Patrick Durgin: The New Phrase

There is a peculiar circuit of influence between the USAmerican poets that most interest me, and which I’ve characterized through various readings of Lorine Niedecker’s “You see here,” a poem with an as-yet unattributed quotation.

You see here
the influence
of inference

Moon on rippled
stream

‘Except as
and unless’

Where does this imperative come from – or, from whom?

The ethics of attribution is in the news, of course. Of course, the news is in the ethics of attribution. Meanwhile, it’s far from enough to “take exception” when the inferences peculiar to the “abstract lyric” (so-called) – ‘as / and unless’ – do not do away with epistemology (as Zukofsky hoped Objectivism might). In Buffalo a year or two back, French poet Dominique Fourcade spoke generally about a “poetics of intimacy” and held the Niedecker-Zukofsky correspondence up as evidence. The particular inferences escape memory now, partly due to the difficulty of moving through a world whose ugliest impulses are seemingly instantaneously extended to principles of action. That’s part of my difficulty and perhaps others’ too. Yet I do turn to resources such as Circulars for a kind of intimacy. I read the initial mission statement as coming from a similar awareness of the peculiar value of the circuits of influence that interest me as subjects to history (social, aesthetic, political) as well as epistemology (though the rudiments of such an epistemology have yet to be articulated to my satisfaction, really, so I won’t go there).

To attempt to articulate this value, I have in mind some remarks on 1) Alan Gilbert’s “circular” from the “Poetry Is News” event at St. Mark’s in NYC, “The Present Versus (the) Now,” 2) Leslie Scalapino’s published response to the St. Mark’s “The Blank Generation?” forum in the latest Poetry Project Newsletter, 3) and last, recent rereading of some of Ron Silliman’s work, especially essays in his collection The New Sentence.

The problem I’m working out of is nonetheless similar, I think, to Gilbert’s viz. how one might accept the value of at least the potential influence between aesthetics and political action. At one time, for me, a potential “synaesthetic poetics” seemed promising (hence my little essay in the “Poetry as Activism” issue of Tripwire in 1998). “Now” it is the problem of the “present.” [How these problems are related, historically, is interesting, but I can't get into that right now.]

For Gilbert, “there’s a difference between a now in which one’s range of political and artistic choices are primarily immediate reactions to a current situation, and a present that draws upon a culture and politics of resistance rooted in the past, present, and future." What Gilbert calls a “micro-politics of the everyday” is this distinction, and connotes, for me, the always parenthetical definite article he places before “now” – what is the inference between every day and everyday? Every day the problem of presence (any instant whatever, as certain trends in continental critical theory have it) compels one to take exception, while “(the) now” elicits acceptance of one or another “reaction.” This dialectic seems to quickly short-circuit when, far from the luxury of speculative writing, the integrity of human bodies is being undermined, and the ludicrously “clear and present danger” of the Bush administration – who occupy the White House under criminal pretenses – exemplify for the nations of the world the worst forms of reactionary politics under the auspices of “moral” obligation. This is how I read Gilbert’s definition: “(the) now might be described as a brief lyric moment in these negotiations that’s interrupted by screaming.” While a suspension of disbelief seems like the last thing we need, what feels like an immanently definite “now” remains incredible. Gilbert remarks: “illiteracy is also a discourse” – I may be misunderstanding this remark, but doesn’t this artificially divide (as if a wider divide needed to be introduced to gain perspective here) the fact that “Language Poetry is now taught at Iowa” from the fact that hip hop stands as one of the most visible influences on contemporary poetic praxis? We can anticipate the historical reception of Chuck D. into the canon that already makes room for Ron Silliman. While I believe I share Gilbert’s impatience with “the reactive possibilities of (the) now,” the problem of the present emerges for me as an impossible one, wherein I’m constantly trying to calibrate what seems endemic with what seems insurgent – my “as” against my “unless,” past against future forthwith.

Discussing separate passages in which Silliman and Lyn Hejinian discuss the differences between the political motives of previous generations – namely, their generation – for Silliman a “critical” motivation marked by organization (?), for Hejinian in part the ability to consider utopian visions “tenable” – Scalapino writes, “Unbeknownst to their intention, both Silliman and Hejinian ‘oppose’ Stein and Dogen's theory of action: one's being in time, the outside and the inside, is one being the present alongside past and future at once.” To be present is deviant – “doing what the time is” – or, for Stein as for younger poets, to be continually present. Be vigilant, Silliman seems to say. Isn’t this a rather untenable critical utopia, holding vigil over or cherishing the lesson of the past? While for Gilbert – and I agree – to be present in the world is a critical act which is, in a term Hejinian has used and that might serve to temper Scalapino’s critique, myopic. Going on to perceive in Hejinian an opposition between thinking and being, Scalapino writes, “’Pain’ then (‘being’ rather than thinking) is connecting with one's being living in world war (not merely an individual's limitations, depoliticized as that characterization).” This is not a mourning but a confusion that is painful in the sense that, endemic to characterizations of aesthetics as politics and vice versa, the aesthetic is presumed to do anything other than hurt. Is that the limitation – namely, pleasure – of art?

I just came from a reading this afternoon where Nathaniel Mackey, to an audience nearly 20% sleeping (this was a college gig and we assume these nappers’ attendance was assigned), read:

I don’t much subscribe to the increasing talk, in these dreary times, of “empowerment,” “subversion,” “resistance” and so forth. I once quoted Bachelard’s line, “Thirst proves the existence of water,” to a friend, who answered, “No, water proves the existence of water.” I find myself more and more thinking that way. I find myself – and this goes for everyone else in the band, I think – increasingly unable (albeit not totally unable) to invest in notions of dialectical inevitability, to read the absence of what’s manifestly not there as the sing of its eventual presence. To whatever extent hyperbolic aubade appears to have eclipsed collective “could,” the ballons’ going on about love’s inflated goodbye should alert us to the Reaganomic roots of that eclipse.
I drove down to Santa Ana yesterday. An old friend and I went to the store at one point and on our way we passed a neighborhood park which has more and more become a camp for the homeless. Park Avenue people now call it, irony their one defense. Anyway, as we drove past, my friend, looking out the window, sneered, “Look at them, a bunch of dialects.” He meant derelicts.” So much for malaprop speech as oppositional speech, I couldn’t help thinking, so much of oppositional anything. (ATET A.D., 120-1).

“N.,” the narrator here, is in a temporarily somber mood, but I don’t think it diminishes the import of his approach. Temporary, but I think it’d be amply malaprop to call it provisional. But is it an instance of myopia (myopic speech)?

Since G. W. Bush and company are not legally elected, is it criminal to speak of their designs as policy? [I think so, yes.] How is it I find that I must resist doing so, given the “clear and present danger"?

Silliman: “Poetry in America … is class war – and more – conducted through the normal social mechanisms of verse. The primary ideological message of poetry lies not in its explicit content, political though it may be, but in the attitude toward reception it demands of the reader. It is this ‘attitude toward information,’ which is carried forward by the recipient. It is this attitude which forms the basis for a response to other information, not necessarily literary, in the text. And, beyond the poem, in the world” (“The Political Economy of Poetry,” The New Sentence, 31).

And what attitude is characterized by rapid eye movement (alternately paranoia and sleep). I’ll confess I assigned Mackey’s reading this afternoon to my writing students. I asked them, in the spirit of Hannah Weiner’s notes for a writing workshop she apparently never conducted ("AWARENESS AND COMMUNICATION - archived at UCSC Libraries), to write a response to the reading as a whole – what went through your mind while attending the event? I was cornered by a student on my way out of the auditorium, and he told me he had made an audio recording of the reading just in case. In case of what? In case I fell asleep – you said how we could write about whatever we were thinking – I want to write about how a bunch of people were asleep. He said he saw me sleeping too. I told him I had closed my eyes to listen. etc.

If his observation had been accurate (he wanted me to sleep), it would have been useful to write. In our previous class session, I found (rereading now Silliman’s essay “The New Sentence”) some vague afterlight of the hypothesis that there is an innate learning curve from full thought to imitation of sentence formulation based on complete thoughts – complete sentences. But I’d set up a dialogic situation in which “As I walked” was a complete thought yet to be completed as a sentence, and that the information carried was itself a vague afterlight of a preceding dialogue. So that, every sentence is “new” in that it ends or arrives, teleologically (the final term [.] is defined by the preceding terms). This is the seam through which Silliman is able to weave “K as if with a chamomile” (Tjanting, 132). “Literary criticism,” writes Silliman, summarizing Willard Van Orman Quine, “ought to serve as a corrective. Unlike philosophy, it is a discourse with a clearly understood material object” (“The New Sentence,” 71). This is, of course, untenable. That's Silliman's critique. But it is not so far from Silliman’s signal reference to Stein: “What Stein means about paragraphs being emotional and sentences not is precisely … that linguistic units integrate only up to the level of the sentence, but higher orders of meaning – such as emotion – integrate at higher levels than the sentence and occur only in the presence of either many sentences or … in the presence of certain complex sentences in which dependent clauses integrate with independent ones. The sentence is the horizon …” (87). But my dialogic approach had had nothing to do with the “removal of context” Silliman points to in Bob Grenier’s Sentences. I would argue against characterizing Grenier’s work in that way. My pedagogical approach anticipated that context is presence insofar as “time-sense” relates to sentence structure. Silliman thought, in this time, “poetic form has moved into the interiors of prose” (89). But this severing of context is precisely the work of the implicit dialectic teleology of Quine’s “eternal sentence” proposes as the intentional object of writing, critical writing.

Why I don’t read blogs: they are at best ‘dialects.’

Why I read, and would like to contribute to, Circulars: it is dialogic and, hence, timely.

Posted by Patrick Durgin at February 12, 2003 07:41 PM