W I T Z

A Journal of Contemporary Poetics


Volume III, Number Two					SPRING 1995

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CONTENTS

_The Lyric as Experimental Possibility_ by Mark Wallace
_Roman Reading_ by Karl Young

Readings & Reviews
_Poetics of the Common Knowledge_ reviewed by Chris Stroffolino
_The Art of Practice_ reviewed by Daniel Barbiero
Left Hand Books (various) reviewed by Harry Polkinhorn

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THE LYRIC AS EXPERIMENTAL POSSIBILITY

By Mark Wallace

1) No statement about the final value of a form of poetry can
possibly be true (including this statement).  As Ron Silliman has
pointed out, forms of writing are basically amoral.  It always
remains possible to test the value of a form again, to see what
use might be made in the present moment of its historically
determinable characteristics, or to alter, recombine, or change
those characteristics to redefine the possibilities of that form
in the present moment.  One interesting possibility, for
instance, would be to combine elements historically thought of as
belonging to one sort of poetic form with elements of another
form, thus distorting both forms to create new hybrids.  In any
case, while the value of a form of writing can be determined
partly by looking at all the uses that have been made of that
form, that determinations can never be complete, not only because
new readings of old uses of that form can always take place, but
also because the value of that form can and will be changed by
any new uses made of it.

2) I read Pound's dictum "make it new" ironically.  There is no
doubt that innovation in poetic forms continues to be of great
value in a society that attempts to fix and control modes not
only of writing but of living.  But it is also true that the
"new" itself is fraught with contradictions, and is easily
co-opted by the forces of both capitalism and imperialism, which
are both interested in extending themselves into the terrain of
the "new" in order to expand their resources and control. The
"new" may or may not challenge dominant social assumptions.  I
find the "new" useful to the extent that it challenges
assumptions, but only with the ironic awareness that the
challenge itself is far more likely to be co-optable than
challenging.  Charles Borkuis: "you originals/are the biggest
dupes."  As Terry Eagleton has pointed out in _The Ideology of the
Aesthetic_ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990, 372), as long as the
ownership of materials is in certain hands, the words of a
writer, however challenging, cannot do much to change power
relations.

3) All writers have only the past to work with when they are
making something new.  The new is made by borrowing from,
changing, refiguring, perhaps demolishing the past, out of a
perception of what might possibly exist.  The new is possible
only because there is a past.

4) Currently dominant notions of past, present and future are
expressions of western linear time and its supposed driving
force, progress.  Whale the present and future may develop out of
the past, it is not clear when it comes to literature and other
arts (leaving aside the vast question of social change) that new
work necessarily "improves" the work of the past.  Does _Gravity's
Rainbow_, represent progress from _Tristram Shandy_; is Charles
Olson's work a "refinement" of Pound's, whatever influence he
takes from Pound?  As Gertrude Stein suggested in "Composition as
Explanation," every art work is new by definition when it first
appears, simply because it did not exist before.  The concept of
"make it new" seems useful to the extent that it suggests that
works of literature should be as complex as their times.  But
such a suggestion does not imply that such works must be
"improvements" of previous literature in order to be significant.
 To the extent that "make it new" suggests that literature needs
to progress or improve in order to be significant, the concept 
imposes linear progress on the much more varied complexities that
works of literature embody.

5) It is only when subjected to the notion of progress that the
word "derivative" takes on the negative connotation it currently
has when applied to literature.  To call something "derivative"
is to say that it has not progressed.  But some level of
imitation in literature and art is unavoidable.  Rather than
condemning all imitation as lack of novelty, it might be more
insightful to think of the complex ways in which new works of
literature and art are influenced by what has come before them,
and to consider the extent to which new works imitate or do not
imitate previous works as one response to the particular problems
the face in their inevitable newness.  isn't honest and
complexity of perception, partly original, partly borrowed, and
however embodied in the form of literature, the goal even of new
forms of writing, indeed the impetus for the creation of new
forms, and more important than the desire to simply present
something new?  Isn't the value of all new forms not simply that
they are new, but that they can allow art to embody complex and
changing perceptions?

6) Historically, one primary difference between the lyric and
other forms of western poetry has been the nature of address. 
The lyric often speaks to another person (in some case perhaps a
group of persons) very specifically, rather than addressing the
"world in general" as does epic poetry or the modern American
"poem with history" (Ezra Pound's _Cantos_, Charles Olson's _Maximus
Poems_, Louis Zukofsky's "A" as some examples).  The history of
lyric address is entirely troubling, perhaps most thoroughly in
its frequent objectifying of the person being spoken to.  Yet I
am also troubled by the address of the epic or "poem with
history,"  Such writing, although often aware that the world is
not hearing what it says, nonetheless continues to address that
preposterous deafness. I am interested in the way the lyric
suggests that address needs to be understood as specific, however
troubling the specific address of specific lyric poems may be.  I
am crucially interested in the question of who might hear me, and
who, in term, I might possible hear.

7) The possibilities that address might be understood valuably as
specific leads me to an insight that causes me both pain and
elation; that I am partial, that is to say, not total, and
specifically interested.  I want to come in contact with others
who are also partial.

8)  If there is one thing I find most troubling about the "poem
with history," it is its assumption that a totalized view of the
world--which usually implies a total containment of it--is
possible.  Whether this total containment attempts to present
itself as coming from beyond the limits of partiality (Pound, who
finally recognized the impossibility of his attempt--for which we
owe him thanks) or from inside some specific but totalizing
mythic stance towards the world (Olson's Maximus, although Olson,
in creating a stance out of action towards the world rather than
knowledge of it, does simultaneously undermine his totalizing
stance), I nonetheless suspect that the desire for totalization
may emerge at least as much from the desire for control as it
does from the desire for liberation.  Would not a desire for
liberation want to see endless partial stances towards the world,
abrupt and glorious contradictions, the repeated shifting of
positions, the chance to change your mind at any time on the
slightest whim? Would not a desire for liberation suggest that
any total view of the world might change at any moment?

9) I have not desire to have a total new of the world, or of the
history of poetry.  Rather I have many views, and believe in the
existence of many histories, imagined and unreal as well as real
and material.  But to say that I have many views and believe in
many histories is not deny that there are some things that I very
specifically and consistently believe.  Of course I would like to
think of myself as able to question even those beliefs.

10) I wonder about the gender implications of the lyric and the
epic.  To what extent is it accidental that in the canon of
western literature the crucial founding voice of the lyric
(Sappho) is female, while the crucial founding voice of the epic
(Homer) is male?  Could it be that the totalizing address is a
function of a masculine desire for control (whether learned or
innate?) whereas the notion of specific address is a function of
a feminine concern for responsiveness?  Even if such a question
is wildly overdetermined by conventional notions of gender (and I
think it is). what does one make of the fact that the American
"poem with history" has been relentlessly male form?  Here
Gertrude Stein seems an endlessly complicating conundrum, since
her work entirely undermines any conventional perspective on
masculine/feminine approaches to literature.  I wish the same
could be said of Pound or Olson.  Even if none of these questions
are answerable, I am nonetheless interested in exploring the
possibility of the feminine in my own writing (at the very least,
exploring its impossibility in my own writing) as a way to make a
problem of my masculinity, which I do not reject but am
interested in questioning.  If in that questioning I find I want
to reject masculinity as it is currently defined, I reserve that
possibility, as I would reserve the possibility of rejecting
current definitions of the feminine.  The lyric has seemed one
way of exploring gender dynamics in my writing.

11) I am perfectly aware that my reading of the "history" of the
lyric, the epic and the "poem with history" is to a great extent
a fiction.  But I still think it is true that the epic and the
"poem with history" both try, to a certain extent, to fix the
nature of the world, and to present that fixed nature to the
world whose nature it is trying to fix.  But it is also true that
within such poems there are many counter examples to this
statement.  Zukofsky's hermeticism in "A," for instance, thoroughly
complicates the issue of whether his address is public.  Ron
Silliman's long poems always complicate the nature of address.  I
am positing this dichotomy of address between the lyric and the
"poem with history" more because of  what I sometimes do with the
lyric in my own writing than because I think that in pointing to
this dichotomy I am making total sense of the history of poetry. 
And for the time being I am characterizing the above sentence as
itself a perception that my partial interest in lyric address
makes possible.

12) If a social collectivity of experimental artist and others
interested in those experiments can have any effect on the social
dynamics of the present moment, such effect must be active on the
level of day-day, specific encounters between individuals, and
must arise out of the perceived concerns of those individuals on
a highly specific, day-to-day basis.  Any attempt to impose a
totalized collectivity is, I think, doomed to failure.  I am
reminded here of Gramasci's concept of "organic intellectuals,"
whose ideas and concerns arise from direct material contact with
all the complexities of their environments.  Such intellectuals
form direct relations with others, out of which collectivity can
perhaps emerge.

Although it seems to me that incisive and lasting social change
cannot happen without such intellectuals beginning to step
forward in large numbers, I am skeptical about the possible
existence of many such intellectuals, or of their ability to gain
power.  As a book like Guy Debord's _Comments on the Society of
the Spectacle_ ( a later reflection on his well-known text of
1967) makes perfectly clear, optimism about the possibility of
change may be a great mistake, may in fact even prohibit its
successful realization, if it is not entirely prohibited
already.

Yet I don't want my skepticism to stand in the way of achieving
meaningful social collectivity, would it be possible.  In a
society in which useful discussion about the relation between
individuals and groups almost never takes place, I'm willing to
concede that my own thinking on this subject may not be
sufficiently complex.  In that insufficiency, lyric address
allows me a mode of writing through which to think towards
significant contact with others.  But at this point in time I,
like many others perhaps, have little or no such contact.

13) Refigurings of the lyric mode have helped me write a
"situationally specific" poetry, one that deals with material,
interpersonal, political, detailed situations in as specific a
manner as possible.  This was one of the primary intentions of my
books _Complications From Standing In A Circle_ and _Every Day Is
Most Of My Time_.  I wanted to write a poetry that was as
materially specific, localized, and partial as I could.  I am
aware that there can be a huge gap between what one wants to
write and what one writes.

14) My sense of lyric as partial, specific, situational, and
local in no sense suggests that I think of lyric as "local
color," that is, as presenting a "slice of life" for audience
satisfaction.  Rather, it seems to me that in addressing,
responding to, recognizing others in the most specific possible
way, the sense of lyric I am suggesting presents a mode of world
address that is potentially more useful than a more generalized,
public address that speaks at (and therefore past) everyone.  The
sense of lyric I am suggesting here potentially provides direct
and meaningful material contact much of the sort that William
Carlos Williams was striving for when he began a magazine called
Contact.  The possibility of this contact, theorized in relation
to Gramsci's concept of "organic intellectuals," is one aspect of
the lyric mode that has a definite social and collective
significance.  Again, however, I can't avoid my skepticism about
the extent of that significance.

15) According to many strict definitions of lyric poetry, I have,
in fact, written very few lyric poems.  In my work, languages of
politics, technology, media deception and academic "expertise"
frequently disrupt any attempt to narrowly define the "subject
matter" of the "lyric poems" I have written.  But even a lyric
poem that fit strict definitions of the lyric might be
interesting, and I have written some such poems.  I see no
necessary opposition between the personal and the political, the
confessional and the collective, the enacted and the theoretical.
 But I do see that overly narrow definitions of these
possibilities dominate discussions of poetry at this particular
time.  I see more danger in overly narrow definitions of form in
poetry than I do in any form itself.  Forms are possibilities
and, as such, it always remains to be seen what can be done with
them.



ROMAN READING

By Karl Young

It is difficult to reconstruct reading practices during the early
days of the Roman alphabet, but we do have some primary sources
and we can piece together a few tentative conclusions. Much of
our data is fragmentary and seems, at times, contradictory. We
should assume that Roman literacy was not simple or homogeneous,
but a complex activity, as it is today.

We can say with some assurance that writing and reading were more
tightly intertwined with speech than they are now. Virtually all
writers on the subject conclude that silent reading was highly
unusual. One of the corroborations for this is a passage from
Augustine's _Confessions_, in which the author expresses
amazement at Ambrose's habit of reading silently, something
Augustine had never seen or heard of before. "As he read, his
eyes moved over the page and his heart received the meaning, but
he spoke not and his tongue was still." Augustine's speculations
on the reasons for this strange behavior may seem as bizarre to
us today as some of the travelers' tales of the ancient world. It
would be interesting to see how Augustine might have tried to
explain Evelyn Wood's reading methods. Much of the primary
material that has come down to us deals with public rather than
private reading. Probably this is because Roman writers thought
of public readings as events to be recorded, but took their own
private reading for granted, as a daily activity that needed no
comment. If this is so, we may feel that the importance of public
reading is exaggerated. In all probability, the Romans spent more
time reading privately at home than they did at public
performances, but this doesn't mean that public readings were not
central to all types of reading. In a time when nearly everyone
read out loud, public recitation probably informed private
reading to a degree that may be hard to comprehend today. A Roman
reading alone in his study or garden probably used the same
intonations, phrasings, rhythms, even gestures that he had
learned from public performances. A bureaucrat reading an order
might have mimicked the tones of a man in power, either seriously
or in comic parody. Even if he were reading a treatise on road
building, he probably would have declaimed it, and would have had
a hard time suppressing gestures as he read. In discussing Roman
reading habits we will have to emphasize public reading -- it is
the only kind for which we have much evidence, and it probably
shaped and reflected private reading as well. We should add,
however, that there were times when silent reading would have
been socially or politically useful and "eyes only" messages were
apparently circulated in the Roman bureaucracy, in the Senate,
and at social events.

We may be using the wrong word when we think of "writing" in the
Roman context. Apparently, almost any author who could afford a
literate slave or secretary dictated his poems or decrees or even
cellar lists. The composers of many of the Roman texts that have
survived probably didn't touch pen or stylus when "writing" their
works. However we do have a documented case of a poet following a
different course: Virgil made careful outlines of the _Aeneid_,
and slowly and painstakingly revised it, presumably on wax
tablets and then on papyrus. Interesting examples of writing and
not writing (albeit in Greek, but part of the same milieu) come
from the biblical epistles of St. Paul, whose custom it was to
take the pen from his secretary and write the last few lines
himself. Thus we have in II Thessalonians, 3:17: "The salutations
of Paul with mine own hand, which is the token in every epistle:
so I write." In Galatians, 6:11, Paul writes, "Ye see how large a
letter I have written unto you with mine own hand." Some
commentators have inferred from this that Paul was nearsighted.
It seems more likely that Paul was just enthusiastic or excited
in his letter writing sessions. Perhaps his exuberance was the
reason why he took the pen from his secretary's hand for the
first time. In this case, he seems to be taking childlike
pleasure in the difference between his own freer writing and the
tighter, more economical script of the professional scribe.
Perhaps he adopted the custom of finishing his letters in his own
hand because it was unusual, distinctive, and added a personal
touch that he hoped might help in some small way to bind the
early Christian congregations together.

We have several references to impromptu composition of verse,
such as the one in the opening lines of Catullus, 50. These may
have run the gamut from completely oral composition to writing
done on a tablet passed back and forth between poets. We can
assume that compositions could result on some occasions in the
earthy pungency of *signifyin* or *dozens* still composed by
African-Americans today, and on other occasions in the refined
decorum of Japanese linked verse. It seems likely that lines
composed in impromptu sessions found their way into finished
poems.

Drama was a living and changeable art during this period, and it
is sometimes difficult to distinguish it precisely from oratory,
poetry, and what we might now have to call performance art. At
the beginning of the period, Latin literature was largely Greek
literature in translation or paraphrase, and Latin adaptations of
Greek plays were apparently the first to be staged in Rome. The
audience could be large or small and the script could be adjusted
to the size and character of the audience. Dramas presented to
smaller audiences were more like poetry readings than elaborate
stage productions. As far as we can tell, from sources that are
usually biased, the early Roman theater didn't develop into the
sort of high art associated with its Greek models, but must have
opened up many possibilities to dramatists and actors. Later
Roman theater included juggling, acrobatics, gladiatorial
contests, and grandiose spectacles. During a play that called for
a severed head to be brought on stage, a returning army brought
the head of an imperial enemy to the actors, who substituted it
for the artificial head they had intended to use -- the emperor
was pleased when he recognized the head carried onto the stage.
Mime, again often based on Greek models, was a more highly
developed art than it is now, employing an elaborate and
expressive language of gestures, which were probably related to
the gestures used in other forms of drama and in the recitation
of poetry. We know little of the texts or scores for these later
types of theater, but they did exist, and probably informed the
reading habits of the audiences as well as giving instruction to
the actors.

Poetry readings grew up along with the drama, beginning, as did
drama, with recitations of Greek verses or Latin adaptations of
them. During the late Republic, when Latin works became
acceptable to audiences, the works read were usually those of
earlier Latin poets. By the time of Augustus, readings of new
works eclipsed the derivative poetry of the previous era and, if
our sources can be trusted, the theater as well. In fact, a
popular poet might read in a theater to a large crowd. Virgil
seems to have adopted the modern habit of ducking out the stage
door to avoid the equivalent of groupies. As many as a thousand
people could attend a reading, but most were given to small
audiences, who were admitted only by invitation. In some cases,
if the poet was not confident in his own ability to recite his
verse, a professional reader could be hired to declaim the lines
while the author stood next to him, supplementing the words with
the appropriate gestures. Clearly the author's presence was
important and physical gesture essential to Roman reading. Both
were as important as the words of the poem or the voice that
carried them. We have descriptions of audiences applauding wildly
and others of audiences waiting out in the hall until the reading
was over, coming in only for the last few minutes, no doubt to
curry favor with other members of the audience or to be able to
join the party after the reading. Impromptu readings were given
in the street with some frequency, and Horace speaks of readers
declaiming their poetry in public baths because the acoustics of
these structures added resonance to the reader's voice. We have
references to readings attended only by poets, and others given
by emperors or men of wealth and power that were attended purely
for political reasons.

Poetry readings served a number of purposes for Roman poets. As
Pliny points out, readings gave a poet the opportunity to test
his work and revise it according to criticism given directly by
his fellows or implied by audience reaction. Many poets simply
wanted to be heard, renting a hall and perhaps even an audience
with their own money. As in twentieth century America, readings
gave poets the opportunity to meet each other, exchange views,
keep up with their colleagues' latest projects, get new ideas for
their own work, and cement bonds of friendship and cooperation
between them -- or to carry on grudges, arguments, and wars
between cliques. Readings seem to have encouraged the sale of
books: we have references to a number of promotional readings,
sometimes sponsored by the publisher of a book. We also have
references to poets fishing for publishers and patrons by giving
readings. Apparently, admission was charged for some of the
larger readings and privileges and favors were exchanged at some
of the more exclusive ones. Patronage was an important political
and economic element in many readings. If a poet impressed his
audience, it increased the patron's prestige -- the patron
expressed his gratitude in cash or other emoluments, and the
poet, in turn, responded by flattering his patron in his own
works. Perhaps the most impressive example of poet-patron
relationship can be seen in a reading of book 6 of the *Aeneid*
before Augustus and his entourage. Virgil introduced the
emperor's nephew, Marcellus, who had recently died, into the poem
as a soul waiting to be born. Octavia, mother of Marcellus,
swooned when this passage was read -- perhaps, given the
ruthlessness of this family, suggesting that poets were not the
only ones capable of theatrics at such readings.

Oratory was one of the basic Roman arts -- its techniques often
borrowed a great deal from the poet's craft, and vice versa.
Prose works such as histories and philosophical treatises were
often composed for oral recitation rather than for the page, and
some historians apparently made no attempt at publishing their
work in writing. On the other hand, some authors circulated their
orations in pamphlet form, never intending to present them
orally. Some of these, such as Cicero's _Against Verres_, had
been rendered unnecessary by current events, but oratory
nevertheless seems to have developed into a genre of its own, not
necessarily dependent on public performance. Many Romans included
diatribes in their wills expressing feelings that they would not
have dared to say to a large public audience while alive. This
was so deeply intrenched in the Roman psyche that even Augustus
(no friend to freedom of speech) squashed a proposal made by the
Senate to ban the practice. Certainly the writers of these wills
composed them as oratory, and that is probably how they were
received.

It is impossible to determine literacy rates among the Romans,
but they must have been relatively high, at least in the cities,
and have included a fair number of women, though writing for
publication was a predominantly male profession. We have
inscriptions on virtually every object imaginable: bottles and
leftover tiles from construction sites as well as monuments and
tombstones. A number of sources suggest that even poor Romans,
with no pretentions of extensive education, owned and used books.
The Romans were a practical people and produced a large number of
how-to books, ranging from language instruction to travel guides
to works on hydraulics and architecture. Though we can not now be
certain how they were read, we should assume that they were read
aloud and that memorization played a significant part in reading.
We can imagine, for instance, a traveler reading and rereading a
guide book, pronouncing the words over and over to make sure he
got his directions straight and would remember them. We can
imagine him reciting them to himself as he walked or rode,
addressing the appropriate passage to a marker or crossroads when
he came to it.

We may consider most Roman texts as scores of one sort or
another, meant as aids in oral re-creation. When we consider
poetry readings, orations, and the like, we should note that the
light weight of papyrus and a clearly legible alphabet were
admirably suited for use as scores. At the same time, lack of
punctuation and word division would demand a great deal of
concentration, of invested effort, on the part of the reader: he
would virtually *have* to speak the words aloud to figure out
where one word ended and another began, which would, in turn,
help embed the words in his memory. Reading texts aloud to
themselves, Roman readers probably tried to re-create the
intonations, inflections, and gestures of the original authors.
The Roman reader probably stimulated his acoustic memory and
re-created for his inner ear the sounds of the original
performance as he read aloud. This applies, in a somewhat
different way, to orations that were never delivered or poems by
authors the reader had never heard: the reader of such works had
to begin by imagining the delivery of the speaker, and the
reader's attempt at inventing a voice to match the written word
must have been a powerful oral and acoustic stimulus.

As Moses Hadas has pointed out, many, if not most, Roman texts
seem to have a sense of conversation behind them, as though the
author had to imagine that he was speaking to someone before he
could compose his work. A secretary taking down his words might
encourage this sense of speaking to someone, but hardly accounts
for it. Inscriptions were often cast in the form of an address.
The inscription on a monument might begin, "You who travel this
road, stop and hear me;" a box might bear the inscription, "Hands
off: I belong to Sota," as though the box or the monument were
speaking to someone with the only voice it had. Even the dogmatic
statements on grander monuments read like the pronouncements of
an emperor directed toward subjects who dare not speak but must
listen.  This suggests that writing was a transformation of
speech into another medium, retaining some of the interchange in
human conversation, but without the sound. The page or the
monument spoke to the reader, who re-created the acoustic
dimension of the words. This is a very different notion from our
own, in which most writing simply conveys information, without a
sense of dialogue or participation, but in it we can see the
seeds of our modern reading habits.

Memory was one of the basic arts of life for the Romans, and it
seems likely that they committed to memory passages from all
sorts of books: from books of poetry to books on mining, from
orations to travel guides, probably even books on memory itself.
Once committed to memory, a passage could be replayed for the
reader's inner ear and reintegrated into life on a number of
levels: passages could be used as guides for successful or
ethical action, as solace in time of adversity, as models for
discourse or composition, as a storehouse for quotations, and so
on.

The Roman alphabet is clear, simple, and legible. This makes it
appropriate to comuniquis and scores. At the same time, when
inscribed in stone or written with a pen on papyrus or vellum, it
has qualities that differentiate it from modern type. During the
twentieth century, book producers have done everything they could
to make the book an invisible and impalpable medium. Tactility
has been minimized in paper and in impression. Printed letters
are uniform throughout a text printed in one face, no matter how
long the book is: a "c" on page 1 will be identical with a "c" on
page 700. Few readers today have any sense of how the books they
read are produced -- indeed, most people don't think of book
manufacture at all: books, like food, clothing, or cars simply
come from specialized stores. For the Roman reader the book was a
palpable object, each with its own individual presence. Papyrus
and vellum have unmistakable textures and make unique sounds when
manipulated -- they even have a distinctive smell, much stronger
than the faint smell of ink, blanket wash, and glue that books
now have when just purchased. The reader of the Roman books never
had any doubt about how books were produced: he could not avoid
the feeling that the book he held was the product of human labor,
that each letter in the book had been written by a human hand.
Now, we try to make type an invisible medium: the less you notice
the type, the faster and easier you can read it. For the Roman
reader, letters conveyed a sense of individuality: each was
unique, and a written word was more an exhortation to action
(however small) than an unnoticed conveyor of information.

The Roman alphabet, then, in its original context, was a nexus
for several types of experience. Sounds, speech, gesture, memory
were encoded into it and could be reconstructed by means of it.
It was an integral part of a continuum that included orations and
monuments, social events and private deliberations, political
intrigue and individual candor, physical gesture and group
identity, human faces and carved trophies, memory and discovery.
Despite the bureaucratic nature of imperial government, the Roman
reader lived in an intensely oral world, filled with human speech
that could not be divorced from human action. A text could not
get too far from its source of composition in speech, and the
reader had to participate in the recreations of that speech. The
Roman alphabet still retained some of the physicality of older
forms of writing, but it provided the first step toward the
emphasis on information in the modern era. Much of the original
physicality is now gone from the alphabet, but the alphabet
itself is still in use.

Partial Bibliography

St. Augustine of Hippo, _Confessions_, William Watts, ed. & trans.
Loeb, 1922.

Edward M. Catich, _The Origin of the Serif_. Catich Gallery, 1991
(reprint of 1968 ed.)

Edward M. Catich, _The Trajan Inscription_. Catfish Press, 1961.
Catullus, Poems, Francis Warre Cornish, ed. & trans. Loeb, 1925.

Ernst Robert Curtius, _European Literature and the Latin Middle
Ages_, Pantheon, 1948.

Cyril Davenport, _The Book -- It's History and Development_, Van
Nostrand, 1908.

O.A.W. Dilke, _Roman Books and Their Impact_, Elmete Press, 1977.

David Diringer, _The Hand-Produced Book_, Philosophical Library,
1953.

Moses Hadas, _Ancilla to Classical Reading_, Columbia U. Press,
1961.

E.A. Havelock, _Origins of Western Literacy_, Ontario Institute for
Studies in Education, 1976.

E.A. Havelock, _Preface to Plato_, Belknap Press, Harvard U.Press,
1963.


_The Holy Bible . . . King James Version_, Oxford U. Press, n.d.l.
Harold A. Innis, Empire and Communication, U. of Toronto Press,
1972.

Edward Johnston, _Writing & Illuminating & Lettering_, Pitman
House, 1977.

Frederick G. Kenyon, _Books and Readers in Ancient Rome_, Oxford,
1932.

E.A. Lowe, _English Uncial_, Oxford, 1968

Walter J. Ong, _Interfaces of the Word_, Cornell U. Press, 1977.

Walter J. Ong, _Orality and Literacy_, Methuen, 1982.

Walter J. Ong, _Presence of the Word_, Yale U. Press, 1967.

Pliny the Younger, _Letters_, William Melmoth, trans., W.M.L.
Hutchinson, ed., 1915 & 1961, Loeb.

Suetonius, _Lives of the Ceasars_, J.C. Rolfe, 1914, Loeb.

Johannes Trithemius, _De Laude Scriptorum (In Praise of Scribes)_,
Coronado Press, 1974.

------------------------------------------------

READINGS AND REVIEWS

[Note: Don Byrd's _Poetics of the Common Knowledge_ was
also reviewed by Robert Grenier in this issue.  But
Grenier's review contains typographical features that would
not transfer to ascii characters.  Paper copies of this issue
are still available.  Use the address at the end of this issue
for correspondence--ed.]

_POETICS OF THE COMMON KNOWLEDGE_ BY DON BYRD

Reviewed by Chris Stroffolino

Don Byrd's _Poetics of the Common Knowledge_ is a difficult book
geared to a primarily academic audience.  Yet it is an attempt
do-program and re-poeticize such an audience.  Here, Byrd
illustrates how one does not have to be relativistic to be
anti-systematic, and thus provides a viable alternative to all
brands of post-structuralism as well as "vulgar Marxism" by
arguing for poetry and poetics as an argument beyond argument,
beyond beyond, and not merely an aesthetic object to be
interpreted.  Though the book is divided into four
sections--"Symbolic Nature," "Symbolic History," "Symbolic Person"
and "Symbolic Symbols" in which he takes to task the
meta-narratives of Descartes, Hegel, Freud and 20th Century
mechanization theories respectively--there is a common thread that
runs though this book, something I'd have to do an injustice to
to refer to it as an "informing sensibility" that posits a
non-humanistic (and non-bourgeois) anarchic individualism that
plants a bomb in the theater of theory. 

Byrd loafs and invites "beings who cause themselves, define
themselves, and enclose themselves in their radical uniqueness,"
but the relentless skepticism towards all but what Robin Blaser
would call "the existential given" necessitates a lot of
"roughing up the ground" on Byrd's part in order to get to these
beings; there's no easy affirmation in the _Poetics of the Common
Knowledge_.  Each chapter ends with a discussion of a poet.  It
may be that Byrd would not have been able to return to such
(poetic) meadows had he not spent so much of the book slumming it
in the very abstract monumental narratives he considers the
biggest culprit in intellectual 'life.'  For Byrd, then, the
"differences" between Marx, Derrida, Freud, Foucault, Hegel,
Descartes dissolve--they are all guilty of the same thing for one
who, like Blake, does not want to be slave to another mans
system, but, unlike Blake, does not need to create his own to do
so--Byrd being against totalitarianism as such. 
Though one may be tempted to see a similarity between the author
of Poetics of the Common Knowledge and the author of Blake's
Apocalypse, Byrd characterizes Prof. Bloom's project as
"initiating everyone into a second world--a world quite alien to
the one the student finds on the street."  If this is true of
Bloom, it is a damning judgment indeed.  But what does Byrd mean
by "the street"?  For Byrd the street isn't social--at least in
the literary sense of that word.  "In confronting each other,
there is no text" (337).  There are no "signs" on Byrd;s street,
so see "the street" as a "text" is as absurd for Byrd as seeing
money as a kind of poetry (even bad poetry).  Much of what seems
social Byrd relentlessly reveals to be merely grammatical,
administrative.  In the spirit of Varela's "autopoesis" Byrd
rejects Barthes' vision of rereading-as-social-activity as an
entrapment of emotions into an input-output model of information
transmission that places us in a simulacrum like the one Harold
Blake, Hegel, etc., (but not Pound or Zukofsky presumably) wish
to create for us, a Lacanian masculine symbolic (cut off from the
real, the common) which interpolates society at the level of
individuals. 

Byrd makes an even more serious challenge when he blames
Romanticism for "impending ecological disaster" (33).  Yet he
seems to read the Romantic paradigm reductively (even by reading
it as a "paradigm" rather than an enactment).  But rather than
merely quarrel here, it's better to ask "what would lead Byrd to
claim Romanticism is more destructive than Cybernetic thought,
Heidegger more irredeemable from fascism than Pound, if not the
way much writers have been read and used by the dominant
academicians?"  If Romanticism means "the infinite will" then it
is in desperate need of delegitimation, if it forgets "all gods
reside in the human breast" and 'grounds' itself less in "I
breathe" than in "I think" or "I'm special," then it's easy to
seen its desire as decadent greed, property as theft, etc.  But I
still think that has more to do with how the Romantics have been
read by academic drudges than with "romanticism" itself.  Yet for
Byrd the question of "romanticism" involves the whole question of
our culture's paralyzing nostalgia.  Byrd puts this nostalgia in
the past where it belongs and quotes Capek (17) against those
"students" who "have retreated to the safety of a bedraggled
Romanticism that forestalls criticism by criticizing itself"
(emphasis added).  This is consistent with his critique of the
flippancy that "appeals to practice but provides no practice
other than the appeal to practice" and his critique of "math
masters."  If poetry is to be an integral ethical part of life,
one cannot expect _The Poetics of the Common Knowledge_ to be
absolutely logical.  For Byrd, then, it is the gestural
connotative power of Einstein's "every law is an absolute" (16)
that makes it preferable to the relatively similar denotations of
the early Wittgenstein's "All propositions are equal" (9).  The
early Wittgenstein was a "math master." 

Thus though one may have quibbles about the way Byrd tends to
"divide the sheep from the wolves," one should not let this get
in the way of the immensely valuable insights in this book. 
Insights which can not be summed up but only enacted by such
aphorisms as Hazard Contingency! Improvise! Be Confident Beyond
Thought! Interpret By Feeling! Do away with "enlightened cynical
complaint!"  Skepticism and Relativism are obscene!  Free the
individual from its greedy bourgeois connotations and activities!
Awakening is more organic than sleep! (316)  There is much
empowering in _The Poetics of the Common Knowledge_.  Byrd's
investment in being a poet is almost everywhere evident there (in
his distinction between Derrida's writing "in which points are
given for style" vs. poetry's anti-discursive breath-gestures). 
Yet Byrd is not so dogmatically anti-discursive than he cannot
appreciate Gertrude Stein.  For Byrd quotes approvingly Stein's
assertion that a sentence isn't emotional but a paragraph is and
is fascinated by how this "emotion" can be "created" in the act
of writing (or reading, for that matter). 

It is through Stein that Byrd explains the method of his own
book: "Her initiation into science and technical philosophy,
which was so thorough that she could forget it, forget its
language, forget is intimidating authority, and forget is boring
insistence that life was over, that only patterns of repetition
remained to be fully discovered and mathematically describe," 
For though Byrd himself spends a lot of time slumming it in
"science and technical philosophy" in this book, her certainly
makes no concessions to them.  _The Poetics of the Common
Knowledge_ not only argues against the history of ideas as the
history of free thinkers, but Byrd's broad brush strokes
dramatize this trauma sufficiently to make even those most
sentimentally attached to the old "great books" way of seeing
things question their assumptions.  Though one may disagree with
certain assumptions (and what seem like 'agendas') on Byrd's
part, this book is valuable not just for "the kind of thinking it
does" (Pound) but also for its radical exhortation for a poetics
whose "radical" and "new" qualities entail an acceptance of the
quotidian.  It is a recursive return to the everyday that the
"great history of Western ideas" has systematically run away in
horror from , just as its politicians have invested more energy
on imperialism and the space program than on dealing with the
domestic (except, of course, in the form of censorship and
cutting of government programs).  In this sense Byrd's book is
not simply a call for a new poetics, but a call for a new
politics, one beyond "politics as we know it," beyond
specialization and "statistics."

_THE ART OF PRACTICE_, EDITED BY DENNIS BARONE & PETER GANICK

Reviewed by Daniel Barbiero

The 45 poets included in this collection can all be seen as
extending an open-form tradition that runs, roughly, from Pound
and Williams through "language" poetry via Surrealism,
Objectivist & Projectivist verse, and points between and beyond. 
_The Art of Practice_ thus functions as a kind of snapshot that
captures the state of the art at a given moment.  What does such
a snapshot reveal?

First of all, the frequent use of what might be termed the
post-lyric sequence.  This is a usually longer poem made up of
changing textures of tone and topic contained in a formal
framework of variable stress patterns, shifting rhythms, and
diverse line groupings.  The post-lyric sequence is not concerned
primarily with the brief expression of personal emotion through
recurring formal devices, but rather with an episodic exploration
of the dynamic perceptual, linguistic, and intentional fields
that mark the territory on which event, experience, and artwork
enmesh.

A number of poets, such as Dodie Bellamy, Abigail Child, Susan
Clark, Norman Fischer, Gil Ott, and Joan Retallack, are
represented by such sequences or by excerpts from more extended
works.  One such sequence, Mei Mei Bersenbrugge's "Fog," moves
across topics from objective/descriptive passages to
subjective/experimental passages.  The first section lists some
observations about fog--that, for instance, it is "a kind of
grounded cloud composed like any cloud of tiny/ drops of water or
of ice particles."  By the fourth section, Bersenbrugge confronts
the question of how one can understand something and then convey
that understanding, asking how one "can describe for you the
phenomenon of feeling her way/ through the fog."  Writing as it
were from the outside to the inside, Bersenbrugge takes what is
out there as the first step towards an exploration of what it is
like to encounter what is out there, i.e., what it is like to be
in fog, whether figurative or literal.

Bersenbrugge's sequence features lines arranged in units ranging
from one to six.  Similarly, an excerpt from Susan Gevirtz's
"Anaxsa Fragment: Coming to new land" consists of variably
indented and grouped lines arranged under topic headings that
play on the combinatorial possibilities of "land": "The Lands,"
"Landlocked," "Landsend," "Landfall," etc.  Gevirtz's sequence
pivots on a theme of migration or diaspora by land and sea, which
she captures with the arresting image of wandering people who "On
two legs in herds travel.  Carrying translations in bulky/
valises."  The poem's tonal shifts encompass a spectrum ranging
from description of visually-charged imagery ("grilled fish eye/
plate white/ vault of sky") to the declamations of a prophetic
voice ("By what authority does the/ sky address us thus"?).

Like "Anaxsa Fragment," the surface organization of the excerpt
from Steven Forth's "Material Space" is arranged topically--the
first three segments are named for the materials porcelain,
ivory, and amber.  The section on ivory is notable for the way it
presents itself as a musical episode organized around the playing
of a flute, reference to which opens and closes the section. 
Within the section are a number of plays on sound--alliterative
stresses on and around v and h ("vain in loving,/ virtuous, a
virile trap"; "held hands, held heads"), and recurrence of the
consonantal clusters tr, fl, gr, nd, and ts.

The attention to sound evident in Forth's work brings up the
question of the general influence of "language" poetry on the
work in this volume.  Although much of the work can legitimately
be thought of as post-"language" poetry--and I think the recovery
of strong visual imagery so frequently found here speaks for a
set of concerns divergent from those of "language" poetry--there
is no conscious rejection of, or worse, blind rebellion against,
"language" poetry.  On the whole, the work here is very much part
of a tradition--just as "language" poetry was itself part of a
tradition, even if, as Ron Silliman points out in the book's
perceptive afterward, it denied this tradition in its initial
stages.  Undeniably, "language" poetry served to radicalize and
renew conventions associated with the open-form tradition.  In
this volume such radicalization is carried on in the treatment of
the line and the grammatical manipulations of poetic language.

A number of poems feature a parallel arrangement of lines--that
is, an arrangement of lines in apparently separate columns
running on the right and left hand sides of the page.  This
entails a certain indeterminacy in reading: should the lines be
read 1) as caesura, 2) as two sets of verse running
simultaneously in parallel columns, or 3) as verse on the left
and commentary on the right?  In Louis Cabri's "Shooting pains
the rifle said," all three possibilities suggest themselves over
the course of the poem.  By contrast, in Kathleen Fraser's "When
New Time Folds Up," words and phrases occurring on the right
provide a series of correspondences with the paraphrases of
images in the lines on the left.  For example, on the left we
read, "something grey inside/ of some other grey" while finding
juxtaposed to the right the single word "digested," which seems
to summarize the relations described on the left.  In the
selection from Rachel Blau DuPlessis' "Writing," the lines on the
right appear to direct questions toward statements on the left,
creating a self-contained dialogue regarding the role of poetic
language.  The effect is to provide the reader with a set of
instructions allowing him or her to make explicit a range of
meanings implicit in the text on the left.

Like the original "language" poets, a number of the poets
represented here approach poetic language as a grammar whereby
sense is a function of the surface structures embedding words. 
This is  consistent with Silliman's designation of the basic
poetic unit as the sentence, albeit a "new" one, which in turn
implied that the derivation of poetic sense would largely be a
function of grammatical rather than semantic criteria.  (Thus
"language" poetry's structuralism seems in retrospect to have
been as much Chomskian as Saussurian.)

The emphasis on the grammatical derivation of sense can been seen
in Colleen Lookingbill's "Book Mode," a prose poem arranged in
four thick paragraphs.  Here is a typical two-sentence excerpt:
"On the part of relief collected and remelted sets the stage. 
Not just the way she intended this style binding nature in
difference places."  Here. the grammatical makeup of the
sentences as well as the functions of certain words (relief,
sets, this, binding, places) are rendered ambiguous, at least in
part by the elision--perhaps of a subject in the first sentence,
and a comma in the second--of those elements that might complete
them.  While Todd Baron's "EYE" also manipulates sense through
linguistic surface structures, it integrates its
"language"-influenced construction of phrases into a more
orthodox Surrealist technique of juxtaposition by way of
unexpected or starling predication.

But perhaps the most surprising development documented in this
volume is the return of the meditative poem--albeit one that is
formally transfigured.  Editor Barone's "Philosophy" is
representative of the new meditative poem, as are the excerpts
from Craig Watson's "Reason" and Margy Sloan's "On Method," 
Although the formal structures are variable across cases, the
general direction is toward discursive content.  In the case of
Watson's selection, the tone is muted, as the poet searches for
"the promise of middle ground/ struck still by equal opposites/
in solid volumes and seamless minutes."

The transfiguration of the meditative poem is, I believe, a
healthy index of a larger openness of the poetic horizon.  In
fact one comes away from this collection with nothing so much as
a profound sense of the multiplied possibilities available to the
open-form tradition at the present moment.


LEFT HAND BOOKS, including Charles Doria (_Selected Poems: June
1988_), Rillo (_An Exchange of Quivers_, _Wolf's Clothing_), Louise
Landes-Levi (_Extinction_), Michael Blitz (_Five Days in the
Electric Chair_), Dick Higgins (_Buster Keaton Enters Into
Paradise_) and Alison Knowles (_Spoken Text_)

Reviewed by Harry Polkinghorn

In the small-press publishing scene today, Left Hand Books has
carved out a unique position for itself'. Having begun in 1990
with exquisitely designed books with letterpressed covers (the
fine work of Paul Woodbine, whose Woodbine Press is listed as
co-publisher), Left Hand Books published titles by poets as
diverse as Charles Doria (_Selected Poems: June 1988_), Rillo (_An
Exchange of Quivers_), Louise Landes-Levi (_Extinction_), and
Michael Blitz (_Five Days in the Electric Chair_). An attention to
typography and book design is reflected in the selection of works
to be published, treated with the respect which good writing
deserves and almost never gets. These books are a pleasure to
hold, look at, and read.      
      
In its second series of publications, the press issued books in a
different physical incarnation. In 8.5 x 11 and 7 x 9 formats,
these titles continue the attention to page space and typographic
values mentioned above, but move from letterpress to photo-offset
covers in black ink. Bryan McHugh, who is responsible for the
Press, is listed as designer. Included are works by Dennis Lucas
(_Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Crow_), Rillo (_Finders Keepers_ and
_Hymns_), Dick Higgins (_The Journey: eight colored scenes_), Charles
Doria (_The Toy Palace_), and Alison Knowles (_Event Scores_).
    
Finally, there is a third look to this small press's production in
its most recent publications. These appear in perfect bound
formats of various trim sizes, each designed by McHugh with the
same care we have seen in the earlier titles. We are offered
works by Rillo (_Wolf's Clothing_), Dick Higgins (_Buster Keaton
Enters Into Paradise_), and Alison Knowles (_Spoken Text_, about
which I have commented elsewhere).
   
On reading through this body of work, I am lead to speculations
about the problematical status of experimental writing in this
country, always a vexed if fascinating question. Several Left
Hand Books authors have a considerable investment i extending the
boundaries of writing and the visual arts, among other ways
through exploring how these traditionally separate signifying
media interpenetrate and cross-pollinate each other.  What
becomes clear from a general review is the role of the channels
of distribution in continuing to marginalize experimentalism. 
Many have noted the pernicious effects of the highly
industrialized publishing machine(s).  Still, excellent work goes
on creating its own audiences, even if on a small scale.  Left
Hand Books is extending a tradition in American publishing, for
which we should be grateful.

II

The work of one of Left Hand's authors calls for a closer
analysis.  Of the twelve titles published, four are by Rillo, the
pseudonym under which Bryan McHugh brings out his work.  Why
would an author want to publish under a pseudonym, yet make it
easily possible for the reader to know what his real name is? 
"Cody is it?  You got a good memory for names, / too good."
(_Wolf's Clothing_).  An exploration of this question may help us
to see how Rillo's work is paradigmatic for experimentalism in
general in the United States.  In addition, it may open up a
number of perspectives which it would behoove us to consider in
these times which are increasingly hostile and constrictive for
those who want to expand the possibilities of art's impact.
	
It would appear that Rillo=Bryan McHugh because the latter is
listed as copyright holder for _An Exchange of Quivers_, _Finders
Keepers_, and _Hymns_.  Of the four titles, only _Wolf's Clothing_ is
copyrighted in Rillo's name.  This ambiguity I would like to
suggest is especially revealing of an issue central to
experimental writing, namely, that of identity (the ambiguity
thereof)--of the author, of the narrator, of the implied reader. 
Here, then the three poles of the aesthetic act can be found:
artist, work, consumer.  This classical triad is held together at
those points here identities isometrically touch, communicating
their parameters (and thus the parameters of signification) from
moment to moment throughout the chain.  Fine and well.  But what
happens when identity is destabilized, shifts, cannot be
isometrically matched up between author and work, between work
and reader?  This dissolving of identity has been a central theme
from _Ulysses_ through _The Western Lands_.
	
Uncertainty--or something that has gone under its
name--characterizes our time, as many have noted.  When I say "our
time" I mean the period of history in which historical
representation collapses, beginning in the nineteenth century and
continuing up to the present.
	
_An Exchange of Quivers_ can perhaps best be described as a poetic
sequence animated by shamanism, a key to all of Rillo's work.
Formally, individual poems are separated by transitional passages
much like the text panels by means of which narrative sections
were divided in silent movies. In the shamanic reality, there is
movement, yet nothing is fixed; transformation and metamorphoses
continuously shift the field or ground of being. Dreams and
dream-visions as mediated through language provide the context in
which meanings are constructed and destroyed. Here human identity
is structural, not psychological; we blend into and out of the
animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms. In some loosely
analogical fashion, the shaman = the artist, but this must be
complemented by a blending of the artist with the work and with
the reader/spectator.
	
The book opens with a traditional invocation, but an updated
version, bathed in a gentle irony.

Lovely girls, sweet boys give ear,  breath and heart 
to my ever humble players . . .

(instead of "prayers"). The possibility of instantaneous nuclear
extinction hovers over this world, which is our world. In
"Phantom Warbler" we get a taste of Rillo's hyper-images, his
baroque crowding and spinning of poetic figures:


. . . Rhythms too deep for woe 
to plumb must be torn off in sheets: read between 
the lines the names of the dead with the dead's 
own eyes, pearls set in jello, a cold, opaque green.

Immediately following the high diction of "Song Sprig" comes the
silent-movie scene change: "An old hat drops onto the stage."
This abrupt, almost harsh (Beckett-like) change becomes
characteristic of Rillo's work throughout. We get a sense of
rapid change as image deepens image and linguistic registers whip
by.

. . . If this hat 
won't float, perhaps it'll learn to shamanize ....

But lo, conscience gnaws. I'll desist 
from blame, lest my tender soul . . . ("Old Hat")

Elizabethan diction is jammed up against hipster street talk from
1940s movies, narrative realism, surrealist or deep images, and
so on. Allusions to Blake, Shelley, Beckett, and others add
further resonance to an already rich linguistic tapestry. The
objective of the game we see in the following:

. . . Though my song 
grows in blackest hell, the world 
grows younger and each step I take 
through bitter woe restores 
to each man, woman, boy and girl 
the wind's clarity, the frog pond's 
lowest note, the stars' reckless speech. ("Song Sprig")

The song is a part of nature, sharing in the transformative powers
of that from which it takes its origin. This is pure shamanism.
The controlling figure in _Finders Keepers_ and _Wolf's Clothing_ is
Hermes. The coyote/trickster appears in _Hymns_ and _Wolf's
Clothing_. Being a trickster allows this character to step into
other identities. The best scholarly treatment I know of this
material remains Norman O. Brown's _Hennes the Thief_ (Wisconsin,
1947). As Brown demonstrates, for the ancient Greeks Hermes the
trickster becomes a culture hero, someone who brings good and joy
to the community (magicians are those who bring about changes,
some of which seem supernatural). Hermes is not only a cattle
thief but also a musician, craftsman, herald, merchant, and
others. Brown shows how theft and robbery are not equivalents in
an age prior to private property the way we have had it since
shortly after the period he discusses. The raising of cattle
brought about a general change in property status and therefore
the very structure of the community. Hermes statues were set up
at the borders, where business was originally conducted (being
moved into the agora only later with the growth of settlements).

We see a number of these elements throughout _Finders Keepers_ but
especially in the title poem.

Read between the lines. You'll find 
hip-hop rhyme, deviant text.

The Shaman-trickster/artist cannot be located in a
content-oriented aesthetics. Identity establishes itself
structurally, through that which it is not.

He meets you at the border. 
You pretend to be somebody else; 
that's like blowing out the eye in the storm. 
No use: he's both desert and hare.

The border marks off difference, which would be a natural place
for Hermes to be found. The border between conscious social life
and the unknown gives rise to transformation and transmutation.
	
In "Talking Cure," the poem which closes this sequence, the images
of the hare and wolf are found

Go to the mountain and cry for a vision, cry wolf. 
Wolf won't come, throw yourself off . . .

The hare's hand-to-mouth illusion; coyote's baby 
pictures, cuteness gone awry: A high-speed pose is all.

Allusions to the roadrunner and coyote cartoons return us to the
cinematic or narrative dimension by means of which mythological
reality establishes itself as a purveyor of the timeless. These
allusions also work to reestablish a popular base for mythic
tales which have passed into the control of elite culture. The
wolf may symbolize the raw power of unmediated wilderness over
against which our pitiful human culture has been set up. The
hare, a semi-tameable wild creature, connects these two levels of
our experience.
	
Wolf's Clothing is Rillo's latest collection. In mostly end-rhymed
quatrains which manage to retain a freshness of diction that
generates a continual sense of surprise, the sequence features a
coyote, a hare, Hermes, Apollo, the cops, Cody Jarrett (who
"ain't human"), and others. As Susan Smith Nash points out in her
lengthy introduction, Coyote is the main character, and the
medium through which identities swirl, merge, and constellate is
that of language itself. The following (enjambed) stanzas give a
sense of the frantic Looney-tune pace and tone of the sequence:

First chance he gets he springs on the herd 
"You wouldn't mind a little trip?" 
It's the god's exploits figured on the bowl. 
A hymn mimed in infrared paint. The strip

shows fresh scenes between its borders.  Nor will turn- 
ing the bowl three sixty degrees bring the god's 
adventures full circle. Its designs 
cheat the round. The human breath has made this ring

of pictures around the bowl. The masked robber 
waits for night. Pursuing his bold plan, the bandit 
cuts off from the herd fifty head of loud- 
lowing cattle, warning: "Now you know how jit-
tery I am--any minute I'm likely 
to explode, now get!" . . . (pp. 60-1)

This hymn mimed in paint in the form of a (comic) strip of images
on a bowl of course is structurally reflected in Rillo's own
story represented in the verbal panels/stanzas of his narrative
and simultaneously in the animated coyote/roadrunner cartoons to
which he makes frequent reference. The main setting is the
western US . badlands, derived from these cartoons and also
providing a backdrop for cattle rustling and the confrontation of
the forces of good and evil through Wild West shootouts. Wolf's
Clothing is a rich, multifaceted work presented through highly
controlled poetic language and although a fully independent
achievement is best read in connection with Rillo's previous
work.

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W I T Z


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year.

The contents of this issue are copyright (c) 1995 by WITZ.

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