Maximus Poems and Pound's 

Cantos tend, as they progress, toward 
the pictoral and gestural: in Pound 

the Chinese ideograms, musical scores, hieroglyphs, 
heart, diamond, club, and spade emblems, 

little drawings of the moon and 
of the winnowing tray of fate; 

or those pages late in Maximus 
where the orientation of the lines 

spirals more than 360 degrees--one 
spiralling page is reproduced in holograph. 

These sections are immune to standardizing 
media: to quote them you need 

a photocopier not a word processor. 
In a similar vein, the work 

of some contemporary writers associated more 
or less closely with the language 

movement avoids standardized typographical grids and 
is as self-specific as possible: Robert 

Grenier's Sentences, a box of 500 
poems printed on 5 by 8 

notecards, or his recent work in 
holograph, often scrawled; the variable leading 

and irregular margins of Larry Eigner's 
poems; Susan Howe's writing which uses 

the page like a canvas--from 
these one could extrapolate a poetry 

where publication would be a demonstration 
of private singularity approximating a neo-Platonic
 

vanishing point, anticipated by Klebnikov's handcolored, 
single-copy books produced in the twenties. 

Such an extrapolation would be inaccurate 
as regards the writers I've mentioned, 

and certainly creates a false picture 
of the language movement, some of 

whose members write very much for 
a if not the public. But 

still there's another grain of false 
truth to my Manichean model of 

a prosy command-center of criticism and 
unique bivouacs on the poetic margins 

so I'll keep this binary in 
focus for another spate of couplets. 

Parallel to such self-defined poetry, there's 
been a tendency in some criticism 

to valorize if not fetishize the 
unrepeatable writing processes of the masters

--Gabler's Ulysses where the drama of 
Joyce's writing mind becomes the shrine 

of a critical edition; the facsimile 
of Pound's editing-creation of what became 

Eliot's Waste Land; the packets into 
which Dickinson sewed her poems, where  

the sequences possibly embody a higher 
order; the notebooks in which Stein 

and Toklas conversed in pencil: having 
seen them, works like Lifting Belly 

can easily be read as interchange 
between bodily writers or writerly bodies 

in bed. The feeling that three's 
a crowd there is called up 

and cancelled by the print's intimacy 
and tact. In all these cases, 

the particularity of the author's mind, 
body, and situation is the object 

of the reading. But it's time 
to dissolve or complicate this binary.

What about a work like Glas? 
--hardly a dully smooth critical monolith.

Doesn't it use the avant-garde (ancient 
poetic adjective!) device of collage more 

extensively than most poems? Is it 
really all that different from, 

say, the Cantos? (Yes. The Cantos's 
incoherence reflects Pound's free-fall writing situation; 

Derrida's institutional address is central. Derrida's 
cut threads, unlike Pound's, always reappear 

farther along.) Nevertheless Glas easily outstrips 
most contemporary poems in such "marginal" 

qualities as undecidability and indecipherability--not 
to mention the 4 to 10 margins 

on each page. Compared to it, 
these poems look like samplers upon 

which are stitched the hoariest platitudes. 
Not to wax polemical: there've been 

plenty of attacks on the voice 
poem, the experience poem, the numerous 

mostly free verse descendants of Wordsworth's 
spots of time: first person meditations 

where the meaning of life becomes 
visible after 30 lines. In its 

own world, this poetry is far 
from marginal: widely published and taught, 

it has established substantial means of 
reproducing itself. But with its distrust 

of intellectuality (apparently indistinguishable from
                                             overintellectuality)
and its reliance on authenticity as 

its basic category of judgment (and 
the poems principally exist to be 

judged), it has become marginal with 
respect to the more theory-oriented sectors 

of the university, the sectors which 
have produced such concepts as "marginalization." 

As a useful antidote, let me 
quote Glas: "One has to understand 

that he is not himself before 
being Medusa to himself. . . . To be 

oneself is to-be-Medusa'd . . . . Dead sure of 
self. . . . Self's dead sure biting (death)." 

Whatever this might mean, and it's
possibly aggrandizingly post-feminist, man swallowing woman,

nevertheless it seems a step toward 
a more communal and critical way 

of writing and thus useful. The 
puns and citations that lubricate Derrida's 

path, making it too slippery for 
all but experienced cake walkers are 

not the point. What I want 
to propose in this anti-generic or 

over-genred writing is the possibility, not 
of genreless writing, but rather of 

a polygeneric, hermaphroditic writing. Glas, for 
all its transgression of critical decorum 

is still, in its treatment of 
the philosophical tradition, a highly decorous 

work; it is marginalia, and the 
master page of Hegel is still 

Hegel, and Genet is Hegel too. 
But a self-critical writing, poetry, minus 

the shortcircuiting rhetoric of vatic privilege, 
might dissolve the antinomies of marginality.