To France and Back: New Circuits in American Poetry
| June 25, 2020 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 25, Number 3, May 2015 |
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Matthew B. Smith (bio)
Northern Illinois University
Abstract
This essay shows that translation has redefined the parameters of poetry in the United States through a case study of two works by the contemporary poets Andrew Zawacki and Bill Luoma. Both responded to the French translation of their poems with a revised or new work in English; whereas Zawacki takes advantage of this new pattern of circulation to enrich and embellish his poem, Luoma documents its obstacles and setbacks. In both cases, these works take up and re-examine the problems and challenges posed by translation. They also signal a new kind of poetry that directly engages with the foreign scene of its circulation.
A little before the poet Andrew Zawacki published “Georgia” in his book, Petals of Zero, Petals of One in 2009, he sat down with his French translator, Sika Fakambi, in her sunny house in Fresnes, working “over many days and many drafts” to translate his poem into French, “hashing out lines and ideas and sonic analogs” (Zawacki, “On Slovenia”). Through the course of these sunny meetings, Zawacki made many promising discoveries in the French translation; in fact, so pleased was he with what he found that he reworked many lines in the original, which had been published earlier that year in the journal 1913: A Journal of Forms, according to their French translation. “I vowed,” he later stated, “that I should never publish anything before it got translated!” (“Tremolo”). Thirteen years prior to this, Bill Luoma contemplated a list of 101 questions sent to him by a group of translators working collectively to bring his My Trip to New York City into French. Luoma later compiled his responses to their questions to create a list poem. Much has been written about what happens to a text in translation. But what to make of texts such as these when they come, so to speak, back home?1
Questions of how poetry circulates and who constitutes its publics loom large in these works, not least because translation, as a practice with growing prestige and as a prominent discourse in both commercial and academic spheres, has increasingly larger stakes in poetry’s circulation.2 This is especially the case in the Franco-American context, where a strong mutual interest is enabled and facilitated by a network of institutions, funding agencies, publishing houses, periodicals, and reading series, not to mention an overlapping canon of writers and a long history of exchange.3 Translation, then, has given rise to a new set of circumstances for poetry: not only is it something that happens to poetry, but its questions and problems often become matters for poets to take up, re-examine, and respond to in their work. Questions of circulation and publics, though, are no less present at a work’s inception, and a writer’s choices—from style to publication contexts—orient a work’s possible trajectories. My intention, then, is to track these two poems as they move from journals and chapbooks into French translation and then back into English in subsequent books.4 As two American poets writing roughly in the same period, Zawacki and Luoma take approaches—borrowing from Bourdieu, we could use the term dispositions—that stand in stark contrast to each other. If Zawacki’s poetry has a more universal impulse with its ontological concerns and its desire to dazzle and disorient with a barrage of linguistic devices, Luoma’s work is involved more with local questions of social communities whose activity he documents with a sort of plain-speech esthetic of casual, offhand commentary. In other words, Zawacki’s text can be characterized in general by an excess of stylization; Luoma’s by its absence. The publics these opposing styles imagine and enable are fundamentally at odds. This is expressed in the poets’ practices—encompassing choices at once stylistic, ideological, and pragmatic—and, ultimately, in the ways they respond to the set of circumstances created by the practices and institutions of translation.
Presently, translation often informs or exists alongside increasingly popular poetic practices such as rewriting, appropriation, multilingual writing, and digital poetry, whose popularity stems from modernist experiments and mid-century movements such as concrete poetry and Oulipo.5 Marjorie Perloff has made a compelling case for linking the rise of these practices to shifts in communication and information technology in a globalized world. For Perloff, citation, ekphrasis, “writing through,” constraint-based experiments, found language, récriture, translation, and intertextuality are all instances of “unoriginal writing,” the import of which is now unquestionable in the age of the Internet, where writing has given way to various forms of rewriting (17). This is the “logical form of ‘writing’ in an age of literally mobile or transferable text—text that can be readily moved from one digital site to another or from print to screen, that can be appropriated, transformed, or hidden by all sorts of means and for all sorts of purposes” (Perloff 17). The writers in question here are certainly participating in this kind of “unoriginal writing.” Zawacki’s text, after all, began as a translation, and Luoma’s “Annotation” is clearly an appropriation of another pre-existing text. But there is a significant difference between “rewriting” as a poetic strategy undertaken by a writer and “rewriting”—or, to be more precise, translation—as a cultural phenomenon to which a writer then responds. Translation, in these cases, not only refers to a procedure of writing, but also to a social trajectory, in particular one that begins with an original poem composed in English, then moves via translation by others into another language, then ends with a new version in the original language. More specifically, I am interested in how this trajectory—its movement in and out of various domestic and foreign publishing contexts—finds expression in these poems.
Whereas recent criticism such as Perloff’s has sought to examine the influence of technology (specifically, the Internet) on practices of rewriting, I am more concerned here with the ways that writers respond to the circulation of their own texts.6 To be sure, there is a long history of fruitful exchanges between poets and their translators; but for the exchange itself to become matter—the subject, even—for new poetic experiments attests to a new shift in social circumstances.7 Although many writers have drawn on, and continue to draw on, translation in their poetry in diverse ways (Pound’s “Homage to Sextus Propertius,” Zukofsky’s homophonic translation of Catullus, Jack Spicer’s playful adaptation in After Lorca, Jerome Rothenberg’s “total translations” of indigenous writing, or Caroline Bergvall’s more recent catalogue of translations of Dante in her piece “Via” represent just a small sample of a wide range of approaches), few, to my knowledge, have approached translation from this angle.8 Bill Luoma and Andrew Zawacki both exploit the opportunity afforded by these new circumstances in distinct ways. Whereas Zawacki’s estheticizing approach to translation leads him to enrich and embellish his original poem, Luoma turns his attention to the social labor of translation by exposing the reading habits of his translators in a new work.
Before Andrew Zawacki sat down with Fakambi to work on the translation of “Georgia,” his poem had already appeared as the co-winner of the 1913 prize in 1913: A Journal of Forms in early 2009.9 By this time, Zawacki had already published two full-length poetry books, By Reason of Breakings (2002) and Anabranch (2004), which were received by poetry enthusiasts with great acclaim and which won distinguished awards and prizes. His first published work, however, was a volume of Slovenian writing from 1945–1995 that he edited (Buffalo, NY: White Pine Press, 1999). Since the mid-nineties, he had been—and continues to be—actively involved in the field of poetry as an editor, translator, and critic (he is currently an Associate Professor of English and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Georgia). He has also published several chapbooks and another full-length collection, Videotape (2013), since his third book, Petals of Zero, Petals of One, came out. When Zawacki began writing “Georgia,” he probably hadn’t given much thought to how the poem would be impacted by its future French translation. But translation of another sort was clearly on his mind at the outset. According to Zawacki, “Georgia,” a poem of twenty-six pages (548 lines), began as a translation of Philippe Soupault’s smaller poem of the same name and expanded into its own while remaining loosely patterned on the original’s anaphoric repetition of the word “Georgia.”10 Though broken up and slightly modified in translation, Soupault’s entire poem of twenty-eight lines makes it into Zawacki’s “Georgia.” The decision to use a modernist poem as a sort of anchor is not without significance. To start with, it provides a clear intertext for Zawacki’s poem, signalling in this way that “Georgia” is to be read in relation to other modernist poetry. Soupault’s poem isn’t the sole intertext. Zawacki also cites Maurice Blanchot, Louis Zukofsky, and William Carlos Williams, among others. If writing can suggest the context in which or against which it wishes to be read, which I believe it inevitably does by indexing various social contexts through tone, register, visual design, references, allusions, and a host of other stylistic mannerisms and devices, then Zawacki’s use of intertextuality asks that “Georgia” be read in relation to other works of literature. This may seem an obvious point, but when viewed in comparison to Luoma’s modes of social address below, we see that it is not to be taken for granted.
One can readily identify traces of Soupault’s style throughout Zawacki’s poem. The flashy, incongruous metaphors, the jarring juxtapositions, and the spew of colorful descriptive adjectives of Zawacki’s “Georgia” strike a strident Surrealist note.11 Consider, for example, the visual clash and simultaneous merge of opposites in “the skuzzy drag queen dawn” (4), where a traditionally poetic subject or symbol—dawn—has anthropomorphized into a socially marginalized figure such that, in spite of its resultant connotative sparks, the two images remain fundamentally irreconcilable. Notice, too, the overlay of horticultural and bodily images as well as the violent corporeal transfiguration in the lines: “I prune your buds / unbutton my ribs / pot you inside like a bonsai Georgia” (8). This sort of bodily transformation seems almost cartoonish, and Zawacki, acutely aware of this—“it’s not unlike a kiddie cartoon / fluorescent way out of proportion”—continues to multiply its effects until it becomes unimaginable: “I see horses / running through diamonds Georgia I / can’t hold / it all in my head” (25). This is characteristic of Zawacki’s style. Rare words and garish metaphors always trump plain, unadorned language, just as figurative modes of expression are favored over their literal counterparts. This also holds true when Zawacki resorts to translation. While at times he modernizes Soupault’s poem—“Je lance des flèches dans la nuit Georgia (I shoot arrows into the night)” is rendered “I shoot bullets into the dark” (3)—most of Zawacki’s decisions display a brazen Gallicizing tendency. Soupault’s “Je marche à pas de loup dans l’ombre Georgia” becomes, for instance, “I walk wolfstep into the shadow Georgia” (4, emphasis added). Instead of drawing on a more common idiom such as “I creep into the shadow” or “I slip into the shadow,” Zawacki translates the words literally to create a jarring neologism of a highly figurative nature. Similarly, Soupault’s “Je vois la fumée qui monte et qui fuit Georgia” (I see smoke rising and drifting off) is rendered “I see smoke it rises it quadrilles Georgia” and “Et le froid et le silence et la peur Georgia”(And the cold and the quiet and the fear) as “And the cold and soundless decibel” (4, emphasis added).12 French clearly inflects Zawacki’s choices here (as do specific phonetic concerns to which I return shortly). Quadrilles, an imaginative evocation of swirling circles, derives from French and visually flaunts this derivation with its “qu-” and “-ll-”; and decibel echoes faintly the French –dicible, as in indicible (unspeakable, unsayable), thereby creating a neat contrast with soundless. These translation choices may seem overreaching when viewed in isolation, but they are consonant with the poem’s overall style, a style that depends on many forms of inflated expression—hyperbole, adynaton, and, more generally, a conspicuous, self-conscious mannerism.
If drawing on Soupault gives Zawacki’s “Georgia” a clear intertext, then his tendency to over-translate in favor of French as well as to stud the text with French expressions and rare words gives the poem a cosmopolitan air of linguistic sophistication (I should mention that the poem is dedicated to Zawacki’s wife, Sandrine, who is French). But appropriation, Surrealist metaphor, and Gallic inflections are only three of the numerous poetic strategies Zawacki deploys in this poem. Indeed, although there is a general absence of meter and its traditional trappings, Zawacki exploits a wide range of linguistic phenomena with panache and flair. This is perhaps made possible by the framing device of the poem: the repeated apostrophe to “Georgia.” Although staged as a direct address, the poem has none of the urgency or intimacy associated with this device. Rather, the addressee functions as a stylistic placeholder, a sort of steady beat whose expected return and regularity binds together the vagaries of Zawacki’s style. And these vagaries are many. Just a partial list of linguistic and literary devices used in the poem would include word-play; assonance; alliteration; rhyme (slant, internal and external, rimes riches); anagrams and visual puns (“it’s aliment vs. ailment Georgia” [9]); shifts in register; phonetic, morpho-syntactic, and lexical disjunction; asemantic and nonsense speech; and a plethora of performative language where the text acts out what it says (“I’m an echo playing bumper cars in basilicas of Georgia Georgia”[24]). Within the larger apostrophic structure, none of these features dominates the poem; instead, no sooner does one feature flash forward than it fades and gives way to the next one, usually triggered by a sort of associative or metonymic link.13 It’s necessary to quote the poem at length in order to witness this at full effect:
a façade Georgia a fusillade the firing squad and the wall Georgia a cenotaph in the aftermath of petty Georgia your petticoat slipping pussy- and pistolwhipped son of a Georgia if I ever I swear if I if you ever so much as hint at Georgia I don’t know what I’d fixin’ to fix you know not what I would do but no one’s ever sure what they’re capable of so I try Georgia I try to remit this dragnet that dredges the ends of an earth what is it Georgia is it Georgia or is it not I can’t figure it Georgia ’twon’t stay in focus it doesn’t possess a center or an outside or an in like skipping a stone and the shale doesn’t sink or taming a tidal wave with a riding crop or swimming inside a prism Georgia (19–20)
With its abrupt shifts, the course of the excerpt is not easy to follow. From façade the poem moves via phonetic likeness to fusillade (note, again, the Gallic inflection), and from fusillade it opens through a semantic channel onto a scene of an execution (while maintaining a surface continuity through rhyme: façade, fusillade, squad). This scene is given period detail by the mention of the “petticoat slipping”—petticoat having sprung from the near homonym petty of the previous line—but no sooner is this scene offered than withdrawn, as the poem quickly shifts along thematic lines to a more contemporary depiction of violence with “pussy- and pistolwhipped son of a Georgia.” A first-person subject enters here as an irate Southerner whose threats suggests impending violence. Zawacki is careful here with his line breaks, granting a pause where the speaker’s temper might cause him to stutter:
if I ever
I swear if I
if you ever so much as hint at Georgia
I don’t know what I’d fixin’ to fix you
This low, regional register gives way to an arch and archaizing syntactic inversion—a clear signal of a higher, literary register: “know not what I would do.” (This is echoed a few lines later with ’twont). Then, after introducing a new, more contemplative first-person, the poem slips into poetic metaphor with “this dragnet that dredges the ends of the earth.” The speaker waxes philosophic for the next seven lines, mulling over an unspecified phenomenological paradox in terms reminiscent of Blanchot (whom, it bears repeating, Zawacki quotes elsewhere in the poem):
it doesn’t possess a center or an outside
or an in
It ends with three jarring poetic analogies, each of which seems to have abandoned its related term or explicatory purpose and drastically veered off in a different semantic direction, demonstrating in this way the speaker’s expressed lack of focus (“I can’t figure it Georgia / ’twont stay in focus”).
This excerpt illustrates what the poem does as a whole. It moves between a variety of thematic material—in this case from violence to philosophical aporia; elsewhere it dwells on the tension between technology and nature and man’s fraught relationship to both—while foregrounding a wide range of linguistic and poetic concerns. As can be seen, the poem doesn’t proceed in any linear manner nor does it follow any narrative arc. What’s more, no stable or coherent subject stands behind its language; instead, the many appearances of a first person pronoun posit as many possible subject positions rather than a single, socially identifiable speaker (at one point, the speaker states, “I is a shotgun shell” [11]). Semantically troubling, nonlinear, and disjointed, “Georgia” displays many characteristic traits of the experimental poetry of previous decades, beginning with the many Modernist movements at turn of the century and extending up to the Language Poets of the 1970s and ’80s. And yet there is no mistaking the fact that Zawacki’s poetry, though greatly influenced by these writers, belongs to another tradition entirely. The reasons for this are many. For one, the devices Zawacki employs are used for different purposes and therefore serve different ends. Whereas the Language poets, for example, had theorized and politicized their use of certain poetic strategies—and these were by no means wholly novel nor did they constitute a fixed, identifiable repertoire—Zawacki’s use of these same devices attests to a knowing poetic style. In other words, Zawacki showcases a sort of virtuosic savoir-faire—thereby signalling his poetic skill—but the tightly stitched surface of his style may obscure his other ostensible concerns. Behind this stitching may lurk a whole host of ontological and metaphysical concerns related to the kind of negative theology he has repeatedly alluded to in interviews and essays—and I trust his engagement with Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Levinas, Blanchot, and Jean-Luc Marion to be deep and sincere—but only infrequently do these concerns find just articulation.
What Zawacki’s poem accomplishes, then, is seemingly at odds with what he considers to be the objective of poetry. Indeed, the various interpretative paths made possible by his virtuosic display of style are overwhelmed, in his own conception of poetry, by metaphysics. Glossing Heidegger’s “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” Zawacki claims that “the poet’s role is to heal the ontological rift that has occurred since mortals took leave of Being and the gods fled the world” (“The Break is Not a Break” 165).14 The poet accomplishes this, according to Zawacki, through love, as this concept is articulated by Kiekegaard and Heidegger: “The poet’s ontological project of recovering Being of both the men and gods is, then, a type of love, as he converts the break that each has effected toward the other into a distance that promotes the possibility of a reunion with their own respective natures and with one another”(169). This is what Heidegger professes when he states: “To be a poet in destitute times means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods” (cited in “The Break is Not a Break” 168). The poet is the only one capable of accomplishing this fundamentally solitary task, since it is in him that the holy resides. As Zawacki makes clear, “By stepping forward, in a solitude occasioned by his fellow mortals’ amnesia and the god’s deliberate default, the poet entrusts himself to the holy that entrusts itself to him” (169). Although without relying on the facile notion of personal experience or without taking for granted a determined self, since, for Heidegger, the self is sacrificed as it steps into Being or into the Open, Zawacki’s understanding of poetry remains evokes a traditional romantic ideology, whereby the poet is a bard whose privileged position gives him a noble, even holy, purpose. Since the privileged poet must step forward “in a solitude occasioned by his fellow mortals’ amnesia,” he thus turns away from the world of social relations and toward an abstract category of Being.15 Following this line of thought, the poem must suspend its personal or social modes of address. It is in this respect that, in spite of his seemingly defiant style, Zawacki inscribes his work into the poetic tradition in which the poet plays the noble role of philosophic bard, one who addresses not the members of his society but absent gods. Although “Georgia” takes the form of a second-person mode of address, the addressee, like a transcendent deity, remains abstract and absent as a mere stylistic ploy. In this way, the poet’s metaphysics overshadows the social relevance of his poem, as the poem is meant to be read more as an unanswerable prayer than an intervention in a given cultural context.
Combining experimental devices with traditional poetic objectives defined much of the poetry of the ’90s and continues to this day. Zawacki himself acknowledges this in the work of Gustaf Sobin, a poet whose work stands as a major point of reference and source of inspiration for Zawacki, and in whose work he detects “the sense of being both archetypal and avant-garde” (“Towards the Blanched Alphabets”). This is because, for Zawacki, “Sobin’s poetry dances on a wire between largely traditional aims and an innovative style which, while emergent from Duncan, Olson, and Char and embraced by experimental writers, is as internally consistent and recognizable as Hopkins or Heraclitus” (“Towards the Blanched Alphabets”).16 The critic Stephen Burt gave wider recognition to this phenomenon in his 1998 review of Susan Wheeler’s Smokes, where he labeled this new tendency in poetry “Elliptical.” Here’s how he describes it:
Elliptical poets try to manifest a person who speaks the poem and reflects the poet while using all the verbal gizmos developed over the last few decades to undermine the coherence of speaking selves. They are post-avant-gardist, or post-“postmodern”: they have read (most of them) Stein’s heirs, and the “language writers,” and have chosen to do otherwise. (“Smokes”)
Additionally, as Burt later explained, “Elliptics seek the authority of the rebellious, they want to challenge their readers, violate decorum, surprise or explode assumptions about what belongs in a poem, or what matters in life, and to do so while meeting traditional lyric goals” (“The Elliptical Poets 346 emphasis added). As for what he means by traditional lyric goals, Burt says little. But he does make the surprising claim that these poets “want to entertain as thoroughly as, but not to resemble, television” (“Smokes”).17
Zawacki might contest any affiliation with Elliptical poetry, not to mention the notion of poetry as entertainment. But Burt’s brief sketch of Ellipticism provides a set of fitting terms for describing “Georgia” (as well as many other works too, which explains its unexpected popularity). We have already noted the ways Zawacki’s poem challenges the reader and undermines the notion of a coherent speaker. But there are many other features of “Georgia” that are helpfully explained by Burt’s Ellipticism. Here’s Burt: “[Elliptical poets] create inversions, homages, takeoffs on old or ‘classic’ poems” (“The Elliptical Poets” 348) (Zawacki’s use of Soupault’s poem is clearly an instance of this); “Elliptical poets like insistent, bravura forms, forms that can shatter and recoalesce, forms with repetends—sestinas, pantoums, or fantasias on single words” (“The Elliptical Poets 346) (“Georgia” is unmistakably a case of the latter, with its title serving as the repetend); “Elliptical love poems that declare ‘I am X, I am Y, I am Z’ where X, Y, Z are incompatible things” (“The Elliptical Poets” 347) (“I’m an echo playing bumper chars in basilicas of Georgia Georgia / a silhouette / I’m a satin flower / I’m a sick bag and the sick Georgia / an avalanche an insomniateque / a ruby-throated humming” [“Georgia” 24–25]). Burt’s catalogue of tendencies also includes jump-cut transitions—“one thought, one impression, tailgates another” (“The Elliptical Poets” 349)—and shifts in register “between low (or slangy) and high (or naively ‘poetic’) diction” (“Smokes”). Both disjunctive transitions and shifts in register are vividly present in the excerpt of “Georgia” cited above.18 But if Zawacki’s “Georgia” can be read within the framework of Ellipticism, it is not for its stylistic choices alone. By appealing to “the poetic” as a set of devices with little or no bearing on social matters, Ellipticism necessarily underplays the role of its own social context and mode of address. Indeed, its position depends on this very fact. Nonetheless, this poetic ideology arises within very specific institutional settings (remember Burt is a Harvard professor, prominent reviewer, and a poet himself). Indeed, the publishing context of “Georgia” supports and throws into sharper relief the esthetic features I’ve highlighted.
As the co-winner of the 1913 Prize for Poetry, “Georgia” first appeared already wearing a ribbon. In a field where blurbs by well-known poets and prizes granted by esteemed judges are increasingly the means of poetic legitimization, its introduction and endorsement by the poets Peter Gizzi and Cole Swensen already guarantees it a public for whom those standards of qualification matter.19 Gizzi’s praise of the work is telling: “[Zawacki] has defiantly written a new anthem to his new home, poetry, an ever present subaltern house of the blues and anvils, house of song, of sting and sung, of bling, and of sorrow” (Gizzi 25). Following this reasoning, “Georgia” is written for and about poetry itself. More importantly, it is written by one of poetry’s newest members. By committing himself to a specific conception of style—a standard practice of Elliptical poetry—Zawacki creates a “new home” that is less a “subaltern house of the blues and anvils,” as Gizzi would have it, than a prison-house of poetry. Yet, if “Georgia” is an “anthem” to poetry without overtly speaking about poetry itself, then it must signal its subject, as well as its belonging, in other less obvious ways. As I’ve noted, by passing quickly through a range of poetic devices, emotional registers, and topical themes, so quickly, in fact, that no single poetic strategy within its apostrophic structure can be isolated and deemed emblematic of the poem, Zawacki’s work is poetically pluralistic. This pluralism is matched and accentuated by the journal in which it appears. Founded by Sandra Doller in 2003, 1913 has an expansive board of directors, a team of interns, and a tendency to fill its pages with a wide and eclectic mix of writers, styles, and forms. With most of its issues nearing three hundred pages, it is a big journal, one that finds its contributors through open submissions and regular prize contests. Casting such a wide net doesn’t exclude the possibility of identifying preferred tendencies, stylistic tics, or related themes in each issue. The very nature of a journal where a diverse group of writing is published together encourages some sort of pattern recognition. The issue in which “Georgia” appears, for example, shares with this poem an interest in appropriation, translation, Surrealism, and linguistic cosmopolitanism. Moreover, the many overlapping frames of reference suggested by much of the work remain within the field of aesthetics (visual art, poetry, music, etc.). For a closer comparison of “Georgia” and the journal, consider Zawacki’s use of Soupault. This decision to draw on the text of a modern Surrealist writer resonates both with the journal’s fascination with all things modern as well as its interest in practices such as collage and appropriation. Just as Zawacki’s “Georgia” is “after Soupault,” so too are many poems in the issue “after” another writer or artist, such as Shin Yu Pai’s “Métaphysique d’éphèmere” written “after Joseph Cornell” or Renee Gladman’s piece “after Pina Bausch” (there are also poems written “after Donne” and “for Zukofsky”). No less represented in the issue are practices of ekphrasis and found language.20 Similarly, Zawacki’s surrealist language is complemented by this issue’s translation of the one-time friend of André Breton and cofounder of the Surrealist movement in Czechoslovakia, Viteslav Nezval. His piece “Parrot on a Motorcycle, or on the Craft of Poetry” offers fanciful definitions of poetic terms such as “image,” “association,” “rhythm,” “rhyme,” “assonance,” and “metaphor,” all of which shed light on Zawacki’s “Georgia” when the two pieces are read in conjunction. In brief, the pluralist tendencies of the journal, its panoply of forms and esthetics, mirrors Zawacki’s own style, with its myriad poetic devices and its appeal to modernist techniques. This style, combined with Zawacki’s desire to dazzle, is precisely what situates “Georgia” within the objectives and criteria of contemporary poetry’s more accepted ideologies and institutions. In many respects, this is what wins prizes.
But Zawacki’s rise within the institutions of poetry began even before the appearance of “Georgia” in 1913: A Journal of Forms. His second collection had won the endorsement of John Ashbery—“Reading Anabranch is like being rowed along the corridors of a flooded palace”—and C.D. Wright, who awarded one of the book’s sections, “Masquerade,” the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award on behalf of the Poetry Society of America, a controversial organization that also granted Zawacki’s poetic sequence Viatica from the same book the 2002 Cecile Hemley Memorial Award.21 Zawacki’s poem “Fermata” from this collection was also published in the esteemed pages of The New Yorker.22 Additionally, selections from “Masquerade” appeared in Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, published by the commercial publishing house Scribner. Endorsed by star poets, conferred prizes by the oldest and most established Poetry Society in the United States, published by a commercial publishing house and a large-circulation, highbrow magazine—Zawacki’s work had already begun circulating among the recognized venues of established poetry.23 In many ways, then, the ground had been laid for a favorable reception of “Georgia” within certain poetic institutions in the United States. Additionally, its engagement with French writers and the French language—exemplified by its translation of Soupault—began to imagine a French public, which it would soon find. By the time Sika Fakambi began translating “Georgia” in 2009, Zawacki’s poetry had already appeared in various French journals such as Action Poétique, Passage à l’Acte, Le Nouveau Recueil and Vacarme, and Zawacki had started translating works by the French poet Sébastien Smirou into English. Zawacki was thus amply prepared to assist Fakambi with her translation. In the process, he became aware of new possibilities for his original, and he took advantage of the poem’s not yet being collected in a book to make small but significant changes to it.
These changes are telling. For instance, what was “an explosive rigged in a micro chip” in the journal becomes “an explosive packed in a microchip” in the book (7). Moreover, “all hauntedlike Georgia” changes to “all haggardlike Georgia” (16); “lean out to know the distance” to “lean out to inquire of the distance” (17); and “the cold and soundless decibel” to “cold the inaudible decibel” (9, emphases added). Zawacki cites this latter change while discussing the productive relationship between translation and writing in an interview.
To give a brief example of translating becoming writing: I had a line in “Georgia” that read, “and cold the noiseless decibel.”24 In Sika’s version, the phrase became, “et ce froid et ces décibles inaudibles.” When I looked at that, the future of the so-called “original” phrase suddenly clarified itself: “inaudible decibel.” Beyond the not-so-striking oxymoron of a silent unit of noise, which is all the phrase initially had to recommend it (if that much), now a pair of –el sounds were in play—and more sexy to my eye for their ending anagrammatically: -le and –el. Moreover, “decibel” literally contains the other word’s “-dible,” although in a scrambled way, or rather “inaudible” seems to bloom into “decibel,” as silence might burst into sound. So thanks to the relative closeness of French and English and especially to Sika’s ear (or her eye?), I changed the line according to the phrasing she’d found—the translation as haint, come back to haunt its antecedent into surrogate, secondary speech. There were other cases like this throughout “Georgia”—I call them backdrafting and imagine them as filaments of smoke causing fire—, and I felt lucky the poem hadn’t been published in English yet. In fact I vowed, reversing the terms, I should never publish anything before it got translated! So maybe Benjamin is right, that a translation invigilates the “maturing process of the original language,” and that “the original undergoes a change” only in its “afterlife” as a translation. That a poem can’t arrive until it’s been carried into another language—this passage is what allows it to begin. (“Tremolo”)
Zawacki’s rich metaphors of backdrafting and haunting can be restated in plainer terms. What he means by “the future of the so-called ‘original’” is simply that through translation he is able to further craft his writing according to the stylistic principles and esthetic effects that most interest him. With inaudible, his objective seems to be to compress as much semantic, acoustic, and visual information into this line as possible, not to mention the gain from the marked French inflection, so that it resonates more with its surrounding text. The other changes can be characterized in the same way. Replacing rigged with packed in the line “an explosive packed in a microchip” gives rise to a semantic contrast between the outward-expanding motion of exploding and the inward-contracting motion of packing. Additionally, the k sound of packing amplifies the crackle—“the racket” and “clatter”—taking place before and after this line with its surplus of voiceless velar stops. Observe the sound patterning in the sequence that precedes the line in question:
they bicker and click
the clamors I mean
blur as if struck with a Lucifer match
guesswork Georgia
netherlight’s joke
I see smoke it rises it quadrilles . . . .(4, emphasis added)
Words such as shellacked, skuzzy, frisking, pixeled, are carefully plotted throughout the next few lines only to be followed by phrases such as “a dumdum blank to the clavicle Georgia” and “the clangors clang if you hearken Georgia” (5, 6). This dense patterning of sound is reflected on a thematic level, too, with frequent references made to noise and feedback (“the feedback Georgia / the anvil’s hymnal / a dial-tone looped in a flophouse Georgia” [6]). The same can be said with respect to Zawacki’s choice to change “all hauntedlike Georgia” to “all haggardlike Georgia” based on the French “hagard ou tout comme Georgia,” only this time the sought-after sound pattern is the voiced velar stop g (“frag,” “blitzkrieg,” “slug cocked snug in the six-shooter chamber”), which has the additional advantage here of visually rhyming while phonetically clashing with the following two lines: “a hangman Georgia / a hanged man Georgia” (16). Finally, the change from know to inquire of in the line “lean out to inquire of the distance” (17) (the French has évaluer le distance) illustrates Zawacki’s predilection for stylization and falls in line with his unabashed taste for neologisms, compound formations, and Latinate constructions. Moreover, inquire is more speculative and also belongs to a higher register than know.
On the whole, the rewritten version of “Georgia” varies only slightly from its first edition, and thus seems to have passed through French and returned to English relatively unscathed, even with a few new spoils. The circumstances and context of the poem’s French translation—Zawacki and Fakambi sitting side by side in Fakambi’s sunny house in Fresnes—offer Zawacki another opportunity to expand and refine the original objectives of his poem, as he keeps his gaze fixed on the formal properties of language (“On Slovenia”). In this respect, Zawacki benefits in many ways from the circulation of “Georgia”—gleaning things here and there, touching up a few rough patches while embracing and using to his own advantage what translation offers him: namely, a writing workshop for fine-tuning his poem.
“If the house is just poetry / we’re in trouble”
– Rod Smith, The Good House (New York: Spectacular Books, 2001)
Bill Luoma’s My Trip to New York City and its companion piece “The Annotated My Trip to NYC” are written with a whole set of choices, concerns, and poetic strategies fundamentally at odds with those we’ve witnessed thus far in Zawacki’s “Georgia.” Whereas Zawacki’s projected public is hemmed in by fixed assumptions concerning the nature of the poetic—since, as we’ve seen, the addressee of the book is no other than an abstract notion of poetry itself—, Luoma’s work addresses an identifiable social group in a mode that at first glance seems more communicative than poetic. First published as a chapbook in 1994, Luoma’s My Trip to New York City was subsequently translated into French as Mon Voyage à New York in 1997, and then reproduced in Luoma’s first full-length book, Works and Days. “My Trip to New York City”—now a poem in a collection—opened the book and “The Annotated My Trip to NYC,” published here for the first time, closed it. If the first piece is ostensibly about a poet’s trip to New York, the second is about a poem’s trip to France. Despite this difference of subject, both pieces address, and consequently enable, very distinct publics.
Bill Luoma began publishing poetry in little magazines—mainly in cheaply produced mags edited by, and printed for, friends—and as small chapbooks in the late 1980s, but it wasn’t until 1998 that his first full-length publication, Works & Days, was published. He has since published a chapbook titled Dear Dad (Tinfish, 2000), which consists of a series of notes, reflections, and casual comments addressed to the author’s dying father, and in 2011 he published his second full-length collection, Some Math (Kenning Editions), a set of neo-dada sound poems that draws on a vast array of jargon from various scientific and cyber-techno fields. Whereas Zawacki is in many respects a career poet—a professor of poetry and creative writing whose regularly published works have gained increasing recognition—Luoma has remained an amateur poet who is employed by other means than his writing and who publishes only occasionally. His work has yet to gain a wider readership and has received very little critical attention other than that from his own circle of friends. His poetic practice, as I attempt to demonstrate, is both a cause and a consequence of this.
“My Trip to New York City” is written in an unmistakably flat style. There are few complex constructions, polished turns of phrase, shifts in register, instances of word play, or marked displays of erudition. It is composed of brief prose paragraphs, each between three and eight sentences, each left justified and separated by an inch of white space. Rather than subordinate clauses there are strings of paratactic remarks—each of which remains stubbornly straightforward and unassuming:
Douglass has a picture of his father on the wall. It is a fishing picture and his dad was smoking. Sometimes he imitates his father by putting a cigarette in his mouth and pretending that a lot of ash has built up. His father would trick him sometimes. (15)
There is seemingly nothing particularly jarring about this paragraph. Each sentence seems to belong to the same context. And yet, the more one considers that last sentence—“His father would trick him sometimes”—the more intractable it becomes. How would his father trick him? It’s unclear whether this is related to what his father does with a cigarette or if it opens onto another subject about which the reader remains in the dark. This is typical of this piece. One sentence, often the last, seems both to belong to the context of the paragraph and to lie outside of it. There are other paragraphs that are more semantically disjointed. Consider the following:
Around us was Snet because they can reach beyond the call. We were cautioned of the depressed storm drains. One time Douglass touched a trend. (21)
We learn from the annotated poem that the first two sentences are species of found language—of which there is abundance at the end of the piece—while the last sentence can only be associated with the previous two by means of associative links (“touch” is related to “reach,” for example). The stylistic influence of Language poetry, where sequential sentences elicit different frames of reference, is well noted in this particular paragraph. But once this paragraph is placed back in its larger context this influence appears less significant. There is, after all, a narrative arc to which all the sentences, no matter their semantic disparity, belong. In keeping with this being a trip to New York City, the found language here comes right off the streets of New York: Snet is a phone company whose advertisements blanket public space, and the narrator is cautioned of depressed storm drains by road signs. What’s more, the narrative “I” is hardly troubled or called into question—a supposed hallmark of Language poetry—since each paragraph relates to the fixed perspective of the first-person narrator. On the whole, even if there is much temporal ambiguity—we come to find out that the trip to New York is actually two trips, for example—and even if certain moments shake the work’s narrative continuity, these elements are never so pronounced as to make one lose sight of what, in the end, the piece is about. Rupture, disjunction, and radical incoherency, all key words used in describing Language poetry and other experimental practices, are here significantly pared down.
If the influence of Language poetry is notably muted in this work, it’s because Luoma was primarily writing for an emergent group of poets who were trying to find a foothold in the field of poetry. Breaking from the Language poets while remaining experimental is not a radical esthetic move on Luoma’s part but rather a simple shift in terms of address. Luoma makes this clear in his piece “Illegal Park.” When asked at a poetry reading if he considered himself a Language poet, he responds (or reports to us his response):
I say I can’t be a language poet because I wasn’t there then. I say language poets were some of my teachers and I was receptive to the work because I had no poetry background having just come from the sciences. It wasn’t all fluffy and stuff I say. I also say that I admire their community model but don’t feel any compulsion to replicate their forms. (Works & Days 99)
That Luoma sees his not belonging to the Language poetry tradition as a simple matter of time and place is an obvious, but significant point to be made (his way of embedding his own “I” through reported speech also curiously distances himself from his own comments). He suggests that poetic traditions originate within a specific social context and are thus often bound to defined periods and geographic locations. Moreover, what he recognizes and values in Language poetry is not its forms but its formations, which recalls Ron Silliman’s claim that the coherence in Language poetry is to be found “not in the writing with its various methods and strategies, but in the social composition of its audience” (“Realism” 64). Published by The Figures, a small publishing house with strong ties to Language poetry, Luoma’s chapbook reflexively positions itself in relation to his predecessors while addressing a new community of writers and readers. Whereas Luoma’s take on the New Sentence recalls the dominant though largely misunderstood experimental tradition of Language poetry and evokes the publishing context of his own work, his use of gossip, in-jokes, and group talk both imagines and realizes a new poetry community. The guiding metaphor of Luoma’s poem is alluded to in the last paragraph of the work:
Scott’s voice was broadcasting on the phone when I got back from New York. Sometimes I crack jokes around Scott. His wife is very beautiful. He wants me to send him some slides. (26)
This is a suggestive metaphor for both the content and structure of the book. It is easy to imagine each paragraph as a slide and each slide as a discreet moment from the trip. More importantly, though, this is a slide show for Scott (which refers to Scott Bentley, another poet and friend of Luoma, and to whom the book is dedicated). Since Scott was unable to join him on the trip, Luoma is simply telling him what happened.25 This framing device provides a specific social context for Luoma’s anecdotes. It also accounts for the intimate details and gossip that give the work a sort of insider feel. Consider the following paragraph:
I asked Cindy where all the power lines were. A stranger can point things out. You can’t jump as high in New York, for example. She was sorry that she smelled so bad because of the shrink and the video producer. Actually, her skin smelled well good. I’ve admired her work for a long time. Bob with Chicken made me laugh more than Hollywood doing Charles Nelson Riley. (13)
Many things are obscure here. Not the least of which is the last sentence—“Bob with Chicken made me laugh more than Hollywood doing Charles Nelson Riley.” It’s hard to know if this relates to the previous sentence, and thus refers to Cindy’s “work”—which also isn’t specified—or if there is some other suppressed context that would clarify this. The annotated poem does indeed fill us in, letting us know that this is a “twisted ‘in-joke’ that only Douglass and Brian and Chris and Dave would get” (128). In this companion piece, Luoma explains the joke, telling us that Cindy is a painter who lives in Williamsburg and that she had made a funny painting of Douglass as part of a series. That only a small group of people would get this joke naturally excludes many readers from this sort of interpretative possibility. In other words, this paragraph offers a very specific reading for only a small, determined group of friends.
In-jokes are only one way of expressing the social relations of this small group, as it is only a subcategory of a larger discursive form central to the poem—namely, gossip.
Margot lives in San Francisco and she currently has a boyfriend. We went to the bar and watched a band that Margot’s friends were in. I liked Carla who sang some songs. Brian had a crush on Rachel. Margot’s old boyfriend Bob was there and Brian blurted out something about Margot moving to New York because her boyfriend just got a job at Columbia. I guess it didn’t matter because Bob was dancing with a tall woman. When Margot questioned Brian about her looks on the phone, Brian asked me. I said I thought she was good looking. That was the wrong answer. (13–14)
Crushes, jealously, social blunders, intimate personal opinions, he-said-she-said talk—under what conditions does one typically encounter this type of discourse? In keeping with Luoma’s structural metaphor, this is precisely the kind of language one might use with friends as a sort of running commentary while showing a series of slides. Except that as readers we don’t really know who Margot and Carla and Brian and Bob are, and, unlike in a novel where names can become fully fleshed out characters, here they remain mere ciphers, some of which are repeated in the work, while others are only mentioned in this paragraph. This is pure gossip. And as gossip is only meaningful when you know the people involved (or at least “know of” the people), this language seems directed at someone else. We know that this poem was ostensibly written as a sequence of metaphorical slides for the poet Scott Bentley. But who else is part of this poem’s intended public? And what is at stake in using gossip as a poetic mode?26
As Michael Warner argues in his work Publics and Counterpublics, the concrete public of a text can never be fully determined by any quantitative measure. This is because a public, as a specific cultural artifact, is “as much notional as it is empirical.” It is created by a self-organizing discourse and exists, solely, “by virtue of being addressed” (72). The logic of a public is thus necessarily circular in order to account for an existence that is at once real and imaginary. “A public might be real and efficacious, but its reality lies in just this reflexivity by which an addressable object is conjured into being in order to enable the very discourse that gives it existence” (67). But any and every move a writer enacts implies or imagines a corresponding public for which that move would be meaningful, regardless of whether this public becomes realized or not. As we saw with Zawacki, the meaningfulness of his poetic gestures depends precisely on one’s ability to recognize them as indexes of the “poetic.” Abstracted from any identifiable social context, these gestures are read as an accumulation of devices—devices bound to widely accepted categories and conventions of poetic expression (with this latter term being a loosely defined category in its own right). The value and significance of Zawacki’s poem thus relies on the institutions that establish these categories since Zawacki’s sympathetic readers must in some way be connected to or instructed by these same mediating institutions. The meaningfulness of Luoma’s gossip, on the other hand, depends more on the social relations of a tight-knit circle of friends (and, we might add, on this group’s knowledge of the importance of coteries in the history of poetry). Although certain features of his work take up practices established by experimental writers, such as gossip in Frank O’Hara’s and Joe Brainard’s writing or the abrupt non sequiturs between consecutive sentences in the work of many Language poets, Luoma’s poem by no means depends on the shared recognition of these conventions for its success. Those who recognize the personal references and the in-jokes and who take interest in the gossip are the same people about whom and for whom the poem is ostensibly written. Whether belonging to this group or not, one cannot fail to notice the poem’s restricted field of reference and its imagined public (there are of course other overlapping publics imagined in this work, a point to which I return shortly).
The proper names strewn throughout Luoma’s piece—Scott, Douglass, Lee Ann, Jennifer, Steve, Monique, Cindy—constitute not only a group of friends, but a network of emerging and amateur poets, critics and painters. It’s important to keep in mind the publishing context of this work. Printed in an edition of only two hundred copies, the book had a limited distribution range, reflecting the restricted public indicated by its style and content. As Warner reminds us, these material limits—“means of production and distribution, the physical textual objects, social conditions of access”—work together with internal ones, including “the need to presuppose forms of intelligibility already in place, as well as the social enclosure entailed by any selection of genre, idiolect, style, and address,” to impose constraints on circulation. In this case, given these limits and constraints, it’s fair to call this group a coterie (Warner 73). This is easy enough to do, since we can identify a small group of like-minded friends whose work is often occasional and is created out of an impulse to share or dispute ideas with one another and to maintain or question certain social relations with each other.27 In fact, as Reva Wolf argues in respect to poetry and art in the 1960s, gossip serves just this purpose: it’s a form of bonding that can keep social groups together when their ties are threatened by external forces. It is also, and often quite intentionally, comprised of exclusionary tactics that prevent others from participating, or at the very least offers a highly stratified structure of participation.28 Contrary to the common association of coteries with high society, as a social formation they are essential to writers who wish to enter the poetic field without participating in the established rituals of recognition, e.g., writing according to market trends, striving toward self-distinction with a competitively innovative personal style, submitting one’s poems to prize contests and recognized journals or publishing houses, attending a distinguished writing program, etc. This is not to say that the writers in Luoma’s coterie did none of these things, only that this close group of poets sought to create their own sub-system of circulation and recognition.29 Of course, belonging to a coterie itself may also constitute an important ritual of recognition—a point surely not lost on this particular group—but the rules of coterie formation remain less apparent than the other established means of poetic legitimatization.
This is where the names and social relations mentioned in the poem take on greater significance. As previously mentioned, Scott is Scott Bentley, poet and founder of the little magazine Letterbox, to which Luoma and many of the poets mentioned here regularly contributed. Lee Ann is Lee Ann Brown. She is a poet and the editor and founder of Tender Buttons Press. Jennifer is Jennifer Moxley, a poet whose small-circulation, stable-bound magazine The Impercipient was an important outlet for this group of friends and a common point of reference for Luoma. Douglass is Douglass Rothschild, whose first chapbook was published three years after My Trip to New York City by Situation Press in an edition of 500.30 Another important figure is Steve. Steve is Steve Evans, a poetry critic and English professor at the University of Maine whose authority is alluded to when the narrator states, “I want to listen when Steve talks. Even Douglass listens to Steve,” and also at the end of the piece when he mentions, “In Providence I read the Frank O’Hara poem that Helena read me when we got married. Steve knows the title” (16, 24). As a critical voice, Steve is in many ways the spokesperson for this coterie. In an article written in 2003, he attempted to make a case for a post-Language avant-garde poetry by assessing new poetic practices in the work of six writers, all of whom he counts as friends, including Bill Luoma, Lee Ann Brown, and Jennifer Moxley (“The American Avant-Garde after 1989”). There are also various amateur painters and artists mentioned throughout Luoma’s piece, such as Monique Van Gerderen. This coordinated network of poets, critics, and painters, all of whom have relations of varying proximity to small presses, poetry magazines, reviews, galleries, and academic institutions, provides a sort of map of this poetry’s conditions of possibility. Together, they create a multi-contextual space through which their writing can circulate, and, through repeated circulation, this group can begin to imagine itself as a self-contained public. But it’s important to stress that “My Trip to New York City” isn’t written only for this context, as if this were preexisting, but rather the poem helps enable it by designating it as its addressee. It’s true that Lee Ann Brown had already established her press a few years prior to this book’s publication, and Moxley’s and Bentley’s respective magazines had started publication two years prior in 1992. But by 1994 these poets still belonged to an emergent group: Scott Bentley published his first book-length work the same year with O Books; Lee Ann Brown’s first book-length work Polyverse was published in 1995 by Sun and Moon Press; Jennifer Moxley’s Imaginative Verses was published by Lee Ann Brown’s press Tender Buttons in 1996; Steve Evans assumed his academic position only in 2000 and wrote the previously mentioned article in 2003.31 Bill Luoma himself didn’t publish his first full-length collection, in which My Trip to New York City is included, until 1996. Luoma’s work, then, both represents and enables this social base of writers by imagining it as the parameters of its own space of circulation. To be sure, this doesn’t mean his work won’t circulate outside its intended field of reference. Once a work is published, that is to say, once it becomes public, it can never fully determine its public in advance. As Warner makes clear, a public by definition is always in excess of its known social base. This means that “a public must be more than a list of one’s friends. It must include strangers” (Warner 74). This is because publics cannot be contained within any institutional framework—the state, the nation, the academy, even the market—and the members of a public can never be determined by any positive, categorical qualifications, such as race, class, or ethnicity. A public is essentially a mobile cultural construct, whose existence is contingent solely upon the participation of social agents. Indeed, to become part of a public, one need only demonstrate some form of interest or some form of active uptake, no matter how nominal this may be.
This is what happens when Luoma’s coterie poem elicits the interest of the French poet Emmanuel Hocquard. As a prominent poet, translator, and editor, Hocquard is largely responsible for the growing interest in American poetry in France. Since the 1970s, he has invited American poets to read at various institutions (most notably, at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, where he curated readings and literary events for fifteen years) and to collaborate on collective translations through the organization he founded in 1989, Un Bureau sur l’Atlantique, the principal aim of which was to strengthen the ties between French and American poetry. He has translated several American poets—including several works by Michael Palmer—and coedited two anthologies of previously untranslated American poetry (21 + 1 poètes américains in 1986 and 49 + 1 nouveaux poètes américains in 1991). This strong interest in American poetry helps explain how Hocquard could come to discover a relatively obscure work published primarily for a small circle of friends. But this isn’t as fortuitous as it may seem. Embedded within the poem’s coterie public is another public bound to a whole different set of concerns. These are related to the poem’s negative space—that is, not what the poem says or does, but what it withholds and refuses to do. And what this poem clearly does not do is employ those poetic devices recognized by established poetic institutions. In fact, one might say that rather than appropriating a slew of poetic devices, as Zawacki does in “Georgia,” Luoma flatly negates them. Of course to write without style is itself a demonstration of style, and Luoma’s use of gossip and the structure of the New Sentence derives in part from the New York School (gossip) and the Language poets (the New Sentence). But the fact remains that, seeking to escape the “poetic”—understood here as a quality abstracted from its social significance—Luoma turns to those modes and strategies that are direct—gossip, casual remarks, frank opinions—while complicating their immediacy with irregular sequencing on the level of the sentence. Due to the weight of tradition, any blatant absence of conventional devices, which are themselves constantly in flux, signals a practice of restraint and willful opposition. It is this absence of the “poetic” that must have interested Emmanuel Hocquard.
Since the 1970s Hocquard and other French writers of his generation such as Claude Royet-Journoud and Anne-Marie Albiach have sought to negate the poetic by advancing a practice of literalism. Against metaphor, analogy, and other forms of poetic connotation, these writers have relied on a diverse set of strategies in order to eschew the traditions and expressive possibilities with which these forms are closely associated. Rosmarie Waldrop has shown how Royet-Journoud strives to eliminate from his texts metaphor, assonance, and alliteration “in order to get down to a flat, literal language” (107). Hocquard further reinforces this point by soliciting a shift in reading, suggesting that if his reader were to view his texts as mere copies—“All my books are to be read as copies. I am the copier of my books” (98)—she wouldn’t find metaphors where none exist. The appeal of Luoma’s text to Hocquard, then, is clear. But when Hocquard organized a collective translation of Luoma’s poem, he was faced with the same challenge that any “outsider” has when confronting this work: namely, the proliferation of allusions, in-jokes, gossip, and group references. As previously mentioned, Hocquard and the other translators approached this problem by sending Luoma a list of questions to which he duly responded (albeit often with tongue in cheek). Luoma then compiled his list of 101 responses to create a new serial poem—“The Annotated My Trip to NYC”—which he dedicated to “the French who asked me 100 questions about the little book” (123; Luoma rounded the number down). Each numbered paragraph provides a response to the translators’ corresponding question. In this piece, however, the questions are withheld.
Luoma prefaced his list of responses with a letter to his translators. A modified version of this is reproduced at the beginning of the annotated poem. After speaking to the difficulty of understanding the many in-jokes and specific allusions, Luoma states:
Please don’t be overly swayed by my responses. Consider that writers tend to say misleading or unhelpful things about their own work […] I believe you will have to lie to the French reader when you translate; that is, please be unfaithful to my text and make the French have multiple meanings. Make it yours. It is the reader who knows nothing of the glee club whom you must please. (125)
This prefatory letter demonstrates Luoma’s attitude toward the translation of his poem. Since the strategies and objectives of the original are bound to the social group—the glee club—to which it is addressed, there is little he can offer in the form of help to his French translators. His role as “annotator,” then, is an ambiguous one. He speaks with authority as to the poem’s initial context while remaining deeply skeptical about its meaning or purpose in its future French setting. On the whole, when read as an annotation, this poem shines no more than a fitful light over the obscure references and intimate details of “My Trip to New York City.” At times the narrator explains much more than required, offering far too many interpretative paths; at others he says far too little, merely repeating the original poem. And sometimes, even when he explains too much, it turns out he’s said very little of importance:
#53: level cut: a hitting term in baseball. there are three basic types of swings, or “cuts.” uppercut, level, & down. when you uppercut you hit fly balls and home runs. for big guys. level you hit line drives, for regular guys. down you make ground balls, for fast guys. however there are many theories of hitting and I have given you a false sense because every hitter must employ variations on every type of swing. I have also imparted to you the notion that hitting can be described. (134)
Here Luoma sketches a schema and then, as though defeated by the task, quickly disavows it. This sense of defeatism runs through the annotations, deflating whatever aura of authority a given annotation may evince at first glance.32
Whether in the spirit of defeatism, sincerity, or play, Luoma often relies on terse explanations by way of repetition in his annotations. This creates many ironic tautologies throughout the annotated poem (another feature Hocquard is particularly fond of).33 Consider the following from the first poem: “Brian has three sisters, Ann, Margot, and Alison. They are always on the phone and Brian calls Ali honey. I think he’ll probably get married” (13). Here’s the annotation: “#21 married: one day Brian will get married” (129). The shift from “They are always on the phone and Brian calls Ali honey” to “I think he’ll probably get married” is one of those inconspicuous transitions that only becomes jarring when one takes account of the small but significant absence of some kind of temporal clause, such as “one day” or “in ten years” between the two sentences. It’s easy to imagine the scrupulous French translators not wanting to miss anything and wondering if “married” is used figuratively or idiomatically. No, Luoma reassures them, “married [means] one day Brian will get married.” There are many of these responses in the annotated poem, several of which consist of a concise repetition, such as that of #23: “Being tall: she is very tall” (129). Taken together, these responses function as a deliberate reversal of some common assumptions of literary translation, especially as they relate to poetry. Indeed, the multiplicity of meaning springing from the interplay of the linguistic sign’s various features—visual, phonic, grammatical, semantic, etc.—is often cited by theorists and translators alike as the principle challenge of translating poetry.
The textures of a language, its musicality, its own specific tradition of forms and meters and imagery, the intrinsic modalities and characteristic linguistic structures that make it possible to express certain concepts, emotions, and responses in a specific manner but not in another—all of these inhere so profoundly in a poem that its translation into another language appears to be an act of rash bravado verging on the foolhardy. (Grossman 94)
Edith Grossman, a prominent translator of both prose and poetry, is expressing a widespread belief here, one that depends on a certain tradition of poetry and poetics. Luoma is clearly working outside of this tradition, and so the problems his translator faces is of an entirely different sort. What’s more, Luoma significantly exacerbates these problems by providing misleading information. For instance, although he encourages his translators to “make the French have multiple meanings,” as an annotator he often does just the opposite by stripping the poem of any figurative or connotative dimension, thereby restricting its meaning. The oft-cited difficulty of translating poetry’s polysemy is therefore not taken here as the translator’s dilemma but as her false assumption. If Zawacki uses the circumstances of translation to make his poem “mean more,” Luoma responds to the same circumstances by countering poetic abstraction and polysemy with direct referential meaning, as in annotation #22, which informs us that “park” refers to “central park” (129).
The significance of “The Annotated My Trip to NYC” lies, then, in the ways in which it fails as an annotation. For if Luoma’s responses serve a precise function for his French translators, how are they to be read when framed as a poem for English readers? Most American readers don’t need to know that ump means umpire or that shrink means psychoanalyst. Motivating such responses are the questions and misunderstandings of the French translators. In other words, the annotated poem documents the reading habits of the French translators by highlighting the limits of their understanding. Luoma capitalizes on this context to create a dynamic poem that moves between frank literal statements and other tangential narrative developments, all written with the same sprezzatura that characterizes “My Trip to New York City.” Luoma’s annotated poem, however, is no postmodern pastiche of annotated works. The poem doesn’t imitate a given style nor does it borrow or abstract its form from another discourse genre, as, say, the epistolary novel does with correspondence. In fact, Luoma’s piece wasn’t written as a poem at all. It was only framed as such subsequently. Removing these responses from their initial social context and presenting them as a poem has many interpretative consequences. On one level, as a record of the social process of translation, the trivial details, false steps and meticulous work of translation are made visible in the poem. In this way, Luoma’s poem is a partial archive of the one thing that often escapes theoretical discussions of translation: the plain fact and history of the translator’s painstaking labor. Like the poem itself, this is at times intellectually engaging, surprising, even funny, and at others profoundly trivial and boring. Another consequence of this procedure is that it brings two cultural contexts together and therefore causes two distinct publics to overlap. Published as a poem in English by a small press, its American readers will take themselves as the public of the work—and not without reason—while continuing to recognize this phantom French public inscribed in the text itself. In this respect, Luoma’s annotated poem complements Charles Bernstein’s 1993 poem “A Test of Poetry.” In this poem, Bernstein arranges in lineated verse the questions his translator, Ziquing Zhang, posed when translating poems from Bernstein’s Rough Trades and The Sophist into Chinese. Bernstein also lifted this piece from personal correspondence, but as opposed to Luoma, he withholds his responses, so that we only have the voice of his translator:
What do you mean by rashes of ash? Is industry
Systematic work, assiduous activity, or ownership
Of factories? Is ripple agitate lightly? Are
We tossed in tune when we write poems? And
What or who emboss with gloss insignias of air? (52)
Perhaps we’re witnessing a burgeoning genre where the circulation of one’s own poems are documented and reimagined through the reading habits of others. Similar to other poetic experiments in translation and multilingual writing, this kind of writing arises from the increased contact and collision of various cultures in a globalized world, and offers a critical response to the impact of the circulation of texts on contemporary poetry. But unlike Bernstein’s poem, Luoma’s annotations take us back into the social world of his circle of friends. And although it is not a coterie poem per se, it specifically addresses the intended limits of Luoma’s social poetic practice. These limits—we can call them limits of address—are brilliantly illustrated, in negative as it were, by the translators’ unstated questions that structure and motivate the annotated poem.
Just as “My Trip to New York City” attempts to document and enable the activity of a given group of poets by designating and creating a space of circulation for them outside the framework of larger institutions (major publishing houses, wide-circulation journals, academia, etc.), “The Annotated My Trip to NYC” documents and interrogates the stakes of circulation once it becomes mediated by these same institutions. For, as I’ve argued, translation plays an increasingly significant role in the circulation of poetry. By addressing the circumstances of his own poetry, Luoma takes stock of poetry’s conditions of possibility. In so doing, he points toward new areas of poetic production, namely those that reflexively engage with poetry’s circulation. Thus, whereas Zawacki approaches translation as a writing workshop for refining formal linguistic matters, Luoma approaches it as a set of social conditions with its own assumptions, practices, and consequences, all of which become new matter for poetry. Zawacki’s “Georgia” and Luoma’s “My Trip to New York City” and “The Annotated My Trip to NYC” thus reflect in contrasting ways their imagined publics and the scene of their circulation. But whereas Zawacki’s poetry does this by transcending its social circumstances, Luoma’s does it by confronting them head-on.
Footnotes
1. Luoma’s poem was first published as a chapbook in 1994 and subsequently reprinted in his first full-volume collection, Works & Days. All citations will be from its later reprinting. “The Annotated My Trip to NYC” was also published in Works & Days.
2. On the growth of translation studies as an academic discipline, see Baker’s introduction to the four-volume collection Translation Studies.
3. These institutions are too numerous to outline here. For more on this exchange as it takes place in periodicals, see Bennett and Mousli. For more on larger social questions concerning translation, see Sapiro.
4. I owe much here to Peter Middleton’s notion of the “long biography of the poem” (1–24).
5. See Dworkin and Goldsmith; Bergvall et al. For a wide range of multilingual and translational experiments, see the fifth and tenth issues of Chain dedicated to “Different Languages” (1998) and “Translucinación” (2003), respectively. All twelve issues of Chain (1994–2005) have been digitally archived and are available at http://jacket2.org/reissues/chain.
6. In addition to Perloff; Dworkin and Goldsmith; see also Fitterman and Place; Morris and Swiss; Funkhouser.
7. In a Franco-American context, it is not uncommon for poems or whole works to appear first in translation. This was most notably the case for Keith Waldrop’s Falling in Love with a Description, which was first published in French translation by Françoise de Laroque (Paris: Créaphis, 1995), before being published as part of Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), the winner of the National Book Award for Poetry in 2009. Many of the poems written by Americans in Emmanuel Hocquard and Claude Royet Journoud’s two anthologies—21 + 1 poètes américains in 1986 and 49 + 1 nouveaux poètes américains in 1991—were also first published in French translation.
8. Charles Bernstein’s treatment of translation in “A Test of Poetry,” discussed below, is similar to Luoma’s.
9. Unless otherwise noted, all citations will be from its republication in his book Petals of Zero, Petals of One, hereafter cited as “G.”
10. Zawacki discusses the origin of the poem in an interview with Leonard Schwartz. Given that Zawacki had recently accepted a teaching position at the University of Georgia, his interest in Soupault’s “Georgia” is perhaps more biographical than esthetic, a point made explicit by his deeming the poem of little poetic value. In any case, it’s clear that “Georgia” stands for far more than a geographical location in the poem. See below, where I discuss its importance as a framing device.
11. Andrew Joron mentions Zawacki in a list of contemporary poets who bear the mark of Surrealist influence in his survey of Surrealism in American poetry from the period 1966–1999.
12. I cite here its publication in 1913, as this line is revised when republished in Petals of Zero, Petals of One to read “cold the inaudible decibel.” I discuss the significance of this change below.
13. There are no fewer emotional registers and tones than there are poetic devices, as the speaker shifts from expressions of sadness to those of anger, arousal, contemplation, joy, pain, etc.
14. Hereafter cited as “BNB.”
15. For a stark point of contrast, see the social function of poetry and love in Frank O’Hara (“Personism: A Manifesto” 499).
16. Sobin’s influence on Zawacki can be noted both stylistically and ideologically. The above discussion of poetic address echoes, in Zawacki’s terms, Sobin’s “invisible auditoria.” [cite source for Sobin?] See Zawacki, “Vertical Tracking.”
17. Burt refined his idea on Elliptical Poetry in “The Elliptical Poets.” I am drawing here on both this article and his review of Susan Wheeler’s “Smokes” where he first introduced the term.
18. For a pointed critique of Elliptical and hybrid poetry, see Craig Dworkin, “Hypermnesia.”
19. On the impact of the prize structure in contemporary poetry, see Steven Evan’s compelling analysis in his “Field Notes, October 2003–June 2004.” My reading of the pluralist tendency of 1913: A Journal of Forms is greatly indebted to this article as well as to his “The Little Magazine A Hundred Years On: A Reader’s Report” and, above all, to his “The Resistible Rise of Fence Enterprise” and the discussion this provoked. These articles are archived on his website Third Factory.
20. There are two consecutive essays on Ronald Johnson, both of which emphasize his use of found language and procedures of erasure, as well as a handful of “ekphrastic pieces,” such as Noah Eli Gordon’s, Jeremy Prokosch’s, and Valerie Mejer’s.
21. The PSA was in the headlines in 2007 after awarding the Frost award to John Holland, a conservative poet who had once referred to “cultures without literatures—West African, Mexican and Central American” and who, in an interview, had stated, “there isn’t much quality of work coming from nonwhite poets today.” See Motoko Rich, “Poetry Prize Sets Off Resignations at Society.”
22. Published the month before the 2003 invasion of Iraq—one of the issue’s featured articles details in mildly critical terms the Bush administration’s justification for war—Zawacki’s poem about personal memory and fragmented subjectivity unfolding under “olivine clouds, / clouds of cerise, a courtesan sky” with fishermen and windmills and a family gathered at a dock at twilight strikes one, at least in hindsight, as a curious choice on the part of The New Yorker editors. It’s interesting to note that the same month of that year Leslie Scalapino and Rick London published an anthology of highly politicized poetry: Enough (Oakland: O Books, 2003).
23. The public success of “Georgia” can be measured by its reviews, many of which are archived on Zawacki’s own webpage.
24. The original publication of the poem reads “soundless decibel.” Whether “noiseless” is from an early or intermediate draft between the original and its republication is unclear.
25. Many of Luoma’s poems are also for someone who couldn’t be at the event he is describing. See, for example, “97.5 KPOI The Rock You Live On” (Works & Days 103–109).
26. Luoma isn’t the first to use gossip as a poetic mode. Frank O’Hara frequently used gossip in his poetry, as in the poem “Adieu to Norma, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul,” where he writes,
and Allen is back talking about god a lot and Peter is back not talking very much and Joe has a cold and is not coming to Kenneth’s although he is coming to lunch with Norman I suspect he is making a distinction well, who isn’t. (328)
For more on O’Hara’s use of gossip, see Wolf 16–21.
27. For more on poetry and coteries, see Shaw. My argument here is greatly indebted to Shaw’s study.
28. See Wolf 15. This argument has its origin in Max Gluckman’s seminal “Gossip and Scandal.”
29. Given that this particular group held no institutional power and did not occupy a dominant position in its field at the time of the book’s publication, it would be a mistake to consider this coterie elitist. For a reading of the coterie as an elite phenomenon in a modernist context, see Rainey 146–168.
30. It is interesting to contrast Moxley’s The Impercipient, one of the major contexts of Luoma’s collection Works & Days, with 1913: Journal of Forms. Whereas 1913 is a big endeavor with interns, a board, and a long and eclectic list of contributors, The Impercipient was run by Moxley herself, printed cheaply, and had an extremely small distribution range. It never appealed to the authority of established poets by asking for their contributions but rather printed only Moxley’s close friends, who were all emerging poets at the time.
31. This delay of recognition is even more marked for others mentioned in the book. Douglas Rothschild, for example, didn’t publish his first book-length work until 2009.
32. The French translation of this annotation opens Hocquard’s Ma haie. One can imagine Hocquard appreciating this annotation on two levels: first, for the specificity of the language game it instantiates, and second, for the distance created by Luoma’s disavowing its explanatory force. Hocquard also briefly discusses the collective translation of this piece (522–523).
33. See his Un test de solitude.
Works Cited
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