W I T Z

A Journal of Contemporary Poetics


Volume III, Number one					WINTER 1994




COMMUNIITY AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALENT

By Charles Bernstein

[This past January, I started a private e-mail discussion group,
Poetics, using the listserve program on one of the University at
Buffalo's mainframe computers.  The program allows any message
sent to "Poetics" to be automatically distrubuted to all
participants.  One of the first, and most sustained discussions
on "Poetics" was on the subject of poetry communities,
particularly in the context of other discussions on the internet
of the "virtual" communities possible in "cyberspace."  I was
slow to join the conversation, so my post on the subject also
served as a reply to serveral specific comments made earlier. 
For information about "Poetics" you can contact me at
bernstei@ubvms. cc.buffalo.edu.]


I had a number of thoughts, over these past weeks of posts, about
community, but I've misplaced them.

Every time I hear the words literary community I reach for my
bivalent autocad simulation card emulator.

Poetry is (or can be) an aversion of community in pursuit of new
constellations of relationship.

In other words, community is as much what I am trying to get away
from--reform--as form.

So there are a spectrum of communities, from the closed community
modelled on the family, to communities fixed by location (what
might otherwise be called, for example, neighborhoods) or civic
identification (the community bounding a literal and figurative
commons or commonplace) or political ideology, to utopian
communities that have either sought to form a new place or to
remain open by refusing to be grounded by a place.

Literary communities have often been understood in terms of place
-- the "local" -- as Michael Davidson writes about the emergence of
a literary community on the West Coast in his book on the SF
Renaissance, or in terms of scene (a local hub within a place) or
group.  Black Mountain remains crucial because it forged an arts
community from writers and artists from many places.  Most
recently, the connections of writers within ethnic, gender, or
racial groups have been designated as communities.  Schools or
movements have not usually been called communities, although Ron
Silliman, among others, has wanted to insist that a shared
aesthetic project among writers in different locations can best
be understood on this model of community.  It's possible to speak
of the "poetry community" in the sense of "the poetry world" (in
the sense of "the art world")-- but such a formulation immediately
suggests that arts funding agencies are nearby (more commonly,
one speaks of the "small press community").  I would say "poetry
communities" but this begs the questions even as it suggests
relief.  Many poets that I know experience poetry communities,
say scenes, as places of their initital exclusion from
publication, readings, recognition.  Being inside, a part of, is
often far less striking than being left out, apart.

Communities, defined by what they have in common --a place, an
ideal, a practice, a heritage, a tradition -- cannot immunize
themselves against what they do not find common.  To have a
community is to make an imaginary inscription against what is
outside the community.  & outside is where some poetry will want
to be.  That is, some poetry will want to work against received
ideas of place, group, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, person,
member, individuality, tradition, aesthetic tendency.  One does
not use collective nouns, or at least not without skepticism (if
not anxiety).

Robert von Hallberg, in _Culture & Value_, argues for a poetry that
reflects community values; this is what he calls a poetry or
accommodation and also, for the U.S. in the 1970s and 80s, a
suburban poetry.

I suppose it has something to do with how comfortable you feel
about the confines of family or nation (fine or confining).  As
the critic asked the poet who had slipped on the ice and was
lying in the middle of the road -- "Are you comfortable?"  --"I
make a good living."

(I take it Steve Evans' comment in his introduction to the
"Technique" in _o.blek/Writing from the New Coast_ about his
generational "hatred of identity" could also apply to a hatred of
community, and perhaps that is implicit in his recent discussion
of  "hating society properly" and also "hating" tradition.  Would
this include a hatred of virtual, or for that matter unavowable,
communities?  Echoing W.C. Fields' famous repost to being
corrected about his insistence that Jews were running the Studio
-- Catholics, worst kind of Jews--might we say: Virtual
communities, worst kind of communities!?)

Any discussion of community would do well to start with the idea
of institution rather than association. For the rules of our
associations, one on one or one with many, is fundamentally an
institutional matter (in the sense that Erving Goffman details in
his many works).  So that I would say the first fact about the
"community" made possible through modems hooked up to mainframes
that are teleconnected is that the access and protocols of this
community are predetermined by the institutions that give us
entry into them; for most of us on this particular list
"membership" in the university "community" -- (and for the few on
commercial services bearing the insignia of ".com" at the end of
their e-mail addresses, they have simply paid to have access to
this already formed nexus.)

This is changing, but that only makes more crucial the need to
acknowledge the overlay of different institutional interests that
mediate our interactions in these spaces.  We don't shed old
institutional habits as we inhabit new institutional spaces so
much as project our old ways onto the new spaces.  A great deal
of sociological analysis is sure to follow us here.  But it is
interesting to consider what patters of "who speaks?" in "live"
group settings -- meetings, seminars -- are also present in
listserv situations, which may at first appear to be free of the
need to interrupt or speak up or find a temporary opening in the
discussion.

For example, I will soon begin monitoring how long each of you
spends online with Poetics@UBVM or whether and what you download.
 --The potential for monitoring such transactions, as well as
doing various forms of statistical analysis of posts and
activity, is part of the medium of our communing here.  Several
subscribers have noted that one of us has chosen to conceal his
identity from the publicly available list of subscribers; am I
right to "out" Chris Funkhauser of our SUNY-Albany node?

I have set up this listserv so that anyone can subscribe and I am
automatically notified, but also so that the list itself is not
listed in any directories of listserves. At some point, to keep
the list at a scale small enough, or "common" enough, to work,
will it be worth considering eliminating open subscriptions?

The idea of possibly hidden listeners is something a listserv
invokes insofar as the communication is considered interpersonal,
private in the way a letter is, or even a seminar or meeting;
although we accept that we never know who buys our books (or
checks them from the library).  But perhaps the situation here is
more like a performance, where we make our recits individually to
an audience that is able to see one another, even if, when on
stage, our view of the audience may be blocked by the
kleiglights.

That, anyway, would bring to mind Rousseau's preference for
public meetings over and against public spectacles (theater): the
public convenes to consider its circumstance, its common needs.

What is public space and why does there seem so little of it, as
if the public had become a commodity no longer in much demand,
but still available for import at high prices, free trade
notwithstanding?  (We import it from ourselves and the tariffs
are high.) So little public space, that is, so much public
spectacle.

This suggests the civic values of spaces like these: not
reinforcing existing communities but taking up the constitution
of social space.

If I resist the idea of a literary community, while working to
support the "actually existing" communities of poets among which
I find myself, it is because I want to imagine reading and
writing, performing and listening, as sites of conversation as
much as collectivity.  I want to imagine a constellation of
readers who write, to and for one another, with the links always
open at the end, spiralling outward --centrifugally -- not closing
in.

At one point in these parts, posts -- a message identified as from
Lolpoet (Loss Glazier), echoed G.E. Moore's shaking of fists at
the skeptics ("at least I know two things that are real!"):  "We
are physical beings, not virtual ones."  My heart sank, for it is
our virtuality that allows for hope.  V139HLA3 (at Buffalo it is
an institutional privilege to have your name be used as part of
your user ID), aka Martin Spinelli, wanting to put off the idea
that this space of exchange is unreal, insisted, "We are *really*
here with our *real* eyes at *real* monitors" (but unfortunately
no real italics): yet, my real eyes do me no good if I aspire to
something else than what I see, and what I want to monitor is
neither real or unreal.

So my hope for electronic communication is not that it engenders
virtual communities, but rather virtual uncommunities.


ON SUBJECTIVITY	

By Daniel Barbiero

In many of the programmatic statements of language-centered
poetics, there is at best an uneasiness regarding the subjective
factors that come into play in the field of poetics.  Certainly,
the more overt manifestations of subjectivity had seemingly been
evacuated from language-centered poetic practice from the
beginning: the confessional subject matter and the intimate voice
frequently found in poetry at the time that language-centered
poetics was beginning to coalesce (the mid-1970s), did not turn
up in "language" poems.  On the contrary: the play of the
signifier supplanted the persona of the sensitive observer
faithfully recording his or her feelings as the ground of
literary meaning.

In retrospect, the programmatic anti-subjectivism of
language-centered poetics seems largely a consequence of the
acceptance of certain assumptions about the function of language
and its role in the lives of its users.  The most quickly grasped
assumption --one that can be gleaned from a reading of the
surface features of language-centered poetry -- is that language,
due to a meaning-occluding opacity, resists its users' attempts
to determine the message it will carry in any given situation. 
This assumption was based in turn on the deeper, ideologically
more important assumption that language's opacity derives
ultimately from its subservience to the social structures it is
supposed to articulate and reproduce through its capacity to
transmit ideology.  Because it was based on these assumptions,
the anti-subjectivism of language-centered poetics was expressed
as the thesis that subjectivity is a more or less passive
construct of social discourses, through which language acts as a
sort of index of the ascendancy of situation over
subjectivity.[1] Language-centered poetry, with its emphasis on
the signifier, was supposed to illustrate this thesis.

But I believe that language-centered poetics demonstrates not the
subordination of subjectivity to situation, but rather the
operation of subjectivity through the workings of imagination --
through which situation can be transformed.  The materiality of
language, while it may be a significant factor in the
determination of meaning, does not determine meaning because of
something independently intrinsic to language.  It must be made
to determine meaning.  In other words, the phonetic (or arguably,
the graphic) aspect of language has to be designated as a locus
of meaning if it is to function on a level greater than or equal
to the referential aspect.  This designation, as I have said, is
a function of subjectivity.

Let me briefly state what it is I mean by "subjectivity."  By
subjectivity I mean the inner correlate of activity, no matter
what form that activity may take.  It is this aspect that I tried
to describe with the notion of the for-itself state, which I used
in a recent essay on Barrett Watten: that is, a state that is for
the organism's own use in orienting itself in the world.  (That
definition was perhaps made rigid and a bit restrictive due to a
residue of late behaviorism which at the time I found appealing;
in effect, I tried to define and describe an inner state without
calling it such.)  While this definition of subjectivity is
fairly schematic, it is so in such a way that it can accommodate
the various kinds of inner states we may have, ranging from a
simple reflexive, demonstrative intentionality to those states of
focused attention in which we might reflect on our personal
histories and what we would recognize as the overall patterns of
our various dispositions.

Given the recent history of what can be called, correctly or not,
anti-Cartesian thinking on the topic (e.g., poststructuralism,
Lacanianism, some of the overtly collective forms of identity
politics, etc.), subjectivity is a troubled and troublesome
notion.  Across cases, the term "the subject" presupposes a
number of different levels of analysis, and may state or imply
one (or more) of a number of things.  There is, for example, an
understanding of "the subject" that appears to equate it with
one's sense of self-identity as enduring or evolving over time:
the "self," in other words; at other times, it seems to mean
nothing but consciousness, usually based at least implicitly on a
model of mental representation derived from a visual model (e.g.,
the cogito, paraphrased as "I represent myself (to myself)"); and
at yet other times, it seems to mean something like a sense of
autonomy, usually exaggerated, in which we are supposed to be
convinced of our ability to will what we will.  In the context of
language-centered poetics, I believe it is this latter meaning is
usually what is intended.


All I am trying to get at with the notion of subjectivity is that
there are internal states, individuated by a content that is not
necessarily linguistic, on the basis of which we can, among other
things, recognize and exploit regularities in the environment.
Language use, and the conventions governing it across different
contexts, are among these regularities.  Thus while I would agree
with Searle that meanings are most likely "in the head," it is
also true that those meanings get there as the result of an
internalization (literally, by way of the selective strengthening
of neural associations), of much that is "out there."  For the
environment consists as much of cultural phenomena -- such as,
for instance, acceptable models of poems -- as of anything else,
and if it is presumably for its adaptive functions that
consciousness has been selected, then it must adapt and respond
to cultural cues and examples.

In fact, subjectivity is inseparable from intentionality.  By
this latter term I simply mean something like "understanding,"
which in a language context can be contrasted with "objective"
conceptual content.  In this sense, intentionality stands for the
way a word (or other language element) is for the user, that is,
the aspect or aspects under which the user grasps its meaning. 
Intentionality is subjective to the extent that the language
user's understanding of the aspect by which the language unit
presents its referent is dependent on the cognitive plasticity
arising from his or her experiences and encounters, as expressed
in the repertoire of concepts he or she can bring to bear in any
given cognitive situation.  One word rather than its synonym may
activate a pertinent nuance or association of understanding; it
may, in other words, serve to present its referent under an
aspect that differs to whatever extent from the aspect with which
the synonym might present the same referent.  This phenomenon,
which is a subjective one, usually goes under the name of opaque
referentiality.

The capacity of the signifier to function as a locus of meaning
may be attributed to an analogous phenomenon that can be
characterized as opaque materiality.  In contrast to opaque
referentiality, which operates through the conceptual schema,
opaque materiality can be seen to operate through the signifier
-- through sound rather than sense.  This is an imaginative
operation; by imagination, I mean the mental faculty by which an
associative transformation of the given can be effected.  If the
given in poetry is language as a signifier bearing a signified,
then it is through subjective associations that the signifier is
transformed into an active constituent of meaning.  The
materiality (and embedded accrued meanings, for that matter) to
which language-centered poetics ascribes predominance is simply
an inert factor that is activated by the (imaginative) intentions
of both producer and receiver.  That is to say that it is made
operative by the subjectivities of producer and receiver.

I do want to make it clear that I believe that the subjective
activities relevant to poetics are constrained.  They must
operate within boundary conditions arising from the practical,
enabling constraints appropriate to the type of language use in
question, whether those constraints are a matter of the
conventions of a genre, the demands of expository clarity, or
whatever.  For while I believe the subjective dimension is
important, it is the context of language use that -- to stay with
the case of language-centered poetry -- provides on the one side
the license to give material factors a place of prominence in the
production of the message, and on the other the cue to take into
account material as well as strictly referential or informational
factors in the interpretive reception of the message.  Producer
and receiver must in effect enter into a kind of contract: the
user must intend that the message be understood in terms of its
sounds as well as its referential content, while the receiver
must agree to pay at least as much attention to how the message
is said as to what it says.

I do not wish to imbalance poetics by contriving to shift its
center of gravity toward a hypothetical (and, I believe,
untenable) subjectivity free from significant determination.  I
simply wish to restore half of an equation -- the half that
consists in the inner correlate of outward forms, as administered
through the intentionality of understanding.  It does not matter
whether this latter is expressed in the producer's intention or
in the receiver's response; for in either case it is through
cognitive and imaginative acts of recognition and association
embedded in subjective states that the signifier -- and indeed,
the signified as well -- can be transformed from the inert husk
of dead example into the active constituent of actual meaning.

[1] Statements of the ascendancy of situation over subjectivity are
plentiful in the literature of language-centered poetics.  See,
for instance, the Charles Bernstein issue of _The Difficulties_
(Vol. 2 #1, 1982); _boundary 2_ #9; and the remarks of P. Inman and
Bruce Andrews in _The Politics of Poetic Form_.


READINGS AND REVIEWS


_KLAONICA: POEMS FOR BOSNIA_, EDITED BY KEN SMITH AND
JUDY BENSON

Reviewed by Dan Featherston

What is a "political" poem? What is its use? What do we expect
from political poetry? How do we respond with language to global
atrocities siphoned through mass media? Is political poetry
simply more "mediated" (mis) information? Is language about war
possible?

Klaonica (Serbo-Croat for slaughterhouse, butchery, shambles) is
a collection of poems from Britain, Ireland, United States,
Europe and Bosnia in response to the war in former-Yugoslavia.
This is a book for Bosnia: a variety of perspectives loosely
grouped into issues of the war such as rape, refugees, cultural
tensions, contrasts of pre-war and contemporary Bosnia, and the
separation-continuum of writing from outside the war-zone.

The weaknesses of Klaonica are not so much related to general
questions concerning the usefulness of political poetry. It is
not whether "...we'll all agree / on the futility / of poetry,"
but that any poetry requires a use of language as powerful and
complex as the issues it confronts. These poems often gloss over
the medium itself, as if how language is used is not as integral
to meaning as is the issue (war) that draws these pieces
together.

For instance, in "Recipe for Saving the World", Katja Wessels
(tr. Margitt Lehbert) turns the Bosnian War into a tossed fruit
salad:

EC Ministers will agree for the first time: 
Watermelons as ammunition for Croat tanks
grapes and pinapples as weapons
for Serb besiegers, bananas for snipers

Here, poetry plays jester in the world court: witty metaphors 
(the joke) destabilizing the symbols of power. What this actually
does is use language to safely encapsulate the reader in fictive
peels of laughter-- Wessel's fruit as "unreal" as an AP photo of a
Muslim blown to pieces in the streets of Gorazde. The metaphor is
supposed to expose the absurdity of war. But these banalities
only mask what lies under the artifice: real shrapnel. Rather
than bringing Bosnia into closer association via metaphor's
disassociation (Rimbaud's "ordered disordering of the senses"),
tanks, weapons and snipers are diffused-(de-fused) without adding
anything meaningful.

The use of metaphor as placement/displacement in political poetry
turns on an ontological basis: poems for vs. poems from. It is
the preposition (pre-position) that determines the poem's
proximity and relationship to the writer, reader, and what is
being "signified." And whether it's the appropriation of the
other's voice (e.g., John Hartley Williams' "John Bosnia", in
which "Bosnia speaks through "John" so as to conceal the writer's
presence), or a Londoner imagining him/herself in the streets of
Sarajevo, the pre-position is decisive. Some examples of poems
that stay, as it were, with Bosnia are Don Paterson's "The Scale
of Intensity" and Holger Teschke's "The Minutes of Hasiba".

Also notable is Ken Smith's "Essential Serbo-Croat": a list of
Serbo-Croat sentences opposite their English translations, form
ing two columns, or zones, divided by a significant space. The
lists are comprised of sentences a UN doctor might find useful,
thumbing through a Serbo-Croat/English dictionary:

Boli 
Boli me 
Boli me ovdje 
Boli me grudi

It hurts 
I have a pain 
I have a pain here 
I have a pain in my breast (p.52)

A kind of satire on the tourist's "Essential Serbo-Croat", the
poem moves from simple description (simple sentences) to
increased specificity of location, degree and duration of pain,
drawing the reader closer to details of the "foreign
language"/"foreign body", while at the same time maintaining a
separation: patient/doctor; Bosnian/world-spectator;
speaker/translator. The poem implies a deeper correlation between
the acts of translating and sympathizing: that all responses are
translations, questioning the writer's abil ity to "treat" a
situation outside his/her own linguistic and ontologic realms.

In her introduction to _Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century
Poetry of Witness_, Carolyn Forche states that "in the oral
testimony of survivors of the Shoah, their accounts fragment as
they approach the core of the trauma. The narrative of the trauma
is itself traumatized..." Forche's comment on survivor narratives
may also imply something about spectator-narratives. The literal
distance that most of the poets in Klaonica are writing from
(over 75% of the writings come from the U.K.) may account for the
disengaged feel of the poems, and the desire to create an
artifice of closure through pathetic fallacy, control led syntax
and linear narrative. This is not to say that meaning ful poetry
cannot exist without parataxis. Nor is this to say that
meaningful poetry cannot exist without having directly
experienced the trauma of war. But it does raise the question of
how the use of language and the imaginative process are impacted
by experience. The formal styles found in Klaonica may not only
indicate cultural variances, but the schizophrenic impact media
has on human psychology whereby the world is st once more
"visible" and more "abstract" (invisible). Klaonica is
significant in that it works from a belief that poetry has a
moral imperative to witness and testify against social and
political injustices (something that the majority of both
formalist and innovative U.S. poets seem to have forgotten or
disregarded since Vietnam). This is a book for Bosnia from the
outside, looking in through newspapers and tv. screens. Despite
its shortcomings, Klaonica implies that the mass media are not
merely something to passively absorb (or deflect), but work into/
against in response to what's happening in and around us.
Ultimately, all klaonicas are human klaonicas-- the global
(slaughter) house where we live; and that's everybody's business,
including poets.

*proceeds from _Klaonica_ go to Feed the Children and other funds
for Bosnia


_THE GARMENT IN WHICH NO ONE HAD SLEPT_ BY PAM REHM

Reviewed by Clint Burnham

I first wrote: "The Political Economy of Pam Grier," in reference
to the seventies grrrl cop valorized by Quentin Tarantino in film
and print. And that's appropriate, I think (although a lot of
people really hate mass culture stuff brought into the ambit of
poetry), because just as Tarantino and his ilk have brought the
70s back into mass appeal (with myself, included), there has
arguably been no more significant event in the last ten years of
college poetry than the invention of the Dickinson-Melville
tradition.

Nostalgia has many uses, not the least of which is to take a
sanitized (albeit "written" & therefore "dirty" in some safe
Derridean way) past and use it to substitute for the unmanageable
present.

And yet, one must agree with a number of propositions
simultaneously, and this is what makes it all a postmodern
dilemma. This was demonstrated by a friend of mine who said that
he did feel, coming onto the scene in 1988-89, the influence of
Bruce Andrews, and that he welcomed the rhetoric of the apex of
the M editorial just because it might open the possibilities a
bit (Pam Rehm is one of the editors of the Buffalo-based apex
magazine.)  But I guess I never felt the constraints of the
Language set -- a sign of being in Canada? -- although many of my
compatriots, or some of them, a handful of prominent poets here
in Toronto, have very negatively reviewed and commented upon and
felt paranoid towards the Kootenay School. Yo mimesis!

Thus, as others have pointed out, there is a bit of a disjunction
between the apex introduction and its contents: I'm thinking of
Benjamin Friedlander's work, which certainly bears for its author
quite a burden. What I mean here is that Friedlander's written
some of the most important work of this moment. To my mind. And
then there's Sean Killian, also killin', but making Benjamin
jammin'.

To return to the question of what Rehm means, we can start with
asking, what are garments? By that I mean, a "garment in which no
one had slept" indicates a bifurcated possibility (or probably a
triad, to invoke the necessary reference to Hong Kong action
films): an allegory in which language is like un-used clothing,
that is, decoration; or a cultural-studies update of Barthesian
semiotics, one both materialist and feminist in its take on what
garments signify (the third is a less readable one, which is
"fuzzed" by the cover photo of Rehm's beautiful Burning Deck
volume). (As will become evident later in this review, the
current vogue with "genre" music -- gangsta, deathcore and
horrorcore being the logical descendants of the use of Poe-like
horror lit by Richard Wright in _Native Son_ and _The Outsider_
--shows how genre and tradition can be used in remarkably
subversive ways. The ghastly photo on the cover of Rehm's book
may possess other intentions.)

So: what is the effect of the Clinton policy in Haiti, but to try
and make a miserable nation long under the yoke of US imperialism
into another CNN mini-series for US power? Commentators have
pointed out that Aristide went to the US because he couldn't get
support from the Anglo Caribbean, even though the people want
intervention.

_The Garment in Which No One Had Slept_: a clause for a title. The
book contains nine multi-page poems, in 62 pages. My first
impression here is one of unrequited minimalism. "Base Material"
is 5 pages of three or four lines a page: here, an asterisk has
the effect of a building blowing up in a Schwarzenegger film. It
is noticed. The poem of about 45 words stretches white space like
recent Village Voice covers (& I have horror vacua so you can see
I'm at a disadvantage). The first page goes, for instance, tiny I
thin hang in hint night*


*Anything I

Now, the page is immediately brilliant, and this is what I mean
about the postmodernism of the whole effect: we have a theory of
anti-Language extremism coupled with a poetry quite different.

"We feel that perhaps Modernism and probably post-Modernism [the
orthography here, small "p", hyphen, large "M" indicate already a
certain bias -- but then again, my lettrism here may be dismissed
as so much pomo foolery] will be seen as having been but
footnotes between, if not two phases of Romanticism -- the
Platonic and the eschatological, then between Romanticism and the
poetries of the coming millennium, and we hope that, following
Dickinson, Melville, Stevens, and others, a new understanding of
our task as iconoclasts and not innovators will emerge" (apex of
the M 1, p. 7.)

First of all, the main purpose of the current fetishization of
the American canon is to ensure that the formal and political
tendencies of Language-influenced writing do not result in an
"Anti-American" discarding of the canon. Unlike a fascination
with Zukofsky a generation ago, the Melville-Dickinson dyad
affirms a white, Anglo based poetics, and one which ensures that
the current generation of poets does not result in the
devaluation of the multi-million dollar library holdings of ivy
league and sub-ivy league colleges and universities. In the same
way deconstruction resulted in maintaining both the ivy league
(Yale school, anyone?) and its presses (Chicago) by accommodating
Californian and midwest schools and presses (Minneapolis
anyone?). The editorial in general is trenchantly critical of
"language"-associated excess (reminding me of a local poet who
dismissed Atom Egoyan's films as Euro-angst video based on seeing
clips of two of them) -- and yet what do I think of when I see
this first set of poems by Rehm, indeed, this first page, but
Steve McCaffery's Knowledge Never Knew (1983)? Like that book,
Rehm's opening pages pose the question of space, of the space
between the initial stanza and the bottom line, "referenced" by
the asterisk. A "tiny I" for sure, which can also be an "Anything
I" thanks to palindrome-like manipulations. But if the poem seems
formally rooted (radicalized?) in McCaffery, it goes in other
directions. Indeed, and without wanting to set up a straw figure
of comparison, it's about as "radical" in that way as the use of
the pun is in "Melville's Marginalia."

Now, I purchased my copy of Susan Howe's _The Non-Conformist's
Memorial_ at The World's Biggest Bookstore here in Toronto, a very
large downtown store owned by the chain Cole's (viz Norma) --which
might quell the "fierce" debates on the buff poetics electronic
conference over poetry in bookstores, it's been very religious &
histrionic (which is not the same thing as hysterical, which I
welcome); I might add that I took Maggie O'Sullivan to The
World's Biggest when she was in town, & she bought six volumes of
bpNichol's _The Martyrology_.

Punning in _The Martyrology_ is one thing (or in Nancy Shaw's
_Scoptocratic_, one of my favourite books of the last ten years);
it serves or does duty in the "avant-garde's poetics of `language
itself,' with its forcefield-like purgation of radical alterity
and non-linguistic, material influx and receptivity" that apex of
the M declaims (p. 7). Actually, I don't really understand what I
just quoted from apex; it seems to say ... well, fuck it. So I'm
saying that the pun is different in Howe: just what does it
matter that the forgotten cultural nationalist James Clarence
Mangan is close to the word "margin," anyway (Howe, 105)? On the
other hand, I think it's cool that Mangan may have been a dope
fiend. Acid marxism from this day on.

In a way, Rehm's work ends up being akin to Wu-Tang Clan or
Gravediggaz, East Coast rappers trying to challenge the hegemony
of the West Coast flavour. And as the Gravediggaz, by having
their album advertised as "horrorcore," were able to then dispute
the label as one invented by their, uh, label, so we can see the
incommensurability of the "poetics" and the "poetry" chez Rehm.
In the end, that is, the totally cool "Thus I Find my Legs" &
"Repudiation" stand out for me. "Repudiation" has the necessary
inclusion of the marginal in a way that seems more Grim or
Neilson and less Howe: i.e. the end of the first page goes:

... I am free to reject the objects of mathematics. However,
explain the closer bond. Testing. 1.2.3.4.

The brilliance of the last line is severely at odds with the
"humanism" of the mathematical rejection (sorry for the humanism
bashing, tho). 1.2.3.4. is unreadable and shifting (the next four
pages are numbered so) in the way that I can sometimes see people
reading Dickinson, but you can read so many writers that way,
from Bliss Carman (Pound's favourite writer in the 1910's) to
Chris Stroffolino, so why stop at ED and HM? Or: HMV, and
remember Moby, great-grandson of the novelist, now a rave and
ambient musicker.

Irreligious ecstasy. In the same way here in Canada a generation
of writers are busy feeding off the corpse of bpNichol
--retrofitted with more Derrida and Cixous. Canonization has too
much balls for my taste. The wrong kind of balls, anyway.


_A VEIL IN THE SAND_ BY SUSAN SMITH NASH

Reviewed by W.B. Keckler


I:  Self, Orion is hung aloft; the neighborhood is asleep; a cup
of pretentious Earl Grey tea (the Queen's favorite) steams
between us; I can't help but feel it is the perfect moment to
discuss Ms. Nash's latest!

I:  I concur, mon semblable, mon fr�re!

I:  Self, what do you make of this new chap about T.E. Lawrence,
the legendary "Lawrence of Arabia?"

I:  I find it to be an interesting animal.  Quite successfully
adapted to its environment.  I am speaking, of course, of
contemporary letters.

I:  What do you know about the legendary "Lawrence of Arabia,"
Self?

I:  Pitifully little, I'm afraid.  Shall we consult our little
red Viking Desk Encyclopedia?  I see you nod "yes":  Well,
"Adventurer, soldier scholar. n Yes.  "Wrote The Seven Pillars of
Wisdom, Revolt in the Desert.  Helped defeat the Turks. 
Diplomacy.  Failed to achieve Arab independence."

I:  They don't mention his penchant for flagellation, a la
Swinburne?

I:  No, but A Veil ln the Sand does.  "(D)o you understand why I
pay/ my jr. officer to flog me until I bleed, until / my mind
thinks only surface?" (from "On Strata".)

I:  There seems to be a good deal of subtext dealing with
Alchemy.  Was Lawrence, as Rimbaud before him, drawn to the
Transmutation of Elements as a metaphor for spiritual
Transmutation in the soul?

I:  I'm not sure.  It is the sort of thing which makes one
curious to read more, non?  The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E-derived lyricism
seems to echo these transmutations itself, with the way words
meld syntax to draw substance to substance: like molecular bonds
shifting almost magically.  It is a sort of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
alchemy.

I:  Yes, I know exactly what you mean.  Witness: "caravanserai
natural transmutation of metal & flesh/ sublimate solid to vapor
like angels & a fallen/ Adam cast forth Paradaisical rhyme
farcical,.."  (from "Barchan"). How about the artist's
counter-genre stance?  What do you make of that?

I: I think it's very imaginative and brave.

I:  Why for the brilliant coloration of its hybridization!  It's
the next generation of L=A=N=G=U-A=G=E poetry put in the service
of serious biography.  Check out her extensive bibliography: 
this poet ain't fooling!

I:  Ah, yes.  But I thought L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry was
scriptible, not lisable....."writerly" as opposed to
"readerly"...that text must be partially or wholly constructed
(with often wildly-varying results) by the reader who is acting
qua writer.

I:  Oh, that's still true!   Fear not: we still have our qua. 
But this is definitely a new animal. I:  So, this new poetry is
not as bloodthirsty as its predecessors, not as intent on
assassinating the Subject?

I:  Not necessarily true, Self.  Be careful you do not entrench
behind an authorial fallacy.  Poets today reserve the right to
enter any and all previous poetic modalities.  And to cross-breed
them at will.  That's Postmodernism 101.  And Ms. Nash is a
versatile author, so let's not reach for the butterfly pins the
way critics always rush to do.

I:  Poets today are different?

I:  Many are.  Ms. Nash is a perfect example.  A schizoid culture
must, of necessity, produce artists doubly gifted at collapsing
(often violent) elements into a stable compound.  Sodium and
chlorine yeild salt.  What do lyricism and total Human skepticism
yield?  What about poetry and materialism?  Such are the concerns
and such is the process of the most interesting poets writing
today.

I:  Ah, Self...I believe we are running out of time.  We are,
after all, merely ad hoc creations of a manipulative being.  Not
even a Socratic dialogue, really.  For we are so evenly matched

I:  Never mind.  Any last comments on A Veil?

I:  Yes.  The chap reads as wonderful biography: the author might
consider presenting it as theater someday, somewhere.

I:  What a wonderful observation, Self!  But now we must go.  I
am quite hungry, as is my wont.

I:  Myself too, oddly enough.  Two Characters in Search of a
Sandwich?

I:  Indeed!


_HELEN KELLER OR ARAKAWA_ BY MADELINE GINS

Reviewed by Serge Gavronsky


Unlike / every other book, it moves foreward / retreats; holds /
releases; absorbs / rejects; is / is not; s/he visible-invisible.
 it is fundamentally a quest / ion.

But (a logical interruptive conjunction) as book it is held /
seen / read, especially seen and read as a play of the vast range
of typography as only a philosophical inquiry (a quest / ion) can
do into the very matter of perception and the thought which
accompanies it, faithful Sancho.  it is a pleasure (rare these
days), a challenge and a victory (an either / or or an "either"
by itself).

We-it / Helen Keller (Madeline Gins / Arakawa / words / spaces /
voices / scoop of page / scope of... )

Madeline Gins is a fabulist with quotation marks as one second
degree of perception technique.  Who is she (is "she"? s/he?) who
wanders / wonders a / round Arakawa's work as she is her Self a
work of Madeline Gins through language in prose, jumping bean of
a prose writer / stable-unstabilizing reading (forcing the reader
to consider the text as opaque (yet transparent too).  It is a
mix of routine talk, poetry in prose, poetry on the page,
maniacal constructs.  She: "line active".  Or again "I tud so".

Make of Madeline Gins what s/he makes her Self (her): playful,
thoughtful, arbitrary, arrows suspended in mid-air going where
arrows go, yet unpredictable in their trajectories (on the canvas
/ page).  The text is motion / space, everything her(e)
imagination and story-telling a telling story since it
re(situates)-capitulates art (perception), philosophy (love of .
. .) the texture in its flagrant presence (could it have been a
paradigmatic shift and made to read, in this case Fragrance?)

If this were not enuf then whatt?

There's physics, and Japan--you got it!  There's cosmos / universe
/ film and processing of thought.  Take two for instance.  Get
the Gins drift of things.  in the margins of the text, there's
Arakawa's title.  Yes, yet another marginal, sotto voce language
with dates, just to make us happy, reassured that in this time of
geography there's a rime with Chamonix.  A blank stare.  There's
even food here and what I think of as haiku.  "Here." 
Fundamentally Madeline Gins is / not a trans /lator of Arakawa's 
Furthermore suppose linearity were fiction where "dots are more
concrete than words."  Then language is a dot syntax.  Dot
Lamour.

I predict you'll love "it"; it's got everything especially a
strategy, a sort of Nietzschian joy, dancer in the air of words. 
Remember, when you turn the book around you've got to look hard
at the black dot on the back cover on a white field with a black
stratosphere below.


_WALK_ BY COLE SWENSEN

Reviewed by Chris Stroffolino

In Cole Swensen's latest chapbook, _Walk_ (Leave Books, 1994), the
distinction between faces and bodies (rather than �mind' and
�body') occupies a privileged position. As early as Section 2 of
this 10 section poem, the speaker can be "seen" siding with
bodies against faces, and thus siding with the third person
against the second. If there seems something "counterintuitive"
about this it's perhaps because we've accepted too uncritically
such 'commonsense' theories as Buber's "I and Thou" and employ
them to flagellate ourselves for such �lapses' Swensen is more
willing to acknowledge (and even provisionally embrace). Though
Swensen implicitly critiques such a stance (of siding with bodies
against faces) by framing it in the past tense, by admitting "I
am/ uncomfortable with faces, they/ make me cry" and by
expressing without passing smug judgment on the desire to live
"alone in the world" and to "read all night long" Swensen
radically questions the cult of �intimacy' that privileges a
face-to-face model at the expense of all others.

Not content with a simple dualism, Swensen enacts a �definition'
of bodies as not static but walking. They resemble both
"iridescent animals/ too small to be seen with the naked eye/
that live in the lungs and read all night long" as well as
writing itself. Nor are the faces static; they are simply only
present as an absence:

Constellations with pages of 
open light just where the faces should be. 
This can only happen in the dark. (III)

This is less of an act of depersonalization than it is of
defamiliarization (more like Elaine DeKooning's portrait of Frank
O'Hara than Beckett's "faceless world incurious"). For though we
could read a certain bleakness to her sense of a faceless world
in such stanzas as:

The bridges are suspended as if a person walking has no anchor in
any world and the foot lands after the foot like a victim of
amnesia in his brand new life. The sound belongs to no one, there
are no mouths here, just round Os that mutter zero, zero, zero.
(IV)

there is also an exhilerating difficulty in such surface tension
in which there's no need for anchors because "the entire body /
is braille and there/ is nothing inside." (At this point, I might
not be entirely unjust to refer to the first line of another
recent Swensen poem not included in Walk: "To love is to remove
the face"--at least the kind of face that denies the primacy of
bodies, though Swensen is not just reacting or working
dialectically here, despite my schemas.

The theme of blindness itself is also central to Walk. What is
addressed here is not so much a fear of going blind as much as a
fear of being told you're going blind. The first poem addresses
this question in terms of ways and means: What should one do in
such a situation? And it is a situation. One could either deny
one's blind, desperately truck off to the eye-doctor, or embrace
the uncertainty of blindness. Swensen chooses the latter. By
rehearsing responses to such accusations of blindness, Swensen
exposes the social condition of writing/walking. Such social
dimensions become more acute in Section 5, the first time the
second person pronoun occurs.

When she writes (in Section 5): "One leads down/ to pick up
something from the ground I cannot see," the content of "it" as
well as the place from where it came are cut off so as to
foreground the picking up itself by framing it with the blindness
of selective perception. Such selective, if not necessarily trunc
ated, perception, allows her to envision something "unaffected by
inversion" which modulates into "The single sentence in which/ no
order above all others," in short, an IDEAL sentence that may not
be able to exist in a single reading. Perhaps it is against such
ideality that Swensen opposes the "you," though at first the
�you' is evoked as a kind of ideal:

Your silence is all that doesn't scare me, all that makes of
breath a sphere, a pierce in arching space, a chime.(V)

Yet this remains consistent with the urge to bypass-faces,
insofar as the �you' with which the speaker sets herself in
relation resembles the spine of an iridescent animal. In the
final stanza:

The spine of an iridescent animal is always a circle. So like me
it has no face and the moving parts take part in some movement,
traceless, that the body replaces with words  (V).

Though one could see the kinship here with Derrida's attack on
the phal-logocentrism of a speech over writing model, one doesn't
have to read Swensen as "bypassing" faces--for the center "faces"
occupy is as culturally inscribed as the "fact" that what opposes
it must be a kind of crippling blindness. In addition, Swensen
evokes a kind of faith in the automatic pilot (if not �invisible
hand') of the chtonic at the start of the next poem (in which the
"sphere" and the "you" are elaborated):

When you went blind I could no longer see you. The curvature of
the earth will make these lines run together, ships sailing
parallel disappear in a single point

so you could be with me always (VI)

There's the sense that eyes and faces separate us and must be
subverted so we can walk together. But walking, a metaphor for
writing throughout, reminds us that this alliance between
"bodies" and "words" against the common enemy of "faces" is at
best uneasy.   For words may be only claiming a relationship to
the body to ground their opposition with faces in something other
than escapism. Swensen seems to sense this when she turns to the
"something...the blind can move in silence/ far beyond their
bodies." But rather than rejecting words, Swensen rejects the
body as ground (just as she rejected the face as ground earlier).
In fact, what Zukofsky would call "the whole face of the ground",
the dream of ground itself, is eschewed here for the silent
second person other/double of "some dearer measure/ that the foot
can't bare.(VI)"

In contrast to the careful, almost technical, voice of VI, with
its four dimensional tropes on "measure" and "foot," section VII
employs more seemingly "conversational" run-ons to dramatize THE
BODY as that which is nostalgic for the gaudy money-shot burst of
alleged authenticity as disruptive force; she opposes this to the
blind who read by touch (braille), but no longer towards the ends
of stripping sight of its status. By section VIII, on the plot
level of the book at least, the eyes, once linked with the face,
also turn against it. They, too, through tropes and substitution,
abandon the sinking ship of the face thus rendering the face more
powerless  or meaningless as a model:

Ships without faces, just eyes to stand for the curvature of the
earth, to hold its place, like a zero waits and so develops its
own life. (VIII)

In a dramatic move, the eyes here join the body, silence,
blindness, the zero, the curvature of the earth, the
other/double. Yet Swensen wonders if this prolif eration of
meaning, this walking, has gone too far. Indeed, the need for a
new limit, or a return, can be seen when she writes:

We see the backs of words in single file while their eyes press
beyond. (VIII)

There is a coming to terms with counting, with choosing, with "a
world that can't be seen from the distance." At last, then, in
section IX, for the first time in the book, there is a present
face. One could say the circle completes itself, but it is no
short circuit for the faces are "felt" not seen:

I feel a face alight and we'l] both be blind and sound will
multiply on its axis, gain momentum and cry.(IX)

To conclude then, one could characterize Walk as a coming to
terms with one's inevitable blindspots, a working through of
one's fear of faces and the crying they "signify." Or one can
conclude that the face-body dualism (not "mind"-- in fact, the
word "mind" never appears in Walk) is only resolved by
foregrounding a more subtle "sight-touch" dualism. This
"sight-touch" distinction however is not a dualism per se because
it doesn't rely on abstract structures (as face and body do) but
on actions, gestures. When she writes:

The walking can be argued as pure action. That which sets the
cell walls trembling and dissolves. Numbers never did anyone any
good without uncountable zeros. (IX)

she is not denying the possibility that there is no such thing as
pure action. She may be more interested in going beyond (or
without) argument. For "pure action" must allow the possibility
of inert manipulable objects, and thus cannot be pure, though
this can be argued. Swensen's evocative mappings leave room for
such arguments, but by coming to the realization that that which
can be argued as pure action is the everything that breathes only
when one feels alone in the world. This world (or view of the
world) is hermetically sealed and thus without distinction and
must be put in the past (tense) in the end.


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END OF WITZ 3.1
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W I T Z


WITZ is a journal of critical writing edited by Christopher
Reiner (creiner@crl.com).  It is published three times a
year.

The contents of this issue are copyright (c) 1994 by WITZ.

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