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.