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Obdurate Brilliance : Exteriority and the Modern

Long Poem
Baker, Peter.
University Press of Florida
0813010640
9780813010649
9780813019000
English
American poetry--20th century--History and
criticism, Saint-John Perse,--1887-1975--Criticism
and interpretation, Literature, Comparative-American and French, Literature, Comparative-French and American, Modernism (Literature)
1991
PS323.5.B35 1991eb
811/.509
American poetry--20th century--History and
criticism, Saint-John Perse,--1887-1975--Criticism
and interpretation, Literature, Comparative-American and French, Literature, Comparative-French and American, Modernism (Literature)

Page iii

Obdurate Brilliance
Exteriority and the Modern Long Poem
Peter Baker
University of Florida Press Gainesville

Page iv

Permission has been granted by the following publishers to use quotations from
copyrighted works:
Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound. Copyright 1934, 1948 by Ezra Pound; 1972 by
the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust.
Ezra Pound, The ABC of Reading. Copyright 1934 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by
permission of New Directions Publ. Corp.
Louis Zukofsky, A. Copyright 1979 Celia and Louis Zukofsky. Reprinted by
permission of The University of California Press.
Charles Olson, Maximus Poems. Edited by George Butterick. Copyright 1983 The
Regents of the University of California. Reprinted by permission of The University of
California Press.
Gertrude Stein, Stanzas in Medtitation. Copyright 1956 by Alice B. Toklas. Reprinted
by permission of Yale University Press.
John Ashbery, "Fragment," published in The Double Dream of Spring. Copyright
1970, 1978, 1979, 1977, 1976 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of
Georges Borchardt, Inc. for the author.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Baker, Peter, b. 1955
Obdurate brilliance: exteriority and the modern long poem / Peter Baker.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references. (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-8130-1064-0 1.
American poetry20th centuryHistory and criticism. 2. SaintJohn Perse, 18871975Criticism and interpretation.
3. Literature, ComparativeAmerican and French. 4. Literature,
ComparativeFrench and American. 5. Modernism (Literature)
I. Title.
PS323.5.B35 811.509dc20
91-17750
CIP
Copyright 1991 by the Board of Regents of the State of Florida
All rights reserved.
Printed in the U.S.A. on acid-free paper.

The University of Florida Press is a member of the University Presses of Florida, the
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universities: Florida A&M University (Tallahassee), Florida Atlantic University (Boca
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North Florida (Jacksonville), University of South Florida (Tampa), and University of
West Florida (Pensacola).
Orders for books published by all member presses should be addressed to University
Presses of Florida, 15 Northwest 15th Street, Gainesville, FL 32611

Page v

Contents
Preface

ix

1. Introduction: Against Interiority

2. Poets of Memory: Larbaud, Fargue, Perse

12

3. The Sexuation of Poetic Language in Saint-John Perse's

30
Anabase
4. Exile in Language: Saint-John Perse's Exil

41

5. A Note on "Knowing": Saint-John Perse's Vents

55

6. Postmodern Poetics of Community: Perse and Char

65

7. Pound's Cantos and the Myth of Transparency

76

8. Poetic Subjectivity in Olson's Maximus Poems

94

9. "They'll tell me it's difficult": Stein / Zukofsky

108

10. Humor, Irony, and Exteriority in Ashbery's "Fragment"135

11. Language, Poetry, and Marginality: Coolidge, Palmer,
149
and Mayer
12. "Language" Theory and the Languages of Feminism

162

Notes

179

Bibliography

207

Index

217

Page vii

To Albert Cook
teacher and friend

Page ix

Preface
The model of exteriority that I develop in this study is a model both of text production
and of interpretation. The modern long poem turns deliberately outward in order to
address the experience of others, at the same time inviting the reader into the process of
making sense out of the text. The exteriority of the modern long poem is one form of
ethical practice in our time.
I concentrate on the work of Saint-John Perse and selected American poets because in
these works there is an outward movement toward the experience of the world and
others. The very real difficulties these works present to any reader are the result of the
attempt to represent honestly the ever-changing relation between language and
experience. Rather than ignoring the reader or leaving the reader behind, these poems
invite the reader to participate in the process of making sense through language. While
not specifically derived from the philosophy and critical theory of the subject, these
poems nevertheless display some of the same movements and concerns that I attempt to
outline briefly in my introduction.
I use the phrase "against interiority" as the title of my introduction, not to minimize the
importance of inner experience, emotional life, or feelings, but rather in an attempt to
reorient the analysis of modern long poems away from the idea of the individual self as
the center of interest and organization. In an ever-more-fragmented and changing culture,
poetry, remains a locus of value. But changes in culture and society ensure that the forms
of expression poetry takes will be different as well. Poetry, that refuses the insularity of
the lyrical "I" in order to engage thoughtfully and energically with the minds and
experiences of others maintains the locus of value as ethical expression.
The poetry of Saint-John Perse is one of the most consistently engaging and provocative
bodies of work in the twentieth century.

Page x

For those who know the work, Perse's difficult vocabulary, and challenging verbal
structures are nearly legendary. Since Perse received the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1960, his reputation, unfortunately, has been that of an aloof, aristocratic poet. The
combination of inherent difficulty and a complicated political position has been
deadening to his literary reputation, especially in the United States. The difficulties are
real, and really quite splendid, and these I address in my chapters on the poetry. The
reputation is something else again.
Saint-John Perse was born Alexis Leger in 1887 on the French island of Guadeloupe.
After publishing poems at the precocious age of seventeen (like his avowed precursor,
Rimbaud), Perse joined the French diplomatic service, eventually rising to the highest
nonpolitical position in the French foreign ministry. From roughly 1932 until 1939 he
faced the highly difficult task of holding together official French foreign policy in the face
of the Nazi threat and with several changes in the French government. When France fell
in 1940, Perse fled to England rather than face almost certain execution at the hands of the
Nazis. From 1941 until his death in 1975, Perse divided his time between Washington,
D.C., where he had an apartment, and a summer home in the south of France (this latter
from 1957 on). Although asked to participate by de Gaulle in the French government-inexile, Perse declined, because he feltand this is my interpretation of the recordthat de
Gaulle's government was not duly constituted and would take power illegitimately
following the Allied victory.
When Perse won the Nobel Prize in 1960, he presented the aristocratic figure of a man at
home with diplomats and kings. His poetry likewise displays a strangely archaic and
sometimes artificial-sounding tone. His early work does deal with the colonial experience
from the point of view of the colonizer, though in a complex and oblique manner, as I
show in Chapter 2. Yet it is my belief that Perse's poetry represents one of the most
marginal and subversive projects of any modern poet. His poetic language presents
strange and shifting constructs, nonrepresentational for the most part, that cause the
reader to question the bases of language and society. Perse's constant interest was in the
co-origins of language (poetry) and society. By managing to place the "scene" of his
investigations at this unimaginable point, Perse challenges his readers to investigate with
him the very structures on which human culture is based.

Page xi

The language-based practice of the American modernists and postmodern poets is

likewise revolutionary, in spite of the sometimes overt ideology of writers like Ezra
Pound. Pound's literary practice, I think it can be shown, far surpasses his ability to
theorize the ethical subject of discourse. And I further believe that as interpreters we are
authorized to see an ethical dimension in a writer's practice even when the writer's
political engagement is widely viewed as abhorrent. The politics and beliefs of writers are
always a difficult subject. Gertrude Stein seems to be conservative in her views of race
and culture. Yet her marginal personal and discursive position causes her to be viewed as
a radical innovator, textually and sexually. Louis Zukofsky's commitment to Marxism in
the thirties did not prevent him from seeking a mentor relationship with Pound, though
that relationship faded in time, and perhaps as a result of Pound's anti-Semitism, though
Zukofsky never says this directly.
While I believe in the value of political analysis, I do not think that the political is the only
form of ethical engagement. As we see an increasing turn toward the ethical dimension of
literary experience, I think it is important that we maintain the entire range of just what
constitutes ethicity in a practice. In theorizing this ethical stance, I draw in part on the
deconstructive project of Derrida, which I see as a profoundly ethical attempt to show
that the horizon for "writing" (in the complex sense he gives this term) is what he terms
"intersubjective violence." The philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, less well known but
increasingly important, also calls for resistance to violence as the first ethical
responsibility of the subject, as what in fact draws the subject out of an isolating personal
subjectivity.
These ethical issues are worked out in the long poems of Saint-John Perse and the
American poets Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, John
Ashbery, Michael Palmer, Clark Coolidge, and Bernadette Mayer. How these issues are
engaged requires specific attention to the language and textual strategies of the poems, as
they represent a turn outward in the direction of others in this new form of poetic practice
in the twentieth century.
How anyone comes to write a book of literary criticism is certainly a highly contingent
process. This book received its initial impetus from a suggestion from Albert Cook that I
apply for a

Page xii

fellowship to the Saint-John Perse Foundation in Aix-en-Provence, France. This I did,

and the fellowship allowed me to study the poet's work for six months, between
completing my degree work and beginning my first academic job. The agreeable
surroundings of the foundation were more than matched by the cordial welcome afforded
me there by Andr Rousseau, Pauline Berthail, and Franoise Laurens. I had the good
fortune to discover at the foundation someone with whom I shared interests and
temperament, and walks in the environs of the Mont Ste-Victoire, Jean-Pierre Vlaminck.
During this time I also became engaged to marry Deborah Lesko (Baker), who has been a
constant and joyful presence during the work that this book represents.
Institutional support from Southern Connecticut State University, in the form of two yearlong research grants, enabled me to return to Aix-en-Provence for additional research as
well as to visit Saint-John Perse's birthplace in Guadeloupe in the context of a centennial
observation of his birth. More important than financial support at Southern Connecticut
was the warm and supportive environment created by an unusual group of colleagues
who are also dear friends, notably Michael Shea, Tony Rosso, Megan Macomber, and
Dieter Burow. Vara Neverow-Turk, who arrived in my final year at Southern, has
continued to show generous attention to this work, and I would be remiss if I did not
acknowledge her shaping influence in discussing with me which poets I should include
and in suggesting readings in feminist theory on which some of my final chapter is based.
I have been fortunate to find at my current institution, Towson State University, a
similarly warm reception. The section of my introduction, entitled "From Phenomenology
to Deconstruction," was delivered as a talk to the English Department, at which I received
valuable comment and response. David Bergman has been extremely generous in his
reading of the manuscript, including subsequent revisions, and in discussing the work as
it progressed.
One's readers, of course, are the only source of immediate contact between the thinking
and the outside world. I would especially like to thank Michael Ruby, who has read this
work and participated in its formulation of ideas from the beginning. Albert Cook has
read the work in various forms and has helped to suggest its final shape. Moreover,
regular contacts and informal conversations with Al helped to encourage my thinking on
these issues in ways which citations and acknowledgments cannot begin to enumerate.
Deborah

Page xiii

Lesko Baker is more than a reader and fellow scholar in the field of poetry; she is
someone from whom I have learned what of love and ethics I can hope to practice.
Acknowledgment is due the journals in which chapters of this work first appeared: "The
Sexuation of Poetic Language in Saint-John Perse's Anabase," in French Forum, "Exile in
Language: Saint-John Perse's Exil," in Studies in Twentieth Century Literature, and
"Poetic Subjectivity in Olson's Maximus Poems," in Sagetrieb. Several other chapters
were first given as talks, and I would like to thank the various audiences for these
occasions. Finally, I would like to thank Phil Martin, M. Keith Booker, Teresa Saul, and
the staff of the University Presses of Florida.

Page 1

1
Introduction: Against Interiority
Against Interiority
Poetry, especially modern and contemporary poetry, has not received the same level of
theoretically oriented criticism that prose fiction has. Speaking in very general terms,
books of literary theory by and large do not consider modern poetry, and many critics of
modern poetry are not particularly theoretically oriented, or if they are, the theory they
present is often their own.
1 One result of this theoretical gap is that we as teachers and interpreters of poetry still

tend to be drawn in by what I view as an inadequate model for reading modernist and
postmodern textsa model I call interiority. Interiority as an interpretive model derives
from a theory of the lyric speaker in a certain view of Romantic and post-Romantic
poetry (and not really adequate to these texts either).2 This theory sees a continuity
between the poet and the poem that is guaranteed by the lyric ''I." Though poets have
resisted this model at least since Rimbaud declared "JE est un autre" and T. S. Eliot
claimed a certain "impersonality" for the poetic text, the lasting effect on the literary and
university community has been that, while we distinguish between the poet and his or her
"persona," that persona or lyric speaker is still assumed to be a consistent integrated ego
with discernible thoughts and emotions.3 The scandal for interpretation that I see is
provoked by modernist and postmodern poets who deliberately eschew this model of
textual production, especially in the creation of epic-length works, or what I will call here
simply long poems.4 My claim in this study is that these works deliberately turn the
notion of the lyric speaker inside-out in order to establish a new kind of text production
based on exteriority.
The model of exteriority that I wish to argue for is based on a movement of poetic
subjectivity, or how the subject is constituted in the text.5 Poets of the twentieth century
were and are

Page 2

deliberately reacting against the Romantic model (accurate to those poets or not) based on
the concept of lyric voice. Contrary to what most critics of the modernist long poem have
said, poets writing long poems in the twentieth century are not interested in extending the
dramatic or narrative lyric into the modern long poem. The long poem has its historical
and developmental roots in epic, but epic poems are based on, indeed work out of, a
cultural consensus of values.
6 In the absence of such a cultural consensuswhich no critic of modernism would argue

exists and which as much as any single factor defines the condition of modernitythe hero
of the traditional epic poem is clearly impossible. What the standard view urges is that the
modern poet rather becomes the hero of his or her own "epic" poem. My model of
exteriority claims that modernist and postmodern poets are in fact seeking to achieve the
level of ethicity present in the successful epic poems of the past, but in the absence of the
traditional epic hero and without centering on their own internal feelings or experiences.
This view of the ethical subject of poetry based on an outward orientation runs parallel to
the view of the subject in the philosophy and critical theory of the twentieth century
which I discuss very briefly in this introduction. What my model of exteriority is
designed to uncover is that the view of language and subjectivity in modern theoryfrom,
say, Nietzsche to Derridais similar to that worked out in the experimental long poems of
the twentieth century, beyond any question of influence.7
From Phenomenology to Deconstruction
Modern philosophy well into the current century has posed itself as the guiding
narrativewhat Jean-Franois Lyotard calls a mtarcitfor all research into what we might
call, following the French practice, the human sciences.8 So, philosophy, history, social
science, and literary study have always operated as semiautonomous branches of
knowledge. But philosophy until recently was seen as providing the answers to the
questions: why pursue such an inquiry? and, what is the underlying model of
epistemology or, more broadly, the human subject, that "authorizes" such an inquiry?
Modern philosophy itself can be seen as an alternation between two large modes of
thought: idealism and existentialism. In this view a height of philosophical insight in the
idealist mode is followed, even counterbalanced, by a response in an existentialist

Page 3

or humanizing mode: Descartes / Pascal; Kant / Kierkegaard; Husserl / Heidegger. Such an

alternation may be seen to prevail with the amalgam of idealist and realist philosophies
that gives rise to phenomenology, first in the idealizing tradition of Husserl, with his
"transcendental reduction," and then the counterbalancing "existential" movement of
Heidegger, who wishes to restore the human subject or Dasein to the philosophical
discourse.
9

But in this century the centralizing role of philosophy in the human sciences has been
subjected to questioning. This large shift is due mainly to the rise of the science of
language (linguistics as an academic field). All of the human sciencesphilosophy, history,
social science, and literary study, among othersare seen to be determined not so much by
their object of study, the human subject, as by their enabling primary condition, which is
language itself. The rise of the science of language leads to viewing all of these domains
as being properly unified by the theory of discourse. The large conceptual markers for
this shift are the terms sign, discourse, and hermeneutics. If all of these fields of inquiry
are based in the conditions of language, then they all can be shown to obey the laws of
the sign. The organizing principles can thus be viewed on a wider scale as discursive
practices. The corresponding mode of analysis to uncovering these discursive practices is
thus interpretation, under the sign of Hermes, or hermeneutics.
The existential side of phenomenology that I alluded to as being represented by the
philosophy of Heidegger over against Husserl is continued in the French tradition by
Jean-Paul Sartre in his philosophy and literary criticism of the thirties and forties. I locate
a succinct version of Sartre's brand of existentialism in his 1945 essay "Man and Things,"
on the poetry of Francis Ponge. The volume by Ponge that Sartre analyzes has the justly
famous title Taking the Side of Things (Le Parti pris des choses).10 In its title and in the
language of the poetry itself Sartre sees the workings of the main principle of
phenomenology as enunciated by Husserl in the phrase: "a return to the things
themselves" (an die Sache selbst; aux choses mmes). In a representative poem by
Ponge, such as "The Oyster,'' Sartre claims that Ponge presents a "strange world where
man is present by his enterprises, but absent as mind or project," or put another way,
"The inhumanity of things sends me back to myself" (342). Thus, in a very specific way
we see repeated the large project of phenomenology, whether viewed by Husserl as
"intentionality" or by Heidegger in his analysis of the tool as the

Page 4

"ready-to-hand," Sartre pushes the analysis further, following his own distinction between
the in-itself (l'en-soi) or the "thing," and the for-itself (le pour-soi) or the human subject.
In Sartre's celebrated formulation, the thing has an identity, since it is identical to itself
from moment to moment. The human subject, as revealed by its projects and
intentionality, changes from moment to moment. In a startling statement, Sartre says: "The
stone has an interior, man does not; but he loses himself so that the stone exists" (35455).
Sartre's friend, schoolmate, and coeditor for a time of Les Temps modernes, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, was engaged in a similar project to restore the element of human
intentionality to the austere phenomenology of Husserl. Merleau-Ponty likewise sought to
account for the bodily nature of human existence in a way neglected by Heidegger's
philosophy of Dasein. Tracing the threads of intentionality that link the human
subjectthrough its projects, movement, and behaviorto the world, Merleau-Ponty
developed the startling thesis in his Phenomenology of Perception (1945) that "the body
is the perceived world" (86).
11 In his tantalizing later philosophy (tantalizing because it is challenging as well as

unfinished), Merleau-Ponty attempted to explore this subject-world connection from the

other side, so to speak. Having discovered the inherence of the world in the body,
Merleau-Ponty sought to discover the "bodily" or "fleshly" aspect of the world that allows
for it to be perceived. Following the indications of artists and painters that their subjects
choose them (e.g., the Mont Ste-Victoire of Czanne imposing itself on the painter),
Merleau-Ponty wants to claim that we not only perceive the world, but in some sense we
feel that the world watches us. This philosophy of flesh (la chair du monde) already
reorients Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology in the direction of exteriority, both in its
greater openness to the outside world and in the element of outside reality affecting the
subject directly.
Merleau-Ponty died in 1961 with his major project The Visible and the Invisible (1963)
still unfinished.12 In the year that this posthumous work appeared, Merleau-Ponty's
friend and fellow searcher Jacques Lacan devoted considerable attention to the
philosopher's theories in his seminar, since published as The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis.13 Lacan restricts his area of inquiry by saying that he is not
interested in the relation of subject-world or even subject-subject, or rather only these two
as they relate to the self-constitution of the subject. The phenomenon

Page 5

of being looked at, what Lacan calls "le spectacle du monde," or the world's spectacle, has
a clear correlation with Lacan's own theory, of the "mirror stage" of development. The
fact that the human subject has no total view of itself, except in the view of others, is the
beginning of the split that Lacan sees in the subject. This split is further accentuated by
the subject's accession to language. Parallel to the larger shift I have outlined, from the
human sciences to fields of discourse under the general lead of the science of language, is
Lacan's return to Freud via the workings of the linguistic sign. In perhaps his most
celebrated statement, Lacan claims that "the unconscious is structured like a language."
This is true both in the sense that a sign can only refer to another sign within a system
(Lacan's reinterpretation of the Freudian symptom), and that there is no direct relation of
the sign to what it signifies (so therefore no direct access to the unconscious signifier).
The latter ensures the permanence of the split subject in that the subject's discourse can
never exactly represent the subject's desire. Once again we are dependent on the Other to
respond, to tell us what our desire is. This is Lacan's theory of the misrecognition
(mconnaissance) of the subject in its own discourse.
Jacques Derrida, at roughly the same time as Lacan, was using the linguistic breakthrough
of Saussure and others to mount a thoroughgoing review of the major trends in
philosophy represented by the works of Husserl and Heidegger. While Sartre attacked the
issue of "interiority" from the perspective of ontological analysis, that is, the difference in
being of the stone and the human subject, Derrida attacks phenomenology through an
analysis of its hidden assumptions about language. Very generally speaking, Derrida
discovers that the "interiority" of the speaking subject is derived from a model of the selfpresence of the self to itself based on an auditory model of hearing oneself speak.
14 Derrida in Of Grammatology (1967) reorients the hierarchy of speech to writing,

claiming that all of the discourses I have been mentioninghistory, philosophy, economics,
psychology, literatureare based on deep underlying structures of power and authority.15
These structures Derrida calls "writing," and he says that such writing precedes the subject
and therefore all speaking. Derrida's philosophy of deconstruction thus stems directly
from the currents in phenomenology that I have been briefly sketching out, though
because of his emphasis on "writing'' his philosophy has had greater impact on literary
studies, at least in this country.

Page 6

The large movement I have been tracing from phenomenology to deconstruction is thus
triggered by the shift from philosophy (of the subject) to the science of language as the
guiding narrative or method. In more purely literary terms, the discourse of authorial
intention as it guarantees meaning comes to be seen as a mythin Derridean terms, an
absent "presence" inhabiting a work that interpretation seeks (blind to its own
assumptions about such presence) to interpret. Following Derrida's practice, many
deconstructive critics seek to locate in the text those "blind spots" that reveal the text's
lack of authority or inability to control all possible meanings generated by the writing. We
could also say, following Lacan's linguistic reorientation of Freud, that a discourse can be
shown to say more than it intends. Julia Kristeva's Lacanian analysis points to the two
registers of semiotic and symbolic, calling the surplus meaning that stems from bodily
drives the semiotic as it disrupts the socially approved symbolic discourse.
16

Yet the very project I have undertaken here to trace the shift from phenomenology to
deconstruction has as one of its goals the effort to maintain the visibility (Derrida might
say the "legibility") of the philosophy of "being-in-the-world." As a counterbalance to the
unlimited "free play" of texts, intertexts, and undecidable meanings, notions derived from
phenomenology such as "world,'' "horizon," and "style" can serve to guide the languageoriented analysis of postmodern criticism. This is especially true when examining the role
of poetic subjectivity in modernist and postmodern texts, since issues of perception and
self-orientation maintain prominence even in experimental works.
Maintaining the viability of phenomenology within what might be called the hermeneutics
of deconstruction is the task of ethical criticism that I derive from the philosophy of
Emmanuel Levinas and certain discourses of feminism.17 Derrida's analysis of "writing,"
as it orders the movement of social and discursive forces, uncovers the horizon for
thinking "writing" as what he calls, very strongly, "intersubjective violence." The
philosophy of Levinas claims that an ethical stance, open to the address of the truly other,
will keep faith with the need to resist such violence, in some sense before the institution
of difference and writing. This openness to the other he terms exteriority. Luce Irigaray
extends Levinas's philosophy of ethics and difference into the realm of sexual difference,
seeing in that difference a founding societal structure that underlies all thinking and
representation of the human subject. In my view, Derrida's

Page 7

"later" philosophy, beginning at least with Glas (1974), presents a similar attempt to think
an ethics of difference outside of what he views as traditional Western metaphysics.
18 Alice Jardine has shown that all the male thinkers of modernity are working out issues
of sexual difference, in thinking the other of the literary text or the ethical instance.19 My

view is that all these projects participate in a larger orientation we need to begin to
recognize as ethical. I will here call the theory of the subject in the philosophy and
literary texts that carry out such a project the ethics of exteriority.
Exteriority and the Poetic Text
I was drawn into this study initially by my desire to account for the "brilliance" of
modernist and postmodern long poems. My initial focus on Saint-John Perse centered
around the extreme "obduracy" of his poetic text. Yet I became convinced that his
strangely archaizing settings, his nonplotlike repetitive structures, and his strongly
embedded enunciative stance together represented an attempt to think poetically the
foundations of human culture, in much the same direction as the philosophy I have been
describing. Moreover, I believe that Perse developed a vision that we might call
postmodern of how we go about "knowing" what he terms, in Vents, the "entire world of
things" (see Chapter 5). Perse's poetics represents a version of phenomenology that is
attentive to foundational issues of human culture and oriented linguistically to the issue of
human community. The problematizing of the traditional lyric speaker in his poems sets
loose productive textual forces that enfold foundational meditations, postmodern
epistemology, and communitarian ethics.
The order of the five chapters on Perse follows chronologically each of Perse's major
phases of production. The earliest texts discussed in Chapter 2 date from 1904, and I
analyze them in juxtaposition with nearly contemporary works by Valery Larbaud and
Lon-Paul Fargue, partly in order to show that Perse was already engaged in a startlingly
differentone might say, presciently postmoderntextual practice. Working out of a
phenomenological model of memory, I demonstrate Perse's reliance on both place
memory and body memory in developing a stance that is resolutely not nostalgic, but is
open to the experience of others. I end my discussion of Perse with a discussion of Amers
(1957) in conjunction with his then near-contemporary Ren Char, devoting attention to

Page 8

the postmodern model of community their texts may be said to embody. The overall
movement in the analysis of Perse's poems follows the main theoretical trends I have
been tracing. I begin with a phenomenological approach to the role of memory in his
early work, explore subversive textual strategies in his middle works that we might call
deconstructive, and point to ethical issues of "knowing" and community in his later
works.
Perse's career spans an extraordinary rangein some real sense he is a contemporary of
both Mallarm and of ours. But the middle of that career is "missing." Between Anabase
(1924) and Exil (1941), or when the poet was between 37 and 54, no work of his
survives. This is due in part to his extremely prominent position in the French
government. I suggest in my conclusion to Chapter 3 that Alexis Leger chose the
pseudonym Saint-John Perse not only, as he claimed, to protect the dignity, of his rank,
but also to protect his deliberately marginal poetic practice that in many important ways
works to subvert the existing social/symbolic order.
This subversion is evidenced in Perse's poetic language. One aspect of the subversion of
discourse is his "sexuation" of language in Anabase (and arguably throughout his work).
Now we might want to say that the assimilation of sexual difference to the human/natural
difference is a masculine fantasy, or that it simply repeats a mythological view of the
Earth as primal mother or female deity. But the enunciative strategies Perse employs
successfully resist, I would claim, any interiorizing move that would assimilate the fantasy
structure to the poet's inner state. The forcestextual, sexual, natural, cultural at the
extreme limit of what we recognize as cultureset in motion by the poem's language
ultimately serve to challenge any fixed notions of the self, the culture, even the species.
Strangely powerful, Perse's "antihumanism" (not a term to which he would have
assented) is both anarchic and communitarian.
Chapter 4 goes the furthest in exploring what I call Perse's "exile in language." Through
close attention to anagrammatic patterning, I pursue the idea that Perse's composition
practice gave in to language in a way that was radically altering. Perse's long poems,
composed in versets, look like prose, and seamless prose at that. (They are anything but
prose, but that is the argument for a different study than this one.)
20 There is evidence, however, to suggest that he constructed his texts through a structure

of anagrams, a structure he may have deployed before writing out the connecting lines,

Page 9

his extended versets. This "logic" of the anagram not only runs counter to rational,
symbolic language, it also runs counter to maintaining or representing any preformed
interior state or subjectivity. Through this exile in language, Perse was able to write "the
pure mobile of our dreams" (Exil IV, 15).
The link between the chapters on Saint-John Perse and the American poets is the overall
theory of exteriority in their poetic practice. Whereas the work of Perse suffers from
obscurity in the critical discourse (especially in English-language criticism), the work of
the major American modernists that I discuss has received high-level attention. Yet, too
often, the model of interiority, the poet as speaker and subject of the poem, has been
employed to examine the poetics of these long poems andnot surprisinglythe poems when
analyzed according to this model have often been found wanting, overly difficult, and
obscure. In examining exteriority in the American long poem I wish to show the variety
and progression of the model as an interpretive construct that will allow for greater
understanding of these seemingly obdurate works. As with the poetry of Perse, I believe
it can be shown that all of these writers explore experimental textual strategies in a
deliberate attempt to challenge existing social/symbolic structures. The exteriority these
poems exemplify is one form of ethical practice in the movement toward a postmodern
subjectivity. In the form itself of the poem, these poets are working out an
intersubjectivity or openness to the world and experience of others, while inviting the
reader to participate in the creation of meaning.
Pound's textual experimentation in The Cantos is based, I argue, on his mistaken view of
the "transparency" of the verbal sign. This is not the phenomenological view of the
speaker as a "sonorous being" (Merleau-Ponty), but more a view stemming from the
native empiricist strain of American transcendentalism. Pound really believed, for
example, that his friend, the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska, could intuit the meaning of nearly
any Chinese character, though Sinologists now tend to acknowledge the pictorial element
in fewer than one in five characters. He moreover believed in an Eleusinian-mystery
philosophy that propounded a flash of insight into truth comparable to the "mysterious"
excess of sexual jouissance. I think Pound was wrong about the transparency of the
verbal sign. My strategy in terming Pound's implicit theory of language the "myth of
transparency" is to show that his practice in The Cantos in fact far exceeded his abilities
to theorize the writing subject. Yet his

Page 10

practice of radical juxtaposition, his wide-ranging cultural syncretism, and his enormous
"gift" for poetic language combined to produce in The Cantos a text that is arguably
"proto-grammatological."
The work of the "language poets" I discuss in Chapter 11 is inconceivable without the
example of Pound, along with Stein and Zukofsky. Despite his abhorrent fascist ideology,
Pound helped to set in motion at least three generations of literary, experimentalism. The
writers of this latest generation are resolutely opposed to the "transparency" of language.
The typography alone of one of the leading journals of the movement, L = A = N = G =
U = A = G = E, is designed to exemplify this "anti-absorptive" stance.
21 These writers position themselves resolutely at the margin of dominant literary culture,

which they view as normative, coercive, and partriarchal. My argument, which is

informed by their poetic texts, is to claim the marginal in the text as a position of strength
and renewal, combining discursive awareness with progressive social activism.
Poetic subjectivity is the guiding model for my interpretive approach to both Olson and
Ashbery. In the case of Olson, I argue for a complex, shifting subjectivity (what Olson
calls tropos) as motivating the different stages and strategies of The Maximus Poems.
Though a declared enemy of the Romantic or lyric "I," Olson struggled throughout his
poetic career with the role of personal history and self-orientation in his epic work,
producing a text that varies widely in its enunciative and other textual strategies. Olson is
partly the fascinating figure he is because of his use of ancient worldviews in an eccentric
mix with what we would now call post-structuralist thought that Olson derived not from
continental theorists but from his own bold reappropriation of certain trends in American
pragmatist philosophy. Ashbery's "Fragment" further explodes the lyric "I," seeming to
move instead toward a polyvalent subjectivity that is represented by his (in)famous
shifting pronouns. Though apparently a love poem, "Fragment" so thoroughly displaces
the I/you relationship that the "you'' often seems to be an aspect of the self orsometimes
interchangeablythe reader. Both Olson and Ashberyin very different waysstruggle against
the enclosed egotistical nature of the lyrical subject, exploring other modes of
intersubjectivity that involve the reader in the ethical situation of the utterance.
As the central chapter on Perse's work explores the internal limits of subjectivity in the
radically altering composition practice of Exil, the central and longest chapter on the
American poets ex

Page 11

plores the hermetic texts of Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky, "Stanzas in Meditation"
and "A," respectively. Their language-based experiments in poetic form are two extreme
examples of poets exploring language and its ability to encompass the external reality of
others. Yet the question inevitably raised by any hermetic text is the extent to which the
text's obscurity excludes from the act of communication those very others it would
include. My argument is that these two stages should not be conflated by confusing a lack
of clarity for a lack of ethicity. The hermeticism of Stein's and Zukofsky's long poems
stems at least in part from the genuine difficulty of the task of representing the
experiences of others at the same time as investigating the limits of the representative
capacities of language. Far from demonstrating a failure of ethicity, Stein's and Zukofsky's
works, viewed from this model of exteriority, show the full ethical force of hermetic
texts.
Exteriority is an ethical position that informs modernist and postmodern literary practice
both on the level of textual production and on the level of interpretive practice, although I
would not want to claim exteriority as the only form of ethical practice. Modernist and
postmodern long poems challenge the unity of the presumed poetic speaker through a
variety of ex-centering textual strategies, in part as a rebellion against the tyranny of the
lyric "I." The position of the rational judging subject has been theorized extensively in
modem philosophy and discourse theory; first, from a phenomenological perspective that
denies the subject's "interiority" (as in Sartre); in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory of the
"split subject'' (continued in the work of Kristeva); and then in the language-oriented shift
to deconstruction that views "writing" as existing prior to and in a strong sense
determining the individual subjectivity. Yet far from threatening the effectual position of
the individual subject, as many counterattacks on current theory claim, an interpretive
practice based on exteriorityas ethical opposition to institutional structures of
intersubjective violenceempowers students and interpreters of the texts through
participation in the very discursive practices that create meaning. And it is my argument
here that such an ethical stance is both an interpretive position and the basis for the
experimental strategies of text production these writers engage in. The truth these texts
urge awaits us with what Rimbaud termed an "ardent patience."

Page 12

2
Poets of Memory: Larbaud, Fargue, Perse
The importance of memory to creative activityand particularly writinghas always been
recognized. In Greek myth, Memory (Mnemosyne) is mother to the Muses. Down through
time views on memory have shifted often, though the most profound change is probably
the limiting mentalistic conception instituted by Descartes and rationalist philosophy
generally. Poets have kept alive a fuller and more varied approach to memory, to the
point of challenging the very unity of the Cartesian thinking subject.
1 In this century it has fallen to phenomenology to try to maintain the full range of

memory in human experience in the face of the limiting models proposed by rationalist
philosophy and modem cognitive psychology. My goal here is to review one recent
phenomenological theory of memory, in order to establish a range of practice in the
poetic texts of three twentieth-century French poets: Valery Larbaud (18811957), LonPaul Fargue (18761947), and Saint-John Perse (18871975).2 Examining their works from
the period of roughly 19001914, I wish to show the variety in their textual strategies,
ranging from simple nostalgia and regret for childhood to an active remembering that
frees memory from being "the mere proxy of its own origins" (Casey, 275), and allows
for a complex freedom of the signifier.
Edward S. Casey's book Remembering: a Phenomenological Study makes good on an
implicit promise proffered by phenomenological inquiry of this century to restore the full
place of memory to human experience. In doing this, Casey comments on, completes, and
goes beyond the theories of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, among others in the
philosophical tradition. He points to what he calls the "passivist paradigm" in Aristotle's
De Memoria et Reminiscentia, of memory as a sort of blotter that is ever open to
experience, but only activated through conscious, eidetic recall (Casey, 15). To counter
the activist/passivist split, Casey

Page 13

moves from a brief personal investigation and the corresponding "Eidetic Features" of
such memories to a three-stage formal investigation. In the first part, he follows the
traditional phenomenological breakdown of mental acts into Act Phase and Object Phase.
This uncovers both the "Main Types of Remembering," which he describes in detail, as
well as the constitution of memories themselves. This preliminary investigation also
indicates that the mentalistic model cannot successfully account for all forms of
remembering.
In the second main part of his inquiry, Casey thus turns to three "mnemonic modes" that
require an extramental component: reminding, reminiscing, and recognizing. The complex
interaction of subject and world involved in these modes leads Casey to a third stage of
"pursuing memory beyond mind," in three central forms of body memory, place memory,
and commemoration. Investigating body memory, Casey addresses an important "lacuna"
in the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty (147). Going against Merleau-Ponty's notion of
certain kinds of movement as constituting a form of perception, Casey defines this
"habitual body memory'' as "an active immanence of the past in the body that informs
present bodily actions in an efficacious, orienting and regular manner" (149).
3 In fact, body memory is so important in Casey's analysis that he asserts, "There is no

memory without body memory" (172; his italics). Basing much of his analysis on a fine
reading of Proust's "Combray," Casey develops the link between mind and world the
body provides: "And the lived body's role, far from being merely formal, has become a
material condition of possibility for remembering: it is this body as actually felt in
causal efficacy that gives to it its seminal importance in matters of memory" (176; his
italics). Casey also finds the lived body to be the crucial link between memory and place
in "place memory." Both of these highly developed concepts of "body memory" and
"place memory" will aid considerably in the analysis of memory in the works of the poets
under consideration.
In the concluding stage of his analysis, Casey considers both memory's "thick autonomy"
and what he calls "freedom in remembering." The continuing presence of memory in the
life of the human subject, the weight and thickness of the past, is what helps to mediate
between the passivist and activist models. On the phenomenon of "delay" (similar to
Freud's Nachtrglichkeit), Casey states: "Any such aprs coup action in memory gestures
toward a middle ground lying between the poles of activism and passivism:

Page 14

an in-between of past and present in which the brunt of the past, its very thickness, is
supported and carried forward (often heavily revised) by an autonomous remembering in
the present that is not the mere proxy of its own origins" (275). In a brilliant commentary
on Heidegger's notion of "identity and difference," Casey points to memory as an instance
of the "same" that is not "self-identical'': "Sameness, as Heidegger . . . has pointed out, is
not to be confused with strict self-identity. Where the self-identical excludes the different
altogether, the same allows for the differenteven fosters it on occasion. One of these
occasions, I would suggest, is memory itself. And it is precisely memory's thick autonomy
that makes this possible" (286; my italics). The notion of memory's autonomy is crucial
for understanding its role in poetic creation. Whether the "revising" that goes on in the
poet's re-creation of the past is of the "idealizing" sort, or whether memory here ought to
be viewed as a place or "site" of a semiautonomous (i.e., from the controlling, rational
mind) creative productivitythe autonomy of memory is part of the transpersonal or nonego-controlled activity that frees the creation of the poem.
Casey defines the freedom of memory as the way a subject can find truth in remembering
the past. The truth which the subject locates or discovers is part of the ongoing selfdefinition which makes the subject's past a vital link to the subject's destiny. In a fine
revision to the Heraclitean maxim that "a man's character is his fate," Casey links character
to this freedom of memory: "Far from being fated, then, my character is altogether an
expression of my free remembering in its in-gathering power" (296). Such for Casey is
the importance of the notion of style in an artist's self-definition in creative production
(302).
4 The freedom that textual practice introduces stems from the mediating role of memory

as the site of creative production. Whether that freedom moves in the direction of selfdefinition (the self's truth) or an increased mobility of the signifying process depends on
the disposition of the poet-subject.5
A movement characteristic of the poet-subject's disposition in early modernist practice is
that of displacement: in identity, in space, in time, through metaphor, and so on. Valery
Larbaud's poetic output is characteristic of early modernism in many of these strategies.
Most notable perhaps is his choice of a fictitious persona through which to write his
poems, that of A. O. Barnabooth.6 Early on entitled "Pomes d'un riche amateur" (1908),
the early publication also contained a facetious biography by "X. M. Tournier de

Page 15

Zamble." With the inclusion of a story, "Le Pauvre chemisier," ostensibly narrated by
Barnabooth, and the "Journal intime" of Barnabooth, the final edition of the work gained
the title, A. O. Barnabooth, ses oeuvres
* compltes (1913) and constitutes a rich exploration of Larbaud's alter ego.7 Larbaud's
Barnabooth is presented as the richest man in the world, a man who is burdened by his
wealth and who seeks to give meaning to his existence through travel and literary
endeavors. Rich in the play of style, subject, and tone, the "Journal intime" follows
Barnabooth's journeys, with sidelong references to his poetic experiments. The poems
themselves, despite the complicated bracketing of authorship and persona, rely heavily
for their material on Larbaud's personal memories, in an atmosphere pervaded by
nostalgia. Saint-John Perse wrote of Larbaud, characterizing him as: "tranger . . .
Voyageur . . . Pote nostalgique non d'un pass mais d'un ailleurs [Stranger . . . Voyager .
. . Poet nostalgic not for a past but for an elsewhere].''8 And while it is certainly true that
Larbaud himself was an endlessly restless intelligence who traveled widely and knew
other languages and cultures intimatelyhe translated both Whitman's Leaves of Grass and
Joyce's Ulysseshe is unquestionably also a poet of nostalgia for the past and particularly
childhood.
Larbaud's "Ode" to a trans-European train, for example, is a poem that in many respects
mirrors the Italian futurists' obsession with speed and mechanical revolution in
transportation; yet it ends:
Ah! il faut que ces bruits et que ce mouvement
Entrent dans mes pomes et disent
Pour moi ma vie indicible, ma vie
D'enfant qui ne veut rien savoir, sinon
Esprer ternellement des choses vagues.
Ah! these noises and movement must
Enter into my poems and tell
For me my untellable life, my life
As a child who wants to know nothing, except
To hope eternally for vague things.
(56)

There is a level of irony operating here that keeps us from simply assimilating
Barnabooth's voice to Larbaudyet the way the trope of inexpressibility is resolved into a
weakly know-nothing childhood finds its reflection throughout these poems. Childhood
in these poems is both a locus of memory and a psychological withdrawal from modern

complexities into a simple and emotionally safe

Page 16

atmosphere of nostalgia and vaguely diffused sadness. Though modern in subject and
strategies, Larbaud is firmly rooted in the fin de sicle world of hazy emotion and
crepuscular descriptive writing.
In fact, all of Barnabooth's travels, based on Larbaud's own (Mallet, 47484), have as their
principal effect an affective retreat into childhood. In "Nuit dans le port" ("Night in the
Port"), Barnabooth says:
En attendant je passerai cette nuit avec mon pass,
Prs de mon pass vu par un trou
Comme dans les dioramas des foires.
While waiting I will spend this night with my past,
Close to my past viewed through a hole
Like those dioramas in fairs.
(60)

In the tradition of the voyage in which one approaches but does not actually see the
destination (from Huysmans to Roussel), Larbaud here plays with the ludic possibilities
yet resolves them with a (perhaps deliberately) banal image of childhood. In the middle
of another voyage poem, "Ocan Indien," in which Barnabooth likewise refers to "mon
coeur
* d'enfant abandonn [my child's abandoned heart]" (62), his reveries lead him to seek a
return to the comforting sights of his native France, specifically Marseille, "Le calme
vieux port et les bateaux du chteau d'If [The calm old port and the boats from the
chteau d'If]" (63). Clearly Larbaud is fooling around with the themes of exotic voyages
and a certain involuntary homesickness. But the humor is based on the recurring motif of
the sadness of childhood.
Just as with Proust's narrator, Marcel, one would be hardpressed to state that the
remembered anguish of childhood in these poems is either feigned or humorous. In the
poem "Yaravi," Barnabooth is on board his yacht, "Narrenschiff [Ship of Fools]," when
he describes himself:
Encore enfant, j'ai parcouru ce chemin
D'obscurit, ce droulement du grand flot porphyren
Tout charg de livides fleurs d'edelweisse maritime.
Still a child, I ran along the street
Of obscurity, this procession of a great porphyry flood
Filled with the livid flowers of sea-edelweiss.
(77)

Page 17

This imaginary return to childhood leads inevitably to the theme of sadness, "Oh, ma
douleur, ma bien-aime [Oh, my sadness, my love]" ending with an extended apostrophe
to this sadness:
Oh, prolonger le souvenir de cette douleur moderne,
Cette douleur qui n'a pas de causes, mais
Qui m'est don des Cieux.
Oh, to prolong the memory of this modern sadness
This sadness that has no cause, but is
Rather a gift from Heaven.
(79)

"Modern" is a strangely placed adjective in this passage, yet it may serve to remind us
how thorough the nostalgic impulse is in early modernism. Some of the lines spoken by
Barnabooth could have been taken directly from Proust (for example): "J'tais comme un
enfant plein d'angoisse et trs sage [I was like an anguished and very sad child]" (84).
Another example would be these lines from "Europe," Barnabooth's long poem on his
travels:
Savoure, faible coeur
*, l'angoisse de cette heure,
Ne songe plus qu' ton enfance. Quoi, tu pleures?
Savor, oh weak heart, the anguish of this hour,
Dream only of your childhood. What, are you crying?
(106)

This overview of Barnabooth's poems does not perhaps place Larbaud's poetic oeuvre in
the best light, but the selection is undeniably representative.
The question remains whether this nostalgia, an openly regressive move back to
childhood as a flight from the complexities of modern life, can be said to be characteristic
of modernism. Larbaud, whose mission as Perse saw it was, "tendre au champ de
modernisme toute l'aire d'histoire europenne [To extend into the field of modernism the
entire area of European history]" (495); Larbaud, of whom Perse went on to say: "He
remains nonetheless, at the beginning of the century, an authentic modernist poet, and his
influence as such was undeniable. He fixed, for a time, a new sensibility which he was the
first to develop. Many have descended from him, whom he never thought to claim as
disciples" (496). Was Perse a poor literary critic or simply blinded by his friendship for
Larbaud? Or does such nostalgia in fact constitute a cornerstone of literary modernism?
Writing on the "postmodern," Jean-Franois

Page 18

Lyotard has identified the difference between modernism and postmodernism as being
played out in the space between what he terms "le regret" ("nostalgia") and "l'essai" ("the
essay'').
9 A certain nostalgia is central to modernist aesthetics, according to Lyotard, and his

central example is Proust (3132). Lyotard proposes this provisional definition of

modernism: "The modem aesthetic is an aesthetic of the sublime, but nostalgic; it permits
the unpresentable to be referred to as an absent content, but the form continues to offer to
the reader or observer, on the basis of its recognizable consistency, material for
consolation and pleasure" (32). The "absent content" to which Lyotard refers could thus
equally be the vanished childhood of Marcel or Barnabooth, or the loss of cultural unity
lamented by Pound and Eliot. Whether personal or cultural, the lost world that literary
modernism evokes is a key identifying trait and one that unifies early high modernism
across language and culture; Larbaud is indeed one of its central exponents.
Saint-John Perse's only extended literary analysisand, with his Nobel Prize speech, one of
his two serious statements on poeticsis the essay "Lon-Paul Fargue, pote" that he wrote
in 1963 as an introduction to his friend Lon-Paul Fargue's collected volume of verse.10
Though there is much of interest in this essay, I want to focus on one central statement by
Perse, which identifies a double movement of "nostalgia" and "desire": "The same
unshakeable verve tied together for him, at the same time, the actual and the inactual, the
temporal and the nontemporal; a similar and tenacious passion of being held for him a
place of alertness, and was his fever, and was his grace, between the hour to come and
the hour just pastnostalgia and desire consuming an identical 'time of Fargue'" (508; my
italics). This is a beautiful and strong statement that both characterizes the double
movement of Fargue's poetry and shows an analogy with the action of memory. An
aspect of what Casey would call "freedom in remembering," the presence of the past in
the present and how that past interacts with present and future projects, is what gives
memory, its "in-gathering" power (Casey, 294)and not incidentally makes memory central
to poetic activity.
Fargue is an intriguing turn-of-the-century figure. A student of Mallarm and a regular at
Mallarm's "evenings," Fargue wrote prose poems that are, in my view, the closest of any
French poet to the brilliant prose poems of Mallarm. Despite his current deep obscurity,
Fargue's influence was considerable in his time.11

Page 19

Fargue's "Pomes," to which I will confine most of my attention, are brilliant and eerily
modern for works apparently written before 1902, (They were not published in book
form until 1912.) Evocative of the Mallarmean quasi absences and quasi presences, these
poems also have a directness of diction and concern with the everyday that herald the
subsequent practice of the Surrealists.
In the poem, "De la tendresseet de la tristesse" ("Of tendernessand of sadness"), a mood
of twilight is evoked. Toward the end of the poem, the speaker says:
J'allume pour nous deux les lampes . . Une parole heureuse, un visage de femme, une fentre
brulante, des voix connues passent et se brisent . . Ah je voudrais serrer tousles souvenirs sur ma
poitrine, en bouquet, pour te les offrir. Mais ils sont lointains comme des signaux. Signaux de soir,
avec leur douceur menaante . .
(86)
I light for us two the lamps . . A happy word, a woman's face, a window burning, known voices
pass and disperse . . Ah, how I would like to hold all these memories against my chest, as a
bouquet, to offer them to you. But they are distant as signals. Signals of night, with their menacing
sweetness . .

We might notice first off Fargue's idiosyncratic use of the two dots for a shortened
ellipsis. Fargue's concern for punctuation was "legendary."
12 He even made it a credo in his ars poetica:
Le gnie est une question de muqueuses.
L'art est une question de virgules.
Genius is a question of mucous membranes.
Art is a question of commas.
(260)

This latter statement (circa 1928) also shows Fargue's strong connection with a poetics of
the body. In the "De la tendresse . . ." the quick cut from one image to another is what
gives the poem its modern feel. Unlike with Larbaud, the mood of hazy emotionalism is
not drawn out in a linear sequence, but forced to hover as the syntax of the poem offers
quick turns of phrase, pauses, breaks, and apparently random connections. This is far
from the classical prose of Mallarm and closer in style to the quick flashes of Rimbaud's
Illuminations. Meanwhile, the half-romantic, half-nostalgic feelings expressed do not
differ that much in kind from the later, more

Page 20

avant-garde practice of poets as different as Apollinaire and Reverdy.

One of Fargue's most haunting poems begins, "Ils entrrent au crpuscule [They entered
as twilight]." Many of the same elements from the previous poem are present here: the
twilight setting, vague quasi presences, a lamp.
13 A voice says to the speaker, "Elle est partie [She has left]," and this is followed by a

sequence of descriptive phrases. Then he enters the room:

J'entrai dans la chambre. Je vis tout de suite quelques vtements que je connaissais et qu'elle avait
laisss sur une chaise. J'allai les toucher et les sentit. Elle tremblait partout dans la chambre
crpusculaire. Et son regard rayonnait comme un lment dans sa forme la plus belle.
Et je restais l sans oser bouger et sans pleurer, car je sentais perdument sa prsence par un
frisson lger contre mes lvres . . .
They entered at twilight.A lamp spread out its wings in the room. And someone placed a hand on
my shoulder. "She has left," said a desert voice.Through the open door came the sound of tired
cracklings of heat, heavy voices, a caressing voice, and then the freshest sounds of evening. A
curtainless window allowed for a view of the town where the mirages were lowering, and the
depth of streets moves like a river . .
She has left. I opened without a sound the door onto the staircase with light. On the landing there
was no sound but the obscure complaint of a fountain. But I saw the hand of Night slide along the
railing ahead of mine . .
I entered the room. I saw immediately some clothes I knew well and that she had left on a chair. I
went to touch them and smell them. She trembled truly everywhere in the twilight room. And her
gaze shined there like an element in its most beautiful form.
And I remained there not daring to move or to cry, because I felt helplessly her presence through a
slight quiver against my lips . . .
(111; my trans.)

This most Mallarmean of Fargue's works bears comparison with Mallarm's "Le Dmon
de l'analogie" ("The Demon of Analogy") or ''Le Nnuphar blanc" ("The White WaterLily") to which it obviously owes much in terms of atmosphere and technique. As
opposed to Perse, who sees in Fargue someone "avide de la prsence et non de l'absence
mallarmenne [avid for presence and not Mal

Page 21

larmean absence]" (517), here there is clearly the same play of presence and absence that
is such a central feature of Mallarm's late work. The atmosphere, the clothes left on the
chair, all the mood of the piece is constructed around a phenomenologically true
experience of the quasi presence of an absent loved one.
14 Much as Mallarm might, Fargue here centers on "son regard [her look]," something

which strictly speaking cannot be present, but which seems to be, and in its seeming
presence firmly fixes the interpersonal nexus that underlies the poem. The "frisson contre
mes lvres [slight quiver against my lips]" with which the poem ends nicely refuses to
resolve the ambiguity of presence and absence. One thinks of something like a scarf
which could cause such a "frisson," or possibly the act of speaking in a whisper, which
the speaker's mute attitude allows to be present without specifically saying so.
In Fargue's strongest poems, of which the foregoing is an example, I identify, a
movement that Lyotard characterizes as bringing the difficulty of representation away
from merely a soothingly couched reference to an "absent content" and toward a form of
poetic expression that will embody that difficulty of representation in the form of its
expression. Fargue's work then is something of a liminal case, imbued with the nostalgia
and sadness of crepuscular sentimentalism (like Larbaud's work), while pointing toward a
profound shift in textual practice in which the form of the utterance itself embodies the
impossibilities of conventional representation (postmodern). The young Saint-Leger
Leger, later to be known as Saint-John Perse, will announce this breakthrough to the
postmodern in his very. first work loges. In these poems, memory and childhood serve,
not as an absent content merely, but as an ongoing, present force that bears weight in the
very form of the utterance.
Valery Larbaud first gave the appellation to the Perse of loges as one of "les potes de
l'enfance [poets of childhood]" when the volume appeared in 1911, and most
interpretations of Perse's early work, to this day, follow this lead.15 For Larbaud, the term
meant, above all, that Perse was an heir to Rimbaud in terms of his imaginative powers:
"This appellation [poet of childhood] is one that M. Leger merits eminently. Like
Rimbaud, he has achieved, in the singular maturity of his twentieth year, the lyricism, still
intact, of his childhood" (1231; my trans.). Even in this characterization, the primary
emphasis is not so much on the subject matter of the poems (though, in passing, to the
chronological youthfulness of

Page 22

both Rimbaud and Perse) but the "lyricism" that the spontaneous, childlike view
generates. In the article, Larbaud does not rest there but ends by claiming for the young
Perse an even wider scope: "M. Leger is not only a poet of childhood. But as every, great
poet, he names things again with his own words: the four elements, the animals, the
plants, the stones, the hunt, fishing, war and all the passions of humankind" (1232). Here
the "pote de l'enfance" title is modified by a sort of Orphism, a creative, Adamic naming
that cannot help but strike any reader of these early poems. In fact, the marked tendency
in Perse's work to let the natural world stand as signifier is already strongly present here,
in the earliest work.
16

The term "poet of childhood" was thus never, even at the outset, totally just or accurate in
describing Perse's early poems. Even the term "poet of memory" needs to be qualified in
order to be useful. The poems from the first edition of loges (1911) that I will be
considering"crit sur la porte" ("Written Over the Door"), "Images Cruso'' ("Pictures
for Crusoe"), "Pour fter une enfance" ("To celebrate a childhood") and "loges"
("Praises")are never simply poems of nostalgia for the lost, idyllic childhood that Perse
experienced from 1887 until 1899 in his native Guadeloupe (French West Indies). The
textual strategies he employs are far too complex to allow for the reader to establish the
speaker-as-poet analogy that would provide for such an "interior" view. Memory, is
indeed the key to these poems, but a non-ego-controlled memory, dominated by "body
memory," or "place memory" (Casey, see above): these poems make of memory not an
idealizing, personal possession, but rather a site, a place where conflicting strategies as
they affect signification are put in motion.17 The resulting signifying process surpasses
what any individual person could claim as a representation of past experiences. Place
memory and body memory are both intrasubjective and intersubjective. So the
subjectivity of these poems explodes the traditional Romantic subject, or lyrical "I,"
placing a radical exteriority at the center of the text.
"crit sur la porte" is Perse's only attempt to create a persona based on the colonialist
sensibility, and it is perhaps unfortunate that he chose to place it at the beginning of his
collected poems sixty years later. Yet, even in this poem, there is a clear double
movement: in this case between the "self-satisfaction" of the colonial landowner and his
repressed desire for freedom of movement and travel.18 Here are the last two versets
where that double movement is expressed:

Page 23
toutes choses suffisantes pour n'envier pas les voiles des voiliers
que j'aperois la hauteur du toit de t1e sur la mer comme un ciel.
All things sufficient to keep me from envying the sails of the sailing ships
which I see on a level with the tin roof on the sea like a sky.
(8)

The persona of the colonist, with its double movement of satisfaction and regret, is
rendered in a much more complicated manner in the persona of Robinson Crusoe that
Perse utilizes in his "Images Cruso" (1904). It is commonly assumed that these poems,
which are set after Crusoe's return to England, are the pure expression of the schoolboy
Alexis Leger's feelings of nostalgia for his native island of Guadeloupe.
19 But the treatment the poem's subject receives, the language itself of the poem, is too

highly charged and ambiguously resonant, for this kind of interior view to hold up.
In the first poem in the series, "Les Cloches" ("The Bells"), the speaker imagines
("j'imagine") what Crusoe must have felt when he hears ''le sanglot des cloches sur la
Ville . . . [the sob of the bells poured over the City . . . ]" (11).20 The poem ends with an
imaginative transfer to the island:
Tu pleurais de songer aux brisants sous la lune: aux sifflements
de rives plus lointaines; aux musiques tranges qui naissent
et s'assourdissent sous l'aile close de la nuit,
pareilles aux cercles enchans que sont les ondes d'une
conque, l'amplification de clameurs sous la mer . . .
You wept to remember the surf in the moonlight; the
whistlings of the more distant shores; the strange music that is
born and is muffled under the folded wing of the night,
like the linked circles that are the waves of a conch, or the
amplifications of the clamours under the sea . . .
(59)

The sobbing of the church clock is directly compared to the crying of Crusoe, caused by
his dream of the island. In itself, this would be a nostalgic turn. The sheer activity and
multiplicity of the images that follow undercut the nostalgia. The "surf in the moonlight"
leads to the noises of "more distant shores." Are the distant shores also being invoked by
the dreaming Crusoe, or did the breakers he remembers cause him back then to dream of
farther shores (i.e., a

Page 24

return home)? The "strange music" that is being produced likewise is further embedded in
a complicated image, "the folded wing of the night." This music in turn is compared in a
direct simile ("pareilles") to the "linked circles that are the waves of a conch," which, in
turn, amplify ''the clamours under the sea." An infinite regress is effectuated here, rings
within rings: sound, physical shape, and natural mimesis. The "Tu pleurais" may be said
to set all of this in motion, but the resonance back and forthand in betweensound and
place, amplify and imbricate the feelings evoked. Besides the simple nostalgia or diffused
sadness, there is mystery, wonder and awe. The mysterious resonance of poetic image
causes this wonder and awe to be "present" despite the "absence" of the island. True to
some extent of all poetic image, the presencing effectuated here goes beyond the mode of
expressive nostalgia we have seen in Larbaud, and to an extent in Fargue, and establishes
memory as a place of presence: an active, ongoing force in both the poetic subject and the
intersubjectivity it allows.
A commonplace of Perse criticism is that the inspiration for the "Images Cruso" is most
likely to be found in Rimbaud's Illuminations. In the longest of these "Images," "La Ville"
("The City," 14 15), the debt to Rimbaud is unmistakable.
21 Whereas in Rimbaud's poems there is a constant motion and an apparently random

switching from scene to scene through the vehicle of metaphor, Perse's poem is tightly
structured. The structure provides an imposed contrast between the city and Crusoe's
island: beginning with a section (A) that describes the city, "L'ardoise eouvre leurs toitures
[Slate covers their roofs]"; then providing a transition (x), "Cruso!ce soir prs de ton le.
. . [Crusoe!this evening over your Island]"; then a long section (B) describing the island,
"C'est le soir sur ton le . . . [It is evening on your Island]"; and ending with a final
comment (y):
Joie! joie dlie dans les hauteurs du ciel!
. . . Cruso! tu es l! Et ta face est offerte aux signes de l nuit, comme une paume renverse.
(14)
Joy! O joy set free in the heights of the sky!
. . . Crusoe! you are there! and your face is profferred to the
signs of the night like an upturned palm.
(65)

The bleak images of the city cause Crusoe to turn inward; in the transition the speaker
says: "Tire les rideaux, n'allume point [Draw

Page 25

the curtains; do not light the lamp]." The sheer explosion of natural images in the island
section that follows has the same presencing effect we noticed in "Les Cloches." The
strong synaesthesia of plants, smells, sound, and colors shows well Casey's view that the
key link between memory and place is accomplished "through the lived body'' (189; his
italics). The concluding section is anything but nostalgic: Crusoe is really there, and this
is because the place is still in him, with him, part of him. The strong and disturbing final
image, like the image of the conch that ends "Les Cloches," is strongly embedded and
works both ways. The sensations of the island have been transformed into signs and
Crusoe's upturned face is like an upturned palm, waiting to be read. The text is mediator
between the place and the poet-subject, likewise between the poet-subject's experience
and the intersubjectivity, it awaits in generations of future readers.
The final poem in the series, "Le Livre" ("The Book," 20, 6769), is the most complex in
terms of the layering of voices and strategies. In a language that prefigures some of the
great themes of Perse's later work, the Crusoe series concludes in a movement of
apocalyptic vision. The poem opens with the figure of Crusoe:
. . . un soir de longues pluies en marche vers la ville, remuait
dans ton coeur l'obscure naissance du langage
. . . a night of long rains on their march toward the city,
stirred in your heart the obscure birth of speech

The series thus ends in a Proustian circle, the culmination of the work as an opening onto
a language that might represent the speaker's experience. And with the first words
spoken"D'un exil lumineux [Of a luminous exile]"a great theme is announced (as well as
being the first use of quotes within quotes that will give Perse's work part of its complex
enunciatory, structure). The exile, Crusoe, here turns to God, and in the poem's
conclusion opens "le Livre":
tu promenais un doigt us entre les prophties, puis le regard fix au large, tu attendais l'instant du
dpart, le lever du grand vent qui te descellerait d'un coup, comme un typhon, divisant les nues
devant l'attente de tes yeux.
and letting your worn finger wander among the prophecies, your gaze far away, you awaited the
moment of departure, the rising of the great wind that would suddenly tear you away, like the
typhoon, parting the clouds before your waiting eyes.

Page 26

Though Perse would later be at pains to deny any biblical echoes in his work (see his note
to Eliot on the latter's translation of Anabase, 1145), the image evoked here is clearly the
Apocalypse as a complex figure of Crusoe's own death.
22 Like the image of the upturned face that ended "La Ville," the image here of Crusoe's

upturned face is one intermingled with images of the natural world. As opposed to that
poem, which implied a complex "reading"both the signs of the natural world and Crusoe's
face like a palmhere Crusoe awaits a great wind that will carry him away, with the
etymological overtone of desceller, "breaking the seals," a reference to the progressive
announcements of the Apocalypse.23 Where the previous poem offered the text as openended, a process of reading, here the text clearly points to an awaiting of both one's
personal demise as well as the Final Judgment.
"Pour fter une enfance" and "loges" are the two poems that seem to deal directly with
Perse's childhood experience. If the movement of "Images Cruso," so often termed
straight nostalgia, can be shown to be much more complexly layered and richly
ambiguous in the signifying function of its images, then these poems too yield more on
the level of the signifier than the straight representation of a vanished or absent content.
As with the Crusoe poems, in these poems a rich synaesthesia is constructed, not for the
sake of intellectual symbolism, but in the service of place memory and body memory,
anchored phenomenologically in the lived body of the rememberer. Here, from the center
of the sequence "Pour fter une enfance," is an evocation of the servants:
. . . Et je n'ai pas connu toutes Leurs voix, et je n'ai pas
connu toutes les femmes, tous les hommes qui servaient dans
la haute demeure
de bois; mais pour longtemps encore j'ai mmoire
des faces insonores, couleur de papaye et d'ennui, qui
s'arrtaient derrire nos chaises comme des astres morts.
(27)
. . . And I never knew all Their voices, and I never knew
all the women and all the men who served in our high
wooden house; but I shall still long remember
mute faces, the colour of papayas and of boredom, that
paused like burnt-out stars behind our chairs.
(29)

Here, in the shift of verbal tense, the speaker insists on the link between past experience
and present memory. The strongest mem

Page 27

ory seems to be the actual bodily presence of these servants, described with a justness of
detail that belies condescension or guilt. The final image of the "burnt-out stars" both
renders a certain pathos and introduces a cosmic dimension. The universe, the speaker
would seem to assert, is constituted by these memories just as much as qualifying the
individual aspects of personal experience.
The "loges" are not all childhood innocence and dreams of a lost, pristine island culture.
This offsetting of expectations is accomplished in part by the liminal presence of one of
Perse's characteristic figureshere called "le Songeur" (the Dreamer):
Alors le Songeur aux joues sales
se tire
d'un vieux songe tout ray de violences, de ruses et d'clats, . . .
Then the Dreamer with dirty cheeks
comes slowly out of
an old dream all streaked with violence, wiles, and flashes of light, . . .
(Section I; 33, 35)

The Dreamer is not the same as the speaker of the poem (see Little, 12). Here the whole
sequence is placed under an ambiguous sign. The violence and ruses are both the
historical condition the poem suspends and flashings of insight the text's mechanics are
designed to provoke. Over against this richly ambiguous background, the speaker can
make moving statements without being trapped by hazy sentimentalism: "Enfance, mon
amour . . . ce double anneau de l'oeil
* et l'aisance d'aimer [Childhood, my love . . . that double ring of the eye and the ease of
loving]" (V, 37, 39). Following Casey's analysis, we could say here that memory, can be
triggered by but is not limited or contained by "eidetic features" or those features of a
memory, that can be visualized mentally ("l'oeil"). The memory the speaker evokes here is
both the image in the mind's eye and the feeling one retains that gives to memory, its truth
and depth.
The violence and the ruses, the flashings of poetic insight, keep the text of "loges" from
developing a sentimentality, or even an interiority, for the character of the speaker. Again
and again, the reader is disarmed by images that perform category reversals. Inner and
outer, ordinary and exotic, colonial and native, are all placed into complex intermodifying
relationships, much like what Lyotard has identified as the function of figure-image in the

Page 28

dreamwork.
24 Is it a plausible alter ego of the poet as a young boy, or is it the dream ego of the adult

speaker, who can say, at the end of a particularly imaged sequence: "Vraiment j'habite la
gorge d'un dieu [Truly I inhabit the throat of a God]" (IX, 41, 45)? An image such as this
one takes us out of the realm of an imagined interiority of the poet-speaker. Neither
childhood reality as remembered nor the psychological dreamscape of an adult speaker
can really be pinned down here. And just as the image sequences in these poems work
against interiority, so they strongly defuse any naive exoticism. The famous image that
concludes Section XV shocked the cultured sensibilities of readers when the poems were
first published: "ceux qui sont vieux dans le pays tirent une chaise sur la cour, boivent des
punchs couleur de pus [Those who are old in the country drag a chair to the courtyard,
drink punches the color of pus]" (48, 53). The pedantic explicator might insist that, based
on actual knowledge of Guadeloupe, that's the way it really is, but would likewise miss
the point. Here the power of poetic image resists the pull of the exotic as much as it resists
assimilation into a naturalized realistic context.
The poem ends with a beautiful envoi that is both a touching rendition of the youthful
poet-speaker and, I would say, the proof that, through memory, the lived experience is
actively present as a force of poetic creation:
prsent laissez-moi, je vais seul.
Je sortirai, car j'ai affaire: un insecte m'attend pour traiter. Je
me fais joie
du gros oeil* facettes: anguleux, imprvu, comme le fruit du
cyprs.
Ou bien j'ai alliance avec les pierres veines-bleu: et vous
me laissez galement,
assis, l'amiti de mes genoux.
And now let me be, I go alone.
I shall go out, for I have things to do: an insect is waiting to
treat with me. I delight in
his big, faceted eye: angular, unexpected, like the fruit of the
cypress.
Or else I have an alliance with the blue-veined stones: and
also you'll let me be,
sitting, in the friendship of my knees.
(XVIII; 52, 57)

An envoi, because the "vous" being addressed is (are) as much the implied reader(s) as
the adults the child addresses petulantly. The

Page 29

beauty of the tone here stems as much from the achieved sense of poetic voicecertainly
not limited to the child-speakeras from the beauty of the images. This achieved sense of
voice, the distant yet intimate tone, marks the poem as an ongoing achievement. Here too
the model is memory: childhood is not something over and done, lost and regretted, but
something that is carried with the speaker and reenacted through the language of the
poem. Memory and the poetic spark are one.

Page 30

3
The Sexuation of Poetic Language in Saint-John Perse's Anabase
A serious meditation on sexual difference serves to motivate the disposition of the text of
Anabase, both in its specific language and its overall strategies of representation.
1 Beginning with specific uses of language means reexamining the often-remarked

strangeness of the language Perse employs to describe objects in the natural world.
Analysis of this "semiotics of the natural world"2 in Anabase shows that the descriptive
register of objects in nature and gender-marked human traits intermingle in figural
strategies that defy traditional tenor/vehicle distinctions.3 The traditional inner/ outer
distinction drawn between "man" and nature is refigured in the register of sexual
differences. Like the human/natural difference, sexual difference is both nonassimilable
and nonoppositional and serves to place in question the logical oppositions of rational
discourse through figural means.4 The figural, following Jean-Franois Lyotard, operates
a "renversement" whereby what is thought to be outer reverses the logical categories of
the inner. This approach to poetic language necessarily goes against the traditional
interpretation of Anabase in terms of Perse's "imaginaire." The traditional view claims the
central character of the poem to be a version of the poet's alter ego and, in one specific
instance, discusses the voyager's encounters with women and other images of femininity
as revealing the inner workings of Perse's psyche.5 Perse's own remarks seem to
legitimate this approach; he says, for instance, that the poem's title has a strictly
etymological sense of "a journey to the interior,'' with a willed ambiguity between the
geographical and spiritual senses of that phrase.6 According to the interpretation
advanced here, Perse's journey to the interior in Anabase discovers an exteriority, or
nonassimilable sexual difference, that is central to the representation of the foundations of
human society.
The overall structure and progression of the poem Anabase, with its ten "Chants" and
opening and closing "Chansons," have always been viewed as referring to a voyage
undertaken by a character

Page 31

representing the poet's alter ego. The Stranger, or Voyager, as he is alternately called in the
text, sets out on a voyage to the interior, presumably involving discovery, conquest, and
settlement. In fact, were it not for the schema developed by T. S. Eliot proposing this
structure, few readers would perceive a narrative structure this organized.
7 Instead, the reader is instantly immersed in a strange and unsettling mixture of high

diction and startling images. Apparent from the outset is that the protagonist is not only an
outsider but also someone who is viewed from the outside, "tranger. Qui passait
[Stranger. Who passed]" ("Chanson," verset 1). And one senses further from the concrete
imagery employed that his voyage will be somehow sensitive to the profound differences
of other cultures. The analysis of sexuation of poetic language that follows will focus on
two Chants (II and IX) where the confrontation with this charged alterity is most
heightened.
If Anabase as a whole and particularly Chant II have always been considered obscure and
of difficult access for the reader, as Sacotte rightly states (57), they have also received
high quality critical attention, which facilitates the subsequent critic's task. The difficulty
of movement in the logical progression from verset to verset stems from what Eliot called
the "logic of the imagination" (10). But perhaps even more strange and disturbing on first
impression is the interpenetration of natural and gender-marked human attributes in the
images. Into an imaginative space that is already constructed according to a powerful
suspension of historical, geographical, and literary standards of reference, Perse
introduces a language that questions human/natural and interpersonal boundaries usually
taken for granted.
Chant II opens with a series of images that disorient the reader by shifting place and tone
in a way radically different from Chant I (Sacotte, 59). The most unsettling instances are
those in parentheses in versets three and four:
Nous enjambons la Robe de la Reine, toute en dentelle avec deux bandes de couleur bise (ah! que
l'acide corps de femme sait tacher une robe l'endroit de l'aisselle!).
Nous enjambons la robe de Sa fille, toute en dentelle avec deux bandes de couleur vive (ah! que la
langue de lzard sait cueillir les fourmis l'endroit de l'aisselle!).
We step over the gown of the Queen, all of lace with two grey stripes (and how well the acid body
of a woman can stain a gown at the armpit).

Page 32
We step over the gown of the Queen's daughter, all of lace with two bright stripes (and how well the
lizard's tongue can catch ants at the armpit).

In the overall strange and unsettling world of Perse's poems, these are certainly two of the
strongest moments of confrontation with alterity. Surely, no other interpretation could
account for the presence here of such poetic force. As Geninasca has observed:
"Everything happens here as if woman were considered in the same way as a natural
species" (232). The whole of Anabase constructs a world in which women and the natural
world are described in communicating semantic registers. This phenomenon may be
examined more closely through attention to linguistic features in the text. (This linguistic
phenomenon should not be confused with the mythological assimilation of the earth to
female figures or deities. Perse's break from the myth-thinking will become clearer in the
analysis of the status of enunciation in the poem.)
The dress of the Queen and that of her daughter already echo the usage of dress (robe) in
the opening "Chanson" (presented here with the similar passage from the first verset as
well): "Je vous salue, ma fille, sous le plus grand des arbres de l'anne [Hail, daughter!
under the most considerable of the trees of the year]" (verset 1); "Je vous salue, ma fille,
sous la plus belle robe de l'anne [Hail, daughter! robed in the loveliest dress of the year]''
(verset 3; trans. modified). This prior "substitution" in Roger Caillois's terms, already
introduces a sort of equivalence between robe and arbre.
8 The mention of "fille" also echoes the previous usage, although with the difference that

the Voyager in the initial "Chanson" says "ma fille." In fact, the word "fille"
(daughter/girl) occurs at least a dozen times in the poem, and fully half of these
occurrences are linked with possessive adjectives. These girl/daughters are figurally
linked with mules and undergarments in Chant IV, perfumed in Chant VI, and at the end
of Chant IX, "les rilles urinaient en cartant la toile de leur robe [the girls urinated by
holding aside their print gowns]" (133; trans. modified).
What are we to make of the action of the voice who says, "Nous enjambons [We step
over]"? In the strict sense, the action is that of stepping over first the dress of the Queen
and then that of her daughter. The images of washing (versets 2 and 7) and of clothes
hung out to dry lead one to assume that the Queen and her daughter are not in their
clothes. However, if they were wearing their clothing, the action of the verb "enjamber"
would carry a strong

Page 33

sexual connotation, "bestriding" the women as one would bestride a horse. Whether in
connection with the verb or through a metonymic association with the dresses, the
following verset poses the hypothesis: "Et peut-tre le jour ne s'coule-t-il point qu'un
mme homme n'ait brl pour une femme et pour sa fille [And perhaps the day does not
pass but the same man may burn with desire for a woman and for her daughter]" (verset
5). The imagery of this passage is sexually charged and would tend to legitimate the
examination of the poem on the basis of the poet's desire or unconscious.
In fact several critical readings (see Sacotte, 5759) interpret the following verset as a
sexual image: "Rire savant des morts, qu'on nous ple ces fruits! [Knowing laugh of the
dead, let this fruit be peeled for us]" (verset 6). While both Sacotte and Geninasca reject
this overly fixed interpretation, Geninasca allows for the idea to be present in the passage.
In effect, the verb cueillir (pick, gather) and the adjective acide (acid) that are first used
to describe the body of the woman and the lizard's tongue suggest together the semantic
category /fruit/ and thus introduce the interpenetration of the semantic categories of
woman and fruit even before the verset in question (Geninasca, 236).
In the two versets in question, the area of the dress and/or woman is the aisselle, or
armpit, itself a potentially sexually charged image. The verb used for the act of staining is
savoir. "Sait tacher" causes Geninasca to invoke "a knowledge of the somatic essence of
women" (232); but the actual staining itself is caused implicitly by the woman's bodily
fluids. A strict feminist interpretation, following the lead of Irigaray's work on the
imagery of fluids and femininity (Ce sexe, 10316), could find consistent evidence for
these associations in Perse's work, particularly in Anabase.
All of the foregoing remarks point to the difficulty of any unitary explanation for the
parenthetical versets in Perse's poem. The "acide corps de femme [acid body of a
woman]" and the lizard's tongue seeking out ants in the woman's armpit are surely images
that evoke associations which defy our ability to fix exactly in discursive terms their value
or precise significance. One would be tempted to invoke the fashionable notion of
"indeterminacy" and say that the poetic text generates but does not control possible
interpretations.
Two formal principles of analysis may aid us to investigate more fully this apparently
unresolvable ambiguity of the text: the study of cumulative structuring repetition and the
status of enunciation.

Page 34

Recent linguistic analysis has heightened our appreciation of the structures of repetition in
Perse's work.
9 On the basis of the previous remarks on the repetition of fille(s)and a parallel

enumeration could be made for femme(s)it may already be sensed that a linguistically
oriented analysis might lead to rather standard conclusions. For this reason, it is crucial to
examine the status of enunciation, particularly as it comes to the fore in Chant IX, as a
means of deepening our reflections on the representation of sexual difference.
Previous discussions of Perse's "imaginaire" have tended to privilege the interiority of the
speaker of the text, often to the extent of equating the speaker with the poet himself.10
Generally speaking, this same privileging of interiority informs most Perse scholarship
and corresponds to the view expressed by Roger Little that there is "a depth of sincerity to
the poems to which the reader's latent Romanticism responds."11 Little also states that in
Anabase "we are aware that this is an interior monologue, that beyond the concrete
imagery lies a psychological and spiritual realm to be explored" (19). My view is rather
that Perse is one of the least Romantic of modern poets and there is no realm "beyond the
concrete imagery," that the vision of the inner in Perse's universe is exactly a vision of the
outer.12
Following the semantic analysis of the language of Chant II, I would argue that it
represents a version of what Irigaray calls the "sexuation of discourse" (71). The
meditation on difference in this text appears to charge the very language used in a way
that cannot be reduced to logical oppositions. Furthermore, the strategy of the figural is to
reverse the arrangement of mental/imaginary space. In this paradoxical reversal, the
"sincere," or what can be isolated from the text and assented to, represents the inner; the
imaged, or figure that cannot be reduced to its content, menaces the space of logical or
even emotional understanding from the outside.
In this way, the lizard licking the ants from the woman's armpit threatens not only logical
but also emotive contexts. Like the mysterious additional "jambe de gauche [left leg]" in
Rimbaud's "Antique," this unaccustomed, impossible image forces us to question the
status of who is speaking.13 For the traditional approach to Perse's "imaginaire," this
basic question of who is speaking becomes something of a scandal. The customary
position is to identify, the discursive stance as an interior monologue and the parts of the
text that are surrounded by quotation marks as a still further inner form

Page 35

of expression. Even Sacotte's excellent analysis stumbles over this question in relation to
Chant IX, recognizing that a woman is speaking, but preferring to see one woman where
there are probably several, in order to salvage a view of Perse's "imaginaire" (58). It is
likely that there are several women who speak in Chant IX; the one who sleeps with the
stranger (verset 11) is unlikely to be the one who says in the following laisse that she
does not know what his ways are with women. The reversal in the status of the speaker in
this pivotal section of the poem allows for unassimilable difference to be figured through
the voices of women who describe the stranger from a position of exteriority.
Moreover, Chant IX is framed by an exterior view of the young women in question.
Going toward the West, the speaker suddenly announces: "Jeunes femmes! et la nature
d'un pays s'en trouve toute parfume [Young women! and the nature of a land is all
scented therewith]" (vetset 3). The four passages which follow are spoken by at least two
different women, as my subsequent analysis will show. At the end of the Chant, the
speaker returns to the exterior view of the women in question:
et debout sur la tranche clatante du jour, au seuil d'un
grand pays plus chaste que la mort,
les filles urinaient en cartant la toile peinte de leur robe.
and erect on the shining edge of day, on the threshold of a
great land made more chaste than death,
the girls urinated by holding aside their print gowns.
(versets 2223; trans. modified)

The same interpenetration of natural and gender-marked human description that

dominates in Chant II is operative in these frame passages, always with the insistence on
death and the strange physical details that assimilate the women figures to the status of
natural phenomena.
If this exterior view of the womenand thus by implication the speaker/poet's imaginative
processeswere all we had, there would be no questioning Sacotte's analysis: "One can
deduce the process of the imagination: the poet, disturbed by an interior fecundity,
involuntary, passive, over which the man is not master and which his imaginary tendency
always carries toward prompt abortions, dreams of a woman's body without mystery,
almost transparent like the network of veins beneath the skin, and of an exterior
fecundity, visible and also dominated by him" (75; my trans.). This

Page 36

is a perceptive, even brilliant, deduction of what must have been the poet's inner
psychology. But, of course, the nature of the question posed determines the kind of
answer that can be given. And if the question is not to interrogate the author's supposed
inner state, but rather the disposition of the text at hand, then a different approach is
necessary. An examination of what the jeunes filles (young women) themselves say
indicates that the very status of the women as speakers necessarily works against an
"inner" view of the poet's psyche.
From the first words of the first speech, "Je t'annonce [I tell you]" (verset 4; my trans.),
repeated at the beginning of each subsequent speech, a relational structure is engaged.
The speaker, a woman ("our women's bodies"), addresses the Voyager as "tu," implying
either an established intimacy or the cultural difference of a language that does not
recognize polite forms of address. In addition to expressing a stance toward the male
Voyager, she goes on to express a stance toward herself as one of a class of women:
mais le plaisir au flanc des femmes se compose, et dans nos
corps de femmes il y a comme un ferment de raisin noir, et de
rpit avec nous-mmes il n'en est point.
but the pleasure forms itself within our flanks, and in our
women's bodies there is a ferment of black grape, and we have
no respite with ourselves.
(verset 7; trans. modified)

Other than verset 5 in Chant II where it is speculated that perhaps a man is unable to
spend a day without burning for both mother and daughter, this is the first mention of
physical pleasure. Is it purely accidental that the speaker is a woman? Is it merely a
strategy by a male poet to find expression for his desire? These questions do not begin to
do justice to the complexity of a vision based on a profound respect for alterity. One
might rather ask: what poet (male or female) has posed the question of the woman's body,
"nos corps de femmes," in such strange and compelling terms? Both inner and outera
fermentation of black grapes and a lack of respite among themselvessuch is the view
presented through the first woman's words.
The second laisse complicates the enunciative structure by posing a question (as well as
the uncertainty whether this is the same young woman or another who speaks):

Page 37
Ceux qui savent les sources sont avec nous dans cet exil; ceux
qui savent les sources nous diront-ils au soir
sous quelles mains pressant la vigne de nos flancs
nos corps s'emplissent d'une salive? (Et la femme s'est couche avec l'homme dans l'herbe; elle se lve, met ordre aux
lignes de son corps, et le criquet s'envole sur son aile bleue.)
Those who know the springs are with us in this exile; those
who know the springs will they tell us at evening
beneath what hands pressing the vine of our flanks
our bodies are filled with saliva? (And the woman has slept
with the man in the grass; she rises, arranges the lines of her
body, and the cricket takes flight on its blue wing.)
(versets 911; trans. modified)

"Ceux qui savent les sources [Those who know the springs]" are presumably the older
persons, invoked in the previous laisse, "qui vieillissent dans l'usage et le soin du silence
[who grow old in the custom and the care of silence]." The speaker wants to know if they
will reveal the secret of the men (presumably) who press her and the others' flanks,
causing them to fill with saliva. The continuity of imagery is striking, from the vine image
that recalls the previous passage, to the saliva image that recalls the theme of liquids and
the woman's body (Irigaray). Certainly, there is an implied physical union in the
parenthetical phrase, "the long-awaited union" as Sacotte puts it (71), but the
representation participates in the same mystery of difference (male/female;
human/natural) that dominates the image sequences in the poem. They sleep together in
the grass. The woman rises. The cricket flies away on its blue wing. Can we really say
that some kind of system of opposition, whether male/ female, amazon/queen (Sacotte),
serves to organize the logic of these associations? Rather, what strikes us is the force of
these images that call for a meditation, probably unresolvable, on the very nature of these
differences. Not rational explanation, but wonder; not empty amazement, but rather a
profoundly unsettling experience that challenges the very system of oppositions that
organizes our mental and social structures.
The speaker of the third passage must be different from the speaker of the second, or else
the woman who sleeps with the Stranger is not the one who speaks in versets 811. Here
the representation of difference as exteriority reaches its apex:
Mais l'Etranger vit sous sa tente, honor de laitages, de
fruits. On lui apporte de l'eau frache

Page 38
pour y laver sa bouche, son visage et son sexe.
On lui mne la nuit de grandes femmes brehaignes (ha!
plus nocturnes dans le jour!) Et peut-tre aussi de moi tirera-t-il
son plaisir. (Je ne sais quelles sont ses faons d'tre avec les
femmes.)
But the Stranger dwells in his tent, honoured with gifts of
dairy produce and fruit. He is offered fresh water to wash therewith his mouth, his face and his sex.
At night he is brought tall barren woman (more nocturnal in
the day!) And perhaps of me also will he have his pleasure. (I
know not what are his ways with women.)
(versets 1315)

The series of differences is both extended and deepened in this passage. The je/tu (I/thou)
structure of enunciation is complicated by the description of the Stranger in the third
person. (Does this mean that he wasn't the one being addressed all along?) The meditation
on the otherness of woman is extended by the image of the barren women brought to his
tent, with the adjective brehaigne (barren), one that normally describes horses. The
Stranger is brought fruit and milk products on the same level as he is brought the women.
These are all concurrent images with those previously examined, showing women as an
extension of the natural world.
The strange reversal that traverses this passage is the Stranger being described in both
physical terms and in terms of pleasure by the women themselves. Despite all the images
of women in the poem to this point, there has been nothing quite so direct as verset 14
where the Stranger washes his mouth, face, and sexual organ (or perhaps it is the women
who do the washing, as is traditional in some cultures). While this is certainly not
shocking and the tone is flat, the impact is undoubtedly greater as a result. And the
woman then goes on to wonder whether the Stranger will take his pleasure with her, thus
negating the possibility of there being a single woman who both speaks all the versets in
Chant IX and also sleeps with the Stranger. This musing is followed by the now familiar
parenthetical expression wherein the speaker states that she does not know his ways with
women (echoing the difference of faons, or customs, implied in the opening "Chanson,"
verset 2). Cultural difference, sexual difference, and difference of class or social roleall
these differences are at once brought to the fore. The language throughout this sequence
has barely been figural at all, thus establishing difference itself as the dominant figure, a
difference that

Page 39

figures a radical exteriority at the center of this journey to the interior.

The final passage returns to the figure-image of the woman as part of the world of nature
as well as to a direct address to a "tu," presumably the Stranger. Among the images in this
beautiful and moving passage are ones that rhyme with those already examined:
et compagnon de l'angle de tombeau, tu me verras long-temps muette sous l'arbre-fille de mes
veines . . . Un lit d'instances sous la tente, l'toile verte dans la cruche, et que je sois sous ta
puissance! nulle servante sous la tente que la cruche d'eau frache! (Je sais sortir avant le jour sans
veillir l'toile verte, le criquet sur le seuil et l'aboiement des chiens de toute la terre.)
and companion of the grave-corner, you shall see me for long time unspeaking under virgin branches
of my veins. . . . A bed of entreaties under the tent, the green star in the cruse, and may I be under
your dominion! no serving-maid under the tent but the cruse of cool water! (I have ways to depart
before day without wakening the green star, the cricket on the threshold and the baying of the dogs
of the whole world.)
(verset 19)

Sacotte elegantly explains the image of the veins like an "arbrefille" (lit., tree-daughter) as
those that the Stranger sees beneath a transparent skin (72). Yet arbre and fille are also the
two interchangeable words from the opening "Chanson" and hence participate in the
woman-as-part-of-nature structure. But even that assertion would be an
oversimplification of what operates here as much at the level of language itself, a striking
instance of what seems from this perspective to be sexuation of poetic language.
The startling reversal thus uncovered at this turning point in Anabase is the substitution
of the other's view for what we had expected to be an inner experience. Instead of the
interiority we expect from poetry, we are presented with a radical exteriority. The male
protagonist is not given as an "object" for study, but rather the view of difference itself is
presented, using a form of enunciation in which that difference is a central figure. Outside
the bounds of logical thought, this nonoppositional difference upsets conventional order
and threatens the foundations of logical discourse. The way is prepared by the language
of the poem, its strange insistence on the radical alterity of women and the positing of a
commonality between woman and nature. To establish that reversal and then use

Page 40

the voices of these women to describe the male protagonist from the outsidesuch is
Perse's project, a wager placed against the odds of a society that probably could not
accept its message and remain the same.
This theory of difference operates as a figure of the postmodern.
14 None of the traditional guiding ideas (mtarcits, Lyotard) of culture can assimilate this

presentation of difference and use it to achieve ends to which the social network would
readily assent. As feminist discourse haunts the margins of the paternal order, threatening
to disrupt its neat oppositional systems, so Perse's text is deliberately marginal with
respect to the poetic practice representing the "great ideas" of Western civilization. It has
always been assumed that Alexis Leger chose the pseudonym Saint-John Perse to protect
the dignity and independence of his diplomatic career. Perhaps the choice of a
pseudonym also served to protect the longterm development of a poetic project that
seriously challenges the societal structures within which Leger the diplomat had no choice
but to work.

Page 41

4
Exile in Language: Saint-John Perse's Exil
Saint-John Perse made his return to poetry in 1941 when he wrote Exil, following his
own personal exile from France. (Anabase, by contrast, was published in 1924.) In many
ways, Exil is central to his overall poetic oeuvre, recapitulating the themes of his earlier
work as well as echoing specific language.
1 The poem also anticipates the rich thematics of the elements that will serve to structure

his later long poems, such as Vents and Amers, which I discuss in the next two chapters.
Recent critical work has centered on the idea of the "signature"and with that a certain
poetic "identity"the poem seems to present, especially in the final declaration: "Et c'est
l'heure, Pote, de dcliner ton nom, ta naissance, et ta race . . . [And the time is come, O
Poet, to declare your name, your birth, and your race . . . ]."2 But this "signature" carries a
double edge, even without considering the problem of the pseudonym Saint-John Perse.
As Steven Winspur has remarked: ''The section entitled Exile does not end on a name, a
birth or a race but on the silence of the three final ellipsis marks."3 The question of
nomination and identity is paradigmatic of the larger structure of Exil, for the poem
represents Perse's deepest meditation on poetry itself and "writing," as subsequent critical
theory has developed that term.4 In fact, this questioning so thoroughly structures the text
as to drive out any other "characters" or even the subjectivity of the presumed speaking
subject. Exil is an exile in language that undermines the distinctions of interiority and
exteriority on which traditional notions of the subject are based.
The play of the speaking subject, the one who says "I" in the poem, is extremely
complicated, with some or most of Chants II, III, V, VI, and VII enclosed in quotation
marks. The speaker in these "enclosed" or "spoken" passages seems at once the "same"
and "different" from the speaker in the rest of the poem. Unlike Perse's previous poem,
Anabase (discussed in the previous

Page 42

chapter), where a truly dialogic structure emerges, or his later antiphonal use of speeches
by a pair of lovers in Amers (which I discuss in Chapter 6), the use of enclosed speeches
here seems to reflect a profound meditation on poetic subjectivity itself. As Antoine
Raybaud has pointed out, the one who speaks in these passages is given an uncertain
status through the use of "changing qualifications" such as "Proscrit [Outlaw]," "Prodigue
[Prodigal One]," "tranger [Stranger],'' "Cavalier [Horseman]" or others even more
"enigmatic" or "undecided" (95). The "I" who speaks is either not named or referred to in
such terms that an impersonality haunts or intrudes on the identity of the speaking
subject.
5 This impersonality that haunts or intrudes on the speaking subject can be compared to

the impersonality that Maurice Blanchot identifies as a constituent of "l"espace littraire,"

literary space, or writing. As Blanchot says: "That which is written delivers the one who
has to write to an affirmation over which he has no authority, which is itself without
substance, which affirms nothing, and yet is not repose, not the dignity of silence, for it is
what still speaks when everything has been said. The affirmation doesn't precede speech,
because it prevents speech from beginning, just as it takes away from language the right
and the power to interrupt itself."6 The problematics of the proper name are thus but one
aspect of a thoroughgoing inquiry into the questions of identity and writing. Exile, for
Perse, is not simply wandering: "Et ce n'est point errer, Prgrin [And it is not at all to
wander, Pilgrim]" (II, 3; my trans.). Exile is a movement of force and change activated on
the textual level through (or in) language whereby the poet gives up his identity rather
than finds it.
"Writing" itself, and not naming or identity, is the central project of Perse's Exil, and the
text is replete with signs of difficulty and danger to the identity of the speaker. Further on
in Chant II, the speaker states:
J'ai fond sur l'abme et l'embrun et la fume des sables. Je
me coucherai dans les citernes et dans les vaisseaux creux
I have built upon the abyss and the spindrift and the sand-smoke.
I shall lie down in cistern and hollow vessel
(6)

What kind of foundation can be established "upon the abyss" or "spindrift" or "sandsmoke"? Clearly only a foundation that is perpetually changing and as close as possible to
nonexistence. Yet it is the hollow or nothingness of the vessel that gives it utility, even a

Page 43

special kind of "Being" in Heidegger's analysis.

7 So the "cistern" or the "hollow vessel" in which the speaker seeks rest are likewise

useful for their sheltering emptiness.

"Writing" and images taken from nature interpenetrate in Exil, in much the same way as
they do in Anabase. In this Chant the interpenetration is effected through a deliberate
archaizing of the theme of reading nature through augury:
Comme le Cavalier, la corde au point, l'entre du dsert,
J'pie au cirque le plus vaste l'lancement des signes les plus
fastes.
Et le matin pour nous mne son doigt d'augure parmi de
saintes critures.
L'exil n'est point d'hier! l'exil n'est point d'hier! " vestiges,
prmisses,"
Dit l'tranger parmi les sables, "toute chose au monde m'est
nouvelle! . . ." Et la naissance de son chant ne lui est pas moins
trangre.
Like the Rider, lariat in hand, at the gate of the desert,
I watch in this vast arena signs of good omen soaring.
And morning, for our sake, moves her prophetic finger
through sacred writings.
Exile is not of yesterday! exile is not of yesterday! . . . "O
vestiges, O premises,"
Says the Stranger on the sands, "the whole world is new to
me. . . ." And the birth of his song is no less alien to him.
(II, 1721)

A rich thematics of margins, borders, and being a "stranger" runs through this sequence,
andas much as the specific words "Cavalier" and "desert"serves to link this poem to
Anabase. ''Writing" is also thematized, as such, in this strange play of inside and outside.
The speaker, like a "Cavalier," looks into this arena from the outside to see the release of
"signs of good omen." Now these signs are presumably a natural product, animal entrails,
or such. The "morning," in a strange personification, leads her "prophetic finger through
sacred writings." These scriptures are presumably either texts used for interpreting the
auguries or sacred texts of a related religious practice, but then again what is the status of
the scene describedis it "present" or "absent"? The interjection that follows would seem to
be a rebuke (of the speaker to himself?) for situating "exile" in the past instead of the
present. The Stranger speaks in a phrase that recalls Rimbaud's " saisons, chateaux [O
seasons, O

Page 44

great houses]," but in a strange register that unites past and future: vestiges and premises.
8 The future that seems to be announced is the future of the poem, "the birth of his song,"

but in terms that recall Blanchot's insistence on the solitude of the writerly activity and the
impersonality of the text. The Stranger is not only an outsider, but the poem's creation is
itself, to him, "no less strange."
Passages such as this one and others in Exil point to Saint-John Perse as the great poet of
"pure" or "radical exteriority," in Blanchot's terms (Taylor 1987, 235). As Taylor states,
"This exteriority makes it possible to distinguish interior and exterior: this outside
differentiates inside and outside" (235). So Perse's "return" to poetry is an ''ex-centering"
of his poetic subjectivity. As Blanchot states: "The 're' of the return inscribes the 'ex,'
opening of all exteriority: as if the return, far from putting an end to it, marks exile, the
commencement in its recommencement of exodus. To return, that would be to return
again to ex-centering oneself, to erring. Only the nomadic affirmation remains."9 This
suggestive passage by Blanchot begins to place some of the paradoxical elements in
Perse's thematics in perspective. The poet who would write "exile" must be the poet
willing to forego a certain unitary, perspective. To give up the consistency of the pathto
give in to erringis not the same as to give up any possible goal. Thus, in Exil, Perse insists
that this exile is not simply wandering but rather a nomadic expedition or pilgrimage.
The "journey to the interior" that structures Anabase is mirrored in this poem by a
journey along the coast: "Je reprendrai ma course de Numide, longeant la mer inalinable
[I shall resume my Numidian flight, skirting the inalienable sea]" (VII, 10). The
Numidians of course were an ancient people in a region of North Africa. The quest or
pilgrimage aspect of the poem is stated even more forcefully when the speaker says:
"Plaise au sage d'pier la naissance des schismes! . . . Le ciel est un Sahel o va l'azalae
en qute de sel gemme [Well may the sage spy out the birth of schisms! . . . The sky, is a
Sahel desert where the holy caravan goes in search of rocksalt]" (V, 11). As the speaker
"spied" into the arena to see the auguries, here the wise man spies into the heavens. The
image that follows links up with the image of the speaker as a Numidian with the
reference to the Sahel.10 The quest or journey itself is the azalae, a word for which
Perse apologized when he sent the poem to Archibald MacLeish (to whom it is
dedicated): "Among the concrete words of the poem there is a single rare or exotic word,
for which I

Page 45

apologizeazalae, which you won't find in the standard dictionaries, is the name given to
the great annual salt caravan in the African deserts. I needed the word for a
transposition."
11 The transposition of which Perse speaks in this letter is probably not the transposition
of letters or anagrammatism (to which I will be turning shortly).12 Rather, Perse

deliberately seeks a transposition in time to a remote, archaic past.

One could argue that Perse's motivation for seeking to ground his exploration of the
theme of exile and erring in such a remote setting is a search for origins, a way of
thinking about Being that has been "forgotten" in the course of Western history, literature,
and philosophy. This is, of course, the thinking Heidegger pursues: "Being sets [beings]
adrift in errancy [Irre]. Beings come to pass in that errancy by which they circumvent
Being and establish the realm of error [Irrtum] (in the sense of the prince's realm or the
realm of poetry). Error is the space in which history unfolds. . . . Without errancy there
would be no connection from destiny to destiny: there would be no history."13 My claim
here is not that Perse follows Heidegger, or even that his project carries the philosophical
seriousness of Heidegger's inquiry. This kind of comparison can serve, however, to
uncover Perse's attraction to, even his need for, the kind of transposition in space and
history which he effectuates in this poem. Perse's intuitive (say, as opposed to
philosophically studied or motivated) move to archaic times allows his poetry a richness
of reflection in which the Being of beings is intimately tied to a quest for thinking in
poetic images. This quest is one with the speaker's song, called forth from him as though
by a mysterious outside force.
The forces that traverse the poem and motivate its image clusters are thus fundamentally
linked with the force of poetry or writing itself, as a clamor which arises uncontrollably
and indistinguishably from the forces of nature. The "enclosed" speaker proclaims:
". . . Toujours il y eut cette clameur, toujours il y eut cette
grandeur,
"Cette chose errante par le monde, cette haute transe par le
monde, et sur toutes grves de ce monde, du mme souffle
profre, la mme vague profrante
"Une seule et longue phrase sans csure jamais inintelligible
. . ."
". . . There has always been this clamour, there has always
been this grandeur,

Page 46
This thing wandering about the world, this high trance about
the world, and on all the shores of the world, by the same
breath uttered, the same wave uttering
One long phrase without pause forever unintelligible . . ."
(III, 46)

And if the word, or message, of this "enclosed" speaker were all we had, we might be
able to discern a philosophy or even an ontotheology of the Logos, in which the "word"
of the speaker stems from, even mirrors, reflects, the "Word" of an ultimate Creator. Yet,
it is clear that this philosophy of the Logos resides in or creates a space of identity, which
the present text menaces at every juncture.
14 Following the end of this proclamation by the ''enclosed" speaker, the nonenclosed

speaker says bluntly:

Je vous connals, monstre! Nous voici de nouveau face
face. Nous reprenons ce long dbat o nous l'avions laiss.
I know you, monster! Once more face to face. We take up the
long debate where we left off.
(III, 10; trans. modified)

Here the "reticent" poet-speaker seems to be reproaching the "declamatory," poet-speaker

(though, as in the passage examined earlier, whether the address represents two separate
figures or aspects of the same speaker is ultimately unresolvable). Further on the
nonenclosed or "reticent" speaker says:
Que voulez-vous encore de moi, souffle original? Et vous,
que pensez-vous encore tirer de ma lvre vivante,
What more do you want of me, O breath of origin? And you,
what more would you drag from my living lips,
(III, 13)

Taylor has well shown the connections between monstrosity and other images of the
labyrinth, marginality, and erring. In juxtaposing these two versets, the conflict between a
"breath of origin" and an unwilling or reticent speaker is figured forth in images of
monstrosity and liminality. Once again, the song, or present poem, seems to be forced on
the speaker from outside. The image the speaker gives for his song being forced on him
is another marginal or liminal one, "my living lips."15
In the central Chant IV of Exil, the scene of "writing" takes on a dizzying array of figures
and images. Among them we find the speaker saying:

Page 47
Et qui donc tait l qui s'en fur sur son aile? Et qui donc,
cette nuit, a sur ma lvre d'tranger pris encore malgr moi
l'usage de ce chant?
And who was it there that flew away? And so who was it that
night, who, against my will, stole from my stranger's lips the
practice of this song?
(10)

Aile (wing) is a repeated word in Exil (III, 8; IV, 2, 17, 20; VII, 2, 9), as is lvre (lip) (III,
2, 13; IV, 10; V, 2; VII, 10). Aile is a near anagram of exilbut Perse's favorite substitution is
aile / aire (II, III, VII; Raybaud, 1067). Homonyms for aile include elle (she) and L; for
aire (shelter), air (air) and erre (wander). Semantically, aire as "shelter" or "nesting place"
is directly opposed to erre and exil. Lvre (lip) might then be seen as liminal
anagrammatically as well as semantically. Lest this seem like pointless play, it is now time
to turn to the text of Exil, Chant IV, and through close analysis of its anagrammatic deep
structure see how the textual apparatus, the words of its "writing," do indeed construct the
text. In his analysis of Exil as "signature,'' Raybaud states: "From which perhaps the
strange signature of Exil: less maybe the announcement of a future poem which could not
be this one, than the poem as signature or signatary, in as far as the poet is in effect, and
of necessity, given as much as giver, and produced by the play of the poem, more than its
instigator or organizer" (96; my trans.). What would it mean for the poet to be produced
by the poem rather than the poem by the poet? We might recall Blanchot's analysis of the
impersonality of writing, through which the writer in the act of writing gives up rather
than establishes control over the text. Perhaps more radically still, might this strange
reversibility. point to a reversal of interiority and exteriority at the innermost place of the
production of the text, the practice of composition itself.
In his brief essay, "General Aims and Theories," Hart Crane develops his conception of
the "logic of metaphor" with reference to specific images from his poems.
16 Besides the famous example of "adagios of islands" from "Voyages," he also analyzes

an image from "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen": "Similarly in 'Faustus and Helen'
(III) the speed and tense altitude of an aeroplane are much better suggested by the idea of
'nimble blue plateaus'implying the aeroplane and its speed against a contrast of stationary,
elevated earth. Although the statement is pseudo in relation to formal logicit is completely
logical in relation to the truth of the

Page 48

imagination, and there is expressed a concept of speed and space that could not be
handled so well in other terms" (22122). Now if it were not for more "concrete" image
sequences in the same poem (e.g., "In corymbulous formations of mechanics," 32), I
doubt whether many readers would see in "nimble blue plateaus" all that Crane would
wish (an airplane juxtaposed with the stationary elevated earth). Even with those other
images, this particular passage of the poem is nearly impenetrable. Here we approach the
heart of the matter to what extent does the poet control meaning; is vouloir-dire
(intending to say) the same as cvire (writing)?
In the middle of Chant IV of Exil there is a verset which bears a glancing similarity to the
image of the airplane that Crane analyzes in his own poem. The speaker says:
De beaux fragments d'histoires en drive sur des pales d'hplices, dans le ciel plein d'erreurs et
d'errantes prmisses, se mire virer pour le d1ice du scoliaste.
Fragments of beautiful stories adrift in spirals [lit., propellor blades], in the sky full of errors and
erring premises, went turning around to the scholiast's delight.
(IV, 9)

Here the translator has already "metaphorized" one of Perse's "concrete expressions"pales
d'hlices (propellot blades). For all of his archaizing tendencies in setting and imagery,
Perse in fact does not depart very. far from the language of his day. In the verset in
question, the connection is roughly the same as "le ciel comme un Sahel [the sky like a
Sahel desert]" or any of the many quick associations whereby one image is suddenly
juxtaposed with another. The question that remains to be posed is whether Perse could
have wished his readers to decipher the "sense,'' the "meaning," his vouloir-dire, in the
same manner as Crane apparently did. Or, put more simply still, what are those pales
d'hlices (propellor blades) doing there in the poem?
A close look at the texture of the verset in question shows, I think, that the underlying
motivation for the sign in question is not conceptual logic or even the logic of metaphor,
but the logic of anagram. Consider the following anagrammatic patterns: d'histoires /
drive / d'hlices / d'erreurs / d'errantes / dlice; drive / d'hlices / prmisses / se mirent
/ virer; histoire / scoliaste (all words from above passage). While we scoliastes are
scurrying to gloss our texts, the words themselves are forming dizzying helices that

Page 49

mount as on wings (or propellor blades) to the skies. Such anagrammatic patterns can
hardly be accidental. In fact, closer examination of manuscript evidence, which is slowly
becoming possible due to the publication of annotated facsimile editions, shows that for
key words in passages such as the foregoing Perse would make extensive word lists in the
margins or even right over the word itself in the place where it occurs in the manuscript.
17 Although anterior versions or brouillons are lacking, it is possible to speculate that

such word lists were not the final touches to the poem, but in some sense formed the
initial structure for the poem itself.18
Concentrating on such possibilities of composition practice allows us a view of the
ending of Chant IV that is anything but metaphysical:
Et les pomes ns d'hier, ah! les pomes ns un soir la
fourche de l'clair, il est comme de la cendre au lait des
femmes, trace infime . . .
Et de toute chose aile dont vous n'avez usage, me composant
un pur langage sans office,
Voici que j'ai dessein encore d'un grand pome dlbile . . .
And the poems born yesterday, ah! the poems born one evening
in the lightning's fork, what's left of them is, like ash in
women's milk, but the faintest trace . . .
And I, from all winged things for which you have no use,
composing a language free of usage and pure,
Now I have once more the design for a great, delible
poem. . . .
(1820)

Rather than "read" these versets for their sense, I want to choose the two words that seem
to organize not just the passage, but the whole Chant (and maybe the whole poem):
Dessein and dlbile. Dessein: "It. 'disegno' Liter. Ide que l'on forme d'excuter qqch.
[From the Italian, disegno, literary, the idea one has of undertaking something]" (Robert).
But if we look again, we see: (V.) dessin: "var. dessein jusqu'au XVIIIe [alternate spelling
dessein until the 18th c.],'' Latin designare, from signum, sign. We have two words, one
which means mental conception or intention to do something, the other a physical sketch
or outlinebut originally they were one word, and they both stem from the Latin for "sign."
The other word is simpler, because rare: Dlbile: "Lat. delebilis de delere 'dtruire,'
Rare. Qui peut s'effacer [Latin for "to destroy," Rare. Which can be erased]" (Robert).
The syntax of the sentence separates

Page 50

these two words: "Look and see that I once again have the design (intention) for a great
poem (that will be) delible." The sense seems to say: the poet has a mental conception for
a project; that project will be an erasable poem. The anagrammatic logic is other.
Following the anagrammatic pair dessein / dlbile through Chant IV, verset by verset, we
discover the following anagrammatic pattern: labiles / d'exil / dclineat (labile / of exile /
sink, 3); Sibylles (Sibyls, 4); d'histoires / drive / d'hlices / d'erreurs / dlice (see above,
verset 9); scribe / style (scribe / style or stylus, 11); des signes illicites (illicit signs, 13);
cilice du sel (hairshirt of salt, 14); nautile / mobile (nautilus / mobile, 15); l'aile fossile
(the fossil wing, 16); dbris (17); d'hier / l'clair (yesterday / lightning, 18); aile (winged,
19). More than just sound patterning as a pleasing embellishment to the poetic text, such
an underlying pattern supports the supposition that Perse may have constructed Chant IV
(and even all his poetry) on such an underlying pattern or structure of words. Beginning
with these shifting anagrams as "marks" of sorts (amer, VI, 2mark used in navigation
along a shoreline), the poet may well have strung his versets along them, stretching the
texture of his linguistic fabric over such a plan or pattern. A textual strategy, like this
would allow the poet leeway to explore vastly different semantic registers, even mixing
semantic registers in the same passage, while using an underlying sound patterning and
pattern of near-repetition as his basic organizing principle. Thus the dessein or underlying
intention of such a poetic project is necessarily something which the poet works out in the
text rather than holding in his mind some image of the ideal completed work. Such a
design is also dlbile, or erasable, in that once it has been integrated into the overall
weave of the poetic text, it is discernible only through extreme attention and, even then,
always, as it were, slips away.
For the most part, in Chant IV, the anagrammatic patterns connect up with a certain
thematizing of the notion of the "erasable" poem. Early on the speaker says:
l'heure o les constellations labiles qui changent de vocable pour les hommes d'exil dclinent
dans les sables la repcherche d'un lieu pur?
At that hour when the lapsing constellations, whose language [lit., a word or term; especially, a
word regarded as a unit of sound or letters rather than as a unit of meaning, Webster's New World]
changes for the men of exile, sink into the sands in search of a place of purity? (3; my italics)

Page 51

In this verset the words already highlighted in the overall anagrammatic pattern are also
linked up with l'heure / lieu pur and vocable / sables. Labile is a somewhat rare word
that means subject to falling. In the phrase constellations labiles, this can only refer on a
literal level to shooting stars. The image links up with "Les spasmes de l'clair sont pour
le ravissement des Princes en Tauride [The spasms of lightning are the delight of Princes
in Taurida]" (I, 7), which ends the first Chant, as well as "Syntaxe de l'clair! [Syntax of
lightning!]" (VII, 1) and "L'clair m'ouvre le lit de plus vastes desseins [Lightning lays
bare to me the bed of immense designs]" (VII, 11), from the final Chant. Also, toward the
end of Chant IV, we find as part of the pattern identified above, ''les pomes ns un soir
la fourche de l'clair [the poems born one evening in the lightning's fork]." Lightning,
constellations, sudden flashes of insight, patterns traced in the sky, (sand)all of these link
up with the theme of the erasable poem. Labile also is a near homonym of labial, relating
to the lips (lvres), and uncovering a register of descriptive grammar or linguistics, as in
vocable and dclinent.
Writing as such is thematized most evidently in versets 4, 11, and 1214. These versets
display close anagrammatic links that fit the dessein / dlbile pattern. Verset 4 presents a
return to the archaic setting identified previously in Chants II and V. Here the speaker
says:
Partout-errante fut son nom de courtisane chez les prtres, aux grottes vertes des Sibylles, et le
matin sur notre seuil sut effacer les traces de pieds nus, parmi de saintes critures . . .
World-wanderer was her courtesan's name among the priests, in the Sibyls' green caves, and
morning knew how to erase the tracks of naked feet from our sill, among sacred writings. . . .
(4; my italics)

The rich thematics of writing, divinatory practice, and sacred scripture causes this passage
to carry multiple resonances. The anagrammatic link from Sibylles to dessein / dlbile,
in the perspective we have been developing, seems like a strong motivating force for the
logic of the image sequences. Writing as an easily erasable trace, like tracks in the sand, is
linked to the divine mysteries through the connotations of Sibylles and saintes critures
(sacred writings). Further on we find the speaker saying:
Renverse, scribe, sur la table des grves, du revers de ton
style la cire empreinte du mot vain.

Page 52
Turn over with your stylus, on the table of the shores, O
Scribe, the wax impressed with your empty statement.
(11; my italics)

Again, in addition to the scribe / style / Sibylle / dlbile pattern, there is another pattern,
Renverse / vain / grves / revers, that organizes this particular verset. The style is here the
"stylus," a cutting instrument used for writing on wax tablets.
19 In this verset the action is that of reversing the tablet to erase the sign, using the other

end of the stylus, the "eraser" end.

Writing, erasing, and sacred divinatory practice are evident in the anagrammatically
patterned versets 1314 as well:
Et c'est l'heure, Mendiante, o sur la face close des grands
miroirs de pierre exposs dans les antres
L'officiant chauss de feutre et gant de soie grge efface,
grand renfort de manches, l'affleurement des signes illicites de
la nuit.
And it is the hour, O Beggarwoman, when on the shut faces
of great stone mirrors exposed in the caves
The celebrant, shod in felt and gloved in raw silk, with a
great sweep of his sleeve wipes away the illicit signs of night.
(my italics)

This passage returns strongly to the archaizing of image examined above and in its
strange, unresolvable movement is certainly one of the strongest confrontations with
alterity in the poem. L'officiant (the celebrant) links up with the prtres (priests) in the
cave of the Sibyls (4) and the penultimate verset, "un pur langage sans office [a language
free of usage and pure]." Here the "celebrant" seems to be in the process of "effacing" the
"illicit signs" produced during the night on "great stone mirrors exposed in the caves.''20
The mind is nearly overwhelmed by the associative possibilities presented by this highly
charged passage. What are the "illicit signs"? Why are they illicit? Why must they be
effaced? Is the night and cave setting associated with sexuality, with divinatory practice,
or somehow with both? While these questions may be finally unanswerable, the
anagrammatic link with dessein / dlbile certainly helps to line up some of the
possibilities. Dessein connects with des signes illicites, both anagrammatically and, in the
strictest sense, etymologically. Dlbile connects with the verb effacer (erase)
semantically, as the latter serves to define the former. In some sense then, this scene
refigures the entire drama of the poem in an unimaginably archaic pastthe scene of

"writing" as a search for "origins."

Page 53

This close analysis of the anagrammatic structuring of Chant IV of Exil reveals that
Perse's textual practice is indeed other than the traditional Western metaphysics of design
and intention. More than most other poets to this day, Perse gave in to a signifying
process that was radically altering. Following the analysis by Blanchot and Taylor of
exteriority, we can say that Perse in Exil figures forth an exteriority that is "pure" or
"radical" in the sense that it precedes traditional inner/outer distinctions by destroying the
presumed interiority of the speaking subject. That Perse places his image sequences in an
unimaginably archaic past seems from this perspective to be due to a genuine inquiry into
the co-originary origins of thought and poetic image. In his composition practice Perse
created images that activate in language unheard-of, strange, prodigious, and excentering forces. In doing so, he discovered, as do we his readers in following his erring
trace, "le pur mobile de nos songes [the pure mobile of our dreams]" (IV, 15; my trans.).

Page 54

5
A Note on "Knowing": Saint-John Perse's Vents
Saint-John Perse's Vents is a profound investigation of "knowing" as postmodern
epistemology, has developed that topic.
1 Wittgenstein's idea of a "philosophical grammar," for example, which represents the

typical forms of questioning, can be compared to Perse's method of composition, based

on movement and montage. As opposed to knowledge, which traditional epistemology
presents as factual, static, and often preestablished, knowing needs to be seen as a
process, something always in progress, a process of knowing the world. In this way,
Perse's use of repetition with variation creates the effect of familiarity. This can be
compared to Wittgenstein's idea of a "pre-epistemological" background knowledge, which
is presupposed in whatever kind of encounter, perception, or discussion. Perse's
interrelated strategies of questioning and cumulative structuring repetition enable the poet
to present a phenomenological description of ''le monde entier des choses [the entire
world of things]" (Vents I, 1) as well as of human activity. The question that the speaker
in Vents poses, "N'est-il rien que d'humain? [Is there only the human?]" (IV, 1) is not a
limitation but rather a formula that characterizes both the context and the process of our
human ways of knowing the world.
The work of Perse having often been qualified as "obscure," it is with this "obscurity"
that I continue to look into his poetics.2 In an interview with Pierre Mazars, the poet
stated: "The poet has a perfect right and even the obligation to explore the most obscure
domains; but the further he goes in this direction, the more he should use concrete means
of expression" (576; my trans.). This notion is tied to his definition of poetry, (following
that of Napoleon for happiness): "the greatest development of all our faculties" (577).
This challenge to the poet becomes one equally to the reader who must utilize the most of
his or her linguistic and imaginary resources. What Perse indicates as "concrete means of
expression" refers to a

Page 55

poetic vocabularyeven if openthat is very learned, mixing registers of discourse and often
using rare and scientific words. Perse seemed to have been aware of this linguistic
difficulty, as when he tells Mazars, in the interview cited above, "I maintain that my
language is precise and clear . . . . If the word I have chosen can be found in the
Larousse, I keep it" (576). As with other modern poets (notably, someone like Zukofsky
whom I discuss in a later chapter), Perse counts on his readers to mobilize all of their
potential linguistic aids when approaching his work.
Still, the "difficulty" of Perse's work must not be confused with its presumed "obscurity."
The poet addressed this idea in his Nobel Prize speech: "The obscurity for which [modern
poetry] is reproached does not come from its own nature, which is to clarify, but rather
from the night it explores, and that it must explore: the night of the soul and of the
mystery the human being is immersed in'' (446; my trans.). This statement leads us to an
expanded understanding of the "domaines obscurs" of which he speaks. These domains
are those of the learned poet, certainly, but they are also those which we have learned,
with Freud, to call the "unconscious." Perse's project in Vents is an exploration of the
souloften utilizing the terms of desire. Antoine Raybaud has given an analysis of this
"obscurity," as an "loge du non-savoir."
3 He describes it as: "Dispensing of an active, perhaps more and more prodigaljoyful and

wise, attentive and gluttonous, ceremonial and orgiastictaking apart of types of

knowledge, at work in the confrontation between the exercise that is the poem and the
forces of night (desire, dissolution, menace, enigma, interdiction) . . ." (354; my trans.).
These obscure domains, night, mystery, "the forces of night"our investigation into Perse's
work in terms of the "act of knowing" is also an investigation into force, violence, and
desire.
Clearly we need analytical terms and structural models in order to undertake such an
investigation, a description of the forces set loose in Vents. Perse himself gives the key
word in a letter to Roger Caillois, saying "poetry is above all for me movement."4 The
poet goes on to explain: "The very philosophy of the 'poet' seems to me to take us back,
essentially, to the elementary philosophy of things of ancient thoughtas that in the West of
our Pre-Socratics. And poetry's metric also, which some ally with rhetoric, also only
tends toward movement, in all of its living resources, the most unforeseeable. From
which the importance in everything, for the poet, of the sea." The poetics of Perse,
interrelating the meaning of the poem

Page 56

and its rhythms, comes from just such a quasi-philosophical engagement.

The notion of movement can be related to that of montage. "Montage" will serve as a
relational term in the philosophy of knowing, because it suggests both movement and
structure. The aspect of questioning in the poetics of movement corresponds to our
analysis of a philosophical grammar, i.e., the questions we pose and our means of posing
them. Thus the sense of "montage" taken from the theatrical and cinematic registers
indicates a temporary formulation, the element of time, the process-oriented aspect in
poetic creation. In the philosophical sense, as in the work of Merleau-Ponty, for example,
a montage may be represented as a "pre-epistemological" background knowledge, over
against which any object presents itself or becomes an object of knowledge.
5 If the effect of theatrical and cinematic montages can often be a process of

disorientation, this is because these montages always already offer the orientation of a
certain space of preunderstanding in which these transformations can take place.
To broach the question of how this familiarity or background knowledge comes to be in
the poetic text, the work of Roger Caillois is crucial, with its descriptions of "metagrams,"
"mutations," and "multiple substitutions" (3966). The explanation that Caillois gives of the
cumulative effect of these strategies remains compelling: "Without doubt, there are few
pages which do not present a reprise of this kind, flighty or emphasized, precise or
doubtful, where some other passage of the work is suddenly called to mind, as if it were
necessary that this universe of extreme exile should give at the same time the impression
of a growing familiarity" (46, my trans. and italics). "The impression of a growing
familiarity'' is an elegant and efficacious formula as it concerns the overall poetic oeuvre
of Saint-John Perse. In the complex system of references, verbal echoes, and
substitutions that Perse utilizes in Vents the specific names of marine algae refer equally to
the species as well as the other instances in the poem (cf. I, 6; IV, 4). Also, the "forces of
night" invoked by Raybaud build power and resonance with each instance in the text of
words such as: force, vents, me, dsir (force, winds, soul, desire), and so on.
Having given these indications of movement and structure, the question that remains to be
asked is their significance for the work at hand. From the point of view of comparison
with other "modernist" poets, these are common strategies.6 Thus the project of Perse

Page 57

would not be that different from those of Eliot or Pound, for example. I would say,
however, that Perse does not substitute "mythic" codes for the codes of history and
narration.
7 The significance and principles of Perse's organization are not that identifiable. The

structural principle which organizes Perse's poetic strategies is rather the "act of
knowing," whereby symbols, structures, repetitions, substitutions, and modes of
questioning are mobilized in order to represent how we, as human subjects, come to
know the world and ourselves. This "act of knowing," I would claim, is not merely an
interpretive construct, but an implicit epistemology which underlies Perse's composition
practice.
A poem as long as Vents poses a particular set of problems to any critic. (Vents is roughly
three times as long as Anabase or Exil.) The explication of the entire text is impractical.
The poem is also difficult to summarize, due to the absence of epic models, whether
narrative or some other kind of linear development. Instead, the reader finds structuring
motifs, repeated words, phrases, and formulas, which, besides giving way to substitutions
and transformations, become points of reference for structures of significance and
coherence. I thus propose as a method of analysis a double strategy, by following the
weave of permutations in individual motifs and giving special attention to passages where
several of these elements are found together.
The beginning of the poem presents several of its important themes:
C'taient de trs grands vents sur toutes faces de ce monde,
De trs grands vents en liesse par le monde, qui n'avaient
d'aire ni de gte,
Qui n'avaient garde ni mesure, et nous laissaient, hommes
de paille,
En l'an de paille sur leur erre . . . Ah! oui, de trs grands
vents sur toutes faces de vivants!
(179)
These were very great winds over all the faces of this world,
Very great winds rejoicing over the world, having neither
eyrie nor resting-place,
Having neither care nor caution, and leaving us, in their
wake,
Men of straw in the year of straw. . . .Ah, yes, very, great
winds over all the faces of the living!
(227)

Page 58

Recalling the terms of Caillois (as well as the extended analysis in the previous chapter), I
would remark the "metagram" or "anagram" of aire / erre. "Aire" in its definition as
nesting place or hiding place, associates with ''gte" and the other images of the surface of
the earth. On the other hand, "erre" in its definition of speed associates with "en liesse"
and the thematics of the winds, force, and violence that traverses the poem. Erring, or
wandering, is a central theme of Vents as it is of Exil.
On the level of phrase substitution, such as previously examined with respect to Anabase,
the most striking instance brings together the first and the last verset: "de trs grands vents
sur toutes faces de ce monde [very great winds over all the faces of this world]" and "de
trs grands vents sur toutes faces de vivants! [very great winds over all the faces of the
living!]" This substitution is evidently a planned one, as well as being a principle of
structure, stemming as it does from a certain attitude toward the world and human
existence. Some versions of deconstructive criticism, which persistently elide the human
element, would resist this interpretation of "vivants."
8 For this reason, it will be useful to follow the progress of this term throughout the

poem. This form of investigation obviously ties in with the ideas of Wittgenstein on the
lebensformen (forms of life) and on "language games" as both a form of investigation and
a form of description.
In Vents I, 2, the speech of the narrator, a figure of the poet, is addressed "aux vivants [to
the living]" (181, 229). Already the category of "vivants" is restricted to those who can
understand speech. The act of speaking to a group of listeners carries necessarily the
extradiagetic reference to the act of the poet in composing his poem. Vents I, 6 continues
this theme:
Et si un homme auprs de nous vient manquer son visage
de vivant, qu'on lui tienne de force la face dans le vent!
(191)
And should any man near us fail in his duty to his face of
living, that he should be held by force face into the wind!
(my trans.)

The same words as in Vents I, 1 are found here in a very strong statement, along with the
terms "visage" and "force." The sense of the passage seems to refer to a quasi-moral
obligation for the human subject to maintain his or her responsibility as a living creature.
This same formula is transformed further on:

Page 59
Et nous nous avanons, hommes vivants, pour rclamer
notre bien en avance d'hoirie.
Qu'on se lve de partout avec nous! Qu'on nous donne,
vivants, la plenitude de notre d.
(19192)
And we move forward, living men, to claim our estate in advance
of inheritance.
Let them arise from everywhere. Let the fullness of our due,
O living ones, be given unto us.
(251)

Perhaps as the reverse of the human responsibility invoked above, the speaker here
insists on what is due to the human subject. We may also notice the sense of community
that the use of the "nous" form gives, as opposed to the impersonal form of address used
previously.
There is only one occurrence in the poem of "vivants" that seems to me to indicate the
nonhuman. At the end of Cantique I, Chant 6, the speaker says:
Murmurantes les grves, parmi l'herbe grainante, et tout ce grand mouvement des hommes vers
l'action.
Et sur l'empire immense des vivants, parmi l'herbe des sables, cet autre mouvement plus vaste que
notre ge!
(194)
Murmuring of beaches amid grass running to seed, and all this great migration of men towards
action,
And over the immense empire of the living, amid the beach grass, that other migration vaster than
our age!
(255)

Here there is an opposition between human actions and the natural world of "vivants" that
is apparently vaster and implies as well a different temporal order. The key element of
movement appears as an essential part to this configuration, as well as the sea with its
shores "murmurantes." The action of murmuring in turn connects with the end of Vents I,
1. The endings of Chants I, 4 and I, 7 also echo the themes we have been discussing, with
their refrain: ''S'en aller! s'en aller! Parole de vivant! [Let us be gone! be gone! Cry, of the
living]" (187, 196; 241, 251).
Having followed the development of repeated usages of the term "vivants [living ones]"
and its relationship to the thematies of the poem, let us now return to the beginning of the
poem in order to examine more closely still the connection between "vivants" and

Page 60

"hommes [men]." The echo of T. S. Eliot in the phrase "hommes de paille [men of
straw]" has often been noticed.
9 In the context that I have been working to establish, the images in Eliot's poem contrast

strongly with those in Perse's poem, in which there is above all an injunction toward
action and movement almost as a moral responsibility. Perse does utilize the tone and the
sentiment of Eliot's poem when he refers to "la scheresse au coeur des hommes investis
[drought in the heart of men in office]'' (179, 227). This sequence of dryness and fragility
continues with the following passage:
Car tout un sicle s'bruitait dans la scheresse de sa paille, parmi d'tranges dsinences: bout de
cosses, de siliques, bout de choses frmissantes
(179)
For a whole century was rustling in the dry, sound of its straw, amid strange terminations[:] at the
tips of husks of pods, at the tips of trembling things
(229)

The words "cosses [husks]" and "siliques [silicles]" are juxtaposed in a fashion that is
difficult to resolve with a word like "dsinence [termination, or word-ending]," from an
entirely different register (the former from the biological register, the latter from a
grammatical register). The thematic melange of the natural world with the world of
speaking beings is offered and retracted in the same movement.
As opposed to the dryness of the straw menindeterminate historically, but with an
implication of those in power politicallywe find the image of the magic tree:
Trs grand arbre mendiant qui a frip son patrimoine, face brle d'amour et de violence o le dsir
encore va chanter.
Very great mendicant tree, its patrimony squandered, its countenance seared by love and violence
whereon desire will sing again.
(229)

The mix of registers and attributes gives this passage a tremendous force. The great tree,
by losing its patrimony, approaches the state of being human. Its "face brle d'amour"
(lit., face burned by love) places it between the earth (with its "face") and the human
realm, with an effect of mediation between the two. Love and desire are typically human
attributes, whereas violence can be attributed equally to nature. The chant ends with the
speaker saying:

Page 61
Ha! trs grand arbre du langage peupl d'oracles, de maximes et murmurant murmure d'aveugle-n
dans les quinconces du savoir . . .
(180)
Ah! very, great tree of language, peopled with oracles and maxims, and murmuring the murmur of
one born blind among the quincunxes of knowledge. . . .
(229)

The mythical perspective would find solid support in this passage, which evokes not
specific "primitive" practices, but rather the implicit possibilities in their combination and
substitution (Laden). But if we place this passage in the context of the interrelation
between the natural and human domains we have been following in selected image
progressions, a different picture emerges. The tree "peupl d'oracles [peopled with
oracles]" connects with other combinations of the same elements, such as ''murmurant
[murmuring]," which has been attributed both to living creatures and seashores. The
unique or nonce occurrences here are the unusual words "aveugle-n [born-blind]" and
"quinconces [quincunxes]." "L'aveugle-n" must be situated somewhere between the
human and the naturalwhat would be a grave misfortune for a human child is the natural
state of a tree. Quincunxes are both natural and humanplantations of trees following a
human design that today are found in orchards and elsewhere, and in ancient times were
used for the oracles.
10

In order to create yet another context for investigation, we might follow the formula "X
du savoir [ of knowledge]" and its progression in the image sequences of the poem. In
the episode of the library, (I, 4), we find the formula "poudre du savoir [powders of
knowledge]" associated with images of dryness and, finally, with "cendres et squames de
l'esprit [ashes and scales of the spirit]" (187; 241). Once more there is a combination of
the natural and the human. In the winter sequence of the poem (II, 2), a nonidentified
speaker says:
"Enseigne-nous le mot de fer, et le silence du savoir comme le sel des ges la suture des grands
vaisseaux de fonte oublis du fondeur . . ."
(204)
"Teach us the iron word, and the silence of knowledge, like the salt of ages at the seams of great
cast-iron vessels forgotten by the caster. . . ."
(273)

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Silence here seems to be associated with the "plnitude de notre d [fullness of our due]"
and the human patrimony. Cantique III, Chant 3 is often interpreted as being a reference
to the atomic age; in this context we find: "Homme l'ampoule, homme l'antenne,
homme charg des chanes du savoir . . . [Man with the bulb, man with the antenna, man
charged with the chains of knowledge]." There are forms of knowing then that are of an
ambiguous status, both marvel and burden. A major theme of the poem is the
announcement of a new age, but apparently not all of its attributes are positive. This
quick look at other image sequences in which it is a question of "savoir [knowing]" now
allows us a more precise characterization of the formula ''quinconces du savoir
[quincunxes of knowledge]" as referring to mythic, historical, and cultural knowledgebut
also as a sort of montage, invoking a background knowledge of associations, and
orienting the image toward change, diverse significations, and underlining its own status
as a temporary expression.
This brief investigation of the formula "X du savoir [ of knowledge]" has also uncovered
a realm of associations with knowing that are not positive, but negative. Already in
Cantique I, Chant 3, the force of the winds is a disorienting presence: "Ainsi croissantes et
sifflantes, elles tenaient ce chant trs pur o nul n'a connaissance . . . [Increasing and
whistling thus, they maintained this very, pure song whereof no one has understanding]"
(185, 237). At the end of this same Chant, the speaker says:
Ivre, plus ivre, disais-tu, d'avoir reni l'ivresse . . .Ivre, plus ivre, d'habiter
La msintelligence.
(185)
Drunken, the more drunken, you were saying, for having denied drunkenness. . . . Drunken, the more
drunken, for dwelling
In disaccord.
(239)

"Msintelligenee" does not correspond in its proper definition to the sequence under
examination (meaning "grave misunderstanding"). Rather it is a question of a metagram, a
word connected by its appearance to the concepts of "savoir," "connaissance," and so on.
In effect, knowing in this poem is often characterized by what it is not. The persona of
the Poet says, for example, "Je te licencierai, logique, o s'estropiaient nos btes
l'entrave [I shall dismiss

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you, logic, on whose shackle our beasts disabled themselves]" (III, 5, 228, 313). Another
negative formula occurs in Cantique IV, Chant 5: "Ah! quand les peuples prissaient par
excs de sagesse, que vaine fut notre vision! . . . [Ah! when nations were perishing from
an excess of prudence, how vain was our vision!]" (24445, 343). This negative formula is
expressed in the verbal form of the imperfect, which places it in an undetermined
sociocultural context. We might also notice the difference between the nominal forms that
are used to designate "negative" knowledge, as opposed to the verbal forms used to
designate "positive" knowinganother indication of the importance of movement and
change implied by the "act of knowing."
All through the poem Vents, the tone of questioning and investigation is tied to the
question of human existence. In the Chant that follows the one concerning the atomic age,
the speaker insists: "Mais c'est de l'homme qu'il s'agit [But man is in question!]" (224,
305). I insisted at the outset that the question, "N'est-il rien que d'humain? [Is there only
the human?]" (my trans.), was not a limitation but rather an indication of the context and
the process of questioning. The entire fourth Cantique of Vents is filled with images of
this kind; in particular, Cantique IV, Chant 6 seems woven from a series of anterior
formulations.
11 Here is a sequence of such phrases from this Chant, with parenthetical references to

their previous occurrences: "C'taient de trs grand vents [These were very great winds]"
(I, 1), "la terre des hommes [the land of men]" (IV, 5), "les hommes nouveaux [new
men]'' (I, 6; IV, 4), "la chause des hommes [the causeway of men]" (IV, 4; IV, 5), "houles
de haute terre [swells of high land]" (II, 1), "murmure [murmur]" (I, 1 et passim),
"mouvement [movement]" (IV, 1 et passim), "hors d'haleine [out of breath]" (I, 7; IV, 3),
"got . . . sur la langue [taste . . . on the tongue]" (IV, 4), "hommes de ma race [men of
my race]" (IV, 4; IV, 5). This list of repeated phrases and echoes gives some indication of
the weaving of motifs and associations accomplished by Perse in Vents as well as giving
an indication of the poem's important themes. From its purely numerical insistence, the
word "hommes" (which obviously indicates both sexes) indicates more than a subject or a
themeit presents the very context of the poetic investigation mounted by the work.
Having given some indications of cumulative structuring repetition in the poem, we are
now in a position to examine its ending as a reflection of its beginning:

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Quand' la violence eut renouvel le lit des hommes sur la
terre,
Un trs vieil arbre, sec de feuilles, reprit le fil de ses maximes
. . .
Et un autre arbre de haut rang montait dj des grandes
Indes souterraines,
Avec sa feuille magntique et son chargement de fruits nouveaux.
(251)
When violence had remade the bed of men on the earth,
A very old tree, barren of leaves, resumed the thread of its
maxims . . .
And another tree of high degree was already rising from the
great subterranean Indies,
With its magnetic leaf and its burden of new fruits.
(357)

The first tree evidently refers to the "grand arbre [great tree]" (I, 1), the tree of myth and
magic. The second treebeyond its biblical echoseems to indicate the new age announced
by the discoveries of modern science. One mark of the strategy of cumulative repetition
in the poem is that one is not forced to judge its ending in terms of success and failure.
The action of formulating, changing, and renewingindicated here by the "violence" of the
first versetcarries through the whole passage in order to render it yet another temporary
stage in the process by which we as human beings come to know the world and
ourselves.

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6
Postmodern Poetics of Community: Perse and Char
"Postmodern" is still a difficult and undecided term in the current critical discourse. One's
sense of what is postmodern thus necessarily continues to be rather sketchy, relying on
intuitive kinds of agreement with the major positions as this agreement fits or not with
one's readings of specific texts. My own sense of the postmodern relies on a general
agreement with the positions of Jean-Franois Lyotard that he has worked out in the past
fifteen or so years.
1 Among these formulations are some important statements in what for other criticism

might be seen as a throwaway book, Le postmoderne expliqu aux enfants. He says there,
for example, that for a work to be modern these days it has first to be postmodern. (For
me this is an elegant formulation for why much of mainstream contemporary poetry has
such a nostalgic pullit's not even modern). He also claims that postmodernism does not
signal an end to modernism but rather indicates what continues to be vital in modernism.
In his more highly developed philosophical approaches to the subject of postmodernism,
as in Le Diffrend, Lyotard has emphasized the element of judgment and, with that, the
sense of community as an achieved or localized working consensus as opposed to a
preexisting standard for judging moral and ethical issues. This analysis raises many of the
same questions of postmodern epistemology discussed in the previous chapter, indicating
among other things that "knowing" and community are interrelated terms in our
postmodern era. The poetic practice of such figures as Saint-John Perse and Ren Char
presents an investigation in the form itself of their poems into the foundations not only of
communication but of those aspects of commonality that make communication possible
in a disjointed and fragmentary modern world. Perse's and Char's texts, from the outset,
seem like very different projects: with Perse utilizing almost exclusively epic-length poetic
forms and Char using a laconic, even fragmentary form. Yet careful examination of their

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respective works reveals a persistent working-out of the notion of human communitynot

as a preexisting consensus to be invoked through established forms, but as an always
escaping, always changing foundation of the poetic text.
The poetics of Saint-John Perse, as those of Char, are worked out in a textual practice that
spans a long, active poetic career. I conclude my discussion of each of the major phases
of Perse's career with an investigation here of his last epic-length work, Amers, first
published in 1957.
2 Jean Paulhan was one of the first to recognize that Perse's poetic project represents a

break from modernism: "Perse breaks with the modernist poetic and the traditions which
that poetic already has imposed on us."3 The implication of this break for Paulhan was
that Perse was returning to a much earlier tradition. Yet analysis of a poem like Amers
shows that the archaizing features of this work are not by any means limited to a return to
a classical poetics, even if such a return were possible. Perse's strategy, as seen in his
work as early as Anabase, is to place the action of his poems in a difficult-to-situate
archaic past. In Exil, this even becomes a search for the origins of "writing." Perse
likewise mobilizes an arcane vocabulary composed in part of historical and geographical
terms to help build this sense of a strangely archaic and often profoundly disorienting
setting. I view these related strategies as part of Perse's move to a poetics of exteriority.
Among these strategies we find an oddly framed classicizing move that seems to return to
a time when all significant actions and even utterances were accomplished in a public
space (Bakhtin, 13335). Perse's syncretic exteriorization of poetic speaker and archaic
setting accounts for the often highly ceremonial and public status of the events in Amers.
In Amers the setting is a city near the sea, at some time in the scarcely imaginable archaic
past. In the context of a recitative procession, the central "Strophe" section presents a
series of representatives of the community. As Perse himself states: "In the framework
evoked of a semicircle of maritime villages . . . [Strophe] introduces, each in turn, eight
human figures that are placed facing the sea: for interrogation, adjuration, imprecation,
initiation, the call, or the celebration" (571; my trans.). Yet this apparently straightforward
description barely touches on the richness of voice, imagery, and language to he found in
the text. First of all, the sea itself takes on a generality that belies any single referential
func

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tion.
4 As Perse himself explains in reference to the "Choeur*" section: "This section is

associated with the sea, as element of power as much as source of knowledgethe sea
identified with universal Being, integrating itself infinitely therein and integrating man
himself, at the limits of the human" (571). So in Perse's own view of the poem, the sea is
to be taken as ''universal Being"not as an abstract or metaphysical concept but rather as
defining the limits of the human condition. But, as in the complex strategies of language
and figuration I have been examining throughout Perse's works, his use of the sea is far
from simple. Following my argument for the "sexuation" of poetic language in Perse's
Anabase, Amers too presents a profound meditation on sexuality, gender, and culture that
underlies the strange movements of figuration and utterance. The psychoanalytic
approach might emphasize the Freudian "oceanic feeling" associated with both sex and
experiences of the numinous. Luce Irigaray's inquiries have emphasized images of fluidity
associated with woman's sexuality. Perse's strong exteriorizing of these elements,
however, prevents us from making the customary psychoanalytic inquiry into the psyche
of the presumed speaking subject. Rather a dialogic structure emerges in which these
issues are at once assumed, foregrounded, and explored.
The form of the poem emphasizes the basis of human community in the amatory couple.
"Etroits sont les vaisseaux [Narrow are the vessels]" is the longest section of "Strophe"
and by itself comprises almost a third of a poem which when first published ran to 300
pages. At the center of the poem's representation of the foundations of human society is a
lovers' dialogue. The lovers in turn are given life through a metaphorical intermingling
with the sea. In other words, the amatory couple is placed at the center of this
communion with the sea, a communion representative of the human community at the
limits of what is human. The thematic of difference, and particularly sexual difference,
informs all of Perse's work, but the antiphonal exchange in "Etroits sont les vaisseaux"
carries this thematic to its fullest development. As in Perse's other work (e.g., Anabase),
the sexual difference is insistently figured through a semantic register involving nature.
Thus there is a nonoppositional quality to this presentation of difference: human nature
both is and isn't the same as nature as a whole; men and women both are and aren't the
same. Rather than the psychologizing turn we might expecti.e., a view of interioritythis
nonoppositional difference is

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both exteriorized in the dialogue form and brought to bear on the very essence of what is
human.
5

The first speech of the female lover begins:

". . . Amour, amour, qui tiens si haut le cri de ma naissance, qu'il est de mer en marche vers
l'Amante! Vigne foule sur toutes grves, bienfait d'cume en toute chair, et chant de bulles sur les
sables . . . Hommage, hommage la Vivacit divine!"
(327)
". . . Love, love, that holds so high the cry, of my birth, how great a sea moving towards the Woman
who loves! Vine trampled on all shores, blessing of foam in all flesh, and song of bubbles on the
sands . . . Homage, homage to the divine Ardour!"
(453)

Here, as throughout the lovers' dialogue, it is less a question of a direct address to the
beloved than an invocation of love itself. This love in turn is subsumed in the larger
context of a votive ceremony in honor of the sea. So here the overt theme of the passage
is love, but the metaphorical register is insistently that of the sea. In paraphrasing the
content of a passage like this, I think one would have to say that the natural forces at
work in any love relationshipwith echoes of birth and mortality in addition to sexualityare
more akin to the forces we perceive in nature than our language is able to accommodate
on a rational level.
At times this thematic interweaving becomes explicitly sexual, as in this passage where the
male lover is speaking for the first time:
"Et comme le sel est dans le bl, la mer en toi dans son principe, la chose en toi qui fut de mer, t'a
fait ce got de femme heureuse et qu'on approche . . . Et ton visage est renvers, ta bouche est fruit
consommer, fond de barque dans la nuit."
(328)
"And as salt is in the wheat, the sea in you in its essence, the thing in you which was of the sea, has
given you that taste of a happy woman to whom I come. . . . And your face is upturned, your mouth
is fruit to be consumed, in the hull of the bark, in the night."
(457)

Though a passage like this one necessarily carries overtones of traditional love poetry,
back to the "Song of Songs," it both invokes

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those associations and refuses to be assimilated into that tradition. How is the sea in the
woman as her beginning or principle? Are these scientific, biological overtones that
would make this an overtly modern poem? Is the expression simply metaphorical? The
beginnings of the species or the saltiness of bodily fluids? There are no easy
determinations to be made here, and that is, I would say, just the point. The sexual
difference, like the human/natural difference, both defines and limits us in ways we can
only grope toward understanding.
If there is one fundamental reason why the sea is invoked as the quasi-divine presence
that endows human existence, it is the quality of vivacityenergy and change:
"Hommage, hommage la diversit divine! Une mme vague par le monde, une mme vague notre
course . . . Etroite la msure, troite la csure, qui rompt en son milieu le corps de femme comme le
mtre antique . . . Tu grandiras licence! La mer lubrique nous exhorte, et l'odeur de ses vasques erre
dans notre lit . . . Rouge d'oursin les chambres de plaisir."
(33435)
"Homage, homage, to the divine diversity! One same wave throughout the world, one same wave
our course . . . Narrow the measure, narrow the caesura, which breaks the woman's body at the
middle like an ancient metre. . . . You will grow, licence! The lubricious sea exhorts us and the
odour of its basins lingers in our bed. . . .Red as sea-urchins are the chambers of pleasure."
(471)

Diversity is praised with the same, as though to saythese are always the forms life takes.
There is also a playful nod to integrating poetics into the discourse, with the comparison
of the classical poetic line to the woman's body. "La mer lubrique"the playful (lit., bestial)
sea is both source and form of life and expression. How do we construct a notion of
community out of this diversity of expression? I think that the vivacity, energy, and
diversity invoked here are also a form of truth: "Vivacit divine!" (327); "diversit
divine!" (334); "veracit divine!" (358).
6 Perse's poetics do not establish a conceptual framework where the idea of what is

human is an external referent or an anterior ideology. The human community in Perse's

oeuvre is rather that truth that is constructed: alive, changing, diverse, and energetic. A
mark of the lively challenge his text

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presents is the centering of all this activity in the community represented by the amatory
couple.
The amatory couple is often seen as the horizon for interpreting the work of Ren Char as
well. The thrust of my argument here will be, however, that the view of "totality" or
"fusion" often used to interpret the vision of love in Char's poetry is less satisfactory than
a postmodern view that seeks a constructed or achieved view of community in the
workings of the text itself.
7 Char, unlike Perse, has developed his poetic theory, at length in a number of forms,

some tending toward the critical essay. In his discussion of "Arthur Rimbaud" (1957), he
gives expression to a sense of what this fleeting or constructed community might be: "In
poetry, one only inhabits the place that one leaves, only creates the work from which one
is detached, only obtains duration by destroying time. But all that one obtains through
rupture, detachment and negation, one obtains for the other. The prison gates swing shut
on the escapee. The giver of liberty is only free in others. The poet only enjoys the liberty
of others" (733; my trans.). Here I think we sense the difficulties Char sees at the basis of
the act of writing. For the later Char it is never a question of nostalgia for lost forms of
expression.8 The poet's moral and ethical responsibility in Char is represented by the
poem's opening out toward others.
I follow the prevailing view in seeing Char's turn toward a poetry expressive of ethical
responsibility as a response to his war experience (La Charit, 88). The initial discussion
here takes up the postwar sequence "Rougeur des matinaux" ("Redness in Morning")
from Les Matinaux (Morning Things, 19471949). This sequence of fragments takes its
place in the development of the fragment form in Char's work generally. As a sequence of
related fragments it carries out a postmodern poetics that separates it from the form of the
wisdom-aphorism. Blanchot has expressed his view on this very forcefully: "In such a
way one says of Ren Char that he employs the 'aphoristic form.' Strange
misunderstanding. The aphorism is closed and limited: the horizontal of every horizon.
Now, what is important . . . is that . . . the 'phrases' . . . carry nevertheless, in their
plurality, the sense of an arrangement that they disclose to the future of the word . . . an
arrangement that is not composed, but juxtaposed, that is to say leaving on the outside
one from the other the related terms, respecting and preserving the exteriority and that
distance as the principlealways already abandonedof all signification."9 Not only does
Blanchot dispose of the "aphorism"

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question here with suitable force, he also frames the question of the interrelation of these
fragments with great acuity in terms of exteriority.
As we saw with Perse, exteriority is a strong analytical concept when dealing with a poetic
project that refuses reference to anterior formulations. In fact, respecting difference and
inquiring into the differences at the foundation of human society is just the exteriorizing
project that Char undertakes. Char plays off the wisdom-aphorism in "Rougeur des
matinaux" (V):
La sagesse est de ne pas s'agglomrer, mais, dans la cration et dans la nature communes, de
trouver notre nombre, notre rciprocit, nos diffrences, notre passage, notre vrit, et ce peu de
dsespoir qui en est l'aiguillon et le mouvant brouillard.
Wisdom is not to gather together, but in the creation and in the common nature, to find our number,
our reciprocity, our differences, our way, our truth, and that little bit of despair that is its needle and
moving fog.
(330; my trans.)

The level of ethical statement in this passage resists well the attempt to invoke as
explanation a plurality of interpretations, or that fashionable term, indeterminacy.
10 It is true that the end of the passage introduces surrealizing images that tend toward

irresolvable equivalencies. But the moral tone of the fragment moves through those
undecidable elements to reinforce a notion of difference at the core of community. The
form itself of the fragment carries an unmistakable philosophical weightone thinks of the
work in modern times of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, among others. (Char repeatedly
invokes Nietzsche as a philosophical precursor.)
How do the fragments in "Rougeur des matinaux" work to achieve this process on a
larger textual level? Perhaps the only way to answer this is to examine an extended
sequence, and thus develop a more complex sense of how interrelated fragments play off
one another to achieve the exteriority Blanchot insists on. Here then is a reading of
sections XIIXVI (332):
XII
L'aventure personelle, l'aventure prodigue, communaut de nos aurores.
The personal adventure, the abundant adventure, community of our auroras.

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Here the thematic of setting out (aventure) and the dialectic between the individual and
the community is formulated in terms that link the fragment to the title of the series (nos
aurores) / Rougeur des matinaux.
XIII
Conqute et conservation indfinie de cette conqute en avant de nous qui murmure notre naufrage,
droute notre dception.
Conquest and indefinite conservation of that conquest still ahead of us which murmurs our
wreckage, disrails our deception.

Insisting on the nous form, the italicized phrase en avant de nous seems to take on not a
temporal (in some distant future) but an ethical significance, i.e., before us now and
always.
XIV
Nous avons cette particularit parfois de nous balancer en marchant. Le temps nous est lger, le sol
nous est facile, notre pied ne tourne qu' bon escient.
We have this particularity of sometimes stumbling when we walk. The time to us is light, the ground
is easy, our foot only lands in the right way.

Clearly the nous here is a facilitator of metaphoric expression (notre pied)the metaphor in
turn stands for something like the path or clearing in Heidegger's philosophy,
participation, rightness, or justesse in the encounter with Being.
XV
Quand nous disons: le coeur
* (et le disons regret), il s'agit du coeur attisant que recouvre la chair miraculeuse et commune, et
qui peut chaque instant cesser de battre et d'accorder.
When we say the heart (and say it regretfully), it's a question of the enlivening heart covered by
miraculous and common flesh, and which could at each instant cease to be or go along.

Char is antisentimental; there is no nostalgia for an unobtainable vision of the world,

archaic or utopian. Here the flesh, like the flesh in Perse's Amers, participates in the
human/natural difference, perhaps even as a move toward what Merleau-Ponty would
later call "la chair du monde," or the world's perceptive capability.11

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XVI
Entre ton plus grand bien et leur moindre mal rougeoie la posie.
Between your greatest good and their least worry poetry reddens.

Char's clear vision is of poetry as ethical connection: there can be no individual liberation
while anyone is suffering pain or oppression. More even than an invocation of the role of
the reader, his practice is an invocation of the human community we realize, each of us
individually, through poetic expression, back and forth in the flux and reflux of a difficult
liberty.
The publication of the Pliade edition of Char's work gives us the opportunity, as Eric
Marty has said, to cease viewing Char's work as texte and begin to see it as an oeuvre
* (though in the postmodern context developed here, this latter must remain a
problematic term).12 Many of Char's widely dispersed opuscules are here collected in one
volume. One such is the poem previously published singly (1974), "A Faulx contente":
Quand les consquences ne sont plus nies, le pome-respire, dit qu'il a obtenu son aire. Iris
rescap de la crue des eaux.
Le souffle lev, descendre reculons, puis obliquer et suivre le sentier qui ne mne qu'au coeur*
ensanglant de soi, source et spulcre du pome.
L'influx de milliards d'annes de toutes parts et circulairement le chant jamais rendu d'Orphe.
Les dieux sont dans la mtaphore. Happe par le brusque cart, la posie s'augmente d'un au-del
sans tutelle.
Le pome nous couche dans une douleur ajourne sans sparer le froid de l'ardent.
Vint un soir o le coeur ne se reconnut plus dans les mots qu'il prononait pour lui seul.
Le pote fait clater les liens de ce qu'il touche. Il n'enseigne pas la fin des liens.
"To the Contented Scythe"
When the consequences are no longer denied, the poem breathes, says it has obtained its resting
place. Iris escaped from the depth of the waters.

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The wind risen, descend backwards, then turn sharply and follow the path that only leads to the
heart bloodied by itself, source and sepulchre of the poem.
The influx of billions of years from everywhere and circularly the never-answered song of Orpheus.
The gods are in the metaphor. Chanced on by the abrupt turn, poetry grows by means of a beyond
with no guide.
The poem lays us down in a delayed pain without separating the cold and the burning.
There came an evening when the heart no longer knew itself in the words it pronounced for itself
alone.
The poet explodes the limits of whatever he touches. He does not teach the end of limits.
(783; my trans.)

Without pretending to an exhaustive explication of this demanding poem, at least some of

the overlap between it and "Rougeur des matinaux" may be noted. The opening line
indicates that the poem begins to take on life when responsibility is fully assumed. This
ethical position is tied to the goddess Iris, the personage embodying Eros in Char's
"Lettera amorosa," (cf. 34647). The second stanza reintroduces the image of the path, the
path of Being, of poetry aware of its burden of existence. Orpheus the first poet is the
dominant figure in the fourth strophe, a strong counterpart to Iris. Perhaps it should be
noted that Char's mythological references are never mere shorthand of nostalgia for
absent gods but rather mobilized personages that actively guide his poetic researches.
The poem is the explicit subject of the fifth strophe; here as increasingly in Char the poem
is viewed as an active subjectivity that implicates the nous. The pain has been temporarily
assuaged, but the contradictions, "le froid" and "l'ardent," remain at issue. The last two
versets seem to form a single strophe. "Vint un soir" implies for the first time a narrative
frameworkbut the narrative is brief, "the heart no longer knew itself in the words it
pronounced for itself alone." An enigmatic utterance, this both refers to the dialectic of
emotion we saw in "Rougeur des matinaux'' and sets up the final verset. The final verset
is a self-commentary, summing up the poem as well as Char's poetic project generally.
The poet through an active presence breaks through the bonds. But, in a phrase with
Nietzschean overtones, the speaker says the poet does not teach the end of bonds. Once
again we are confronted with the difficult

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liberty that can be achieved in the working out of the textual process, but from which the
poet must move on, as must we all.
Both Perse and Char construct texts in which the ethical question of the subject's
responsibility toward others is posed in a language that speaks from the difficult site of
being aware of differences. These differences are allowed to emerge in part due to the
exteriority highlighted by the form of the poetic utterance. The truth these texts urge
should not be viewed as the mirror of an interior state or as some personal achievement
of the poetrather our own ethical response is engaged, assuring that the poem's truth
emerges in the way of its speaking.

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7
Pound's Cantos and the Myth of Transparency
The issue of ethics enters inevitably into any discussion of the work of one of the
century's most controversial poets, Ezra Pound. Yet despite this emphasis, maybe even
because of it, the important element of exteriority in Pound's textual practice remains
largely unexamined. One reason for our difficulty in reading Pound's text is Pound's own
belief (and the subsequent reification of that belief into dogma in the official Poundian
criticism) in what I am here calling the "transparency" of written language. At its simplest
level, this myth of transparency claims an unproblematic relation between the verbal sign
and things or situations in the world and moreover posits a model of text reception in
which this relation is intuited directly and instantaneously by the reader. Pound really
believed, I think, that the rightly inclined reader could gain instant enlightenment from
almost any randomly chosen passage in the Cantos. So far did Pound's cultural
syncretism extend that he felt everything in the poem, from mystical light imagery,
politics, history, monetary policy, and moral philosophy to obscure personal and literary
anecdotes, to be vitally and even "clearly" interrelated. Pound's ideal reader who read
with mind fully attuned to these vital interrelations would thus be able to attain an
enlightenment Pound felt was necessary for cultural survival. This dream or myth of
verbal transparency is not exactly the same as Pound's political ideology, although they
are related, as I will show. More importantly, the myth of a transparent verbal signwhich
has received devastating treatment, notably in the work of Derridacorresponds almost not
at all to the actual text of the Cantos. As Marjorie Perloff and others have shown, Pound's
poeticsbased on word rhythms, textual quotations, and quick juxtaposition or
montagelead to models of interpretation that need to be open-ended in part because they
are not yet in place and so get called "postmodern." Despite the best efforts of Pound's
supporters to prove the empirical

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validity of his text, the Cantos are not "transparent" in the way Pound wished. Pound's
textual practice also successfully resists the attempts of recent historicist critics, notably
Jerome McGann, to offer definitive ethical judgments on the Cantos by applying a
modernist aesthetics-as-ideology matrix. The model of exteriority which I am proposing
here and throughout this study is one way of examining the ethical direction of a textual
practice, in Pound's case in spite of his overtly reactionary ideology and his mistaken
view of the transparency of the written sign.
The poem The Cantos presents its own myth or dream of reading. According to that myth
the total structure of the poem cannot really be explained. Rather, illumination, as in the
act of sex or the Eleusinian mystery rites, comes in a flash and can be provoked by the
smallest textual instance. This paradigm of reading is presented, among other instances, at
the opening of Canto XLI:
1
"Ma questo,"
said the Boss, " divertente."
catching the point before the aesthetes had got
there;
Having drained off the muck by Vada
From the marshes, by Circeo, where no one else wd. have
drained it.
(202)

Referring to the one personal meeting between Pound and Mussolini, in 1933, this
passage presents "the Boss" (Pound's translation of il Duce) as a person of superior
insight, one capable of gleaning the essential insight from Pound's XXX Cantos that were
on his desk. "Divertente" has a range of meanings in Italian and is used very frequently,
the way a contemporary American speaker might say "interesting." Carroll Terrell, to his
credit, looks at this remark with restrained bemusement: "Pound probably took politeness
to indicate quick comprehension by a genius'' (Terrell, 167). Guy Davenport quotes the
remark in a total aside in the general context of a discussion of Pound's gift for mimicry.2
I will deal with the further, nonhumorous, context of this scene shortly. What I insist on
here is that Pound is totally serious. He actually believes (to the extent that the author's
intent is ever discernible) that Mussolini got the point. Clearly, if Mussolini can get the
point, so can anyone who is rightly inclined.
The heroic portrait of the Bossas it reveals Pound's belief systemcontinues with
Mussolini's accomplishments: draining the

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marshes, supplying water for the people, building housing. In Pound's "gift for mimicry"
he then goes on to tell a story about the Boss told by a "mezzo-yit." The story ends:
And the Boss said: but what will you
DO with that money?"
"But! but! Signore, you do not ask a man
what he will do with his money.
That is a personal matter.
And the Boss said: but what will you do?
You won't really need all that money
because you are all for the confine."
(202)

Here Terrell's gloss fudges the issue, taking an irrelevant dictionary entry, "border" or
"boundary," for confine and adducing a possible error on Pound's part (167). The
Garzanti dictionary gives confine as a possible alternative for confino, as "a police
measure, which forces one to live in a different commune from the one of residence, for
a fixed time" (my trans.). Pound clearly knew what confine meant; he uses the variant
again, when dealing with Chinese subjects, in Canto LV, "whom he sent to confino" (297)
and in Canto LXI: ''And they druv out Lon Coto fer graftin' / sent him to confino to watch
men breakin' ground" (336). Confino evolved during the Fascist period, from a form of
internal exile during the Ethiopian war, to concentration camps in the forties.
3 Try, as they may, the Poundians can never excuse Pound's anti-Semitism. Pound knew

exactly what Mussolini was doing, earlier than most, and his propaganda efforts
supported these actions entirely.4 Pound, of course, paid for these efforts, and the whole
controversy surrounding the Rome broadcasts, the treason trial (or "non-trial," according
to Torrey), and Pound's incarceration in St. Elizabeth's is unlikely ever to be resolved. The
question posed here is not, was Pound crazy? That question I believe to be unanswerable.
But rather, was his belief in his "transparent" text as crazy as it might seem.
Pound's dream of "transparency" was lifelong and informed his aesthetic formulations at
every stage. At a stage roughly contemporary with the first Cantos, he proclaims:
It is not necessary, either in the young or in the mature artist, that all the geometry of a painting be
tossed up into the consciousness and analysed by the painter before he puts brush to canvas. The
genius can pay in nugget and in lump gold: it is not necessary that he bring up his knowledge
into the mint of con

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sciousness, stamp it into either the coin of conscientiously analysed form-detail knowledge or
into the paper money of words before he transmit it. A bit of luck for the young man, and the
sudden coagulation of bits of knowledge collected here and there during years, need not for the
elder artist be re-sorted and arranged into coin.
5

Jean-Michel Rabat has commented brilliantly on the role of money, and especially coin,
in Pound's "imaginary," going well beyond the well-known visit by the young Pound to
the Philadelphia mint.6 What leaps out in this passage is the model for poetic production
that the analogy with coin and precious metal provides.7 Just as the rightly inclined reader
can receive sudden illumination from the smallest passage, so the artist of genius can
transmit this insight without having to labor to transform it into "common" currency. The
model of reading for Pound is also and always a model of writing.
In following the dream of transparency in Pound's aesthetic formulations, one also has
the entire range of Pound's pedagogical output. Pound's method is perhaps best
encapsulated in the story of Agassiz and the fish.
No man is equipped for modern thinking until he has understood the anecdote of Agassiz and the
fish:
A post-graduate student equipped with honours and diplomas went to Agassiz to receive the final
and finishing touches. The great man offered him a small fish and told him to describe it.
Post-Graduate Student: 'That's only a sunfish.'
Agassiz: 'I know that. Write a description of it.'
After a few minutes the student returned with the description of the Ichthus Heliodiplodokus, or
whatever term is used to conceal the common sunfish from vulgar knowledge, family of
Heliichtherinkus, etc., as found in textbooks of the subject.
Agassiz again told the student to describe the fish.
The student produced a four-page essay. Agassiz then told him to look at the fish. At the end of three
weeks the fish was in a state of advanced decomposition, but the student knew something about it.
(ABC of Reading, 1718)

The most remarkable aspect of this story is that Pound conveys nothing at all about the
content of the student's description. What about the fish? Do readers of this anecdote
learn about the fish, or rather about a certain kind of authoritarian teaching practice? In an

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essay from the same time, Pound excoriates the teaching of literature by use of general
terms, saying: "All of which is inexcusable AFTER the era of 'Agassiz and the fish'" ("The
Teacher's Mission," Literary Essays, 60). Not only is the reader assumed to have read
Pound's previous writing on the subject, the reader is supposed to know what the story
means. The "biological method" that Pound proposes in the Agassiz story is about as
scientific as his image of coining metal, which is to say, not at all. The point is that the
reader is supposed to grasp the ''gist" of it in the same way as Agassiz's student: through
direct intuition. The fish in Pound's story, through the process of decomposition,
becomes "transparent" (cf. Kenner, The Pound Era, 16372).
Of course, one way in which the dream of transparency can become the dogma of
criticism is through a certain filiation.
8 From my perspective, the uniting factor in all critics whom one might choose to call

"Poundians" is their adoption of the terminology of vision, illumination, and insight when
dealing with the works of the master. This also may help to account for the strange
retrograde feel there is to much Pound scholarship, since the transparency of the verbal
sign has been put to hard use as a valid theory by most modern linguistic theory and
literary theory which develops any sort of linguistic sophistication.9 This aspect of my
argument does not represent a rejection of the very fine scholarly work on Pound,
performed over the last four decades. I rather wish to show that if the Poundian reception
aesthetic is clearly oriented around a model of transparency, then we might locate the
reasons for this in Pound's text with greater acuity.
I would like to discuss Guy Davenport's early work, specifically his 1961 Harvard Ph.D.
thesis, as a relevant example of the model of transparency in interpreting the Cantos.10
As in much Pound criticism, the reader of this work senses that the study of Pound has
had a profound impact on the writer's life choices (as, I should say, it has had on my
own). One sees references to areas of scholarly interest that are clearly gleaned from an
attention to the Pound pedagogy, as well as eventual meetings with the poet, viva voce
citations, and so forth. Davenport clearly believes that Pound had something to teach, and
he has put himself to school at the "Ezuversity." Davenport clearly states the central theme
of The Cantos: they "are about the tragic loss of sensibility by which men live well" (6).11
I will deal somewhat later with the "tragic" aspect of the poem. Here the "sensibility" that
Davenport adduces is at issue

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and it is consistently tied in Davenport's study to failures in the educational, and to some
extent the governmental, system of this country.
The Cantos, then, to begin with, are about a tragic decline, which helps to account for the
Dantean structure, beginning with a descent into Hell. As Davenport says: "Since an
imagery of light accompanies the subject of moral splendor, political order, and heroic
achievement, it follows that the decline of any of these can be symbolized by fading light"
(17). As a discussion of image patterns, this statement is accurate to the Cantos. What I
find interesting is Davenport's claim that the light imagery can stand for any of these large
subjects that he takes to organize the poem. We are also expected to be able to move
among these orders with no particular problem. Davenport is direct about the structure of
the poem: "The Cantos, if you will, are a poem from which the ordinary binding structure
has been removed, leaving image after image suspended" (59). This unique structure
places special demands on the reader: "One can understand a lot of poetry without being
aware of its ultimate coherence as it is possible to be; it is even taken for granted that a
poem of Donne's, say, will communicate 'on one level' quite satisfactorily, and that there
is yet more to be seen. Pound will not communicate this way; one must see from the
beginning the relevance of image to image" (6162; my italics). Davenport does not say
how one is to achieve this advance insight into the ultimate unity of the poem. As with
Agassiz's student, this direct intuitionor visionis either there or it isn't.
The meaning of The Cantos, according to this view, is just there. Davenport quotes
Pound (1957, viva voce), speaking to his Italian translator: "Don't worry about the
meaning of the poem. Translate accurately line by line. The meaning is inherent in the
material" (63).
12 On the subject of possible obscurities the reader might encounter in the poem,

Davenport says that these must become "clear to our reading vision" (73). At the
conclusion of his study, however, Davenport does allow that Pound's organization
through juxtaposition can cause problems: "The ideogram proves to be, ultimately, a
collage of images. Its meaning is wholly dependent on our seeing swiftly the strategy of
arrangement. When the ideogram fails, it fails because of a snarl in thought and thereby
discloses its weakness as a method" (253; my italics). This conclusion might seem to
contradict Davenport's previous comparison of Pound to Donne. That statement said one
must have advance insight. Here

Page 82

the failure, if there is a failure, is attributed to "a snarl in thought," presumably the poet's.
Armed with advance understanding, the ideal reader can see everything swiftly and
clearlyexcept those passages that are unclear to begin with. I have difficulty deriving a
pedagogy from this model: how are we to distinguish our blindness from the poet's?
13

Having followed a certain filiation of the Poundian criticism, I wish to turn now to an
examination of Pound's sources for his model of transparency, especially the ways in
which The Cantos draw on the philosophy of light in the writings of that tradition. A
common refrain in the Pound criticism is the desire not simply to move from one
splendid passage to another. If this analysis emphasizes splendor while dealing with the
philosophers of light and the imagery Pound takes from them, that is because it is an
organizing principle of the poem. Light and eyes are recurrent images in the early Cantos.
The only interpolated lines in Canto I have primarily to do with Aphrodite, "thou with
dark eyelids" (5). The goddess, or a version of her, reappears in Canto II, with "sleek
head . . . eyes of Picasso" (6), along with the refrain from the young Pound persona "I
have seen what I have seen" (9). Much of the beautiful nature imagery in this canto has to
do with light and the glare off of water.
In Canto III, almost the only "original" lines concern the gods and light:
Gods float in the azure air
Bright gods and Tuscan, back before dew was shed.
(11)

Ronald Bush has shown well how these early versions evolved, especially in relation to
Pound's passionate interests at the time, including the works of Allen Upward (Genesis,
87102). On the persistence of the Greek gods in the southern Mediterranean cultures,
there is also the often quoted statement from Pound's 1930 "Credo": "I believe that a light
from Eleusis persisted throughout the middle ages and set beauty in the songs of
Provence and of Italy" (Selected Prose, 53). A more nearly contemporary text to these
early cantos, "Psychology and Troubadours" (1916; Spirit of Romance, 87100) explores
this connection more fully. Bush has explored this connection, as well as the connection
between the current Cantos III and IV in the stages of revision from the early Poetry "3
Cantos.'' Though, for Bush, Pound's revisions eliminated

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too much of the narrative connectives: "The unfortunate effect of Pound's 1923 revisions
was to obscure Canto IV forever" (Genesis, 255).
The passage in question shiftsBush would say, inexplicably; Davenport, that we have to
see in advancefrom the Greek / Provence / Tuscany universe to a Japanese setting:
Thus the light rains, thus pours, e lo soleils plovil The liquid and rushing crystal
beneath the knees of the gods.
Brook film bearing white petals.
The pine at Takasago
grows with the pine of Is!
The water whirls up the bright pale sand of in the spring's
mouth
"Behold the Tree of Visages!"
Forked branch-tips, flaming as if with lotus.
Ply over ply
The shallow eddying fluid,
beneath the knees of the gods.
(15)

As the achieved beauty of this passage shows, Bush, in my view, overemphasizes the
importance of narrative connectives. Pound in his revisions of the original "3 Cantos"
was moving toward his fully achieved poetic breakthrough, not attempting to rewrite
narrative poetry in the mode of Browning's "Sordello." Nor do I agree with Davenport
that all this must make sense in advance. One of the remarkable features of Pound's
method is that the raining sun, "e lo soleils plovil,'' can anticipate the "rays" ideogram
(254) that Pound had not yet discovered.
As The Cantos develop, the sources of light imagery in Neoplatonic philosophy and in
Dante are spelled out, as much as they can be in Pound's logic of quick juxtaposition.
Canto V describes the city of Deioces, moving into light imagery:
Iamblichus' light,
the souls ascending,
Sparks like a partridge covey
Like the "ciocco," brand struck in the game.
"Et omniformis": Air, fire, the pale soft light.
Topaz I manage, and three sorts of blue:
but on the barb of time.
(17)

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This passage is packed with allusion: to Iamblichus, fourth-century Neoplatonic

philosopher; to Dante's vision of the sphere of the blessed, Paradiso XVIII; to Ficino's
commentaries on Porphyry; and perhaps to Giordano Bruno (Terrell, 1718). We could
simply adduce Pound's theory of the "luminous detail" (Selected Prose, 21ff.) and pass
on. Or we could notice that the structure of experience in this passage is directly cognate
with Pound's aesthetics and pedagogy. That is to say, the moment of illumination is
represented as light, makes only the most glancing reference to its source (as the word
"ciocco" is made to stand for the interrelated sense of community and instantaneous
sympathy among the souls of the blessed in Dante's depiction) and happens quickly, "on
the barb of time."
The Cantos do not follow the Hell / Purgatory / Paradise structure of Dante's poem in
exact form. Preceding the Hell Cantos, the image of the "ciocco" (V, 17, and VII, 24) has
already introduced light as salvific. So the quote from Inferno V, "Io venni in luogo
d'ogni luce muto," that begins Pound's descent into hell is already a contrastive usage.
Rabat has shown how the reascent out of hell in Cantos XIV and XV is structured
according to Plotinus and light philosophy (26465). The invocation to Plotinus and the
head of the Medusa (XV, 66) is what allows the speaker to emerge from the hell of Canto
XV. The ambiguous lines "blind with sunlight / swollen-eyed, rested, / lids sinking,
darkness unconscious" (67) that end Canto XV are interpreted by Rabat: "As with
Wandjina, castration and blindness turn out to be positive" (265). The images of light and
the philosophers associated with them are not simply part of the structure of quotation
and cross-echoing in the poem. At moments such as this they serve to structure the
dramatic movement and progression of the poem. In other words, light perfuses these
moments that Pound described as structuring The Cantos (Selected Letters, 210): the
descent into hell, the ''repeat in history" and the "magic moment" of metamorphosis.
14 Light imagery serves this same mediating purpose in Canto XX, the Canto of the Lotos

Eaters, when Pound cites St. Francis's "Nel fuoco / D'amore mi mise . . . [In the flame of
love he put me]" (9293; Terrell, 83; Selected Letters, 210); and again in the otherwise
negatively oriented Canto XXIII, with Porphyry counterbalancing the episode of Ulysses'
men stealing the cattle of the sun (1079). In both Cantos light imagery meliorates the
otherwise bestial activities drawn from the Odyssey. The connection of the light
philosophers to St. Francis to

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the troubadours is one of Pound's still not totally disproven contributions to the study of
these medieval literatures.
The medieval poet that Pound made the most claims for in regard to light imagery as a
form of philosophical thinkingand second only to Dante in terms of overall influence on
The Cantosis Guido Cavaleanti, and especially his poem, "Donna mi prega." James
Wilhelm has made the most rigorous attempt to place Pound's repeated attentions to this
poem in the context of philological criticism.
15 Wilhelm's detailed analysis shows that Pound was working (perhaps deliberately) with

a flawed text of the poem, and, more importantly, that most recent criticism now rejects
Pound's assimilation of Cavalcanti to pure "Platonism" (Literary Essays, 159). Crucial to
this analysis, then, is exactly how Pound takes the light imagery in the poem and uses it to
buttress his own personal philosophy, despite the philological evidence to the contrary.
Pound's interest in Cavalcanti the philosophical poet is as a link from Greek thought
through the scholastic and Neoplatonic philosophers to the medieval tradition of love
poetry. The Greek mysteries are condensed neatly in the essay on Cavalcanti: "The Greek
aesthetic would seem to consist wholly in plastic, or in plastic moving toward coitus, and
limited by incest, which is the sole Greek taboo" (Literary Essays, 150). The connection
to Greek thought from Aristotle to Averros that Pound claims (149) is now widely
accepted by critics (Wilhelm, 76). The speculation that Pound engages in ties Cavalcanti
to yet another scholastic tradition: "It may be impossible to prove that he had heard of
Roger Bacon, but the whole canzone is easier to understand if we suppose, or at least one
finds, a considerable interest in the speculation, that he had read Grosseteste on the
Generation of Light" (Literary Essays, 149).16 Pound's extremely diffident syntax here
can be made to stand for much of his method: i.e., the connection is there whether it can
be shown with scholarly rigor or not. Grosseteste's major premise is that light has a form
of corporeity, and is in fact the first form of corporeity. This would place him in direct
conflict with the Averroistic conception of a certain material subsistence in the absence of
spirit. Grosseteste's philosophy also denies the radical dualism of much Neoplatonic
thought, thus showing Pound a way to light as the unifying principle he sought. Light, in
Grosseteste's philosophy, begins as a single point and spreads out uniformly in all
directions. In some sense, all light imagery in The Cantos that follows

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this structure could be said to derive from Pound's reading of Grosseteste.

17

The "radiant world where one thought cuts through another with clear edge, the world of
moving energies" (Literary Essays, 154), is the world that the major religions, according
to Pound, have caused us to lose, with their emphasis on morality and the dualism of
mind and body. This active principle, or virtu, that Pound locates in Cavalcanti's "Donna
mi prega," unites love and light as moving energy in the mind:
What is its virtu and power
Its being and every moving
Or delight whereby 'tis called "to love"
Or if man can show it to sight.
(XXXVI, 177)

The "natural demonstration" (natural dimostramento) is the method that Cavalcanti's

speaker claims in this opening stanza, when called by a lady (Donna mi prega) to speak
of love. Yet this natural demonstration is addressed only to those in the know
(conoscente). As in Pound's own poetry, a preunderstanding, an ability to see the relation
of images, is adduced as a prerequisite to understanding the poem.
The second stanza contains the celebrated phrase "dove sta memora" and presents the
crux of Pound's and others' interpretations. I present the early translation, the Italian text,
and the version from Canto XXXVI of the first four lines:
In memory's locus taketh he his state
Formed there in manner as mist of light
Upon a dusk that is come from Mars and stays
(Literary Essays, 155)
In quella partedove sta memora
prende suo stato,s formato,come
diaffan da lume,d'una scuritate
la qual da Martevne e fa demora;
(Contini, 173)
Where memory liveth
it takes its state
Formed like a diafan from light on shade
Which shadow cometh of Mars and remaineth . . .
(XXXVI, 177)

Wilhelm summarizes the critical debate between the Platonizing J. E. Shaw and the

Averroistic view of Bruno Nardi (7778).

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Briefly, Nardi and more recent critics emphasize the corporality of the image, the
obscurity coming from Mars and remaining. Pound's light-philosophy view sees the
"diafan" as a glowing corporal locus for the energy, of spirit. We can almost see the
streamlining in the revision Pound made of the first two lines for Canto XXXVI. In each
of these first two lines a half-line drops out: "In quella partedove sta memora" becomes
"where memory liveth" and "prende suo statos formato'' becomes "it takes its state." As
with much of Pound's translation practice, he here makes the poem mean what he wants
to see in it. Given the beauty of these two lines in Pound's later version, it would be
pedantic to argue with his results. The whole translation process, which my analysis has
only begun to suggest, reveals Pound's impetus toward transparency. The "dove sta
memora" and the image of "diafan from light on shade" may have been intended in an
entirely differentindeed opposingsense by Cavalcanti. What matters is that Pound has
forever made these images resplendent with his own philosophy of light, virtu, and vital
energy.
The light philosophyand so the implicit theory of transparencycontinues to operate as a
guiding structural principle from Cantos XLII to LXXI, although in a much reduced way.
The "Fifth Decad" (XLIILI) concentrates largely on the history of the Monte dei Paschi
bank in Siena and subsequently the theme of usury. Still, in Canto XLII where Pound
presents a recapitulation of the descent into hell, under the sign of Circe, light once again
serves a structural device to lead the way out: "The light has entered the cave" (238). In
the Usura Cantos proper, XLV and LI, light and love as vital energy are the positive
values which are subverted by usury. Thus Canto LI begins with a quotation from Guido
Guinizelli's "Al cor gentil . . .":
Shines
in the mind of heaven God
who made it
more than the sun
in our eye.
(250)

The God of"natural" religion is here seen to be on a direct continuum with the natural
increase of nature (cf. Rabat 21334). Likewise, a passage combining Grosseteste and
Cavalcanti is brought in to rhyme with Chinese rational philosophy in Canto LV:

Page 88
Lux in enim per se omnem in partem
Reason from heaven, said Tcheou Tun-y
enlighteneth all things
seipsum seipsum diffundit, risplende
Is the beginning of all things, et effectu
(298)

Grosseteste's theory of light radiating out to every part from a center and as its own
source here picks up one word from the crucial second stanza of Cavalcanti's poem just
examined: "risplendein s perpetual effetto" (Contini, 173). This mode of quick
juxtaposition of isolated tags standing for the larger philosophical concerns will continue
to dominate throughout Rock-Drill, Thrones, and Drafts and Fragments, especially in
Cantos XCI, XCIII, C, CXIII, and CXVI.
One of the considerable ironies of the intertwined fate of Ezra Pound the person and his
epic poem is that just at the moment both he and the poem were to enter history, he seems
to have lost faith in the complete transparency of his text.
18 The stepped-up production of the poem from 1934 on (very, roughly speaking, Pound

wrote as much or more from 1934 to 1939 than he had from 1914 to 1934) was enabled,
some would say, by his discovery of a direct presentational method. Especially in the
Chinese and Adams Cantos, LIILXXI, the method consists in large measure of
condensing and arranging large blocks of historical material in his already wellestablished "ideogrammic" method. As most commentators have noted, Pound leaves out
many of the narrative connectives and even the identity of speakers and persons being
described, apparently assuming either that the serious reader had access to the same
sources or, as already cited, that "the meaning is inherent in the material." My personal
view is that Canto LXII is sufficient to get the Adams material across, and Pound was
mistaken in thinking he either needed, or that his readers would put up with, ten Cantos
when one would have done. Cookson (Guide, 66) says that Pound wrote the Adams
Cantos in 193839 (very fast even by the stepped-up pace he had set himself) and that they
in fact presage his later mental condition.
The hysterical tone that is present in parts of the Adams Cantos will be recognizable again
in the Rome radio broadcasts, and it increasingly characterizes his letters from this period
as well. The year 1939 is of course the date of Pound's "first visit to U.S. since 1910 in
endeavor to stave off war" (Selected Poems, viii). The parts

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of the Adams Cantos that I find especially interesting in this regard are the two passages
that Pound "emphasized with a black line" (Guide, 66).
19 The two highlighted passages are:
For my part thought that Americans
Had been embroiled in European wars long enough
easy to see that
France and England wd/ try to embroil us OBvious
that all powers of Europe will be continually at manoeuvre
to work us into their real or imaginary balances
of power
(LXV, 377)
Every bank of discount is downright corruption
taxing the public for private individuals' gain.
and if I say this in my will
the American people wd/ pronounce I died crazy.
(LXXI, 416)

As I have said, the fact that Pound felt he needed to insist typographically, in this
extraordinary, way (really much more unusual than his use of Chinese characters or any
other of his innovations in "open" form), on the special relevance of these passages
indicates that he had lost faith in the infallibility of his method to transmit much needed
enlightenment. The speaker in both instances is, of course, not Pound but John Adams.
And, once again, I am not characterizing the content of the statements, which is familiar
enough to readers of Pound. The question for this inquiry, into the myth of transparency
is ratherdid Pound's historical judgment fail at this time with the failure of his
"transparent" text? Or further still, did the myth of transparency that shows its cracks here
necessarily lead Pound into error and failure?
In a somewhat different sense from my own, Jerome McGann claims that Pound's poem
is indeed a failure: "To the degree that Pound's work sets out to redefine, for the twentieth
century, an order of permanent or foundational civilization, it does not merely fail, it
engenders the plot of its own failure" ("Truth in Contradiction," 8). In another work
McGann has called this failure "tragic": "Many peopleI am decidedly one of themregard
the Cantos as the most important English poem of this century. It is however, a tragic
poem, a work which is ensnared in its own illusions" (Social Values, 51).20 In the
presumably later Critical Inquiry article, McGann rescinds this judgment: ''This is why the
Cantos is not,

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finally, a tragic work" ("Truth in Contradiction," 25). I will have reason to return to the
issue of tragedy. Here I want to examine the historicist premises on which this series of
conflicting judgments by McGann is based. McGann's claim is that Pound saw his long
poem as redefining cultural values in a "foundational" way. The poem, from this view,
embodies a totalizing or "Totalitarian" vision, and the aesthetics underlying this vision
need to be subjected to the terms of judgment Pound himself sets up.
21 Moreover, a ''poem including history," also enters and becomes a part of history and

needs to be judged by historical criteria. For McGann, as I read him, the poem fails on
both counts.
I have no disagreement with McGann that The Cantos embody a fascist ideology. Pound
continues to list fascist honor rolls throughout the Pisan Cantos and later (e.g., LXXXIV,
539). The contemporary heroes he praises are all from the "wrong" side, as history would
teach. Yet McGann in his declared historicism plays loosely with the text of the
poemwhich after all is also part of the historical recordand this finally, for me, undercuts
the force of his argument. Here is one example of McGann's loose treatment of the text:
"But when the Cantos is fascist there is no mistaking the fact: for example when he
presents Adolf Hitler as a Blakean figure, 'furious from perception' (104: 741) because he
has grasped the international conspiracy of Jewish bankers and usocrats . . ." ("Truth in
Contradiction," 11; my italics). Here is a slightly expanded source of the citation in Canto
CIV:
And who try to use the mind for the senses
drive screws with a hammer
maalesh
Adolf furious from perception.
But there is a blindness that comes from insidethey
try to explain themselves out of nullity.
(741)

Now I don't think that there is any doubt that this is fascist. What I question is McGann's
interpretation, or rather his presentation of interpretation as "fact" (his word). As it
happens, McGann seems to have derived his "fact" from Terrell's Companion to the
Cantos (678; Terrell in turn cites the text of the Rome broadcasts). I find this particularly
ironic in that McGann elsewhere in the same article derides Terrell ("Truth in
Contradictions," 16n., 19n.). McGann also makes a fundamental mistake of reading the
statement as if it read: "Adolf furious from the perception that . . ." or, in other

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words, as if the statement had a logically clear, connective structure.

22 McGann's drive for historical certainty leads him to add causal connectives where there

are none. In the above passage there is no causal link. Rather there is Pound's typical
associative logic, linking Adolf with those who "drive screws with a hammer" (just
before) and those with "a blindness that comes from inside" (just after). I would not claim
that Hitler is subjected to criticism, necessarily, by these juxtapositions. But it is a difficult
passage, one in which Pound's fascism is displayed in all of its blazing obscurity.
McGann's misleading addition of the clarifying connective (one not even his own) shows
his deep committedness to an aesthetic model that is inadequate to the complexity of the
poem's method, even on this local level.
In the longer work that also deals with Pound's poem in some depth, McGann has
outlined his understanding of this new-historicist aesthetic. He says: "At the dawning of
the incommensurate we come to understand that the human world is not made up of
'facts' and/or 'interpretations,' it is made up of eventsspecific and worlded engagements in
which meaning is rendered and used. Poetic work locates one type of event. Its special
function is to display the eventuality of meaning through representations of the
incommensurable" (Social Values, 72; my final italics). This whole passage is steeped in a
post-Romantic Kantian aesthetics which, while trying hard to define "event" and describe
the ''poetic work," takes for granted such charged terms as "meaning" and
"representation." (I think McGann seriously misrepresents Kant, but that is another
issue.)23 Jean-Franois Lyotard has described the difference (or diffrend) between
modern and postmodern aesthetics as follows: "Here then is the diffrend: the modern
aesthetic is an aesthetic of the sublime, but nostalgic; it permits the unpresentable
[McGann's incommensurate] to be referred to as an absent content, but the form
continues to offer to the reader or observer, on the basis of its recognizable consistency
[McGann's representations], material for consolation and pleasure. . . . The postmodern
would be that which in the modern invokes the unpresentable in the presentation itself"
(my italics).24 I find McGann's modernist aesthetic-as-ideology, model to be seriously
flawed. "Meaning" is not somehow encodable in texts, whether as art, interpretation, or
event. And standards of representation have given way to presentation, in a way that Ezra
Pound was one of the first to announce and to carry over into his practice.

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Of course Pound was wrong about the "transparency" of his verbal text.
25 But in the tremendous effort that this "error" engendered, Pound established a truly

revolutionary break with early twentieth-century aesthetics. The poetry. that continues
Pound's breakthrough (Olson, Zukofsky, Snyder, all of the "Language" writers, whether
they like it or not) is all thoroughly indebted to the huge effortcultural and historical as
wellthat is The Cantos. Rabat has written brilliantly on the status of The Cantos in terms
of "enunciation'' (1213), making far-reaching associations with Heidegger's later
philosophy of language, as well as moving powerfully into the Lacanian field (13ff.).
Rabat's meditations on what I have called the myth of "transparency" are particularly
revelatory. with respect to the practice of the later Cantos. This special attention to the
issue of enunciation also serves to resolve some thorny issues regarding the status of the
speaker in the early Cantos. As the method of The Cantos becomes more "legible," the
aspect of tragedy that McGann denies to the poem may become more intelligible as
well.26
The question of the status of the speaking subject in the modern long poem, especially in
the criticism of modernist texts, is nothing less than a scandal. Rabat's work is the only
work on Pound I am aware of that approaches the subject with anything like the level of
sophistication that has been developed in narrative theory, for example, of the last twenty
years.27 Instead, most studies of Pound's long poem still treat the issue of organization as
one of voice and narrative technique, taking for granted that the central model for Pound
and twentieth-century poetry is still the interior monologue of Browning. Bush, for
example, says: "Sordello, then, and the Cantos modeled after it, intend to be a new kind
of narrative poetrya poetry. that portrays not just action but an authentically modern
dramatization of the way an action acquires significance within an individual intelligence"
(83). As I've stated earlier, this is just what The Cantos do not do, and this is what makes
The Cantos, even early on, a radical break from Browning. The model of interiority, or a
certain unifying consciousnesseven as a representation of consciousness in dramatic
termsjust won't work as an interpretive framework. The Cantos present material,
exteriorizing the relationship of text to text. Even the ego scriptor EP is an external addon to the collage of various materials presented in juxtaposition.
The ideogrammic method that Pound proposed has been well explored (notably by
Marjorie Perloff). In some sense, the "trans

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parency" model that is the larger subject here is always related to the notion that the most
diverse materials can be directly intuited through an apprehension of the ideogrammic
radicals. One whole aspect of the Pound scholarly industry is devoted to proving that all
of Pound's materials can be understood, even shown to be directly (transparently) related
to an empirical source.
28 What few have dared to say, until Rabat (10635), is that, even fully explicated, all

sources located, assimilated, and understood, Pound's text is still strange. The text is not
just not transparent, it is positively "antiabsorptive," in Charles Bernstein's phrase.29 That
is to say, The Cantos are not the failure that McGann claims, according to a modernist
totalizing aesthetic: The Cantos create a new aesthetic that we are still trying to name.30
The new aesthetic that The Cantos point to must begin with discarding the notion of
"voice" as it implies an interior monologue, in favor of a model for enunciation by a
necessarily "split subject." A polyphony of voicespersonal, transpersonal, textual,
intertextualspeaks through and across the surface of the text. Much of the text must even
be "voiceless" to the reader without Chinese, unless one supposes an intoning of the
Chinese characters parallel to the text. Does one "speak" the rays ideogram (254) or the
Egyptian cartouches (62627), or the temple symbol (678, 681)? Pound is even adduced,
along with Mallarm, by Jacques Derrida, as a protogrammatologist.31 We imagine Pound
would have been horrified by this, but as Gary Snyder says: "Because there is no we /
There is art.''32

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8
Poetic Subjectivity in Olson's Maximus Poems
As an aspect of the ethics of exteriority, the question of subjectivityor the role of the
speaking subject in the enunciation of the poemcontinues to be a complicated and
unresolved issue in the work of Charles Olson. Olson realized early on that the Romantic
subjectivity, or lyrical "I," and its persistence among the early modernists, was something
of which he needed to break the hold. He praised Pound as one who had broken through
modernist quandaries of authenticity and standards of representation.
1 In his own work, however, even in the great work of his maturity, The Maximus Poems,
the role of the speaking subject, the one who says "I" in the poems, varies tremendously.2

And his own theoretical statements, whether in essays, talks, or interviews, show a variety
of positions, none of them completely consistent. In fact, it will be my position that the
shifting subjectivity in Olson's major work is one of its major wellsprings, a source of
continual renovation and renewal in the development of the text of the poem. Taking the
second part of the well-known Olson triad topos / tropos / typos, I think it can be shown
that the self-orienting of tropos allows Olson to make what he calls the "Leap" (Maximus,
180) from the geography of actual place, actual reality, to the comprehensive mythological
view that serves as humankind's guide back to that reality. In Olson's view the myth-work
is also and always a sociopolitical stance, allowing for the integration of grounded locale
and wider cultural awareness.
Olson was continually drawn to Keats's comments on "Negative Capability." This
approach to the issue was confirmed by Olson's discovery of Rimbaud's strong antiRomantic stance and shows up with force in the poems of the late 1940s (Collected
Poems, 12102) and his essay "Projective Verse" (Human Universe, 5261) that are roughly
contemporary with the start of the Maximus series in May 1950 (Butterick, Guide, 5). The
combination of the situatedness of

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the poet in the geographical locality and the aversive stance his speaker adopts helps to
establish an elocutory force of a communication act that folds in the poet's motives and
implicit moral stance. Indeed this elocutory stance is of such complexity from the outset
that the notion of personaof "Maximus" as a mask for a depersonalized Olsonis clearly
inadequate. So too, from this view, is the notion (originally Olson's) of proprioception, if,
as it is taken by some critics, it means a theoretical stance taken prior to the poem that
allows for a suspension of certain issues as they impinge on the creation of the text.
3 Rather, the continual "self-action" of tropos means that the subjectivity is developed in

the text, as Sherman Paul implies: "Tropos is self-action and its linguistic complement is
the middle voice, mentioned here and in the 'Syllabary' and defined later in
Proprioception as the voice of 'propius-ception / 'one's own'-ception.' In the middle
voice, Olson explains, the subject is represented as acting on himself, for himself, and on
something belonging to oneselfactions, incidentally, that yield him articles of faith: will,
believe, be graceful, obey, accept self-responsibility."4 If tropos is act, and by extension,
the emptying out of personality in proprioception so that the personal can be reenergized, this act can only take place in the composition (act of writing) of the poem.
Olson's clearest exposition of the topos / tropos / typos triad is in the Beloit lectures from
1968 (Poetry and Truth), though this had been a working structure for him much earlier
still.5 In these lectures the trio actually serves to structure his exposition and ordering of
the poems he reads. The topos or actual earth, geography, of Olson's poetic thinking has
been a constant focus for his critics (concentrating especially on the historical
development of Gloucester, logically enough). The mythological thinking of typos, how
the myth is "stamped" into the poem and given shape, is coming into greater prominence
with recent publications.6 Perhaps because of Olson's own difficulty in coming to terms
with the impact of his own biography/personality in the shaping of his poetic works,
relatively little has been said about how the self-orienting of tropos, or development of a
meaningful subjectivity in the text, allows Olson to move from topos to typos. In the
"Beloits" (Olson's own way of referring to these talks) he comes the closest to a lucid selfinsight into this vexed issue.
"Tropism" is, he says, "actually the riddler of the lot" (Poetry and Truth, 43)and this
because of a difficulty in the whole history of poetics. As he had said earlier, the question
is, "How do you, how

Page 96

as a person, not only as a poet, does one live one's own image, rather than use it simply
for writingwhich has been a three hundred year problem in English and now is broken"
(3334). In this instance, he returns to the question of one's own self in the writing through
recounting a personal experience: "I mean, literally, that to light the dark is to have come
to whatever it is I think any of us seeks. And tropism to my mindand actually here I do or
again express an experience of, say, twenty years ago, which was to me dogmatic, when I
knew there was a sun, I mean a helio inside myself, so that everything, that every other
human being, and everything in creation, was something that I could see if I could keep
that experience" (44). In the same territory as Keats's "Negative Capability," Olson here
formulates a bridge from the personal situatedness of the individual to a universality of
experience. In a move beyond the earlier poetics "of knowing there is / a construct"
(Collected Poems, 173), Olson here moves onto ground that is charged philosophically
and existentially, the ''ground of being" or the question of how the poet's being radiates
outward toward others in the act of the poem.
7 Olson's use of "dogmatic" in this passage is odd and characteristic, and he returns to it,

saying: "the experience of image or vision is as simple as that. It's simply an entrance into
our own self of what our dogmatic conditions. . . which we inherit by being alive and
acquire by seeking to be alive . . . And that those two things are both true of our having
been at all" (Poetry and Truth, 44; ellipses in the text). The analysis of The Maximus
Poems in terms of this view of "subjectivity" should not be seen as the reimposition on
largely prior work of Olson's later aesthetic pronouncements but rather as an investigation
of the working out in the text of this central question of how one's selfor beingis
communicated in the "production" of the poem.8
The "push" of the first Maximus poems is clearly a breakthrough by Olson into many
areas at once: subject, place, style, tone, verse form, among them. But the "Maximus"
persona, though helping to organize certain of these features of the poems, cannot
account for all of the complicated infolding of issues, place, and personal history into the
elocutory stance of the poet. It is customary in Olson criticism to cite the opening of the
first poem "I, Maximus / a metal hot from boiling water . . ." (Maximus, 5), and then
allow that view of "Maximus" to account for all of the complex network of associations
then generated. If Olson in later years tired of this view (and, one has to think, its blindly
enthusiastic reception), this oversim

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plified view may also have been simply false from the beginning. In "Letter 3" of The
Maximus Poems, the ending which mirrors this opening:
Isolated person in Gloucester, Massachusetts, I, Maximus
address you
you islands
of men and girls
(16)

has been prepared for in the poem by such lines as:

I was not born there, came, as so many of the people came
from elsewhere. That is, my father did.
(14)

The large-scale mythic persona is thus never, not even at the outset, all there is to the
speaking subject, or "I," of the poems. Olson/ Maximus will not really do as an
identification either. Throughout the process or act of production that will eventually
become The Maximus Poems, the search for identity of the speaking subject will remain
an aspect of the "one makes many" (3) the poems celebrate and question.
The ill-humored attack on Vincent Ferrini that motivates "Letter 5" (Butterick, Guide, 30),
besides showing that bile can work for some in the ways of genius, also gives a brilliant
framing to the aversive stance that is so important to the achieved poetic subjectivity of
the Maximus series. Olson's aversive stance springs brilliantly from the notion of
situatedness, place, the body. He will never say it better than:
I am not at all aware
that anything more than that
is called for. Limits
are what any of us
are inside of
(Maximus, 21)

The notion of transcendence that forms such an integral and integrating part in the
Romantic subjectivity, and on through such different poetic oeuvres as those of
Dickinson and Pound, is thoroughly grounded by Olson. Transcendence and the
"egotistical sublime" (Keats) are in fact those elements that Olson means most when he
refers to the poetics of "three hundred years." Geography, actual earth, and the actual
human body constitute value for Olson not just because of topos or place, but because
they determine one's

Page 98

own relation to that place, to space, to history, and to one's own action. The turn that is
tropos is a turn away from or within in such constraints of the reala turning, never a
transcendence. Thus, self-orienting is a crucial constitutive aspect of any effective action
in the real world, especially when one chooses, as Olson does, to act against the
prevailing currents.
This aversive stance suits Olson's strategies, allowing him to move easily from his own
experience to that of early Gloucester settlers, current and remembered Gloucester seamen
and fishermen, even Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth's, as rendered in "Letter 6." But the
implicit moral stance goes beyond what one might call plain meanness as a character
judgment and toward an inner quality of careful attention, what Olson implicitly urges in
"polis is / eyes" (30). The anecdotal material is thus run through the speaker's stance:
It is just such folly is not necessary, yet I have not noticed
that those who are sharp haven't got that way
by pushing their limits.
(30)

Here is an orneriness that extends to the apparent willfullness of the strongly embedded
double negative in the syntax, mirroring the serious no-nonsense attitude it endorses.
Later in the series, fishing captains who risk lives to get the catch to market faster, for
example, are seen through this stance as exemplary individuals, rather than ornery or
foolhardy.
9 So Pound remains for Olson an exemplary figure, despite Olson's own personal break
from him due to Pound's persistent fascism and anti-Semitism.10

The speaker, by contrast to these heroic figures, presents himself as a slow learner, in a
way that has nothing apparently to do with "Maximus." The speaker's stance can
incorporate the small with the large: "And I buzz, / as the bee does" (Maximus, 48). This
continual testing of the limits of what can be said, of which size is one image, becomes
thematized as a structure in the utterance:
I measure my song,
measure the sources of my song,
measure me, measure
my forces
(Maximus, 48)

Through repetition, the size motif in the surface meaning of "measure" gives way to
something like the medieval poet's sense of misura, fitness or rightness in verse and its
corresponding moral di-

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mension. The measure of the verse composition highlights the other elements that are
held in a skillful balance.
11 Thus, my song / sources of my song / me / my forces are set off in a startling equipoise

(almost as in the late, fragmentary practice of Mallarm) that is yet an ongoing

articulation. Stasis gives way to a movement through the elements, a movement that is
inevitably a relation. And in this relation the speaker returns again and again to aspects of
himself in the act of composition.
In these early poems of the series even the historical material is framed by the personal
and rendered in a way that gives the reader a sense of the efforts expended by the speaker
in order to be in a position to give forth such information. So, in "Maximus, to
Gloucester, Letter 11," there is an account of Olson's reaching the plaque concerning
Miles Standish, "the rock I know by my belly and torn nails" (52). Standish in turn is
quickly placed in imaginary juxtaposition with the figure of the poet's father: "wld have
been the first to lie in the cemetery where my father does" (52). Neither one is buried
there, in fact, as the poem tells us, but that doesn't impede the culminating lines of the
section:
That a man's life
(his, anyway)
is what there is
what tradition is
at least is where I find it,
how I got to
what I say
(52)

The historiographical impulse that proceeds to take over the major portion of Volume 1 is
at least at the start firmly anchored in personal detail and family history, in turn given
expression through the poem's delicately articulated subjectivity.
In Volume 1 of The Maximus Poems, "Letter 23" stands as a hinge poem between the
earlier and later poems. Originally written in 1953, but then extensively rewritten in 1958
(Butterick, Guide, 141), it both marks a pause in the development of the series and sets
the series off in a considerably different direction. In this poem, the speaker states:
I would be an historian as Herodotus was, looking
for oneself for the evidence of
what is said:

(Maximus, 100101)

Page 100

As a theorist of historiography, as well as a historian in his own right, Olson has come to
be central in how contemporary poets view history. I am not denying the importance of
his achievement, then, when I remark that the complex subjectivity that guided all of the
enfolding elements in the previous poems of the series is severely restricted for the rest of
this run of poems (99160). And, in fact, the severe self-restriction that this effort must
have involved for Olson prepares for the major breakthrough into an even richer and
more complex subjectivity with the start of the poems that will constitute Volumes 2 and
3.
12

Sherman Paul has well characterized the renewal of tropos in this new start, by
comparison with the historiographical impulse that dominates the final poems of Volume
1: "Maximus begins again in this volume because the tropic faltering that is so much an
insistence of the previous poems has been accounted for by history. History has brought
him to an impasse. . . . The poems now find primary articulation in terms of myth and
geology (earth-history). . . . For what history denies, myth justifies: tropos, the hunger for
being and the push to stand forth" (181). It is around this time that Olson in the "Beloits"
will date his discovery of the "archaic" (Poetry and Truth, 34), but the mythological, or
the move toward typos, comes from a renewed self-orienting tropos, the subjectivity that
in the text of the poem allows for the experience of "one's self'' to become that of anyone.
The renewed spirit of the series is felt everywhere and is generated by the "leap" of the
self in the workings of the poem.
So "Letter 41 [broken off]" begins:
With a leap (she said it was an arabesque
I made, off the porch, the night of the
St Valentine Day's storm, into the snow.
Nor did she fail of course to make the point
what a sight I was the size I am all over the storm
trying to be graceful Or was it? She hadn't seen me
in 19 years
(171)

The poem continues with Olson's explorations into geological inquiry, size and setting
off, the drift of continentsbut here is a striking image of self and stamping out, tropos and
typos. Set at the beginning of what will be Volume 2, it echoes the opening of Volume 1,
but with the important difference that the "Maximus" persona is largely absent. This is
Olson's experience, Olson's size,

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transformed through the act of expression into something that, if not already myth, allows
for a subsequent shaping of myth. Olson returns to this same leap later in the series with
another poem that goes to the heart of subjectivity as creative wellspring: "Wrote my first
poems" (Maximus, 299). Butterick has helpfully added some of Olson's notes from 1953
that refer to the essay the later poem mentions, an essay on myth. These notes serve
equally well as a gloss on this first poem of Volume 2: "[essay] written in a boarding
house on the banks of a river which I have only recently discovered is a prime image of
all my experience, of woman of birth of my own town of meof who I am, the subject of
my work has been what I there tackled the morning after a St Valentine's day blizzard of
26 inches of snow: the nature of myth" (Guide, 415). As opposed to the historiographical
impulsewhich in practice for Olson meant a restricted poetic subjectivityit is clear from
these notes and poems that myth is both a forward or outward push as well as a process
that the poems embody of looking within to his own past experience for meanings that
will give shape to the production of the poem.
The "leap" of"Letter 41" takes on an added mythological dimension as the "Leap" of the
"Maximus, from Dogtown'' poems. In these poems the full myth finds expression, with
the aspects of Babylonian cosmology, "Nut is water," etc. (Maximus, 172), coming
together with the wisdom literature of the Orient through Jung, "the Black
Chrysanthemum" (180), and Olson's own ongoing research into the relation of
Gloucester's unique geology to the theory of continental drift and cultural dissemination.
13 In these contexts, the Leap represents a turn landward from the sea, in some sense the

arrival of "Maximus" at a place proper for inquiry to be deepened:

LEAP onto
the LAND, the AQUARIAN
TIME
(180; slightly slanted in the text)

The gesture of moving landward, arriving at the significant place, in short, the Leap,
belongs to Olson as "Maximus," but the effort at articulating (both speaking and causing
to be joined in movement) of these widely disparate thought/culture strains is clearly the
speaker's own.
The move through subjectivity to mythos even allows Olson to recuperate earlier poems
suppressed during the 19531958 period

Page 102

discussed before. One reason for this suppression may have been a feeling on Olson's
part that the poems were too "subjective," not enough in line with the objectivity of the
Herodotean historiographer. "Maximus, to Gloucester, Letter 27 [withheld]," from this
perspective, continues the overall movement of Volume 2 in terms of personal
exploration, and shows interesting links to the works examined previously, with the direct
mix of personal, anecdotal, familial material with the larger concerns of the series:
I come back to the geography of it,
the land failing off to the left
where my father shot his scabby golf
and the rest of us played baseball
into the summer darkness until no flies
could be seen and we came home
to our various piazzas where the women
buzzed
(184)

Here, as in Volume 1, the geographical stems directly from the personal. The figure of
Olson's father seems to generate or at the very least to organize the rest of these hazy,
nostalgic (for Olson) reminiscences. The strength of the poem derives from the speaker's
shift to a more abstract, synthesizing stance, with some of Olson's strongest formulations
of the links between the individual subject and the subject of the poem:
There is no strict personal order
for my inheritance
(184)
An American
is a complex of occasions,
themselves a geometry
of spatial nature
(185)

In terms of the overall vision of the Maximus series, it is fortunate that Olson enlarged his
stance and allowed this material to take its

Page 103

place. These passages confirm the working hypothesis that a poetic subjectivity drives the
overall subject (complex as it is) of the poem. They move in a theoretical domain close to
that of Call Me Ishmael while intensifying the perspective on anyone's "personal order"
through close attention to the speaker's own.
From this special "geometry" of the personal, Olson, in this stretch of poems, moves out
in startling directions to widen and deepen the mythological constellation. In "the bottom /
backward" (Maximus, 221), the speaker concludes a run of images collocating Georges
Bank fishing, the life cycle of fish, and exploration of "paleontological times" with the
famed lines:
I stand on Main Street like Diorite
stone
(221)

Gloucester's Main Street is brought into swift conjunction with the myth-thinking,
"Diorite stone" here referring to a sea-bottom pro-tuberance, tropos as "vertical kinetics"
(Paul, 136). The Diorite stone as a kind of benign monstrosity rhymes with the
"Maximus" persona (again, so complexly as to leave "persona'' with a flat ring). It also
links up with the poem "Peloria" (257), in which a dream sequence has a hermaphroditic
Maximus as a "whelping mother" and a malevolent dog that will increasingly become the
type of the threatening monster in the series. Butterick's indications of Olson's sources
(Guide, 36869) show Olson thinking of "peloria" as ambiguously "monster and portent"
(Harrison, as quoted by Butterick). Olson's transformation, making his own this richly
ambiguous portent/monstrosity, leads to this statement:
I am making a mappemunde. It is to include my being.
It is called here, at this point and point of time
Peloria.
(257)

Olson's rich myth-thinking goes beyond the Renaissance cartographer's inclusion of

human figures on maps of the world, to open up the rich question of subjectivity,
incorporating the strongly ambiguous monstrosity with a statement of spatial and
temporal actuality.
14

For various reasonsmany of them tragic and personalthe poems that form Volume 3 of
The Maximus Poems return with obsessive insistence to the question of identity.15 As we
have been following the flux of poetic subjectivity, it may be too simple to

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assert, as Paul does: "It is notable too that Maximus himself disappears in this volume and
Olson comes forward" (218). The complex poetic subjectivity that drives the poem, I
have been saying, simply will not allow for "Maximus" or even "Olson" to serve as
adequate markers for the subject who says ''I" in the poem. The turn toward directly
examining states of identityor loss of identityin the later Maximus poems shows a great
deal of painful searching along with the increased honesty of the personal speaker. But,
even aside from the biographical reasons, this should not come as a complete surprise.
Indeed, Olson's attitude toward how much to allow the personal into the poetic
subjectivity has been contradictory before this.
The stance of the poetic subjectivity interacts in this volume strongly with the freedom of
typographical diversity. One poem (Maximus, 438) that presents two obliquely crossing
lines (cf. Cook, "Projections") deals explicitly with the situatedness of the personal:
My shore, my sound, my earth, / / my place

[crossing with]:
afterwards, in between, and since

This fragment, with its subjectivity anchored in the personal possessive, echoes the poem
with which Olson expressly wished to conclude the series:
my wife my car my color and myself
(635)

As in the passage analyzed earlier ("I measure my song," 48) the repeated possessive
allows the individual elements to stand in an equipoise of relation. These two sections
from Volume 3 strongly frame the variations of personal investigations in a quiet repose,
an achieved grace of utterance.
The assuredness of these sections balances off against more pointed questioning
elsewhere, lines that question any possible identity, such as:
once more drawn into the
plague of my own unsatisfying possible identity as
denominable Charles Olson
(450)

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There are passages that seem to represent an effort to clear the poems of the personal:
It is not I,
even if the life appeared
biographical. The only interesting thing
is if one can be
an image
of man, "The nobleness and the arete."
(473)

Here Olson does not so much refute the personal as insist on the necessary completion in
the act of productionfrom tropos through to typosthat the work bear the stamp of the
"man" in order to become "his" image. The stamp of the made thing, "Only my written
word" (as the poem begins), is necessary to show not an individual's characteristics, but
rather lasting value.
Olson himself speaks in the "Beloits" of his effort in these poems to get away from
"Maximus" and to explore the "I." Referring to "[to get the rituals straight . . .'' (Maximus,
556), he says: "An obdurate or, as I say, an archaic time or condition. And the poem I
wrote two years ago was an attempt to bring this thing closer and try to talk as though it
was I rather than some creature like I said I call Maximus . . ." (Poetry and Truth, 34).
Here as in the earlier reference to the breakthrough into the "archaic," the archaic seems to
have a sense especially linked to a personal subjectivity. Besides the representation of
physical searching, as in this poem
I have
been a tireless Intichiuma eater & crawler of my own
ground
(556)

there are numerous poems where the weave of the myththought comes together in
dreams. In fact, through the "axis of combination" (Cook, Myth and Language, 66) that
Olson adapts from his research into myth, all kinds of personal, geographical, and archaic
material are presented as being part of the same overall thrust:
the
paths (Intichiuma

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made known,
Love made known
(557)

As the archaic thrust of the poems is increasingly made through inner researches, the
power of personal observation and statement widens in these poems, making them a truly
fit conclusion to such an ongoing production.
In the "Beloits" Olson uses the topos / tropos / typos triad not just to give a theoretical
matrix but also to order his presentation of the poems, some of which he says were even
"written for Beloit" (Poetry and Truth, 64). But as to what order they ultimately assume,
"whether tropism or this imprint of creation belong one before the other I have no way of
knowing" (64). One of the final poems he reads, he says, "isn't most conspicuously
tropistic (64), though for our purposes here it shows the inner resources of subjectivity.
The poem (in its entirety.) reads:
Wholly absorbed
into my own condition
an inner nature or subterranean lake
the depths or bounds of which I more and more
explore and know more
of, in that sense that other than that all else
closes out and I tend to fall further into
the Beloved Lake and I am blinder from
spending time as insistently in and on
this personal preserve from which
what I do emerges more well-known than
other ways and other outside places which
don't give as much and distract me from
keeping my attentions clear
"Additions," March 19682
(585)

If this poem is not "conspicuously tropistic," perhaps, in Olson's thinking, the movement
is inward and down rather than up and outward. So it may be that "tropism" and
"subjectivity" are not strictly synonymous; the latter term may thus be seen as
incorporating the former while embodying other possibilities as well. The "subterranean
lake'' here is a beautiful image for the Jungian researches that Olson had spent a decade
on, largely through dreamwork, showing how the archaic resides in inner reserves. The
sec

Page 107

ond stanza links up tropos and topos, if by "well-known" the speaker here implies the
stamped-out quality, of the earlier "Only my written word" (473). Certainly the final line
provides a memorably succinct summation to this clear and insightful work, while
simultaneously ringing one of the major themes of the poem from its inception.
The penultimate poem in the series "says it (all) in terms of topos, tropos, typos," as
Sherman Paul has noted (240). The poem reveals a richly achieved subjectivity as the
series moves toward its (tragically forced) conclusion:
the Blow is Creation
& the Twist the Nasturtium
is any one of Ourselves
And the Place of it All?
Mother Earth Alone
(Maximus, 634)

The "Blow" is clearly the stamping out of typos (cf. Butterick, Guide, 74950), both the
form given to the made work of artistic production and the form of the earth-source of
mythology. The "Twist," literally tropos, is associated with the poet's flower (Maximus,
632), as well as that emptying out or "Negative Capability" by which the poet seeks to
become "any one.'' "Place" as topos is likewise clear and expressed in moving simplicity.
The struggle with the materials of productionthe actual place and reality of Olson's
surroundings, the myth-thinking that he startlingly uses to reach back through to the
sources, and the poet's own experience and backgroundleaves a clear marking on the text
of The Maximus Poems. Through close attention to the shifting status of the speaking
subject, we as readers are enabled to reenact this process. We discover thereby a rich
poetic subjectivity, directed outward to the world and others.

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9
"They'll tell me it's difficult": Stein / Zukofsky
The ethical force of hermetic texts shows forth in the experimental work of Gertrude
Stein and Louis Zukofsky. Without going into a historical review of literary hermeticism,
it is my claim here that the difficulties both poets pose in their long poems are ways of
incorporating the surrounding realities they both faced into the form itself of their works.
This poetic practice points to the crucial related question of the communicative aspect of
these textscan poems that respond to the surrounding reality of "others" become so
difficult that these others are excluded from the experience of the text? I will show,
through a detailed reading of Stein's "Stanzas in Meditation" and Zukofsky's "A''
(especially "A" 22 and 23), that both poets take their ethical responsibility extremely
seriously, especially where the question of communication (or lack thereof) is raised.
1 The criticism of Stein's and Zukofsky's experimental work in my view too often

conflates the two stages I have outlined, mistaking a lack of "precision" or "lucidity" in
the texts for a failure of ethicity.2 As the ethical dimension of literary works comes
increasingly into play in the current critical discourse, it is imperative that we not exclude
from our attention the ethical force of these exemplary hermetic works.3
Much of Gertrude Stein's literary output, especially in her final phase of literary activity, is
directly about the making of literature.4 Stein stated repeatedly, as here from The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, that "one writes for oneself and strangers," apparently
addressing thereby the question of communication in the literary work.5 My subsequent
analysis of "Stanzas in Meditation" will show that her attitude toward this potential
audience of strangers was anything but straightforward. How others come to be part of
one's literary material was also a question that Stein investigated repeatedly in her works.
The basic axioms of literary production in Stein's

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theory tend toward a deceptive simplicity, such as: "Observation and construction make
imagination, that is granting the possession of imagination" (Selected Writings, 72). The
latter part of this dictum clearly relates to Stein's theory of the genius, which she labors in
the two autobiographies. The first half of the statement bears increased scrutiny as it
points toward the surrounding reality that Stein always claimed as her subject. In the
somewhat earlier lecture, "Composition as Explanation," Stein addresses the issues of
observation and others: ''The only thing that is different from one time to another is what
is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything. That makes
the thing we are looking at very different and this makes what those who describe it make
of it, it makes a composition, it confuses, it shows, it is, it looks, it likes it as it is, and this
makes what is seen as it is seen. Nothing changes from generation to generation except
the thing seen and that makes a composition" (Selected Writings, 513). For me Stein's
statement points in at least two directions: toward her theory of artistic productionthe
writings on Picasso, for example, are based on many of these premisesand backward, as it
were, to her theory, of psychological types or "bottom nature" underlying much of The
Making of Americans and other works of her first major period. Although by definition
such a philosophy of composition cannot be described as progressive, it is inclusive and
points toward the emphasis on society and other people that is a prominent feature in all
of Stein's works.
In yet another direction, Stein's philosophy of composition cited above leads her to a
certain simplicity in her practice, a simplicity, that surprisingly allies her with Louis
Zukofsky. In an interview near the end of her life, Stein accounted for her cryptic
answers to various literary questionnaires by saying: "That does not interest me; it is like
the Gallup Poll. After all, my only thought is a complicated simplicity. I like a thing
simple, but it must be simple through complication. Everything must come into your
scheme; otherwise you cannot achieve real simplicity."
6 Whether paradox or oxymoron, Stein's "complicated simplicity" is an elegant phrase to

describe her own practice and one that begins to address ethical issues of audience that
are the larger subject here. Zukofsky found a link between Stein's idea of complicated
simplicity and his own poetics in a statement of Einstein that he quotes twice: "Everything
should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler."7 In fact, the essay

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on William Carlos Williams where this quote appears serves to link two otherwise
separate passages in "A" 12 which bear looking at in some depth.
In the essay on Williams, Zukofsky uses Stein, "one of Williams' interests" (Prepositions,
50), to argue the questions of science, explanation, simplicity, and (implicitly) the poet's
relation to the times. Zukofsky quotes from The Making of Americans: "Knowledge is a
thing you know and how can you know more than you know . . . Before that in all the
periods before things had been said been known been described been sung about, been
fought about been destroyed been imprisoned been lost but never been explained. So
then they began to explain. And we may say that they have been explaining ever since.
And as I say we are still in the shadow of it" (Prepositions, 50; ellipses in the text). This is
followed by: "There is also the other side of the same coin minted by Einstein:
'Everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler'a scientist's defense of art and
knowledgeof lightness, completeness and accuracy" (5051). Zukofsky translated a
biography of Einstein anonymously in 1931 and used him as a touchstone after, much as
he does Stein.
8 The associative Zukofsky logic at work here seems to link Stein's remark (as an attack

on science?) to Einstein's own approach to scientific knowledge through the shared value
of simplicity; but then again, not an easy simplicity, but rather one that acknowledges and
makes use of the discourses of the scientist among others.
Zukofsky had said early on that "a simple order of speech is an asset in poetry."9 Later in
"A" 12 he shows some of his associative logic in ringing the changes on this phrase by
Einstein:
Had he asked me to say Kadish
I believe I would have said it for him.
How fathom his will
Who had taught himself to be simple.
Everything should be as simple as it can be,
Says Einstein,
But not simpler.
What can make the difficult disposition easier?
Not to be difficult.
Can there be
A difficult composition?
(A 143)

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Through a process of selection I have already made this passage seem simpler than it
really is. In context, this passage is part of a long meditation on Zukofsky's father's death
and religion (ambiguously shared by the poet), on the naming of his son Paul after his
father Pinchos while the latter was still alive (another rub on the tradition), Bach's music,
Aristotle's ethics, and several other major themes. One critic points to the German spelling
of "Kadish" as linking this passage to Zukofsky's earlier major work, "Poem beginning
'The.'"
10 Here the emphasis is on the poet's father, "simple" in a respectful appellation. The

"difficult disposition" in the following strophe ambiguously implicates the father, as well
as the poet himself. From "disposition'' to "composition," the matter of poetic difficulty
intrudes, though "composition" carries with it the musical associations as well.
Later in "A" 12, Zukofsky investigates the Stein quote, in another passage dense with
associations:
A poetics is informed and informs
Just informs maybethe rest a risk.
Or: that a bit of culture
Dies a sudden death
Of a man over ninety
That much culture is little breath
[. . .]
Or: remember, G.S. begins
"Making of Americans"
With a quote
From Nicomachus' father
With patient father and angry son
(A 168)

The quotation cited earlier from the essay follows this passage, once again in the context
of what to teach his young son Paul. The family contextteaching the son, the death of the
poet's father as the loss of a culturefar from making this a private experience actually
anchors the teaching, the transmission of cultural knowledge, in the ethical realm.
Zukofsky, among other things, reminds us of the familial dimension to Stein's work as
well. But the lead-in, the reflection on his own poetics, carries with it a certain diffidence.
The ethical dimension of the project that is the poem is firmly statedthe hope that others
will benefit remains just that. How this multiple layering of ethical response to the world
of others and the

Page 112

practice of the poetic text could ever be viewed as "simple" is what I now examine in the
practice of both Zukofsky and Stein.
Following the standard division of Stein's work into three major periods, the main period
of experimentation is the second. "Stanzas in Meditation" (1932) in a sense brings this
period to a close, at the same time that The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas inaugurates
the final phase of her literary production. In the later part of her experimental period,
Stein became "increasingly aware of the presence of an audience," according to Michael
Hoffman.
11 Asked to lecture publicly in the late twenties, Stein produced such texts as

"Composition as Explanation," cited earlier. Her opera in collaboration with Virgil

Thomson, Four Saints in Three Acts (Selected Writings, 577612), enjoyed a great public
success and began to make Stein into the public persona that she celebrated in the
autobiographies of the thirties. Richard Bridgman has proposed that ''Stanzas in
Meditation" "was written concurrently with The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, as a
Steinian apologia for consenting to produce a popular book."12 Despite the weakness of
Bridgman's supporting evidence for this claim, this view has been widely adopted by
others. Briefly stated, Bridgman's argument is based on the similarity between the style of
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and works authored by Toklas herself after Stein's
death. This leads to the tantalizing possibility "that Alice Toklas composed her own
autobiography" (Bridgman, 209). Lacking any hard evidence to this effect, Bridgman in
essence bases his entire argument on an uncomprehending reading of "Stanzas in
Meditation," which "proves" that Stein wrote the poem out of guilt for claiming
authorship for the autobiography (20913). Bridgman adduces no evidence for his view
that the two works were written concurrently, even though this contradicts Stein's (or
Toklas's) statement that Stein finished "Stanzas" just before writing the autobiography
(Selected Writings, 212; Autobiography, 276; Bridgman, 213). Despite the (in my own
view, extremely limited) interest in the question of who actually wrote the autobiography,
Bridgman's authoritative reading, based entirely on guesswork and inference, has had the
effect of obscuring "Stanzas in Meditation" from serious attention. In fact, only because
he doesn't understand the work can he base his claim on it: this in turn validates all
subsequent readings which claim that the work cannot be understood.
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar base their reading of "Stanzas" entirely on Bridgman's
thesis.13 Their bias against experimental

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works is expressed in a breezy dismissal of Stein's experimental period: "Draining

significance from what has historically signified, Stein's oeuvre in the middle of her
career is easier and more fun to theorize about than it is to read" (No Man's Land, 2:245).
14 Gilbert and Gubar defend mimetic language with two opposed strategies: historical

signification, which they don't bother to define, and "fun," a less than rigorous category
for investigating significant literary works. Gilbert and Gubar in fact are interested in
"Stanzas'' mainly for what it says about literary collaboration, especially the
Autobiography. (Why they should be interested in questions of possible collaboration is
clear enough.)
Other feminist critics have taken Stein's literary experimentalism much more seriously,
though still not according much attention to the "Stanzas." Randa Dubnick applies some
major structuralist models to her discussions of Stein's "obscurity." Using Jakobson's
model of the horizontal and vertical axes of metonymy and metaphor, Dubnick proposes
dividing Stein's experiments with language according to its analytic (prose) and synthetic
(poetry) phases, respectively. Stein's own remarks on poetry lend support to Dubnick's
argument that the poetry represents the vertical axis of nomination.15 This useful
distinction between, say, the style of The Making of Americans and Tender Buttons points
to another problem in discussing Stein's experimental work, one that limits Dubnick and
others. The poetry that Stein had published when she began her public lectures in the late
twenties was very limited. So, while the emphasis on noun-centered styles may be of use
when discussing Tender Buttons, the same emphasis will not carry very far when
discussing what I view as Stein's major experimental work in the long poem, a series that
only begins to be defined by works published posthumously such as "Lifting Belly"
(191415), "Patriarchal Poetry" (1927), and "Stanzas in Meditation" (1932).16
Marianne DeKoven centers her work explicitly on Stein's "experimental" writing, giving
that term a useful definition as "that writing which violates grammatical convention,
thereby preventing normal reading" (xivxv). Further, she argues, correctly I think, that
Stein's experimental work is at least implicitly feminist: "Although Stein never intended to
be anti-patriarchal . . . opposition to partriarchal modes seems to me the ultimate raison
d'tre for all experimental writing" (xvi). DeKoven takes a next step of determining the
effective levels of experimentation in Stein's work according to Noam Chomsky's "levels
of grammaticalness."17

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According to this classification, Chomsky's famous example, "colorless green ideas sleep
furiously," attains a second degree of grammaticalness, more than totally asyntactic, yet
not fully grammatical in the sense that most readers would be able to comprehend or
unproblematically assimilate the phrase (DeKoven, 10; Chomsky, 222). DeKoven values
this second-degree style of experimentation in Stein because of the "core" meanings that
are still present (e.g., in "Rue de Rennes," DeKoven 5360). She judges works as "failed''
experiments when they fall into Chomsky's first degree (DeKoven's third) of
grammaticality. Leaving aside whether the linguist's theory, can account for the presence
or absence of literary values (I don't think it can, finally)my main problem with
DeKoven's criticism on Stein is that other categories are brought in at those times in her
argument when it comes to assessing the value of different works. Thus, "Stanzas in
Meditation" is classed together with "Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship
Faded" (Writings and Lectures, 27487), which I agree is in some sense a failed work, and
dismissed because of the presence of "poetic" diction (DeKoven, 1057). Here it seems to
me that DeKoven has left the categories she works so hard to establish just at the point
where they would at least serve to pose the more important questions of language, the
relation of language to experience, and thus the communicative aspect of language, that
are especially at issue in such experimental works.
For I think it is very important that the feminist dimension of Stein's work be taken
seriously, especially in the theorizing of "experimental" work as defined by resistance to
patriarchy. In this I agree with Lisa Ruddick that "Stein's most obscure texts, texts that
have received attention only as important stylistic experiments, are in fact filled with ideas
and that the ideas are sophisticated and coherent. We might also call them feminist ideas.
Stein is both more intelligible and more centrally interested in issues of gender than has
been thought."
18 It may be, in fact, that Stein's value to the literary canon, which has yet to be

established, may emerge most interestingly in the intersecting discursive spaces of literary,
feminism, lesbian activism, and woman-oriented writing generally. As I discuss at some
length in my final chapter, experimental writing is too often excluded from the discourses
of feminist literary theory, and there are some serious reasons for this that I discuss there,
as well as some deleterious consequences.
Interestingly enough, the best assessment of Stein's "Stanzas" was one of the first to
appear. John Ashbery at least takes seriously

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the literary experimentalism of the poem, representing as it does for him an "impossible"
task.
19 He also anticipates what will be my approach to the importance of personal pronouns

in the work: "Perhaps the word that occurs oftenest in the Stanzas is the word 'they,' for
this is a poem about the world, about 'them.' . . . As we get deeper into the poem, it seems
not so much as if we were reading as living a rather long period of our lives with a
houseful of people" ("The Impossible," 250). Now I don't think this statement is entirely
accurate. ''They" in "Stanzas" do a lot of "entering," "coming," and so forth (as I analyze
below), but they definitely are not allowed to set up house. Ashbery's statement is
interesting to me in part because it shows how Ashbery in a sense uses Stein's work to
establish his own mode for the intersubjective consciousness that we normally associate
with his work beginning about a decade later.20
There is no question that "Stanzas in Meditation" is a daunting work: a poem in five parts:
each part containing between sixteen and eighty-three stanzas (Part 3 has two stanzas
entitled "Stanza II" and two stanzas entitled "Stanza XVI"); with stanzas ranging from one
line to several pages; and almost no mimetic "content." As I hope to show, the deep
subject of the poem is the relationship of the poet to her audience, presented as "I" and
"they," with the poem itself as the space where all of the problems and ambiguities that
Stein felt about this relationship come into play. In the first (posthumous) publication of
the poem, Donald Sutherland offered a gloss on the first line of the poem, "I caught a
bird that made a ball" (The Yale Gertrude Stein, 316; Stanzas in Meditation, 3), as: "I
captured a 'lyricity' that constituted a complete and self-contained entity" (Stanzas, xiii).
Yet the phrase itself continues: "I caught a bird that made a ball / And they thought better
of it," While I don't disagree with Sutherland's interpretation of the first line, the second
line is at least as important as the first. It could variously be taken to mean: they (others,
audience, friends, posterity) in fact liked the work, "thought well of it"; or that they
regretted its appearance, as the colloquial sense reverses the sense of "better"; or that they
somehow cancelled it altogether, as one thinking better of an act does not commit it; or,
following the bird image, that "they" somehow let it go. Just as the first line, as
Sutherland states, represents an atypical instance of Stein's use of "symbolization"
(Stanzas, xiii), the second line, more typically, accumulates meanings around a
commonplace expression, which in turn explores the ambiguous relationship "they" have
to the poet's work in a way that will come to structure the entire drama of the poem.

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The overall drama of the poem then is the relationship between readers, or others in
general, they, and the text/author, mine/I. Stein explores the questions: To what extent do
others impinge on the creation of the text and thus, to some extent, on the author's
identity? To what extent can readers enter (where come equals understanding) the region
of understanding created by the text? Do they by entering this region (coming) become
part of the text, or mine? Stein displays a radical ambiguity concerning these
questionswhy should what they want in any way determine what she as a writer does? But
the poem's strength is that Stein doesn't simply say no to the others' desires, but follows
out the textual implications in her composition practice. The textual "I am I" (Part V:
LXX, 457) creates the subject's identity; that knowing is bound up in their knowing; they
by coming become mineor do they?
The key terms in the poem are, not surprisingly: know, knowing, known, choice, choose,
coming, meaning, pleasure, feeling, thought, welcome, remember, place, roses,
difference, landscape. In the poem Stein spends considerable time counting to three.
(Three is the number of relationship, or the symbolic order, in Lacan.)
21 The pronoun structure, on which I focus my attention, is centered around the

alternation or relationship of I and they and their various forms. He / she is not very
important and tends to "shift," as in Ashbery. Us / ours is almost nonexistent in the poem
and the youvery important in "Lifting Belly" (e.g.) or ''A Sonatina Followed by Another"
(The Yale Gertrude Stein, 287315), as one would expect in love poems is very rare in
"Stanzas" and occurs almost entirely in the two phrases "I love you" (standard personal)
and "Thank you" (standard public). It is also rare in "Stanzas" that they refers to anything
nonhuman. There is an apparent argument about a tree (Part I: VIII, 325), mention of
roses, strawberries and raspberries, some meditation on the respective advantages of
English vs. Italian. Otherwise the burden of the poem is the I/they relation. After Stanza I
of Part I, the next ten Stanzas begin with a line concerning them:
II: It is not with them that they come
III: It is not now that they could answer
IV: Just when they ask their questions they will always go
away
V: Why can pansies be their aid or paths.
VI: I have not heard from him but they ask more
VII: Make a place made where they need land

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VIII: I ought not to have known that they came well
IX: With which they can be only made to brush
X: Might they remember that he did not dislike
XI: But which it is not by that they are rich

Repetition with Stein, as she often noted, is a form of insistence. Repetition in these
opening phrases calls attention to sameness (they) as well as to inevitable differences, in
this case the different contexts in which they appear. On the level of grammar, only one
line is punctuated as a sentence, but overall the variance from standard grammar is never
very, marked. Except for the pansies in Stanza V (cf. roses in my list above), there are
few instances of overly poetic diction for which DeKoven criticizes the poem.
22

Stanzas XII and XIV of Part I begin with a line including she. The end of Stanza XI may
thus be viewed as a turning point in the poem to this point:
Just as soon as ever if they come
By that in trial that they manage
It is for this for which for them for her
Coming to think it only as they knew
Known makes it plain I shall
Think birds and ways and frogs and grass and now
That they call meadows more
I have seen what they know
(The Yale Gertrude Stein, 32930)

According to my discussion so far, "they come" has something to do with others entering
the poem, possibly by reading and understanding it. Here that process is termed a "trial"
as the poem's acknowledged difficulty seems to recognize. This "coming" becomes a form
of ''knowing," though the syntactic wrenching between the fourth and fifth lines is the
strongest in the passage. The fifth line looks back to the fourth through the link "knew /
known" and forward to the next line "I shall / Think." How is "it" made "plain"? Is it
made evident? Is it flattened out? The things "I shall / Think"birds, ways, frogs,
grassseem to be perceptual particulars flattened out into what "they call meadows." Does
this mean that the particulars of the poet's experience are condensed and standardized in
the speech of the poem the readers are allowed to share? There is a clear link between
poet's perception and reader's knowledge in the final line. All of this is deepened by the
question "for whom?" in the third line, through which "she" enters, to become the focus
of the stanzas that follow. Stanza XV, the final stanza of Part I,

Page 118

returns to what "they" are doing, possibly with respect to the traditional roles of poetry:
"Should they can be they might if they delight" (332). Delighting in this stanza is tied to
seeing: "It is very well to have seen what they have seen" (333). Both of these activities
are mixed in with gardening (Toklas's sphere of activity). Presumably because "it is well
to have seen," they become "well-wishers'' in the final lines of the Stanza as Part I moves
toward a definite closure: "And so they think well of well-wishers. / I have my wellwishers thank you." The Stein formulaic "thank you" indicates the public realm of polite
(phatic) discourse and is often used as a form of closure, setting off the inner drama of
the text from the public sphere of utterance.
The I/they relationshipnot a dialogue, I don't thinkcontinues to structure the movement of
Part II, Stanza XI, which begins:
I thought how could I very well think that
But which they were a choice that now they know
For which they could always be there and asking

and ends thirty-eight lines later:

They have been with the place their place
Why is there not why is there not with doubt.
Not able to be with mine.

The Stanza begins with a shift from I to they and ends with the inverse motion. The
beginning seems to view the inclusion of "them" in the thinking process as a burden.
Once included they have to have choices: to be open to the other without seeking to
control the other's subjectivity is the essence of the ethical.
23 But what a pain they can be: "always there and asking." To the extent that this

understanding becomes "their place," at the end of the stanza, this seems to block the
poet's possession of her own utterance: "Not able to be with mine."
The conflict between letting them into the act of knowing that is the poem and the
resulting lack of possession, or mine, that this leads to in Part II, is refigured in Part III as
a crisis of identity and naming. In Stanza XI of Part III we encounter the possibility of a
nameless I, which is quickly rejected:
I cannot often be without my name.
Not at all
They will not wonder which at a time
And can it be alright.

Page 119
They can lead any one away.
Now look not at that.
(The Yale Gertrude Stein, 365)

To be nameless leads to the possibility of one being led away, for it seems that for I to
become merely a one means they will not care to step in and prevent the resulting loss of
identity. Naming returns in Stanza XV:
Could it be thought did would
By it a name.
I think I could say what nobody thought
Nobody thought I went there
This is however that they add sufficiently
Because it is better not allowed
All will come too.
(367)

Thought needs a name to have an identity"By it a name" sliding into "Buy it a name" and
the commodity aspect of authorship (Foucault). The possibility of originality is hinted at
in the third line, undercut by the repetition of"Nobody thought" in different syntactic
position in the following line. "I went'' resonates in a textual space that Stein has claimed
with the verbs of coming and entering used repeatedly to suggest understanding the text.
"Nobody thought" shifts rapidly into "All will come too"even though the author runs the
risk of namelessness or nonidentity, everyone has access to the text the author produces
in order to gain a name.
Why anyone should run such risks for such a small chance at successful possession is a
question asked but answered only obliquely, as at the end of Stanza XVI:
Once more I return to why I went
I went often and I was not mistaken.
And why was I not mistaken
Because I went often.
(371)

Stein here asserts the artist's stubborn insistenceinsistence as repetitionthat some part of
the artist's inclination is unerring, though curiously not individualistic in my reading. This
insistence becomes an open conflict with the reader, though it depends on the reader to
listen (Stanza XIX):
I cannot think with indifference
Nor will they not want me

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Do will they add would or they would or not
For which they for which fortunately
Make it be mine.
I have often thought of make it be mine.
Now I ask anyone to hear me.
This is what I say.
(37576)

This tone of struggle and conflict is expressed at the end of the Stanza as a form of
anxiety: "Anxious to please not only why but when / So then anxious to mean. I will not
now." Stanza XX follows up this emotionally strong passage with self-commentary,
beginning:
Now I recount how I felt when dwelt upon it.
I meant all of it to be not rather yes I went
[. . .]
It does make a difference how often they go
Or will they prepare that I know
I know this I know that I shall say so
Or can they choose an anagram
This one said this one.
(376)

Feeling joins meaning here in the verb of going, "I went," that by now characterizes the
space of the text. The lines that follow acknowledge the role readers play in "how often
they go" and whether and what ''they choose." The strange word here, to my reading, is
anagram. Does Stein mean that the reader, by choosing, has the power to make what "I
say" into just what any "one said"? Faced with this possibility, of anonymity in spite of
emotional risks and feelings of anxiety, Stein's response is ultimately defiant. Part III
(Stanza XXI) ends:
I could not favor leaves of trees in any case
Place me to mine.
This is not what they care or for poetry.
(37879)

Stein's defiance from this point on in the poemcrisis of identity avertedwill be to say: the
poem is mine, if they enter they become mine, and whether they enter or not is up to
them.
Even though Part IV repeats the shift from I to they in the beginning of Stanza I, there is a
continued defiance, recognizably the same kind of self-vaunting as in the autobiography:

Page 121
I should think it makes no difference
That so few people are me.
That is to say in each generation there are so few geniuses
And why should I be one which I am
[. . .]
I am interested not only in what I hear but as if
They would hear
Or she can be plainly anxious.
(380)

The way the self-vaunting merges rather quickly into a form of anxiety shows that the
two are deeply related. As dominated as The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is by this
kind of puffery, the relative lack of it in "Stanzas" makes the latter, for me, a more
genuine work, an autobiography of doubt and uncertainty in the mind of the writer. This
is the significance I see in the line, "This is an autobiography in two instances" (The Yale
Gertrude Stein, 389): Stein realizing that putting so much of her creative self into such a
poem about her relationship to her potential audience is a form of autobiography. As
many writers on Stein have emphasized (e.g., Hoffman, 12122), her increased celebrity
caused her to doubt her "writing self" (if we can call it that) and thus suffer from loss of
identity at the very moment she became someone. But as the interior drama of this poem
shows, such a struggle was much present to her mind before her period of greatest
celebrity. And it seems very, much to be involved with questions of understanding.
Paradoxically, in Stein's most difficult poetic text she explores exactly the question of
understanding:
I have thought that I would not mind if they came
But I do.
I also thought that it made no difference if they came
But it does.
(The Yale Gertrude Stein, 391)

What is her audience to make of her, her work, she seems to ask: "Should they call me
what they call me / When they come to call on me" (392). Though she claims, "It does not
bother me not to delight them" (396), clearly it matters what they think. Part IV
concludes:
It is difficult not to think how celebrated I am.
And if I think how celebrated I am
They know who know that I am new

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That is I knew I know how celebrated I am
And after all it astonishes even me.
(403)

Such an autobiographical account of literary fame is redeemedif it isprimarily through the

way in which they are accorded such a prominent place in the speaker's astonishment.
Part V of "Stanzas" expands in length to nearly the length of Parts IIV combined.
24 This is an overt strategy of Part V, as the beginning of Stanza VI makes explicit:
This one will be just as long
As let it be no mistake to know
That in any case they like what they do
If I do what I do I do too
That is to say this conclusion is not with which.
(408)

The reason Part V goes on so long is that the final working out of the relation between
expression and understanding, meaning and acceptance, the reality of others and one's
own identity, is a nearly interminable problem. Readers willing to enter this investigation
eventually become mine, the text implies, just as the text is mine to the speaker: "In which
in which case / Can they be mine in mine" (42829). Paradoxically, the mine of the text
radically escapes the I who creates it despite creating a textual identity for the writer. The
emptying-out of selfhood in the creation of the textual identity occurs as a shocking
reversal toward the end of the poem:
I often think will I be thought to know
Oh yes of course I will be known to know
I will be here I will be here and here
It may not be that it is I am here.
(447)

Despite the later affirmation "That I am I" (457), the effect here is almost one of sleightof-hand. The readers, by entering into the maze of the text, have become mine, but the I
who in some sense created this experience has both affirmed its own identity and
vanished from the scene. Thus the text can only wait, as at the end of Stanza LXXXIII,
which is also the end of the poem:
Why am I if I am uncertain reasons may inclose.
Remain remain propose repose chose.
I call carelessly that the door is open
Which if they can refuse to open

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No one can rush to close.
Let them be mine therefor.
Everybody knows that I chose.
Therefor if therefor before I close.
I will therefor offer therefor I offer This.
Which if I refuse to miss can be miss is mine.
I will be well welcome when I come.
Because I am coming.
Certainly I am come having come.
These stanzas are done.

Stein's text confronts directly the question of ethicity. Its difficulties are genuine, because
the questions it poses are difficult onesidentity, meaning, understanding. For all that, it
awaits its future readers in a state of startling simplicity.
Louis Zukofsky is another poet who struggled all his productive life with questions of
simplicity and difficulty, producing works in different genres with a similar drive toward
ethical expression. The title of the present chapter is taken from the end of a text of an
interview with the poet late in his life. In context, the poet is trying to emphasize the
ethical thrust of his work by contrasting a passage from "A" 13 with a passage from his
long prose work on Shakespeare, ethics, and epistemology, Bottom: On Shakespeare.
25 When the text of his statement was poorly printed without his knowledge, Zukofsky

cared enough to bring out an eight-page edition of the corrected text, which he then
included in his collected essays, Prepositions. As he says at the end of the statement:
"Well maybe that explains itthey'll tell me it's difficult" (Prepositions, 172). The sixty-fiveyear-old poet had struggled throughout his lifetime with the knowledge of his own
obscurity to the reading public. But, like Stein, Zukofsky made the ethical stance toward
the experience of others a basis of his poetics. His major long poem "A" likewise awaits
future generations of readers in a ''complicated simplicity."
In A Test of Poetry (finished in 1936, published in 1948),26 Zukofsky addressed at some
length the questions of where poetry, comes from and to whom it is addressed:
Poetry does not arise and exist in a vacuum. It is one of the artssometimes individual, sometimes
collective in originand reflects economic and social status of peoples; their language habits arising
out of everyday matter of fact; the

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constructions which the intelligence and the emotions make over and apart from the everyday after it
has been understood and generally expressed [ . . . ]
The less poetry is concerned with everyday existence and the rhythmic talents of a people, the less
readable that poetry is likely to be. But the forms of particular communicationwhich are necessary
enough for a varied lifemay never, in any society, be absorbed as automatically as air.
(A Test of Poetrty, 99)

The former part of this statement demonstrates Zukofsky's allegiance to socialist and
Marxist theories of the thirties. This radical ideology in itself distinguishes Zukofsky
politically from Stein, who seems to have been a political conservative despite her
sexually alternative life-style. The second part of the statement shows Zukofsky's distance
from social realism as an artistic doctrine, and hints at the strong hermeticism which
characterizes much of his own practice (and which continues to draw fire from dogmatic
Marxist critics like Eric Mottram).
Zukofsky's commitment to poetic form"Poetry convinces not by argument but by the
form it creates to carry its content" (Test of Poetry, 52)also involved him, as it did Stein,
in a lifelong questioning of identity. In a statement on "Poetry (For my Son When He Can
Read)," Zukofsky concludes with a moving acknowledgment of the flux of identity:
"Writing this, Paul, for a time when you can read, I do not presume that you will read
'me.' That 'me' will be lost today when he says goodnight on your third birthday, and not
missed tomorrow when he says good morning as you begin your fourth year. It took all
human time to nurse those greetings. And how else can the poet speak them but as poet''
(Prepositions, 11).
27 As a contrast to the potentially very conservative stance Zukofsky apparently approved

of in Stein"Nothing changes from one generation to another except the things seen" (cited
in Bottom, 261)the flux of identity here ensures the element of change against a
background of poetic tradition. In a sense, nothing mattered more to Zukofsky than the
continuity of poetic forms as they embody unchanging ethical values: "Seeing cannot be
on to a new way but always on the same way in a different placeand so with equal pace to
hear and think out of time, but never false to a time. Lesser art is not different except it
shows and moves less" (Bottom, 185). The future (the poet's son), the present time,
poetry also guards the important values of the past: "Poetry if anything has a sense for

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everything. Meaning: without poetry life would have little present. To write poems is not
enough if they do not keep the life that has gone" (Prepositions, 3). Zukofsky obviously
sees poetry as fulfilling a crucial function in the social and communal life of people. The
writing of poetry itself, in this view, can never take place without the highest ethical sense
of the involvement of others.
Zukofsky criticism fortunately recognizes this ethical thrust for the most part, though the
body of critical work on Zukofsky is shockingly small. Barry Ahearn's book-length study
of "A" recognizes the constant effort that readers must devote to an understanding of the
text: "By refusing to be the god of his poem, Zukofsky invites participation by the reader.
We are pressed into service, whether we like it or not, and asked to complete the poem
with our interpretations."
28 Though in some sense true of all literary works, the participation of the readers is

especially crucial to an understanding of "A" both because of its tremendous difficulties

and the fact that, as with other long poems of the twentieth century that I have been
examining from Saint-John Perse to Charles Olson, Zukofsky rejects a narrow focus on
the inner drama that characterizes Romantic and early modernist work in this form. I find
Don Byrd has preceded me in this observation: "By the beginning of the twentieth
century, the poet arrived at the point where it seemed impossible to speak of anything but
himself. In Zukofsky's criticism, however, these terms [image, sound, and the interplay of
concepts] are restated as precise foci of almost two centuries of radical poetic and
philosophic thought. In his careful understanding of the situation, he establishes a
practice which relates the poem object not to poet alone but to experience at large and
other individuals" (in Terrell, Louis Zukofsky, 176). Although I find that Byrd does not
provide nearly enough evidence for these assertions, the overall sense merges well with
the overall goal of my study hereto establish exteriority as the working model for the
practice of the long poem in the latter part of this century. What needs to be emphasized is
that the hermetic form of the poem works toward establishing the ethical force of the text
as much as the poet's intent to represent the surrounding reality of others.29
Having discussed some elements of Zukofsky's "complicated simplicity" early on in his
career, as well as having indicated in the barest terms Zukofsky's views on the ethical
nature of poetry, I want to face the toughest challenge Zukofsky's oeuvre presents and
examine the last two movements of "A": 22 and 23 (last in terms of

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their dates of composition: 197073 and 197374, respectively). These two sections of the
poem are the most hermetic in a very difficult work and ultimately must raise questions
about the relation of ethics and communication. Breaking down syntax much more
radically than even a work like Stein's "Stanzas," A-22 and A-23 are identical in length
(1,000 lines each) and are composed according to an austere five-words-per-line pattern
that the poet had worked in before, notably in his translation of Plautus's Rudens (A-21).
In fact, if there is a context for the radical language experiments in A-22 and A-23, it is to
be found in the Rudens translation (1967), Zukofsky's versions of Catullus (1969), and
his final finished work, 80 Flowers (published posthumously in 1978).
30

A-22 begins with an "air" which Zukofsky compared to Wallace Stevens's "Puella
Parvula" (Prepositions, 32). Air is a key word in both A-22 and A-23: one of the four
elements, it is also what gives breath to sing, and is another word for song. The air begins
with three lines in bold type:
AN ERA
ANY TIME
OF YEAR
(A-22, 508)

Barry Ahearn see two columns of three words each (181); but if "anytime" is seen as one
word (it's actually hard to tell from the printed text), then there are five words, one in the
center, equidistant from each of four others, the form of a quincunx.31 Quincunx is a
recurring word in A-22, in part because it is a form that is both natural and human.
Flowers and leaves often show patterns of five; orchards are planted in quincuncial
arrangements as were the oracles in ancient times; a hand has five fingers. Zukofsky's
theme in A-22 and A-23 is the emergence of natural forms into human forms of
knowledge, whether thought, sight, or activity. A horse can be seen as a pattern of fivelike
an orchard, a horse is part of nature that exists in its present form due to human
intervention, serves humankind, yet is apart from it. Finally, the five-word lines arranged
in five-line stanzas form the first hundred lines of both A-22 and A-23 and the last ninetyseven of A-22 (cf. Levi-Strauss, 82).
The opening "air" of A-22 continues:
Others letters a sum owed
ages account years each year

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out of old fields, permute
blow blue up against yellow
scapes welcome young birdsinitial

How do we read such a poem? Abeam believes we must supply a pronoun: "I owed
others . . ." or "Others owed me . . ." in order to complete the syntax (187). In a sense we
are back to the problem that Stein's critics have worried over: what to do about apparently
aberrant syntactic constructions? Another solution to the first line would be to see it as an
example of Pound's "radical juxtaposition without copula." Following this lead, "others
letters" (others, letters or others' letters) are ''a sum owed," that is, Zukofsky
acknowledges his debt to the poets of the past (essentially the same as Ahearn's reading).
So much of one's experiencenot just poetry, but nature, the love of others, one's own
existencereminds one of an unpayable debt. Zukofsky's poem takes on these debts in a
turn outward, mainly in this passage toward nature as the "initial" beginning.
The poetry in A-22 moves in an area of deceptive simplicity as Zukofsky ranges from his
surroundings to natural history, the web of his personal involvements to the poetry of the
past. In many passages all of these elements glance off the associations set in motion by
simple words:
one air then a host
an air not my own
an earth of three trees
sleep revivesnight adds hours
awake to augur days impend
(509)

Having continued from the first strophe to explore birds, the "air" here could be birdsong,
which at dawn can quickly signal the awakening and furious activity of a multitude of
birds. The air one breathes is not one's own, nor are the songs, words, or tunes of poets
past. One's own song is not one's own once it is given over to others. (We saw how
insistently Stein returned to this.) The air welcomes birds as a host does guests, whereas
plants and humans are more comfortable on earth. "An earth of three trees" is perhaps a
"private" experience; both of these movements were composed when the Zukofskys lived
in Port Jefferson on Long Island in a house not far from their son Paul (Ahearn, 185).
Three has always been the key number in the Zukofsky family structure, as it is the

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number of them in Stein. The final two lines here indicate that much of the poem in this
section will simply be attentive to the events of single days.
After the first hundred lines, the poem enters a long stretch concerned with natural and
geological history. Why this should be is perhaps answered by the plays of Shakespeare
that deal with old age; Zukofsky's reformulation of the final lines of King Lear runs:
Summers looking across marshes to
mountains an old mind sees
more, thinking of a thought not his thought, older complexities:
("A," 512; initial italics mine)

Another recurring theme: a thought, but not "his thought." A way of fathoming the one:
"if created Once (a thought)" (513). The older person in seeing more sees all that is not
within the sphere of the ego, sees back into various pasts. This passage continues:
the fractional state of the
annals, a bird's merrythought graving
of quill and down, apposed
human cranium's dendritical crystallizations offer
no sure estimate of antiquity
only archaic time unchanged unchangeable:
(512)

Fractions can function as ratios, as they do throughout these movements. The annals are
also the books of history, and we remember that Zukofsky approved of Pound's
Confucian historian who left blanks for periods of no interest (Prepositions, 12). The
bird's song examined previously picks up the theme of "thought" in the previous lines,
but merrythought is actually the name for the wishbone. Unlike this hard evidence we can
touch, the brain (and this passage is obscure to me) offers no physical evidence of when
humans began to think, but only the archaic residue that underlies our modern "thinking"
in the structure of the human brain.
The Renaissance sought to move from nature to spirit through alchemy, the alchemical
"abstracter of / quintessence" (530). Zukofsky likewise sees an older order in modern
science, whether geology, biology, or zoology:
the emphatical decussation
quincunx chiasma of 5-leafed, 5-blossom,
and of olive orchards

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5 fingers of a hand
crossed X of bird merrythought:
conjugal or wedding number: all
things began in order to
end in Ordainer, yet always
few genera rule without exception,
(531)

A decussation is a "crossing of lines, fibres, rays, etc. to form an X," and usefully
describes optic nerves, among other physical and biological phenomena. It is also used
for the rhetorical chiasmus. Zukofsky's quincunx is the physical evidence for this
phenomenon in nature, as well as human ordering of nature. As part of the entry for
merrythought, the OED says pulling on the wishbone determines who will marry first, as
quincunxes in antiquity were associated with the divinatory, practice of oracles. The order
of nature reflects or is reflected by the orderly nature of the human mind and both of
these arguments have been used to prove the existence of God. In Zukofsky's poem, the
quincunx is most often associated with thought: "crossways opposite leaves thought
quincunx" and ''thinking quincunx when a flash" (533). His poetic form in these
asyntactic five-word lines affords thought its true complexity, not controlled by a linear
functionality, not merely ambiguous, but truly various, shooting off in the four cardinal
directions at once.
Zukofsky is truly serious in all of this language play. If his poetry presents difficulties,
that is because the complexities exist in the world and in our efforts to understand it and
each other. A repeated phrase that embodies the ethics of language links A-22 and A-23:
Trivial uttered, hard to stand
under (A-22, 519)
Trivial uttered
hard to stand under
(A-23, 544)

Zukofsky's etymology, of understanding, which amazingly enough is not folk etymology,

comes in part from Shakespeare, when Launce in Two Gentlemen of Verona says: "Why
stand-under and understand is all one" (II, v; cf. Bottom, 51). This physical-mental
correlation is what Zukofsky finds in Aristotle, Spinoza, and Wittgenstein: "Launce
asserting 'stand-under and under-stand is all one' is as concise and complete an
explanation of Aristotle's temper and contentsfinal cause, thinking . . . substance is first,
and all the

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rest of itas any" (Bottom, 55). And that isethics: that one's utterances are part of one's
temper and understanding and ought to be judged accordingly. We can only assume that if
Zukofsky leads us through a difficult process of understanding it is because he respected
both the difficulties of language and experience as well as the minds and experiences of
his potential readers.
A-23 is actually the last movement Zukofsky composed (A-24, L.Z. Masque is a score for
the performance of selections from Zukofsky's works put together by Celia Zukofsky and
presented to the poet in 1968). A-23 begins with a reference to the first line of A-1, "A /
Round of fiddles playing Bach" ("A," 1):
An unforeseen delight a round
beginning ardent; to end blest
presence less than nothing thrives:
a world worn in whose
happiest reins preempt histories
(536)

Ahearn notes three of the four words that structure the end of A12: blest, ardent, and
happiness; which are each coded themselves to Bach, Aristotle, and Paracelsus (von
Hohenheim) (Ahearn, 191, 125). Only missing is Celia, the "she's hid" at the end of A-22
emerging partially in "submerged name in coldenia" ("A," 538; Ahearn, 191). Zukofsky's
"delight" is to finish the poem ''A," a task he had set himself nearly fifty years before as "a
foreseen curve" (536). The "end" is also a "beginning" in part because it celebrates the
couple's move to Port Jefferson. Cid Corman has identified the following passage as
relating particularly to the move:
her logic's unanswerable refurnishing from
nothing: unstopping motion whose smallest
note further divided would serve
nothingdestined actual infinitely initial
how dire his honor who'll
peddle nothing: rendered his requiem
alive (white gold-autumn-leafed mat cut
down to 1-foot circle and
tasseled) would praise when 80
flowers the new lives' descant
thought's rarer air, act, story
words earththe saving history
not to deny the gifts

Page 131
of time where those who
never met together may hear
this other time sound one (53839; Corman, in Louis Zukofsky, ed. Terrell, 306)

Now if this is about the couple's move, it is so in the most oblique way possible. One can
see a woman's activity in the first six or eight lines, which activity then uses the newly
begun 80 Flowers as both a reference and a turning point for a reflection of poetry itself
(cf. Ahearn, 193). As in A-22, and throughout Zukofsky's poems, "air" hinges the whole
structure: spirit, song, the air we breathe. These are "words earth," the words a poet uses
to honor the earth, the words the earth uses to express itself through the poet.
32 The poem at this point opens wide to include history as well as the future audience

''those who / never met together." That all of these may be heard as one is the poet's most
fervent hope.
The long central section of A-23 is as difficult as any poem written in the twentieth
century and poses many of the questions examined earlier with respect to Stein's
"Stanzas." At what point does the poet, through practicing deliberate obscurity, begin to
lose the otherwise ethical thrust of the work by seeming to ignore language's
communicative function? I want to examine a page chosen semirandomly from the dense
thicket of A-23:
Regal mien swathed unrustling tread
o' the wick, boy, waded reef
willing my habit overhailed-ayre beat,
wrest-pins lifting me welcome strung
guest into cloud over folk
flood, fold (and my name?)
these lift, bear, little over
barrow lighted: cinder black with
swart sallow body. Songs rove
heap'm fare rath loud chirm
tread at barnhouses'll hum poor-souls
knit to bairn now name
themselves'starlings.' ait, aight, eyet,
eyot, eyght sing the same . . river . . among green aits . . eye-land islands and meadows. A laugh .
.
and not butt my head.
Claque-lawbard hard, fire yet:
miracle porker-lane, apple, birch, greetings:
calf-eyed, pie betide the . . gore

Page 132
off head a great delight
beguile war in the nightingale
lullaby to your bounty, lulla
tree, snow-leeeyry air goad.
Flute, feather stridor, horse-scamper; beggar
clown-sage, love-must know dessert desrt
(earth's ring bare knee . . ice . .
ness . . tempest . . "not Green-land" . . sigh
and Wine-land woodleaf sprag, eyed
create sky-firesbe roof and
do know my like'll home
who knows one . . all alone
3 the fathers, 4 the
mothers9 to birth) my
dove'll echo . . of guide-rules sleep . .
be a Shown ware eye
given to waylay fear: m'core
(557)

Now I may be very, embarrassed when future research shows this to be one of
Zukofsky's translations from Old Norse or Gaelic, but I intend to treat this as an English
text. In fact, as with Zukofsky's translations, every word is locatable in a dictionary. The
"ait, night, eyet, / eyot, eyght" sequence is lifted direct from the OEDthey are "the same"
as variant spellings for ait, a small island, with the visual pun eye-land seeming to
provide the motivation. The word ait is close to the word air, which shows up in
"overhailed-ayre beat'' (a drum beat for marching), and "eyry air goad" (the same?). A
rath is a hill-fort, via Irish; a chirm, a chatter, "especially of birds"; bairn is Anglo-Saxon
for child (as in Beowulf); claque is a group of hired applauders; sprag is a twig or sprig;
ness, a promontory or protrusion into a body of water (OED for all the foregoing). Yet
where do the meanings of these words get us? Are the words intended primarily to be
heard?
My view here is that Zukofsky in fact had in mind a small community of readers (like
himself?), sounding out the words, living them, allowing them to become part of an
environment which sings more than signifies. Perhaps he had as a goal to defeat exactly
such efforts as my own right now, to show that poetry needs to move in radically new
directions. If Stein's project posited a struggle between poet and audience that finally was
resolved when they became mine by entering the text, Zukofsky has here set in motion a
mobile of words which are anybody's and nobody's. If we like these

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words, they become ours, but no more than they are the earth'sthere is a preponderance
of earth wordsor the air's. For Zukofsky, strangely, this is home"do know my like'll home/
who knows one." Is it our home as well? That's the challenge. Zukofsky knew he was
making a tough poemsaw himself in that tradition. He echoes Cavalcanti's "Donna mi
prega," especially its envoi,
33 when he says:
'blazed, man trove-airs
occlude sots, grant chant's precise
that's its praisenone "equal," touch'
(558)

The trouveres or troubadours preceded Guido"'Guide, o were / a star seem as 1'" (559)in
their craft of trobar clus or closed poetry-making. Keep the dullards out, "occlude sots,"
might have been their rallying cry. Their "airs'' are now a "trove" in Zukofsky's pun on
their collective appellation. If the song is well-crafted, that's its value.
The tone eases up considerably as the movement nears its end. There are two moments of
closure, one just before the last hundred lines:
Of Noughtlight, leaf, grief
lend grace wife and her
son keep to life's end
serein (horse) a full lawn.
(560)

Here poetry functions as prayer, acknowledging the nothingness that is impending death,
asking protection for his survivors. The definition of serein"A fine rain falling from a
cloudless sky after sunset"could almost be a poem itself in another era. Here it is one
word asked to do more than single words often are. Likewise the parenthetical horse, a
joke perhaps, a tongue-in-cheek way of saying, yes, I know I'm obsessed. The final three
lines of the movement look forward to A-24 and Celia's Masque, as well as referring to
the way from the Zukofskys' house to their son's (Ahearn, 191). The private in this case is
the public:
music, thought, drama, story, poem
parks' sunburstanimals, grace notes
z-sited path are but us.
(563)

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Zukofsky's lifework, as he said of Shakespeare, has as its goal for love to see with the
eyes of reason.
Difficult, private, hermetic works, Stein's "Stanzas in Meditation" and Zukofsky's "A" are
not very similar. Stein's vocabulary is reduced to a very restricted register; Virgil
Thomson compares one of her works to her practice of playing the piano each evening
using only the white keys (Bee Time Vine, 3). Zukofsky's language is a complex fugal
arrangement using a range of words no one could possibly be prepared to recognize
without the aid of a very good dictionary. As I showed in analyzing Stein, she seems to
have had an extremely ambivalent feeling about her potential audience. In Zukofsky there
is no such overt expression, though that may have been the result of a lifetime's
disappointment borne silently. Neither Stein nor Zukofsky is firmly placed in the literary
canon (at least as represented by these works). Yet already the influence of both on
subsequent experimental writers is demonstrably strong. The work of Ashbery and the
''language poets" that I examine in my final chapters is unimaginable without the examples
of Stein and Zukofsky. In many ways their most experimental work may never be
surpassed in terms of sheer variety of verbal strategies. My intention has only been
secondarily to demonstrate their verbal brilliance. First and foremost (and I would claim
for them as well) has been my desire to demonstrate the ethical engagement with the
world and other people their works body forth.

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10
Humor, Irony, and Exteriority in Ashbery's "Fragment"
The stage of John Ashbery's work that begins with the publication of Double Dream of
Spring (1970), and continues through Three Poems (1972), Self-Portrait in a Convex
Mirror (1975), and House-boat Days (1977), represents a move into the "ironization of
the self."
1 Whether manifested as humor or, more complexly, in the relation of the presumed

speaker to other(s), the freedom of verbal tone and the sheer inventiveness of language
must be considered a primary reason for Ashbery's increased public acceptance around
that time. In this chapter, I will attempt to account for that "humor" in the deeper structure
of the ironization of selfor, more precisely, in the ''negativization of
narcissism"specifically through a close analysis of the long poem "Fragment" that
concludes the Double Dream.2 As it happens, "Fragment" is probably the least overtly
funny poem in Double Dream, but in this poem the drama of the self's exteriority to itself
structures the language, images, and progress through the poem in a remarkable way.
Ashbery's experimental early work, while I personally value it very much, has very little
of the intersubjectivity that he increasingly develops in the work from this middle period.
In concluding my argument, I compare Ashbery's work briefly to the austere experimental
style of Clark Coolidge in his work The Maintains from roughly the same time as Double
Dream, in part to show how humor and intersubjectivity are bound up in experimental
texts. (This in turn leads to my discussion, in my next chapter, of the "language poets"
with whom Coolidge has been associated.) I am far from wanting to claim the ethics of
exteriority that characterizes Ashbery's practice in the long poem from this period as the
only form of ethical practice. I do think attention needs to be drawn to the ethical
challenge his work represents in order to mediate between conflicting claims for the value
of his work put forth by very different critical approaches.
The form of "Fragment"fifty stanzas of ten lines each, all but four of which are endstoppedderives from Ashbery's reading of

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Maurice Scve's Dlie, as the poet has stated. He said he was attracted to the ten-line form
as a "purposely stunted form which is ideal for these repetitions with minimal variations."
3 Although he initially says that he had no particular wish to "imitate" Scve (Bloom and

Rosada, ''Craft Interview," 125), Ashbery does refer obliquely to a question on the
"content" of "Fragment" with a reference to the Dlie: "I think what I said before about
its taking up again and again a single situation and repeatedly developing and then in a
way casting aside what had been developed to start over is the content in this particular
case. I think it's like maybe all my poems, it's a love poem; Scve's "Dlie" was a long
cerebral love poem; and the actual situation isn't apparent in the poem, but it's what is
behind it and is generating these repeated re-examinations and rejections and then further
examinations" (127). Interestingly, the reference to the poem in the last phrase of this
statement is ambiguous and could refer to either the Dlie or "Fragment." The relation
between the two texts is more complex than Ashbery here allows. An elucidation of this
relation requires a more thorough examination of the interpersonal structure of Scve's
work.
Scve's Dlie is "a long, cerebral love poem" in the same sense as Petrarch's Canzoniere,
as Deborah Lesko Baker has pointed out.4 That is, the relationship with the woman to
whom the poems are addressed exists primarily, if not exclusively, in the speaker's, or the
poet's, imagination. (That poet and lyric speaker are difficult to distinguish is another
aspect of Scve's Petrarchism.) But the affective quality of the verseas Lesko Baker's
analysis repeatedly brings outbelies the characterization of the poem sequence as entirely
"cerebral." An example of Scve in his Petrarchan imitative mode is Dizain CCLXII:
I go seeking the most solitary places
Those haunted by despair and horror
So I can make them repositories of my pains,
Pains from total good, of course, disinherited,
That are used to harm me and others
And still cause fear, even in solitude,
Sensing my life in such disarray
That the more I flee, night and day,
Her beautiful sainted eyes farther away
From serving my thought, are here sweet rest.5
Je vais cherchant les lieux plus solitaires,
De dsespoir et d'horreur habits,

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Pour de mes maux les rendre secretaires,
Maux de tout bien, certes, dshrits,
Qui de me nuire et autrui usits,
Font encor peur, mme la solitude,
Sentant ma vie en telle inquitude
Que plus fuyant, et de nuit et de jour,
Ses beaux yeux saints, plus loin de servitude
mon penser sont ici doux sjour.

One long period, the poem's conclusion is syntactically related to its beginning, the verb
"are" having as a subject "places" (l. 1), in a way impossible to maintain in English
(McFarlane, 442n.). This is clearly a love poem, in the love-as-suffering tradition of the
"inaccessible" love object. The trope of the locus amoenus (negativized) combines with
the trope of the beloved's eyes haunting the lover in solitude. Though apparently a poem
of action and movement, the entire stage machinery is obviously internal in the stylized
tradition of much Renaissance verse. What is interesting about this poem and the overall
sequence of which it is part is the "progression" through its "repetitions with minimal
variations.''
Lesko Baker's study locates Narcissus as the central myth motivating the psychic
progression in the poem, even though the name of "Narcissus" does not appear in the
text.
6 The Narcissus myth, of course, operates on a psychic level in a way that Freud's theory

has opened to fertile and continuing examination. Lesko Baker's commentary on the
function of the myth in Scve's text can thus be made to stand as a bridge between the
mythic and the psychoanalytical conceptions, as when she states: "This transformation in
the perception of Dlie from external other to internal, organic 'infusion' is an important
aspect of narcissistic interioritywhere narcissistic connotes seeing what is outside the self
in terms of the self" (30). Scve's lyric voice or "speaker" is thus narcissistic in a way that
much lyric poetry is. While Ashbery's poem "Fragment" borrows both the form and the
process of repetition with variation on the theme of love from Scve (and from the lyric
tradition generally), his innovation is to exteriorize the lyric speaker, turning narcissistic
interiority inside-out.
Harold Bloom has discussed the aspect of narcissism in "Fragment," seeing in it the force
of the poet's will to succeed against the strong precursor: "The mystery of poetic style, the
exuberance that is beauty in every strong poet, is akin to the mature ego's delight in its
own individuality, which reduces to the mystery of narcissism"

Page 138

(Anxiety of Influence, 146). Now neither Freud's theories concerning primary narcissism
nor the clinical study of secondary narcissism leads to anything like the situation of a
"mature ego's delight in its own individuality" that Bloom celebrates here.
7 The ego-ideal that Freud describes with regard to narcissism is not the ego per se, and

there is a strong temptation to see in this willful misreading by Bloom a certain defense of
his own critical procedures. My argument here is that this is also a significant misreading
of Ashbery's practice generally and in "Fragment" specifically.
Julia Kristeva, following the Lacanian derivation of Freud's thought, has explained well
the structuring of narcissism in the modern personality. Far from the "Apophrades" that
Bloom proclaims as a heroic assimilation of the dead precursor, Kristeva points indeed to
the relation between Narcissus and the death drive: "The death drive and its psychological
equivalent, hatred, is what Freud discovers after stopping off at Narcissus. Narcissism
and its lining, emptiness, are in short our most intimate, brittle, and archaic elaborations
of the death drive. The most advanced, courageous, and threatened sentries of primal
repression."8 Narcissism, in this more theoretically rigorous psychoanalytic view, is
nothing like the "exuberance'' of a healthy poetic ego (whatever that might be). In fact,
some take Kristeva's theory of narcissism in almost the opposite sense. Alice Jardine has
interpreted Kristeva's stance: "For Kristeva, the only possible ethicity for the late twentieth
century in the West is what she terms the negativization of narcissism within a practice"
(109). I would agree with Jardine that this is one of Kristeva's most important insights
into current practice, as well as one of theoretical feminism's most important insights into
the ethical subject of discourse.9
The play of pronouns in Ashbery's work has long been a source of critical controversy.
The first critics to notice it seemed to assume that the shifts between "I," "you," "he,"
"she," "we," and so on, represented lapses in attention on the part of the poet. Ashbery
himself has defended the practice, by claiming that it represents the consciousnesses of
others, diffusing the importance of the main speaker.10 In "Fragment," the play of
pronouns has created considerable disagreement among critics: are there two people
involved, three, or simply the self addressing an aspect of itself.11 In "Fragment" the
pronoun "you" occurs with the greatest frequency, in eighteen of the fifty stanzas. The
pronouns "we" and "us" occur in eight stanzas; the pronouns "I" and "me" in six. The
third-person

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singular masculine pronoun occurs in four stanzas, but only one instance that indicates a
relation with the speaker. The third-person singular feminine pronoun likewise occurs in
four stanzas, including the first and last (though as my subsequent analysis will indicate,
not as a major player). The third person plural pronoun occurs in three stanzas, and there
are fully thirteen stanzas that contain no pronouns at all.
This brief count of the occurrence of pronouns in the poem indicates to me that the
practice of the lyric speaker that remains constant throughout a sequence and brings in
other figures that likewise remain constant has here been overturned.
12 The predominant pronoun "you," as I will show, shifts the mostbetween an

exteriorized version of the speaker and what seems to be a palpable "other," with still
other instances that cannot be pinned down even this clearly. If "Fragment'' is a love
poem, as the poet and all his critics seem to agree, it is unlike any love poem that the
tradition produced prior to Ashbery. I think we could accurately describe "Fragment" as a
love poem that explores the boundaries of the self in order to show that self/other
boundaries and "love" are aspects of each other.
The first stanza sets the tone for these deepening meditations:
The last block is closed in April. You
See the intrusions clouding over her face
As in the memory given you of older
Permissiveness which dies in the
Falling back toward recondite ends.
The sympathy of yellow flowers.
Never mentioned in the sighs of the oblong day
The saw-toothed flames and point of other
Space not given, and yet never withdrawn
And never yet imagined: a moment's commandment.

As Albert Cook has stated, Ashbery achieves a level of abstraction that is yet not totally
abstract. Referents can be found if one follows out certain axes of metaphorical and
metonymic combinations and displacements. In this stanza the "her face" could easily
refer back as a personification of April, which names the month and is also a commonenough woman's name. The yellow flowers, to link in with the present analysis, could be
neatly identified as narcissus (a flower name which occurs more than once in Ashbery);
the sympathy they represent here fits nicely into the compensatory, function exercised by
the flower in Ovid's telling of the Narcissus myth.

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Clearly the hovering between concrete reference and abstract generality operates on a
different level from the combination of specificity and affect in Scve. In Scve's poem,
the internal situation of the poet/speaker allows for the tropes to be assimilated easily into
an overall psychic constellation. So far in Ashbery's poem, one is not even certain who is
speaking or why or what background situation might be seen to obtain.
What could be stronger hints of an interpersonal situation proliferate in the second stanza:
"your face, the only real beginning," "the end of friendship / With self alone," and "The
stance to you / Is a fiction, to me a whole." But even the fuller surrounding context makes
it hard to see who this ''you" is. On the most basic level, is it another self or an aspect of
the speaker? The last phrase cited could refer to the Imaginary component to affective
relations, or to the imagined interlocutor as part of the self. This potential mixing is what I
take to be "the ironization of the self" that Cook sees in both Ashbery and Stevens.
13 But there is a difference between the two poets that I see as crucial. "The stance to you

/ Is a fiction, to me a whole" could perhaps appear in a poem by Stevens (Bloom's

"Apophrades"), but the utterance occupies a different place in the poem than it would in
Stevens. Whereas Stevens's fictive other or "interior paramour" grounds the whole
utterance in a psychic drama not that dissimilar to Scve in the Dlie, this formulation by
Ashbery is one of several in the same stanza and itself is undercut by the quick shifts
occurring immediately after. The internalized other is a grounded "presence" in Stevens
and Serve in a way that it is not in Ashbery.
The stanza in which narcissism seems to be directly thematized (as it is in both "The
Skaters" and "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror") is stanza four:
Not forgetting either the chance that you
Might want to revise this version of what is
The only real one, it might be that
No real relation exists between my wish for you
To return and the movements of your arms and legs.
But my inability to accept this fact
Annihilates it. Thus
My power over you is absolute.
You exist only in me and on account of me
And my features reflect this proved compactness.

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Lovers in a relationship, members of a family, associates in a common endeavor can all

maintain different "versions" of the same events. There is no logical linkonly an "it might
be that"between the first part of the initial sentence and the second. The relation between
desire and the other's actions is nicely highlighted by the line break, "my wish for you /
To return," which takes a general desire and suddenly makes it very, specific. The
''power" asserted by the speaker would be scary were the irony of the utterance not so
pervasive. The question of "existence" evoked in the last two lines places the narcissistic
interiorization of the other on a plane with the text: "You exist only in me" could just as
well be the poem speaking to the presumed speaker exteriorized.
Anticipating reader-response, or embedding an actual experience of the real other
chancing upon the real manuscript, stanza six begins:
The part in which you read about yourself
Grew out of this. Your interpretation is
Extremely bitter and can serve no profitable end
Except continual development.

Is this funny? Or is the tone "bitter"? Who is the you? Is it you or me? Is it a lover? An
aspect of Ashbery's speaker/persona/self? All these questions are relevant, and that they
cannot be answered definitively need not lead us to the fashionable notion of
"undecidability." Challenging fixed notions of the self in poetic representation can lead
fruitfully to a similar challenge for readers of the work.
The polished surface of "Fragment," however, inhibits standard identificatory moves on
the part of the reader. The humor that makes the poem seem inviting is more than
matched by a "cool" tone that distances and alienates.
14 In stanza eight a broad irony pervades a rare use of the collective "we": "We cannot

keep the peace / At home, and at the same time be winning wars abroad." The social
world, a reference to the Vietnam War perhaps, is placed in balance with an ironic
inversion of the actual situation or a quasi-domestic reference that would move more into
the register of the interpersonal. This line is followed by what I just referred to as a "cool"
tone, in another passage that shifts the "we" strongly into the interpersonal:
And the great flower of what we have been twists
On its stem of earth, for not being

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What we are to become, fated to live in
Intimidated solitude and isolation.

Past, present, and future are conjoined in an atmosphere of loss. The "great flower" is
certainly ironic, but in a cold way. The "stem of earth" is simultaneously surreal and
coolly analytic, almost morbid. These first two instances of the "we" pronoun are
anything but comforting or inclusive.
The next two stanzas, 9 and 10, represent the first apotheosis of the theme of narcissism.
Stanza 9, the "diamond" stanza has received serious attention, and would seem to support
Bloom's idea of the failed or "imperfect solipsist":
Slowly as from the center of some diamond
You begin to take in the world as it moves
In toward you, part of its own burden of thought

Here consciousness indeed seems to be taken to an extreme of inwardness, where the

obduracy of the diamond and its highly reflective surface would stand both for the hard
ego armor of the self and its narcissistic tendencies. But the harsh image of the diamond
consciousness is immediately commented on in the opening of stanza 10:
Thus your only world is an inside one
Ironically fashioned out of external phenomena
Having no rhyme or reason, and yet neither
An existence independent of foreboding and sly grief.

The first of three stanzas in the poem that begin "Thus . . ." (also 33 and 39), this stanza
takes a quasi-philosophical language and adds deflating touches: the self-commentary of
"Ironically fashioned," the clich "Having no rhyme or reason," and the odd but touching
"foreboding and sly grief.'' The last phrase returns to the theme of time examined
previously in stanza 8. The solipsism of the self-reflective self is thus undercut by the
lived experience of time as it works imaginatively and affectively in past and future
modes.
The complicated and ironized inwardness of stanzas 810 gives way more and more in the
progression of the poem to reflections of inner and outer that lead to a strong reversal in
stanza 13 and especially in stanza 16. The blood orange image that opens stanza 13 causes
Bloom to see the image of the ripened gourds in Stevens's "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle"
(Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, 14344). But an examination of the image can show us the
essential difference between the two poets:

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Like the blood orange we have a single
Vocabulary. all heart and skin and can see
Through the dust of incisions the central perimeter
Our imaginations' orbit.

Far from being simply the image of autumn fullness, like Stevens's "warty squashes"
(Collected Poems, 16), implying a ludicrous, overripe qualityAshbery's image regards the
surface of the fruit. The oxymoronic "central perimeter" that is likened to "Our
imaginations' orbit" (despite the lack of a comma, this would seem to be an appositive)
deepens the exterior/interior thinking. Beginning with these stanzas, the image of self will
be seen less from the inside than in terms of the face, the outside that becomes the inside.
Stanza 16 is only the third stanza so far in the poem to explore the relational "we." The
exterior/interior model of self in confrontation with the other is given a charged treatment:
The volcanic entrance to an antechamber
Was not what either of us meant.
More outside than before, but what is worse, outside
Within the peripherry we are confronted
With one another, and our meeting escapes through the dark
Like a well.
Our habits ask us for instructions.
The news is to return by stages
Of uncertainty, too early or too late. It is the invisible
Shapes, the bed's confusion and prattling. The late quiet.
This is how it feels.
15

Where stanza 13 pictured an inside that was outside "the central perimeter," here that same
outside is brought inside, "Outside / Within the periphery." This model for the
confrontation with alterity, "we are confronted / With one another," is strikingly similar to
Lacan's discussion of the exteriority at the core of the subject, in his discussion of the
ethics of psychoanalysis.16 In that discussion, the Real is what at the core of the subject is
unknowable and around which the subject's desire is motivated. The image Ashbery gives
of the well through which the encounter between the two lovers "escapes" would
correspond to the darkly unknowable center that Kristeva claims underlies narcissism,
The concluding images of uncertainty in stanza 16 are moving depictions of the affective
quandary the subject remains in, despite the relative level of "self-knowledge'' brought to
the difficult encounter.

Page 144

The stanzas following this depiction of the encounter that reveals the central lack of being
move into some of the only story-like elements in the poem, a fantasy escape perhaps
from the inner/outer dilemma. But when the central subject returns at the end of stanza
20, the theme of narcissism is writ large: "And I some joy of this have, returning to the
throbbing / Mirror's stiff enclave, the sides of my face stiff and overrun." This is a stark
image that may be seen to anticipate the more stylizedand thus more distancedmeditations
of "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror." Where that poem's mirror is convex, in this poem
the mirror is an "enclave," more akin to the diamond image earlier, a reflecting surface
within which the soul is trapped. But the poem's logic is thoroughly relational: in the next
stanza the speaker says: "Just one step / Takes you into so much outside." Not only is the
outer made inner (the face in the mirror), but the inner is made outer in the encounter
with the radically other.
The drama of narcissism and involvement deepens in stanza 22:
I haven't made it clear that I want it all from you
In writing, so as to study your facial expressions
Simultaneously: hesitations, reverse darts, the sky
Of your plans run through with many sutured points.
Only in this way can a true basis for understanding be
Set up.

One would assume that this dictatorial tone is addressed to the lover, but the previous
stanzas have created a structure uniting specular self-involvement and the writing of the
poem. The simultaneity between the two requested actions is especially strange, unless the
poet is figured writing while looking at his own image in the mirror, as Mallarm was
known to do. But the understanding does not seem to be only a self-understanding. And
the tone creates a distance that is difficult to resolve as inner alienation. The
distanceactually separationis more acute in the following stanza when the speaker says:
"Leaning from an upper story / We should not separate in misunderstanding." In terms of
the presence of personal pronouns in the poem, this separation is effectuated over seven
stanzas, returning to the "we" in a mock-naive tone in stanza 31.
In stanza 31 it seems as though nothing has changed in the relationship:

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We talked, and after that went out.
It was nice. There was lots of time left
And we could always come back to it, and use it later

But the "normalization" in the relationship achieved here is certainly marked by the tone.
The sequence of actions itself implies a lack of intimacy. The theme of time is also
reintroduced, but once again in a jocose way that undercuts its potential seriousness. How
is one to reconcile the notion of "lots of time left" with the possibility that they could "use
it later"? After the intensity of the relational dramas in stanzas 810, 13, and 16, what we
have here almost amounts to a recapitulation in a diminished key. Perhaps Lacan's notion
of the fading, by which, relationally, one's ego grows less distinct in the pull of another,
would help us to understand how the diminishment in the tone could actually be masking
an ongoing struggle of the narcissistic self.
This middle section of the poem can be seen to accept implicitly the separation of selves,
as in stanza 33: "Yet so much time for / What arrives, unnoticed our separate, parallel
thought." Or farther on, in stanza 35, as it enjambs with stanza 36:
So
the weather of that day, and scalloped
Appearance of those who went by you
Are changed like mist.

From a different perspective the "you" addressed here has shifted back to an exteriorized
view of the self. In a turn on the lyric speaker's position in Scve (for example), the
landscape and external phenomena are charged by the speaker's inner state. As with
Scve's speaker there is an inescapable quality to the suffering of love such an inner-outer
confusion represents. Stanza 37 returns to the image of the hole which we saw as a well
in stanza 16:
That hole, towering secret, familiar
If one is poking among the evening rubbish, yet how
Square behind you in the mirror, so much authority
And intelligence in such a miserable result.
Could it bind you because of the simplicity
Or could you in fact escape because of that limp frame,
Those conditions tumbling upward, like piles of smoke?

Stevens's "man on the dump" did not bring to his ontological speculations a mirror with
which to try to sort out the ambiguities of

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identity in otherness. The image patterns here are not so much inner/outer, as up and
down, but the motions as they create a relational space are similar to those examined
previously.
Out of this abyss of narcissistic self-involvement, surely figured as a negative state, the
poem's concluding movement is in the direction of a strongly ironic, and achieved,
intersubjectivity. In stanza 38 the only otherwise unidentified male third-person pronoun
in the poem seems to trigger this other-directed thrust: "for his midnight interpretation / Is
suddenly clasped to you with the force of a hand." In stanza 44, "the outline / Of your
famous openness" reinforces this sense of other-directedness. The stanza ends, however,
on an ambiguous note:
Determined
To live, so that you and your possessions
May be dealt with at last, you forgot the other previous
station.

Here a criticism is implied, a rebuke, probably to the speaker himself. Where a complex
time awareness has been consistently engaged in many of the passages directly related to
relationship, here the awareness of time is nearly an ethical obligation.
The end of "Fragment" requires special attention. Its heavily ironized structure places
unique demands on the reader's understanding. The final stanza begins as a response to
the last two lines of stanza 49: "The words sung in the next room are unavoidable / But
their passionate intelligence will be studied in you." The identity of the "you" here is hard
to gauge, the flux between inner and outer, activity and passivity, leading to a state akin to
osmosis. The final stanza responds to this ambiguity and adds its own:
But what could I make of this? Glaze
Of many identical foreclosures wrested from
The operative hand, like a judgment but still
The atmosphere of seeing? That two people could
Collide in the dusk means that the time of
Shapelessly foraging had come undone: the space was
Magnificent and dry. On flat evenings
In the months ahead, she would remember that that
Anomaly had spoken to her, words like disjointed beaches
Brown under the advancing signs of the air.

The "I" in the first line seems artless and sincerethere does seem to be a genuine attempt
to tie things together under the rubric of

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understanding. The "operative hand" might well refer back to "his midnight
interpretation" in stanza 38. The image of the two people colliding sounds again the
interpersonal theme, in the ironic mode of near-clich (as in, "Strangers in the Night").
The final figure "she" yields a measure of closure, returning to ''her face" in the opening
stanza. Yet I think this figure represents someone like the reader, one who is exterior to
the relationship being explored.
This reading of "Fragment," guided throughout by an attention to the structuring of
personal pronouns, has established the unquestionable importance of a relational
structure. The "I" is not the traditional lyric speaker. If any pronoun represents that
stance, it is more likely the "you" as an aspect of the self. The relationship that hovers
over this poem is both highly abstract and extremely important to the line-by-line
meaning. Without some background notion of a love relationship there can be no
progression in the poem, but there are no specific references either. "We talked, and after
that went out. / It was nice" is about as close to a specific reference as we get. The context
gives virtually no clue to the identities of the couple, and the tone is deliberately naivesounding. As I have argued throughout, the driving force in the poem is an exteriorization
of the speaker. The space of inner and outer is consistently transformed by the play of
personal pronouns and the image sequences in which they are implicated. The travails of
the lyrical "ego" are not denied, nor are they projected outward onto nature. Rather the
ego itself is turned inside-out, perceptions and experiences modifying the consciousness
which becomes neither personal nor collective, but transpersonal, other-directed.
This exteriorization of the guiding consciousness of the poem requires a playful attitude
toward more than the pronouns. The irony is more than an irony of self. The irony
implicates self and other in a relational pattern in which neither is clearly distinguishable.
One could say that this strategy represents a certain generosity toward the reader who is
implicitly invited into the construction of sense as well as outlining the basic shifts in the
relational pattern. I said at the outset that this generosity, or more specifically humor in a
special sense that only now is entirely explicable, must be seen as one reason for the
increased public acceptance of Ashbery's work from this period. Ironically enough, this
shift in his work has also alienated many of the experimental writers one might assume to
be most sympathetic to Ashbery's overall project. With near unanimity, the "language
poets" have proclaimed this shift in Ashbery's

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work a wrong turn, even a betrayal.

17 The randomness of The Tennis Court Oath is seen by these writers as a touchstone for

experimentation from which the work of the seventies departs.

A writer often compared to Ashbery in this context (cf. Warten), who published his first
work at about the time of Double Dream, is Clark Coolidge. Coolidge's work has been
prolific and demonstrates a certain progression, and there is no question that he is one of
our leading experimental writers.18 In his The Maintains (1974), there are exactly six
personal pronouns by my count (not counting "one" or "it") in approximately 3,500
lines.19 Here is one of those instances:
oosphere
glossily finish
one in
alone by
chief
a during within the time on revolt
at in as on ones
phrases
one at soon at some as
book on coition lies
abrase snail
a free fold
her pertain parts neat
push-built nap
jerreed lament
(81)

Compared to "Fragment," this stanza of Coolidge is indeed an austere piece of writing. He

not only eschews pronouns, he also avoids most linear syntax, or any other logical, even
associative, connections. The reason I quote this passage is to show the almost-complete
absence of humor in the sense I have been developing, though the phrase, "book on
coition lies," might provoke a chuckle here and there. It is almost as though a language so
thoroughly experimental has to deny any possible break in seriousnessin order to be taken
seriously. In this wayand almost only in this waythe early work of Coolidge is similar to
early Ashbery.
The buried assertion that Ashbery deliberately popularized his style to gain wider
acceptance I find absurd. As other critics have shown (notably Albert Cook), the poles of
randomness and discursiveness are present in varying degrees in all his work. Rather, we

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need to begin to recognize the shift I have been outlining as one away from the
"seriousness" of his earlier experimental work, to the humor of his middle and laterstill
experimentalwork. This humor, as I have shown in analyzing "Fragment," allows the poet
to disrupt in a fundamental way the inwardness of the traditional lyric voice. Ashbery's
postmodern experimentalism consists in his thorough-going reversal, or "negativization,"
of the narcissism associated with the poetic speaker. This movement of exteriority marks
Ashbery's poetic project as profoundly ethical.

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11
Language, Poetry, and Marginality: Coolidge, Palmer, and Mayer
The movement of exteriority in contemporary poetry continues in the work of those
identified as "language poets," though I should make clear from the outset (the first
comma in my title being a gesture in that direction) that I share the misgivings often
expressed about that label.
1 Although Michael Palmer, Clark Coolidge, and Bernadette Mayer have all been

associated with this group of poets, there is by no means a consensus that their work
corresponds to all of the social and political goals claimed for the movement. In fact,
Palmer, Coolidge, and Mayer have all maintained a certain distance from the more active
propagandists of the movement and their work is noticeably underrepresented in overtly
Marxist discussions such as George Hartley's.2 And yet I want to claim here that the work
in longer forms of these writers maintains the ethical thrust of linguistically aware
intersubjectivity that throughout this study I have been calling exteriority. This exteriority
stems from a distinct awareness of working on the discursive margins while maintaining a
strongly other-directed orientation. That three such different poets establish an ethicity in
language practice, which is yet not explicitly political, calls into question whether
approaches such as Hartley's may be unnecessarily narrow in their strictly ideological
focus.3 By displaying a commitment to working out through questioning our assumptions
about language, others, representation, and communicationin the form itself of their
worksthese poets continue the line of experimental writing by Americans, Stein, Ashbery,
Zukofsky, among others, that has come to be called postmodern.
The poetic texts of Palmer, Coolidge, and Mayer are experimental in that they are both
powerfully innovative and discursively marginal.4 One hears a certain amount of
complaining from language-oriented writers of all persuasions about the "marginal"

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position they occupy, as this term is taken to refer to the lack of mainstream publishing
possibilities and the domination by a much more conservative mode of writing in the
high-profile journals and reviews.
5 Following the direction of Lyotard's analysis of the postmodernas this stands

metonymically for the complex social, economic, and governmental forces at work to
shape the cultural discourseI think a revaluation of the term "marginal" is already well
underway. Forms of poetic expression that break with the "modern" in a bold move
toward innovation and construction in the forms of the utterance itself are attempting a
restructuring of our thinking about what poetry, should be. "Marginality" in the sense of
innovation, renewal of the poetic materials in their form of presentation to achieve a
constructed or ongoing poetic intersubjectivity involving the reader, should no longer be
viewed as a kind of deprivation (as it clearly is in social terms). Rather the discursive
margin should be recognized for being what it is in our complex, postmodern eraa
position of renewal and change.
There is no surprise when Michael Palmer, one of the most cerebral of contemporary
experimental poets, chooses to base one of his more ambitious texts, "Seven Lines of
Equal Length," on a text of Mallarm.6 Yet even in the collected work of Mallarm,
"Igitur" is a complex and, I think one could say, marginal work. "Simplement parole et
geste," Palmer's epigraph from Mallarm, refers to the character of Igitur, who in the text
of the same name (like the eponymous Hamlet who in turn is Mallarm's model) exists
only in the imagination of the reader, as per Mallarm's instructions for the execution of
the text. That Mallarm should have thought to include directions for the execution of his
text in one sense makes him an early "performance'' artist, not unlike Marcel Duchamp,
from whose aleatory composition Palmer takes his title (Palmer, personal communication,
1987). Mallarm is arguably one of the foremost marginal figures in recent literary history,
a confirmed late Romantic who is also adduced as a leader of avant-garde literary
practice.7 Invoking these highly literate and complexly embedded contradictions, Palmer's
text is likewise a construction of an impossible space called into being by language:
1.
He describes a city that apparently never was
thus the sun bending
and the paperback's blue spine

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telling of a voyage
past memory into a copse or grove fitted with doors
("Seven Lines," 41)

The mysterious "he" at the outset perhaps refers to, but could not be pinned down to,
Mallarm or Igitur. Or is it the poet? Or his alter-ego? (The free-floating pronouns in
Palmer's work continue the practice noted previously in Stein and Ashbery.) "He" is
describing now in the present tense of the poem, further embedded as a book is
mentioned. (Notes for Echo Lake is a paperback with a blue spine.) The city, like those in
Rimbaud's Villes, probably doesn't exist. This space in turn is embedded in a fictional
narrative, rendered surrealistically, "copse or grove fitted with doors," though Palmer's
version of surrealism, like Ashbery's, is distinctly "cool.''
As the first section continues, similar impossibilities present themselves:
The sun is an artificial one
and he has lost three-hundred pounds
by listening to Chopin in the background
the Nocturnes and Preludes by day
and the Gizmos by artificial night
so deceptively simple to play

Chopin did write Nocturnes and Preludes, but since he didn't write, to my knowledge,
any "Gizmos," what could it mean that they are "so deceptively simple to play"? The
speaker mentions one letter that never reached his interlocutor, "This letter will never
reach you," then asks about the content of another. Senders of letters presumably don't
need to ask this question. All around us the traditional model of communicationsender,
message, receiveris breaking down. There has been no reference so far to the Mallarm
text, but the interior scene the reader is being asked to realize in imagination is just as
complex and unperformable.
Section 2 is a laconic two lines: "It occurs somewhere off the page / a white or blue and
then a white containing grey." No pronoun reference is given for "It," and if it "occurs,"
we may be sure it's not on the page, though what can this mean in a text in which writing
is, as it were, foregrounded. Are colors really actions? Here they seem to be asked at least
to stand for actions, as often in Palmer's work.
8 Like a narrative which is otherwise absent, these color-actions take place in a defined

sequence, give hints of emo

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tional resonances, and invoke semireferential categories. Palmer's cerebral meditations

thus invoke while ostensibly avoiding real-world domestic and emotive contexts.
The interpersonal situation intrudes again into the poem's third section, which is modeled
on Igitur 1 and begins as a translation of Mallarm:
9
Certainly something of midnight persists
The hour hasn't disappeared through a mirror
hasn't fled into tapestries
recalling a furnished room by its sound
("Seven Lines," 42)

The sequence of four quatrains is interrupted here by a parenthetical expression:

(We're told her terror is of almost knowing
by those who say they definitely know)

What continues as a faithful, if abbreviated, translation of Mallarm is here more than

interrupted. A female character is introduced, one who will recur, but doesn't appear in
Mallarm. What are we to make of this departure, or for that matter, Palmer's use of
Mallarm in the first place. It seems to me that Palmer's attraction to the Mallarm text is
to its being constructed, as it were, purely, out of nothing. This reflects a certain Romantic
ideology on Mallarm's part, of course. That Palmer should still be attracted to this aspect
of Mallarm's Romanticism while maintaining a strong awareness of the actual source of
his composition in the materiality of language is, I would argue, one aspect of Palmer's
marginality. That is, Palmer iconoclastieally refuses to rest comfortably within any one
well-defined area of language practice, thus running counter to some of the seemingly
agreed-upon "conventions" of "language writing." Still, Mallarm's extended Romantic
meditation on the ''Idea," the "Act," and hazard as culminating in the death of Igitur seems
of less interest here than the shadowy midnight scene, the book "pale and open on a
table" (though Palmer leaves out that it's a book). Certainly a common element between
the two is the thematics of "knowing" invoked in the parenthetical phrase.10
Whereas Mallarm's "Igitur" is a solitary meditation on death, nothingness, and eternity,
Palmer's "Seven Lines of Equal Length" is more a meditation on language, relatedness,
space, and memory. These meditations on language-based intersubjectivity require a
pronomial flexibility, as in the work of Stein or Ashbery. Consistent

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with the constant hovering between possibilities that is so prominent in Palmer's work,
there can hardly be any consistent self as character. So, "she" is introduced as a foil, a
potential partner, someone to wonder, as in Part 4 (Igitur IIIV):
The simple past has weight
but where are the fountains you spoke of
she wonders in perfect innocence
and the flowering trees
and what is the word that stands for these things
he asks her between the branches
(43)

Over against Mallarm's dense diction, piling up attributes and shadowy, actions, Palmer's
language here is stripped bare in its diction. The complexity he achievesin what Hartley
calls "a verse of qualification" (93)is therefore even more startling. Every image, relation,
or idea is in turn undercut by its context. Even a simple declarative utterance like the first
line of this sequence is hard to take at surface value. Indeed how can the past have weight
if the characters have no internal consistency and words don't refer to anything (or those
words which do having been lost).
This exteriorityof the characters to each other, of the individual to his or her own past, of
the thing to the word which seeks to nameit assumes weight and significance in the
impossible landscape of the poem. Lack of interiority, however, does not imply lack of
value or lack of pathos. Sections 57 continue to explore this dialectic in an aura of
growing emotion:
6.
He remembers a city, that never was
actual flowers and a frame of light blue
at the margins of sight. Her stuttering
to accommodate a name (her reluctance
to simplify a name). Or would raise each other
into place. He recalls a name for it
among the repeated phrases,
the border of crosses and stars
standing in crystal at the central point.
Do you think I believe this
because a dog barks? The other, recurring
difference holds us in place.
("Seven Lines," 45)

Page 155

"Difference" may be the operative term here. The felt significance of this scene seems to
be the fatal, or at least mortal, difference between the human characters or quasi
presences, centered on the theme of naming. But if there are no characters in the poem,
that still doesn't mean we don't face the driving issue that this textwhile miming
inarticulatenessarticulates as being our human condition. The way such a sense of
exteriority serves to structure the experience of the text foregrounds the ethical dimension
of Palmer's project in spite of its "cool" surface affect.
If one result of Palmer's reorientation of verbal space is to problematize any kind of close
reading or explication, a work like Clark Coolidge's The Crystal Text, with its large
degree of self-commentary, encourages a reexamination of the assumptions underlying a
discourse model based on explication du texte.
11 The crystal of Coolidge's text seems from my perspective to be less an organizing

metaphor or recurring symbol at the level of content, and more a metaphor for the text
itself. Thus the clarity (if one can still use that word) of expression leads the reader to see
through the daily life aspect to his or her daily life, while the work itself stays obdurate
and of difficult analysis, where analysis here stands for taking something apart to see how
it works.
In a telling juxtaposition of sections, Coolidge quotes Phillip Whalen's statement, "the
crystal does nothing" (116), and then renders his own daily activity as follows:
But what do I do? I wake in the morning, late, usually
feeling like I've risen from nearly drowning, glance
at the thermometer if it's winter, if it isn't
ignore it, get to feet, strange phrase, as if
feet were a verb, at least they're transitive enough,
proceed to bathroom, splash water in eyes, that's
intelligent, to see better?, and writing this way makes me
feel like I'm delivering my retarded valedictorian
address, no matter . . .
(117)

And this passage continues, as does the poem, in such a manner that any commentary
may seem impertinent in face of the commentary already registered in the text. Here a
strong sense of the lived experience combines with quick associative juxtapositions
having to do with the relationship of language to that experience. The speed of registering
such disparate associations is part of the text's effectiveness as well as its wacky humor.
And yet Coolidge is

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serious about all this too. His daily writing is in fact the subject of The Crystal Text,
though, in a sense, being is its object. Like the crystal, this book-length poem is
ostentatious in doing nothing, making nothing happen.
By making the writing of the text its subject, the drama of the writing becomes the drama
of thought: "How much of poetry is unprovoked thought?" (27). But the thought in turn is
not something that can be caught and held as the crystal can. Physical space and the
volume of shapes are turned into a guiding metaphor for this following out of the errancy
of language: "It fascinates me to see if I find things to / speak what shapes their sentences
will take" (29). The reader willing to follow this process is implicitly a reader willing to
suspend traditional literary judgments, as the poet gives in to the possibilities of language,
some of necessity opaque as much as revelatory:
Chocolate cake, rubber wands, calypso in plaster,
a static emitter, a length of butter, the stage
in darkness, a crumpled-up tongue mess, Blake's
compass, the golden rectangle, body by Fisher,
a Balthus land letter, all my tomorrows in a
simple vein of sand, or sound, or stilled light.
Better you reach out and grasp it and touch it to
your mask.
It coils your days to a certain same.
(38)

The noun list that begins this passage imitates the text'sand to some extent, it seems, the
poet'sdesire simply to "be" at the level of a thing. However, the active qualitybeauty as
action toward a future possibilitytaking over as the passage continues introduces a tone of
ethical responsibility, in spite of the sameness of days.
To the extent that the crystal is thematized as a subject of the poem, it is always something
exterior to the writing subject's knowledge, something which therefore serves as a
reminder of the futility of static knowledge and an incitement to future discover. The
obduracy of the crystal, its separateness from the writing "self," is conjoined with its
brilliance, the flashes it produces, inciting the subject to similar speed in motion:
This book called the unread text might not be the one
the crystal reveals. The text of crystal might
reveal everything but itself. Readable as any plot
that shows a hole, a hole as central to itself.
The things not framed allow the mind. The crystal

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continues to flag thought, and thought's belief in any of the
wisdoms. This book will not allow me to write
beyond itself. And less than a foot away
from these moving lines lies the crystal.
To catch the changes of its lights I must move
myself. Speed is essential matter.
The writer increases to any stop.
The crystal is not here.
I would be no longer writer of these words.
(79)

Ashbery's use of images like "central perimeter" in "Fragment," discussed in the previous
chapter, corresponds here to the image of a hole used to interrogate the supposed unity
and consistency of the judging subject. Where in Ashbery's poem the element of personal
intersubjectivity motivated the confusion between interior and exterior, in this text by
Coolidge, the crystalboth internal and external to the writing subjectdances across this
series of actions and reflective statements. Coolidge's distinctive mode here and elsewhere
in his work is to problematize the normative disjunction between action and reflection, in
part by fronting the activity of writing that is usually thought of, as for example in
Wordsworth, as a uniquely reflective state. Coolidge's text would also serve to refute
Poe's theory of the long poemthat the long poem of necessity cannot operate always at the
same level of intensity, but must contain bald patches or explanatory comment to advance
the action. Not only does everything serve in Coolidge's text, but following the
postmodern move toward the constructive text, the writer would not be an external judge
capable of isolating the bald patches or identifying the central ideas or moments of
sublimity. These are the ideas that slip away as quickly as the light changes. The writer
says, "I must move / myself. Speed is essential matter." Such an ethics of poetic practice
ensures the effacement of the writer/subject in the text as writing.
If the sameness of days is Coolidge's continuing frame in The Crystal Text, it is the
intense presentation of a single day that is Bernadette Mayer's goal in Midwinter Day.
12 And whereas Coolidge's text oscillates between the activity of mind and the inanimate

crystal that serves both to negate and to incite knowing, Mayer's two poles are the intimate
detail of life as unfolding and the dream-life going on either through sleep or through the
recurrence of memory. But, like Coolidge, Mayer's experimental stance toward writing
involves speed in recording:

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To be existing, to be existing and practicing as a poet, no I can't say that. In the past of the west and
maybe further, poets told stories, they sang, they wrote epics, they composed for occasions. Inherent
in the history, of our lives together since I, all the while wanting to write this book, met you is a
story I don't know if I can tell it, I'll go as fast as I can on the occasion of this day.
(89)

The relational structure thus engaged at the level of writing the book is always present:
the story of the day is embedded in the practice of writing with intersubjectivity at the
core.
In Mayer's text, marginality is also a social issue, though not insistently so. As with her
other writings (like the earlier Memory which I discuss in my final chapter), so much
apparently random personal detail is given that one is almost forced to figure out certain
personal situations underlying the production of the text, which becomes
indistinguishable from her life. With two children, a husband/lover, and an extended
circle of friends and family, the issue of writing in the life of the subject pushes all else
out, or absorbs all else. But the stance of the marginal writer also allows for observation
of an intensely detailed description of the life of the community, both the family and the
life of the town. Writing and dreaming interpenetrate and become the central trope of the
text: "In Yokuntown we write all night / In the literal, love and experimental ways" (Part
6, p. 99). If one goal of this text is to have the writing somehow capture the texture of life,
its method is largely to make writing stand for life.
The text is arranged to follow the course of a day. Part 1 is an extended account of dreams
(from the night before? or is this "writing"?). Like much of the text, Part 1 is written for
the most part in Mayer's graceful poetic line, with an uninterrupted syntactic flow that has
an effect of all-inclusiveness and speed. Early on:
A while ago
The Japanese lady who lives next door smiled
When Marie smelled the fragrance of her cultivated rose
Sometimes dream is so rampant, so wild
As to seem more luxuriant than day's repose
So without riot spreading everywhere
How can I be both here and there?
(3)

The relatively rare end-rhyme alerts us that this is a "high" passage, yet the thematic it
unfolds carries through this section and the

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poem as a whole. From the information given, we would be hard-pressed to say whether
the Japanese lady is in the dream or not. Perhaps the image of the rose, from real life, is
only introduced here to extend the luxuriance of the dream motif. The question which
ends this passage is genuine and will continue to appear in the poetics of the text. If
realitythrough the work of writingqualifies the dream-life, so the dream-life will
consistently permeate the interior setting of writing in the midst of daily activity.
The sameness of days in Coolidge's text is mirrored by a relative consistency in the textual
practice; Mayer's strategies, however, vary widely as she moves in and out of dream, daily
routine, interaction with others, and solitary, meditation. The prose sections of Part 2 are
concerned with daily life, but the text works against the transparency of mimetic or
realistic prose standards:
The potato masher in Marie's bed's as good to eat as prone Cadillacs I might want to give friends if
I could if they were given to that, you're conversing, sudden kisses make you try to bounce without
getting hurt by it but then hurt anyway by my observation come as distraction you fall and get tired
and since I'm anxious to be done I entertain the theory you've already forgotten for putting more of
this into that and begin to take the first steps.
(31)

The child's disconnected motility is reproduced at a verbal level by the poet/mother's

movement from concrete objects to dreamed presences, real bouncings to bouncing
signifiers. We also sense that mere observation could be potentially harmfuldoes that
mean that sense-making would be more harmful still? Running through the passage is an
accuracy fueled by a refusal to reduce the texture of lived experience to the bland (potato
masher) standardization of prose-sense utterance. (And yet, as I take up again in the final
chapter, Mayer's experimental strategies do address what are often identified as "women's
themes." I notice in rereading my own commentary that I refer to Mayer's speaker as
"poet/mother," something which, given the interrelation of the writing and the life, is
nearly unavoidable.)
Next to my amazement at its sheer variety, vivacity, and energy, is my admiration for what
I can only call the beauty at times of Mayer's writing. Here, the beginning of Part 3:
The dark brown stairs
Towards the doors
Of this house

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Wisdom's gray sky remembers
Snow is white crystals
Hall mirror,
Misaligned and broken strollers,
Sex and going out
What there is of snow icing
The path plowed over the ground
Which is a story
Earth's surface, lovers' intentions
Astounded as no one's around us
A woman two children a man
(41)

Memory is a constant force in Mayer's text. The most detailed memories are rather awful:
car accidents, deaths, hospitals. But the surrounding, enveloping sense of memory as a
part of the natural world, as here, is often of revelatory force. And since memory does
enter into the subject's perceptive field, as accurate description would have it, memory
does indeed become part of the perceived world. Next to the bare simplicity of the
situation, "A woman two children a man" on a cold midwinter day, the mind's activity
yields almost too much richness.
Yet the text's richness also exposes the limitations of certain kinds of analysis. Part of the
poem's appeal is the wealth of detail, the nonstop piling up of story, incident, image, and
dreamscape. Like Coolidge's text, Mayer's poem both announces what it is doing and
provides a running commentary. Mayer's text thus invites the reader to explore the
ostensive practice that produced what he or she is currently reading, while forestalling
acts of judgment.
I had an idea to write a book that would translate the detail of thought from a day to language like a
dream transformed to read as it does, everything, a book that would end before it started in time to
prove the day like the dream has everything in it, to do this without remembering like a dream
inciting writing continuously for as long as you can stand up till you fall down like in a story to
show and possess everything we know because having it all at once is performing a magical service
for survival by the use of the mind like memory.
(89)

How is such a text written? The fiction it presents is having been written in one day, the
whole thing. This stretches credibility, but then so does the effort at writing it represents.
Everything would be here, contained, held, offered up. The interpenetration of reg

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isters, dream and day, the thought of the wholeMayer's text even anticipates critical
commentary on what it is attempting. Yet this too may finally be seen as a form of
intersubjectivity. By anticipating commentary, the text both blocks and invites the kind of
sense-making the reader is used to performing. Suspending final or totalizing judgments,
the text would remain open past the point of critical evaluation, inviting endless readings
and active writings, where "writing" includes much more than composing poetry.
The longer text by Palmer, the book-length texts by Coolidge and Mayer, all operate
within a literary space that is recognizably post-modern, not as an end or a footnote to
modernism, but as a movement of continual possibility, freshness, and renewal. Being a
poet practicing such rigorous and daring enterprises, one might well complain about one's
position as "marginal" with respect to the dominant culture. But I think it is beyond
question that the marginal in the writing will prove the greatest source and resource.
Whether the effort is to change the linguistic space, to write simply because compelled to
it, or "performing a magical service for survival," these works perform a service, open a
space, create future possibilities as we continue to readand to writethe text that is
ourselves.

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12
"Language" Theory and the Languages of Feminism
Experimental poetry deliberately challenges received notions of transparency on which
standard models of communication are based, in order, I have been saying, to establish an
increased other-directed orientation of exteriority. While in the previous chapter I
examined the practice of three contemporary experimental writers, there remains a further
question: Is there a theory of "language poetry" that could contribute to the theory of
exteriority?
1 Here I want to address this question by considering the related question of the place of
experimental writing in feminist theories of literary production.2 While experimental

writers are deliberately "marginal" with respect to the prevailing modes of mimetic or
representational language, many feminists place themselves (or are placed) at the margins
of the dominant partriarchal discourse. And yet, perhaps not so surprisingly, there is very
little communication between these two discursive positions. This stems in part, in my
view, from that element in feminist theory that wants to claim mainstream status, that is, a
strong centrality for "female" expression. The resulting "normative" language posited by
this centralizing discourse generally excludes as marginal the work of artists in
experimental modes. I would say, artists both men and women, except that
experimentalism is classed, as we shall see, as almost exclusively male by these feminist
critics, thus rendering experimental women writers nearly invisible. From the other side,
some of the most interesting theoretical work dealing with ''language-centered" writing
explicitly addresses the question of "normative" language, as this stands for mimetic
standards of representation in literary language and the upholding of conventional societal
norms. I began this study with a theoretical introduction and conclude with a survey of
these theoretical issues in the contemporary discourse. For a literary example, I examine
Bernadette Mayer's Memory.3 As in the previous chapter, I believe that the discursive
margin is a position

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of renewal and change and, further, that any discourse claiming revolutionary goals ought
not exclude experimental writing.
Just as there is no "language" writing (see previous note), there is barely any theory of
language-oriented writing.
4 This stems first and most importantly from the notionarticulated repeatedly in the many

writings one might want to call both "primary" and ''secondary"that the theory and
practice are the same. As Charles Bernstein says (paraphrasing Robert Creeley and
Aristotle, among others): "Theory, is never more than an extension of practice."5 Works
by Bernstein, Alan Davies, Barrett Watten, Ron Silliman, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and
others, that might present theoretical concerns, often do so in language that is nearly
indistinguishable from their poetic practice, or if recognizably discursive prose, at least
avoids customary expository argument.6 The writing occupies a range that runs from the
more recognizably "critical" (Watten, Silliman, Bernstein) to the more enigmatic, allusive
and poetic (e.g., Davies, DuPlessis). Bernstein has theorized this move: "I would
characterize as sharing a political project both a philosophical practice and a poetic
practice that refuse to adopt expository principles as their basic claim to validity"
(Content's Dream, 221). In a more recent work, Artifice of Absorption, Bernstein has
further blurred the distinction by writing a critical, philosophical text in what looks like
verse.7 But this is not to say that these texts, poetic and critical, do not develop an
approach to the work, as well as ideas about what the work should be.8
Resistance to the "language" label stems both from the idea, relatively simple, that all
poetry is "language-centered," as well as a debate within the movement concerning
"normative" language. The debate over normative language is of special importance in the
link, to be developed shortly, with feminist writings. Most of the writers associated with
the "language" movement claim a specific, grounded, historical engagement.9 And that
engagement is worked out through a systematic appraisal of the normativity of language,
the way language works to determine prevailing social, political, sexual, and religious
norms.10 And, of course, following Wittgenstein, one aspect of language is the extent to
which one can never establish a perspective "outside" of language. As Steve Benson states
in his essay "On Realism": "In the sense that I take it, the terms of the normative tend to
comprise a language, which itself pretends to the status of a comprehensive mythos of
everyday life, a language thus pretending to a stability howsoever conscious of its

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indispensable contingency, apparently transfixed in a mutability it can hardly

comprehend" (in In the American Tree, 510). Barrett Watten has expanded on Benson's
discussion to investigate the consequences for artistic practice (Total Syntax, 196200).
What these writers raise is the question asked by James Sherry: "Can we come to the
realization that language is one of the languages?" (The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book,
47).
Bernstein recasts the question of normative language, suggestively to my mind, as an
oscillation between what he calls "absorption" and "impermeability," where absorption
stands for a language practice based on models of transparency of communication, and
impermeability represents a text that blocks customary modes of understanding through
identification.
11 As Bernstein puts it:
Translating Zukofsky's formula for poetry
(lower limit, speech; upper limit, music)
I would suggest that
poetry has as its outer limit, impermeability
& as its inner limit, absorption.
(Artifice of Absorption, 48)

Bernstein's terms seem to match the models of interiority and exteriority that I have
developed to structure the analysis of long poems in this book. But, as I have been
claiming throughout, exteriority also structures the engagement of the text with its
audience. In this sense, Bernstein says, paraphrasing Merleau-Ponty:
The thickness of writing between
the reader & the poem is constitutive for the poem
of its visibility & for the reader
of the outer limit of his or her absorption
in the poem; it is not an obstacle
between them, it is their means
of communication.
(64)

In other words, the materiality of language, as it is deliberately worked out by Bernstein

and others in the movement (and before them, by Stein and Zukofsky in their different
ways), is at the same time "anti-absorptive" and the very means that the reader has to gain
access to his or her own subjectivity in reading.
And here I must shift ground to make good on both pronouns in the last part of the
previous sentence. Ron Silliman claims, in his introduction to In the American Tree, that

part of the movement has been explicitly feminist: "Of particular importance has been the

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full articulation of a literature by, and consciously for, women" (xxi). But the anthology,
itself conspicuously does not adduce evidence of this claim. The one article that does
address the issue is "Why Don't Women Do Language-Oriented Writing?" written by Rae
Armantrout.
12 Armantrout takes this question that has been addressed to her and examines it from

both the gender and the "language-oriented'' angles, finding it inadequate to account for
the writing actually being done by women and men associated with the movement. Her
conclusion is:
The writers I like are surprising, revelatory. They bring the underlying language/thought into
consciousness. They spurn the facile. Though they generally don't believe in the Truth, they are
scrupulously honest about the way word relates to word, sentence to sentence. Some of them are
men and some are women.
(Armantrout, in In the American Tree, 546)

This statement bears out the sense I have developed through reading the works of writers
associated with this movement that they are already "marginal" with respect to the
dominant culture (in both the strong or discursive sense, and in the sense of being outside
the mainstream publishing markets); they don't wish to "marginalize" themselves further
through following out a preformed set of assumptions about the gender struggle.
But this is not at all to say that a strong gender consciousness is absent from the work of
women working in the experimental modes. The work of Bernadette Mayer, Midwinter
Day, examined in the previous chapter, is clearly motivated by an attention to real,
socially rooted detail that characterizes much explicitly feminist writing. Another major
work that I will be discussing here, Memory, is likewise meticulously attentive to the
detail of lived, and gendered, experience. Of course, this is not the work's only claim to
serious attention. I draw attention to this aspect of Mayer's work to show the congruence
of her concerns, her content, if you will, with "normative" feminist concerns. I also want
to focus on Memory here because it has provoked some commentary, in the "language"
criticism, and because it shows, to me at least, why experimental writing should not be
marginalized by American feminist literary, criticism.
What to call Memory is something of a problem. Douglas Messerli, in a review of another
Mayer text, calls Memory "a novel," which while recalling Bakhtin's sense of the
novelization

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of other genres, is still not totally convincing (The L=A=N= G=U=A=G=E Book, 248).
13 Memory is an experimental text that combines elements of the diary, automatic writing,

and poetic prose. In another work, Studying Hunger, Mayer sets out the "method" of the
text's production:
But I was bound to start again. You see, the whole thing had already had a beginning with a project
called MEMORY which turned into a show which turned into a dream or returned to a dream that
enabled me to walk. Before this I couldnt walk, I had street fantasies like any normal prostitute.
Anyway, Memory was 1200 color snapshots, 3 x 5, processed by Kodak plus 7 hours of taped
narration. I had shot one roll of 35-mm color film every day for the month of July, 1971. The
pictures were mounted side by side in row after row along a long wall, each line to be read from
left to right, 36 feet by 4 feet. All the images made each day were included, in sequence, along with
a 31-part tape, which took the pictures as points of focus, one by one & as taking-off points for
digression, filling in the spaces between. Memory was described by A.D. Coleman as 'an enormous
accumulation of data.' I had described it as an 'emotional science project.' I was right.
(Mayer, in In the American Tree, 413)

So MEMORY as described here and Memory as available in printed (book) form are not
identical. In fact, although a reader familiar with the above description can see the links,
the printed text as it stands does not carry this detailed description of its method. The style
of writing in this passage, jumping from the apparently fantastic stories of "walking" and
prostitution to realistic detail of the project, could be said to be fairly typical of Mayer.
The text of Memory is even prefaced by David Rubenfine, M.D. (whom I take to be a
"real" person), who talks in psychological terms about the feat of "memory." that the text
represents.
Charles Bernstein has referred to the effects of "naturalness" he sees as motivating to
some extent the text's disposition: "I would point to Bernadette Mayer's Memory as a work
that seems rooted in some of these ('natural') assumptions, as well as to much of Kerouac.
In a different way, & the look of the work is a measure of how different, Frank O'Hara's
poetry is relevant. The achievement of these three poets has much to do with how they
fronted these assumptions" (Content's Dream, 41). Of course, naturalness is not a
positive, or valorized, term in Bernstein's discourse and so I read

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this as something of a veiled criticism. Yet the phrase "fronted these assumptions" seems
to recuperate Mayer's text for the "language-"centered, experimental project. There is no
question in my mind that Memory is the result of a prodigious experimentation. Perhaps
the most widely known text by Mayer is a short collaborative text called "Experiments," in
which she lists numerous writing projects designed to shake up normal patterns of text
production.
14 My favorite statement is the final one: ''Work your ass off to change the language &

dont ever get famous" (The L=A=N= G = U = A = G = E Book, 83).

Memory is a series of thirty-one dated entries that correspond to the days in July 1971,
with a postscript, called "Dreaming," that seems to take the subject into August of that
year, the whole work totaling 195 very, dense pages. The method of composition, from
Studying Hunger, has already been discussed. Here is a short excerpt (a quarter of a page)
that gives something of the texture of the writing:
Colors & colors they're yellow blue brick grey white green pink words taxi lights my things tag
$2.19 people radio balloon baby chair bright blue car l'escargot the chimes the boardwalk 3rd ave
el baronet & coronet king movies can move backwards diamond ice cubes co. maneuvering not able
to maneuver true sea & ski & rheingold beer the woman drive defensively from the canadian
rockies up on the roof violins horn & hardarts black white up down shoes clothes rear view mirror
love a guy gets out of his car, looks around a kid gets out he gets back in he parked in the middle of
the street, flashers, all the way to texas if you want, stirring up dust, if any.
(22)

Writing like this renders analysis difficult from at least two angles, as seen in the previous
chapter. For one, the level of recorded reality is so insistent that there seems to be only
that levelsurface meaning and that's all. The second, and more difficult, problem is the
extent to which the text already embeds its own self-commentary, rendering secondary
criticism suspiciously unnecessary. But, as I argued in the previous chapter, I don't think
these two difficulties preclude intelligent discussion of what is at work in a text like this
one. Here evidently is a street scene, one of many in the text. Knowing the method of
composition, one can identify the "photographic" elements as well as the sound elements
(though these latter are not so prevalent here), and finally, elements of chance

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composition. Residents or cognoscenti of New York likewise can recognize otherwise

obscure details like "hardarts," a long-time automated diner. This passage is fairly
representative of the style of the work as a whole in the run-on, action sentence that
drives the accumulation of detail, comment, and associative resonance (though it does not
seem to me to fit Ron Silliman's model for "the new sentence").
Is this text written by a woman in the 1970s a feminist text? What are the logics at work
that would either claim such a work to be at least partially gender-determined or, further,
to participate in an ongoing revolution in the place of women's writing in society? That
there are no clear answers to these questions is due at least in part to the proliferation of
feminisms, the differing emphases of feminist discourses. As a male author I approach
such questions with some hesitancy.
15 Bracketing for the moment the question of whether a man can truly be a feminist, I

wish to review here some major kinds of feminist literary theory practiced, or available
discursively to the American academic audience, and to suggest some reasons why the
"language" movement and feminism, far from joining forces as movements opposing
patriarchal forces of power and domination, seem at present to be vases
incommunicants.16
In this book so far, the prevailing mode of feminist criticism has been that influenced by
the French feminists, in particular the work of Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. In
Chapter 3, I used Irigaray's notion of sexuation of discourse to look specifically at the
sexuation of Saint-John Perse's poetic language in Anabase. Irigaray's model of sexuation
of discourse provides a means of analysis for gender determinations in both male- and
female-authored texts, though she herself has chosen, as part of her overall strategy, to
concentrate solely on works by men. The sexuation in poetic language is a rich area that
has hardly been noticed in English-language criticism, that is, gender determinations in
language rather than "content." The work of Julia Kristeva likewise focuses on the
workings of language in the poetic text, though once again focusing primarily on maleauthored texts.17 In an earlier work, I described Kristeva's model of the sujet-en-procs
as follows: "The subject-in-process is the writer both in the process of writing and in the
process of dissolving him or herself in the work. The process is envisioned through a
spatial metaphor as a place where the inner urge to create which is also an urge to destroy
spurs the conflicting

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elements of the subject's experience and corporal strategies to break down the existing
discourse and forge a new language intimately related to personal history. The place
where this occurs is the subject-in-process, the process is a semiotic dispositif, and the
result is the poetic text" (Modern Poetic Practice, 1415). I still feel that Kristeva's model
of the subject-in-process is of great value in describing the process of poetic composition.
The works of Irigaray and Kristeva provide models for gendered practice, as well as a
means for beginning to investigate an ethics of that practice.
18

The work of feminist theorists in Britain shares many of the theoretical bases of French
feminism, with an even greater insistence on sociohistorical analysis and political
engagement. Some of the writers who might be seen to share this perspective, despite
significant differences of approach and emphasis, are Toril Moi, Jacqueline Rose, and
Chris Weedon.19 Moi's work is perhaps the most sustained attempt to analyze closely the
theoretical assumptions of both French and American feminisms. In sustaining her
analyses through a consistently politicizing approach, her work shows the exciting
possibilities of a theoretically aware feminist discourse grounded in the theory, of
progressive social activism. As she says: "The aims of feminist criticism are or should be
revolutionary. It is politics, the opposition to patriarchy and sexism in all its forms, which
gives feminist criticism its specificity" (quoted in Eagleton, 198). Because of this political
stance, it is perhaps somewhat surprising to find that Moi associates herself most closely
with the theories of Kristeva.20 For the argument based on marginality that has occupied
this study and the previous chapter, Moi's work is particularly helpful. She states, "As the
feminine is defined as marginal under patriarchy, so the semiotic is marginal to language.
This is why the two categories, along with other forms of 'dissidence,' can be theorized in
roughly the same way in Kristeva's work" (Sexual/Textual Politics, 166). But Moi
criticizes the lack of emphasis in Kristeva on "the conscious decision-making processes
that must be part of any collective revolutionary project'' (170). The "revolution" in
language that Kristeva announces remains for Moi on the level of language (171), and so
the implications for a fully social program remain to be theorized.
Jacqueline Rose's theoretical move, which I find equally compelling, is to argue for the
importance of psychoanalytical discourse to feminism, and more, to argue that feminism
is uniquely suited to

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explore fully the significance of psychoanalytic discoveries.

21 Rose's combination of theory, feminist, and political concerns demands a close

attention:
More than writing, but less than the event, psychoanalysis continues to point to an instance which
cannot be caught by the infinite play of language any more than it can be answered by class,
economy or power. That has always been its political importance and its difficulty, although it is
through feminism that this has been articulated more clearly than anywhere else. To understand
subjectivity, sexual difference and fantasy in a way which neither entrenches the terms nor
denies them still seems to me to be a crucial task for today. Not a luxury, but rather the key
processes through whichas women and as menwe experience, and then question, our truly political
fates.
(23; my italics)

The continuity, with Moi, in arguing for the political importance of discursive practices, is
apparent here. In some senses, the psychoanalytic "instance" Rose adduces here maintains
a Kristevan emphasis on the irreducibility of psychic phenomena, suggesting that, as
opposed to Moi, consciously held belief systems may not be able to account for the
power of unconscious drives to subvert the symbolic order.
Rose's emphasis on a politicized, feminist approach to Freud and Lacan opens up the area
of subjectivity that has been at issue throughout this study. Chris Weedon takes a
Foucauldian approach to the construction of subjectivity within discursive practices,
while maintaining an insistence on the feminist political dimension of such constructions.
Weedon insists that issues of identity and subjectivity can only emerge through active
participation in a discourse. As she says: "Individuals can only identify their 'own'
interests in discourse by becoming the subject of particular discourses. Individuals are
both the site and subjects of discursive struggle for their identity" (97). Weedon's analysis
works well to counter the fear expressed in many feminist writings that the "antihumanist" tendencies implied (or proclaimed) by Foucauldian and other postmodern
theories threaten the just-emerging sense of self and personal identity for women that is
associated with feminism. My own view (one that has been strengthened by my
experience teaching college composition) is that the awareness of discursive practices is in
fact empowering for individual subjects in an explicitly political way.22 Weedon's ideas
about subjectivity and discursive practice

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lead directly to a critique of "humanist" feminism that is highly relevant to the argument
here. She claims that "humanist feminists have tended to be drawn to realist fiction,
constructing their general theories of women's writing, women's language and feminist
aesthetics accordingly. In doing so they have rejected texts which contest the apparent
transparency and closure of meaning in realism and attempt to deconstruct the fixity of
meaning" (17172; emphasis added). Weedon's emphasis here on terms such as
"transparency" and "closure of meaning" brings her analysis close to that of Bernstein and
the "language'' theorists. Like those theorists, Weedon insists that an actively constructed
subjectivity must question and resist the myths of transparent language, in order to engage
in fully aware political activity. Her critique here of "humanist feminism" is less a
rejection, to my reading, than a way of posing the debate to highlight the interrelation of
language and practice. Weedon is thus one feminist theorist who apparently would be
open to the "language" movement's experiments in textual practice and, I suppose, to a
project such as Bernadette Mayer's Memory.
From the perspective of the different feminist writers working in Britain, there can be no
absolute breakdown between theory and language-based practice. As Mary Eagleton
states: "Critics such as Moi and the Marxist-feminist Literature Collective feel they have
no choice as to whether or not to theorise; theory is an indispensable and unavoidable
aspect of their criticism. Thus, just as there is no 'knowledge' that does not need to be
understood theoretically, so there is no 'female experience' that does not have to be
theorised" (153). This description of Moiand, I have argued, Rose and Weedonwould be
applicable to a distinctive group of feminist writers who work in the United States while
maintaining strong theoretical and practical ties to France. These theorists would include,
notably but not exclusively, Jane Gallop, Alice Jardine, and Naomi Schor.
23 Since their work is relatively well known, I will confine my all-too-brief analysis to

Jardine's Gynesis and its theorizing of the role of protofeminist thinking in the male
writers and theorists of modernity, or what I have called "postmodern" throughout this
study (Jardine, 2224 passim).
Jardine's book discloses truly dizzying possibilities for the as-yet-undefined ratios
between writing, gender, and theory. Her argument that male theorists of modernity have
usurped the feminine-gendered corpus of literary theory is very compelling. In a wideranging and provocative statement, Jardine outlines the scope of

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her project: "It is perhaps through what we might call a new French-American
connection, a different conjunction of ethical concerns with process, that what
Marguerite Duras has called 'the last theoretical imbecile' may begin to perceive that the
question of woman and language is not one of fashion; it involves rather a profound
rethinking of both the male and female speaking subjects' relationship to the real,
imaginary and symbolic, as well as the status of metadiscourse itself" (44). I see in the
first part of this statement a way of conceptualizing the overall goal in this study, that is,
to uncover the ethical concerns that inform the process of poetic production. My model
for exteriority is inescapably subject to Jardine's argument that male theorists of the
postmodern have theorized the question of woman in ways that are central to their
theoretical project.
And yet, I also think that Jardine's study inadvertently points to feminist discourse as the
normative discourse of the contemporary American academy. For example, she states:
"But there is one final reason for the absence of an alliance between traditional feminism
and modernity: the theoretical writing in question does not enjoy a valorized position in
the vast majority of French and American critical circles, while feminism, especially as
linked to women's studies in the United States, is one of the few viable critical discourses
around" (63; my italics). This statement, it seems to me, bears a weight disproportionate
to its content. What does it mean for a discourse to be "viable"? I suggest that viable here
means something like normative. Otherwise, why doesn't Jardine name any of the other
"viable critical discourses around"? Viable as used in this context clearly means capable of
soliciting and sustaining the interest of a preexisting, at least in some important sense
preformed, audience, an audience that presumably is ready to receive certain utterances
providing they bear the clear markings of a preexisting, again in some sense preformed,
discourse.
What other feminist authors, some of them discussed here, call "empiricist" or "humanist"
American feminist theory bears all the signs of such a normative discourse. (Jardine's
previously cited statement establishes a clear break between "theory" and ''normative"
feminism. I do not mean to suggest here that Jardine's work can be conflated with the
latter approach.) To come full circle, then, I wish to show how two recent texts that
clearly operate within this normative feminist discourse cannot accommodate a writerly
practice which just as clearly rejects any such normative language as one

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of its primary positional strategies.

24 Alicia Ostriker's Stealing the Language and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's No

Man's Land (vol. 1): The War of the Words, are both undoubtedly "viable" texts that are
certain to reach a much wider audience than any of the works discussed so far.25 The
authors of both works participate in an academic, humanist feminism that ensures their
texts both prominence and authority.
Ostriker's title is deliberately provocative; less so her argument that women since 1960
have come fully into their own as poets with strong personal identities and an impressive
record of vital, searching work. Ostriker also details the history of struggle for women in
American society to achieve respect, as well as a market, for their work. I agree with her
assessment of the importance of this movement and the vital achievement it represents. In
fact, I admire almost everything about this book, except its model of poetic production,
which is frankly, even militantly, empiricist. Ostriker states: "My subject is the
extraordinary tide of poetry by American women in our time. An increasing proportion of
this work is explicitly female in the sense that the writers have chosen to explore
experiences central to their sex and find forms and styles appropriate to that expression"
(7). This is almost a definition of literary empiricism: the work is drawn directly from
experience (apparently not a problematic concept), and only after seeks "appropriate"
means of expression. Ostriker repeats a certain version of phenomenology by claiming
that women poets today "interpret external reality through the medium of the body" (11).
And she claims that in this poetry: "academic distinctions between the self and what we in
the classroom call the 'persona' move to the vanishing point. When a woman poet today
says 'I,' she is likely to mean herself'' (12). This movement toward the identification of the
poet and the speaking subject runs exactly counter to most theorized versions of
subjectivity, as, for example, in the works of Weedon or Jardine.
Ostriker's method of examining the themes of women's poetry yields quite a range of
subject matters and attitudes toward those subject matters. Indeed, as she says, "The
house of poetry has many mansions, and among the attractions of the women's poetry
movement is its encouragement of diversity" (13; emphasis added). Despite this claim for
diversity, of the nearly one hundred contemporary women poets she discusses and lists in
her bibliography, there is not a single woman poet whose work appears in the three
anthologies I have cited (Messerli, "Language" Poetries, Hocquard

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and Royet-Journaud, 21 + 1 American poets today; Silliman, In the American Tree) that
Ostriker either mentions or cites. By my count there are fourteen women represented in
these anthologies (roughly one-third of the writers listed in each table of contents). Now it
could be that Ostriker is simply unaware of their work, though such broad claims as she
makes could only be strengthened by its inclusion.
26 I find it more likely that the experimentation in language their work consists of

precludes them from notice according to Ostriker's empiricist model for poetry about
women's experience ("female" poetry), thus causing their work to be perceived as outside
the "literary mainstream" that Ostriker unabashedly supports (13).
Gilbert and Gubar's recent work takes this process of marginalizing experimental work
one step further by theorizing experimentation itself as masculinist deformation of the
"mother tongue." Their presuppositions in arriving at this stance are more explicitly
theorized than Ostriker's, though no less empiricist. In their preface they argue against
recent theories of the fictive element to history writing and the "death of the author"
proclaimed by Foucault and others. Maintaining a real author and actual history allows
them, they claim, to make the following move: "Once we reimagine the author as a
gendered human being whose texts reflect key cultural conditions, we can conflate and
collate individual literary narratives, so that they constitute one possible metastory, a story
of stories about gender strife in this period'' (xiv). One wonders why Gilbert and Gubar
even bother to claim real status for the author and history when they intend to
"reimagine" the author and "conflate" the individual stories. Literary history of male
authors in the last hundred years is confined to an examination of antifeminist attitudes in
the works and comments of the major modernist authors. I agree entirely with Gilbert and
Gubar that the misogyny of modernist poets and novelists is an important subject, and I
respect their thorough excavation of the evidence that points to the conclusion that
Pound, Williams, Lawrence, Yeats, and the rest struggled with a blind and often blinding
hatred of women. In the metastory Gilbert and Gubar propose this is not a side issue:
"Indeed it is possible to hypothesize that a reaction-formation against the rise of literary
women became not just a theme in modernist writing but a motive for modernism" (156).
Fear of women writers, in Gilbert and Gubar's view, led directly to the fragmentary style
and presence of foreign words in The Cantos and The Waste Land, and to

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the literary experimentalism of Ulysses and other works of the period (156).
They move in their final chapter from descriptive literary history to a theory of language
and literary production, in part to support theoretically this observed antifeminist trend of
experimentalism in these modernist works. Against Kristeva's theory of women as
alienated from patriarchal discourse (woman in some sense representing the semiotic as
opposed to the symbolic), they claim, "The female subject is not necessarily alienated
from the words she writes and speaks" (229). Male-authored texts thus misrepresent
women, especially if these texts are experimental. On the subject of Molly Bloom's
monologue in Ulysses, they declare, "Her artless jingles are secondary and asyntactic"
(232). This is because literary experimentation (by men) is always and essentially an
attack on the "mother tongue." Joyce, Mallarm, Williams, and others are lambasted for
their assaults on language in the most sustained anti-intellectual attack on progressive
literary experimentation I've ever read (25162). Gilbert and Gubar claim that all literary
theory is fantasy, so they propose their own: "But the very fact that one can metaphorize
the mouth as a womb, the word as the child of female power, implies that women need
not experience any ontological alienation from the area of language as we know it" (265).
This highly questionable theory-fantasy rests in turn on some dubious premises.
27 More seriously, Gilbert and Gubar's attack on experimentation in language, in itself, as

pernicious and male, presents a reactionary side to the normative discourse of empiricist
feminism. I don't see that at this late stage of literary modernism (and perhaps traditional
feminism as well), Gilbert and Gubar's move, even if it is only strategic, does anyone any
good. Do writers need to be encouraged to use normative language? Does it aid women
writers to be told from an authoritative source that literary experimentation is nasty and
masculine? The experimental work of Mayer and others associated with the "language''
movement is discursively marginal, in the complex sense I have urged. But for the
marginal in the work to maintain its power and its radiance, we must all resist efforts from
whatever source to marginalize experimental work culturally and societally. Such work
quite simply is our future.

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Afterword
Work your ass off to change the language & dont ever get famous.

I don't think Bernadette Mayer is in any immediate danger of becoming a famous writer.
1 Indeed some of the poets whose work I have studied here have experienced literary
fame as a burden.2 The obduracy of their works militates against wide acceptance. But

we are also dealing with the conflicting claims made by proponents of different literarycritical constituencies. Whereas experimental writers and many feminists theorize
marginality as a position from which to change the language, norms, and goals of society,
there seems to be relatively little communication between their respective positions on the
margin. Unfortunately, to my perspective, one element of "normative" feminism is
engaged in a rearguard action against literary experimentalism by classifying linguistic
experiments as inherently masculine and thus harmful. I am one of those who believe that
the sexuation of language is an observable phenomenon and a useful approach to text
analysis; but there can be no simple distinctions of the typical binary type (e.g.,
experimental vs. woman-centered) concerning the gender-coding of different kinds of
language practice. Proponents of a "normative" literary language representing the
experience of women who oppose linguistic experimentation are mis-serving their
audiences by excluding the important work of experimental women writers, not to
mention rendering these already marginal literary practitioners nearly invisible. I think
one could also criticize many of what appear to be the "masculinist" assumptions
underlying the "language" theorists' preference for Marxist analysis and class struggle, to
the detriment of individual, gendered experience, and thus texts like those by Mayer. Yet,
in the seemingly impossible discursive interstices, these kinds of experimental writingby
women and mencon

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tinue to thrive without any apparent need of legitimation from the critical discourses.
3

The exteriority these works are based onfrom the poems of Saint-John Perse to those of
Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, and Gertrude Stein, from Charles Olson and John Ashbery
to Michael Palmer, Clark Coolidge, and Mayeris an aspect of the ethics of literary practice
they represent. The modern long poem, often through experimental strategies, works to
break down the identification of the poetic speaker and the poet/author. This earlier
model, whether seen as Romantic subjectivity or lyric voice, is based on what I have
called interiority, and is exactly what these poets were and are trying to turn inside-out.
As readers, our ethical response is thus engaged, as we are confronted with works in
which the very structure of intersubjectivity is worked out in the disposition of their
textual strategies. The corresponding theory of the subject in the philosophy and theory of
the twentieth century, with which I began, traces the shift from a phenomenological view
to a deconstructive one. Derrida's diffrance is a profoundly ethical project, challenging
institutional structures he views as forms of "writing," and urging us to see the
intersubjective violence that is the horizon for thinking those structures. Theoretical
feminism is likewise involved in the ethical task of interrogating the theory of the subject
in the context of these structures of power and domination. That a male writer should
necessarily be occupied with questions of the feminine and the literary text is the result of
a cultural positioning that Alice Jardine has exposed with great acuity. Equally the result
of social and discursive forces is the fact that much of the activities these texts call for
occurs in the classroom. Such work, in my view, represents the best chance for
transforming our universities into places of social and political change. Students learn to
develop specifically grounded subjectivities by gaining knowledge of different discursive
practicesthey gain that knowledge through active participation in those discourses, of
which literary language is one. "To change the language" is itself a revolutionary goal. In
our postmodern condition the literary practice creating that change takes the form of an
ethics of exteriority.

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Notes
Chapter 1
1. This is not to minimize the importance of very fine work by critics of distinction such
as Charles Altieri, Albert Cook, and Marjorie Perloff, to mention only a few prominent
writers who brilliantly manage the combination of theory and modern poetry. Two critics
who have developed recognizably personal brands of theory are Harold Bloom and Hugh
Kenner. I discuss the work of all these writers in the specific analyses that follow.
2. To cite one representative example of the argument for the persistence of the Romantic
subjectivity in modern and contemporary poetry, Robert Pinsky, The Situation of Poetry.
Marjorie Perloff argues for a major reorientation of our thinking on "lyric," especially in
current poetry, in Poetic License: Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric.
3. Maud Ellman's provocative study of Eliot's and Pound's "impersonality," The Poetics of
Impersonality, concludes that it is not possible to remove the personal (historical, ethical,
political) from the work and that this is a hidden ideological move perpetrated by
modernist criticism to avoid difficult questions of history and politics in writers like
Pound and Eliot.
4. In The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic Michael Andr
Bernstein has argued forcefully, but in my view not convincingly, for the use of the term
"modern verse epic" as opposed to "modern long poem."
5. I am not the first person to have used "exteriority" as a term to describe a model for
literary production (nor as a philosophical term; see below, discussion of Levinas).
Mikhail Bakhtin uses the term in his study of the novel in at least two different senses.
Bakhtin says that citizens of the city-states in antiquity lived in a state of "exteriority"
because their entire activity was undertaken out of doors, in the main square. A person's
utterances were likewise made in this outdoor arena. Such a thing as a private or interior
discourse, according to this view, was simply not part of the model (The Dialogic
Imagination, 13335). When Bakhtin speaks of"exteriority" with regard to the works of
Rabelais, his sense of the term is related but

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different. Rabelais achieves exteriority in his portrayal of Gargantua and Pantagruel in

that all of the characters' significant actions are described from an external perspective.
The internal thoughts or states of mind of his characters are not explored at all. His
characters are what they do, including bodily functions, eating, and so forth (239).
Despite Bakhtin's claim for the "novelization" of other genres, I'm not sure he would
have been willing to extend a sense of exteriority to poetry (cf. 286).
6. See, for example, Albert Cook, The Classic Line.
7. Friedrich Nietzsche is one philosopher whose work would have been readily available
and would have certainly affected the views of Perse and Char, among others. Nietzsche's
view of the subjectfrom the standpoint of perception, memory, and thus identityis
consonant with many of the ways that the poets I discuss try to break out of an isolating
personal subjectivity. See especially, Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, sections
5052.
8. Jean-Franois Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne, translated under the title The
Postmodern Condition. This section of my introduction summarizes the first three
chapters of my parallel work-in-progress on theories of subjectivity and exteriority in
modern philosophy and critical theory.
9. I owe this model of idealist and existentialist alternation as a way of viewing the
relationship of Heidegger to Husserl to the teaching of Douglas Heinsen.
10. Francis Ponge, Le Parti pris des choses; Jean-Paul Sartre, "L'homme et les choses," in
Situations I.
11. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La Phnomnologie de la perception. I discuss my
translation of this phrase, which is really also an interpretation, in Peter Baker, Modern
Poetic Practice: Structure and Genesis, 37.
12. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l'invisible.
13. Jacques Lacan, Le Sminaire (XI): Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la
psychanalyse, translated under the title The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis.
14. Jacques Derrida, La Voix et le phnomne, translated under the title Speech and
Phenomena.
15. Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie, translated under the title Of Grammotology.
16. Julia Kristeva, La Rvolution du langage potique, translated under the title
Revolution in Poetic Language. I discuss Kristeva's theory of the semiotic and symbolic

in Modern Poetic Practice, 1315, as well as in Chapter 12 of the present study.

17. Emmanuel Levinas, Totalit et infini: essai sur l'extriorit. I discuss some of the
ethical directions of feminist theories in Chapter 12.
18. Jacques Derrida, Glas.

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19. Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity.

20. See Peter Baker, "Metric, Naming and Exile: Perse / Pound / Genet," in The Scope of
Words: In Honor of Albert S. Cook, 3958.
21. Charles Bernstein, Artifice of Absorption.
Chapter 2
1. On the shift from what I call "ideal memory" to memory as a "place of production" that
breaks down the unitary subject, see my "Memory as a Model for Poetic Creation (Hardy
and Williams)," in Modern Poetic Practice, 536.
2. Especially, Edward S. Casey, Remembering: a Phenomenological Study. Cited
hereafter by page number.
3. Casey's analysis has led me to reject the analysis I put forth of certain kinds of actions
not being governed by memory (Modern Poetic Practice, 1213). Casey's valuable
contribution allows us to see "habitual body memory" at work in these actions, as
opposed to the mentalistic or associationist view of memory he and I both view as
inadequate for explaining these memory phenomena.
4. I propose a somewhat different phenomenological model for style as "compassion for
others" in "Style and Compassion in the Williams Tradition (Williams and O'Hara),"
Modern Poetic Practice, 177212.
5. William Carlos Williams in Spring and All calls this force or place, the "imagination,"
stating that it has the effect "to liberate the man to act in whatever direction his disposition
leads" (Imaginations, 150).
6. All references to the work of Valery Larbaud, unless otherwise noted, are to: OEuvres
* compltes de Valery Larbaud, vol. IV: A. O. Barnabooth, ses oeuvres * compltes.
7. For publishing history, see the introduction by Robert Mallet (Larbaud, 715). The final
edition suppressed the original "biography."
8. All references to Perse are to: Saint-John Perse, OEuvres compltes. Here, "Message
pour Valery Larbaud," 560. All subsequent references to page number in the text.
Translations of the poetry in this chapter are by Louise Varse, in Saint-John Perse,
Collected Poems.
9. Jean-Franois Lyotard, Le Postmoderne expliqu aux enfants (Correspondance,

19821985), 31. Cited hereafter by page number.

10. Lon-Paul Fargue, Posies. All references to Fargue are to this volume; translations
are my own. The Perse preface is reprinted in his OEuvres compltes, 50732, to which
my page references correspond. For a fuller analysis of the preface in comparison with
the Nobel Prize speech, see my "Perse on Poetry."
11. As an example, see the three translations of Fargue made by Wallace Stevens, in Opus
Posthumous, 12124. Though there has been much speculation on the French influences
on Stevens, this is one of the very few pieces of "hard" evidence. It is tempting to claim
Fargue's

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work as the crucial link between Mallarm's poetics and those of Stevens.
12. Perse states: "Lon-Paul Fargue fut homme prendre un train de nuit pour courir en
province, chez l'imprimeur, s'assurer sur preuves de l'emplacement d'une virgule [LonPaul Fargue was the kind of man to jump on a night train and rush out to the country to
the printer, to make sure by examining the proofs that a comma appeared in the right
place]" (526, my trans.). This is forty years before William Carlos Williams's equally
characteristic dot with a space on either side, that first appeared in Paterson. The two
dots, incidentally, do not survive translation in Stevens's versions, whether it was Stevens
or his publisher who regularized them.
13. Perse states: "Fargue, lui demandait-on un soir, vous qui aimez les mots en euxmmes et pour eux-mmes, comme des cratures vivantes encore relies leur naissance,
nous direz-vous un mot de votre choix, et qui vous ait encore sa faveur?'Le mot lampe,'
ditil simplement (ce mot port, comme son nom mme de Fargue, par deux syllabes
ingales: une forte et une muette) [Fargue, we asked him one night, you who love words
in themselves and for themselves, like living creatures still tied to their birth, would you
tell us a word of your choice, and one which still has you in its favor?'The word lampe,'
he said simply (this word conveyed, even as his name Fargue, by two uneven syllables,
one strong and one mute)]" (530). Cf. Baker, "Perse on Poetry," 5657.
14. See my "Poetic Practice: The Structure of Absence (Mallarm and Ungaretti)," in
Modern Poetic Practice, 3766.
15. Larbaud, review of loges, in La Phalange, December 1911, reprinted in Perse, 122732.
16. Jacques Geninasca has called this Perse's "smiotique du monde naturel [semiotics of
the natural world]," in "Mise en clair des messages: Analyse et rcit du discours
potique." I follow up this analysis further in Chapter 3.
17. What Kristeva would call "semiosis." See La Rvolution du langage potique.
18. Roger Little states, "But the poet does not entirely share this self-satisfaction: by
implication we read into the last two lines the poet's restless fascination with the sea and
its invitation to departure" (Saint-John Perse, 9).
19. What Pauline Berthail calls the "nostalgie de l'exil dchu loin de son le heureuse
[nostalgia of the person exiled far away from his happy island]," in D"'Amers"
"Nocturne." Saint-John Perse: Bibliographie 18871975, 17.
20. The similarity is striking between this image and the famous image Proust uses to
describe the sobs of his young narrator that are only perceived "now" that the narrator has

come to write the book in his

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old age: "En ralit ils n'ont jamais cess; et c'est seulement parce que la vie se tait
maintenant davantage autour de moi que je les entends de nouveau, comme ces cloches
de couvents que couvrent si bien les bruits de la ville pendant le jour qu'on les croirait
arrtes mais qui se remettent sonner dans le silence du soir [In reality their echo has
never ceased; and it is only because life is now growing more and more quiet round
about me that I hear them anew, like those convent bells which are so effectively
drowned during the day by the noises of the street that one would suppose them to
have stopped, until they ring out again through the silent evening air]" (A la recherche
du temps perdu, 1:37; Moncrief/Kilmartin trans., 1:40). I would remark in passing the
tone of nostalgia and regret in this passage in contrast to the dynamic image which
Perse introduces that embeds the emotion in a complex layering that finally keeps
regret from being the sole or even dominant feeling.
21. Rimbaud, Illuminations, in OEuvres
*. See especially, "Ville," 274; "Villes," 27677; and "Villes," 27980.
22. For a different version of this theme, see Randall Jarrell's late poem, "Women on a
Bus," which ends: "May I die on the day the world ends" (The Complete Poems, 489).
23. Cf. Ren Galand, Saint-John Perse, 21.
24. Lyotard, Discours, figure, 277.
Chapter 3
1. The term "sexuation" is developed in Luce Irigaray's feminist discourse. Irigaray
develops the concept of sexuation of language or, more specifically, discourse to offer a
critique of the masculine bias in Freud's writings that causes him to misrepresent basic
issues of feminine identity and sexuality (Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un, 71). More recently,
she has expanded her thinking on the concept as a means for inquiring into sexual issues
at the foundation of language and ethical practice (thique de la diffrence sexuelle,
12728). My inquiry accepts Irigaray's basic premises on the "sexuation" of discourse as a
means for exploring issues of sexual difference and language in the poetic practice of
Saint-John Perse.
2. Jacques Geninasca, "Mise en clair des messages: Analyse du rcit et analyse du
discours potique," 221. My translation.
3. For a fuller discussion of this particular issue, see my "The Poet's Body: Toward a
Semiotic of Whitman and Rimbaud," and the analysis of instances such as Whitman's

"fibre of manly wheat" where the human serves momentarily as the vehicle for an image
in an overall progression in which the human is actually the content of the statement. The
terms "tenor" and "vehicle" are of course those of I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of
Rhetoric.

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4. Briefly stated, the thesis of Jean-Franois Lyotard's work on the figural would establish
two spaces for thinking and expression: the figural that haunts the borders of discourse;
and "le discours . . . dans la figure comme rve [the discourse in the figure as dream]"
(Discours, figure, 253; my trans.). Specifically in what Lyotard calls the function of
"figure-image" resides the poetic activity that "s'accomplit dans un espace de diffrence
[takes place in the space of difference]" (271). The figural that haunts the borders of
discourse operates outside the logical systems of thought based on classification and
opposition. This leads to the concept of nonoppositional difference or, as he states, "la
possibilit de penser une relation sans l'inclure dans un systme d'oppositions [the
possibility of thinking a relationship without including it in an oppositional system]"
(139).
5. See Mireille Sacotte, "Sur deux chants d' Anabase."
6. Saint-John Perse, OEuvres
* compltes, 1108. This is of course the standard text of reference. Translation, by T. S.
Eliot, in Saint-John Perse, Collected Poems. I follow Eliot's translation except where
noted. All textual citations of Anabase have been compared with the critical edition
established by Albert Henry, Anabase de Saint-John Perse. I would also like to express
gratitude to the Fondation Saint-John Perse for allowing me access to many of the
materials used in preparing this chapter.
7. See T. S. Eliot's preface to his translation, Anabasis, A Poem by Saint-John Perse.
8. See Roger Caillois, Potique de Saint-John Perse, 3966.
9. See especially Madeleine Frdric, La Rptition et ses structures dans l'oeuvre*
potique de Saint-John Perse. I have outlined my belief that structuring repetition in
Perse's work helps to establish an overall effect of human community through the
commonality of ways we go about questioning and seeking to know the world. See
Chapter 5.
10. Use of the term "imaginaire" in the discussion of Perse is associated primarily with the
work of Jean-Pierre Richard. See his Onze tudes sur la posie moderne, and his
"Anabase: Un imaginaire de l'esprit," in Le Lieu et la formule, 21622.
11. Roger Little, Saint-John Perse, 22.
12. Kenneth White gives expression to my general thesis in the context of a criticism
leveled against Perse's procedure when he states: "Si grand que soit Anabase, il reste pour

moi plus monumental que pntrant. Cette 'expdition vers l'intrieur' reste trop . . .
extrieure [As great as Anabase is, it remains for me more monumental than penetrating.
This 'expedition toward the interior' remains too . . . exterior]" (La Figure du dehors, 123;
ellipsis his; my trans.).
13. For a fuller analysis of this disorienting of readerly expectations in a poetics of the
body, see my "The Poet's Body."
14. See Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne.

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Chapter 4
1. See Antoine Raybaud, "Exil palimpseste."
2. Saint-John Perse, OEuvres
*compltes, 137, Further references in the text; roman numerals shall refer to individual
sections, or Chants, arabic numerals to individual versets. "Winds," translated by Denis
Devlin, in Saint-John Perse, Collected Poems. Unless indicated, I have used Devlin's
translation throughout.
3. Steven Winspur, "Le signe pur," 50.
4. Most importantly in the work of Jacques Derrida (e.g., La Voix et le phnomne).
There be argues that the Bedeutung or vouloir-dire (meaning) that underlies Husserlian
intentionality is based on a privileging of speech as absolute self-presence. "Writing" as a
category, that precedes such a speech/writing dyad is thus the nonoriginary "foundation"
of any possibility of thinking or speaking.
5. The philosophical implications of this search for the "proper" name are explored well
by Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology. He states, for example,
"Possession of a proper name is not only the aim of sojourning subjects; it is also the goal
of Western philosophy and theology," (41).
6. Maurice Blanchot, L'Espace litteraire, 1617, translated under the title Literary Space,
26 (translation modified).
7. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 16772. A reading of this is provided by
Mark C. Taylor, Altarity, 8385.
8. Rimbaud, OEuvres, 17980. According to Yves Bonnefoy, this phrase of Rimbaud is not
an achieved ideal vision, but rather reveals an inescapable flaw: "En de, bien sr, des
chteaux et des saisons esprs (le vrai lieu et le vrai temps d'une vie fonde en absolu) ce
consentement n'est que le dfaut inhrent toute me humaine [On this side, of course,
of the hoped-for great houses and seasons (the true place and the true time of a life
founded on the absolute) this giving in is only the inherent flaw contained in every
human soul]" (Rimbaud, 81; my translation). Rimbaud is one of the only poets from the
French tradition to whom Perse consistently refers with approbation.
9. Maurice Blanchot, Le Pas au-del (49; quoted in, and translated by, Taylor, Altarity,
239). Taylor elsewhere states: "The inscription of the subject within this tissue of relations
results in the collapse of the absolute opposition between interiority and exteriority. If the

subject is not self-centered but is a cipher for forces that play through it, there can be no
sharp opposition between inwardness and outwardness. What appears to be merely
outward is actually inward, and what appears to be exclusively inward is at the same time
outward. This interplay of inwardness and outwardness subverts purely private and
personal subjectivity" (Erring, 136).

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10. ''Region of seaside hills in North AfricaTransitional zone between the desert zones and
those dominated by the Sudanese climate" (Robert dictionary of the French language; my
trans.).
11. Saint-John Perse, OEuvres
* comptes, 548; Letters, 448.
12. The classic source for investigating Perse's play with the materiality of language is
Roger Caillois, Potique de Saint-John Perse.
13. Martin Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, 27, quoted by Taylor, Altarity, 52, who adds
the original German in brackets.
14. Mark Taylor analyzes the link between identity and the image of God: "In most cases,
the locus of the indivisible singularity is identified as an absolutely private interiority or
purely personal inwardness. The hidden inwardness of the personality is the mirror image
of the impenetrable mystery of the personal God. As God transcends the world through
total alterity and radical solitude, so the self transcends its world through thoroughgoing
otherness and complete alterity" (Erring, 130). The Logos is the name for what Steven
Winspur calls "le signe pur" in his article of that title. As he says: "Tout le recueil Exil est
engendr par cette structure d'un 'signe pur' dont le ct matriel semble s'effacer devant
le revers pur et incorporel [The entire collection Exile is engendered by this structure of a
'pure sign,' the material side of which seems to be erased by the pure and incorporeal
side]" (61). This deconstructive approach seems to me to be based on the assumption that
such a "pure sign" is the "blind spot" of Perse's text. I'm not sure such an assumption
stands up in the face of an investigation into Perse's text as a deep meditation on "writing"
itself. In my further analysis, the materiality of language itself will help to point up the
seriousness of Perse's meditation on "writing."
15. The reader may recall that Isaiah cries out in a similar fashion when he has his "face
to face" encounter with God: "Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a
man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes
have seen the King, the Lord of hosts" (Isaiah 6:5).
16. Hart Crane, "General Aims and Theories," in The Complete Poems and Selected
Letters, 21723. It is interesting to compare Crane's phrase "logic of metaphor" with T. S.
Eliot's terms "logic of the imagination" and "logic of imagery" which he uses in the
preface to his translation of Perse's Anabase to describe Perse's poetic practice.
17. So far, Amiti du Prince, ed. Albert Henry; Anabase, ed. Albert Henry; Nocturne, ed.

Albert Henry.
18. Roger Little, Saint-John Perse, 112. Little, besides being responsible for the
forthcoming manuscript edition of Exil, also discussed composition practice with the
poet.
19. The style/stylus pair runs through Mark Taylor's rich meditations in Altarity.

Page 187

20. Albert Cook has written on the cultural and signifying associations of mirrors, in "The
Wilderness of Mirrors."
Chapter 5
1. The present chapter is a revised version of material on Saint-John Perse that originally
appeared as a part of Chapter 4, "The Act of Knowing: Non-Linear Structures in Long
Poems," in my Modern Poetic Practice: Structure and Genesis, 13551; used here by
permission of Peter Lang Publishing, Inc. For a further development of the material from
Wittgenstein, see Modern Poetic Practice, 11935. All references are to Saint-John Perse,
OEuvres
* compltes. Roman numerals refer to the four major sections, or Cantiques, of Vents;
arabic numerals to the smaller subdivisions, or Chants. Translation of "Winds" is by
Hugh Chisholm, in Saint-John Perse, Collected Poems.
2. See Chapter 9 for my discussion of the ethical aspect of hermeticism, with respect to
the long poems of Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky.
3. Raybaud, "loge du non-savoir."
4. Cited by Roger Caillois, Potique de Saint-John Perse, 181.
5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La Phnomnologie de la perception. He refers, for example,
to "les montages que nous avons acquis dans notre frquentation du monde [the
montages we have acquired by living in the world]" (326). Elsewhere, he states that "il
faut dire que mon exprience dbouche dans les choses et se transcende en elles, parce
qu'elle s'effectue toujours dans le cadre d'un certain montage l'gard du monde qui est la
dfinition de mon corps [it must be said that my experience issues from things and
transcends itself in them, because my experience always takes place in the framework of a
certain montage with respect to the world that is the definition of my body]" (350).
6. See Charles Altieri, "Motives in Metaphor: John Ashbery and the Modernist Long
Poem." He states: "The long poem might overcome the limitations of ordinary logics by
multiplying perspectives, voices and emotive contexts and by forcing the reader to
explore implicit relational patterns as the only possible sources of thematic coherence.
Multiplicity would challenge conventional notions of unity, but the purpose of the
challenge was to reveal deeper unifying structures latent in the psyche and in the culture"
(653). For my analysis of Ashbery's "Litany" as an ''act of knowing," see Modern Poetic
Practice, 15166.

7. As Richard Laden would have it. See his "'Les relais du verbe': Perse's Reticular
Rhetoric." He states: "What authorizes the mythification is not a theological center or
logos, but a language within that

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makes possible the symbolic substitution of traditional cults. By the imitation I have
described, the poem is not syncretically religious but offers rather a religion of
religions" (180).
8. In fact, the persistent substitution of the term "sign" for the term "human" is what
allows Laden to develop his ''mythic" position.
9. See Perse's translation of "The Hollow Men," OEuvres
* compltes, 46566.
10. The classic source on the quincunx is Sir Thomas Browne, Garden of Cyrus (1658).
Browne cites Quintilian, among others: "Quid Quincunce speciosus, qui in quam cunque
partem spectaveris, rectus est [Thus the beauty, of the quincunx, which no matter which
way one looks, is always a straight line]." The quincunx is an element found as well in
Louis Zukofsky, A 22 and 23 ("A"). See my discussion in Chapter 9 of Zukofsky's use of
the quincunx.
11. See Antoine Raybaud, "Exil palimpseste."
Chapter 6
1. The main outlines of Lyotard's career may be suggested by the following works, many
of which I discuss in this context: La Phnomnologie; Discours, figure; La Condition
postmoderne; Le Diffrend; Le Postmoderne expliqu aux enfants: Correspondance
19821985. I discuss some elements of Lyotard's theory of the postmodern in Chapter 2,
in reference to Larbaud, Fargue, and Perse.
2. The texts of reference are: Saint-John Perse, OEuvres compltes; and Ren Char,
OEuvres compltes. All references to these two texts by page number in the text.
Translation of Amers, by Wallace Fowlie, in Saint-John Perse, Collected Poems.
3. Jean Paulhan, "Enigmes de Perse," in OEuvres compltes, 4:165; my translation.
4. Cf. Albert Cook, Prisms, 60.
5. See Chapter 3, "Sexuation of Poetic Language in Saint-John Perse's Anabase," for a
fuller discussion of the "semiotics of nature" and non-oppositional difference as
exteriority.
6. The fundamental study of Perse's poetics from a formal standpoint, where the present
example would be termed a form of "substitution," is Roger Caillois, Potique de SaintJohn Perse, especially 3966.

7. Virginia A. La Charit, for example, in her study of Char's work, describes his poetic
project as presenting "the inherent homogeneity of existence . . . a fusion which negates
all limits, especially those of spatiality and temporality" (The Poetics and the Poetry of
Ren Char, 163). She speaks elsewhere of his "prime objective: the communication of the
totality of reality" (110).
8. As it seems to be at times in the early Char; for example, the one

Page 189

line poem "La Main de Lacenaire": "Les mondes loquents ont t perdus [The
eloquent worlds have been lost]" (23; my trans.). My discussion here brackets the
question of Char's adherence or nonadherence to Surrealism. For an extended
discussion of Char in the context of a conceptually rigorous model of surrealist
practice, see Albert Cook, Figural Choice in Poetry and Art, Chap. 5, "Surrealism and
Surrealisms," 86123.
9. Maurice Blanchot, "Parole de fragment," in L'Entretien infini, 45158. See also, "Ren
Char et la pense du neutre," 43950. My translation.
10. Cf. Mary Ann Caws, The Presence of Ren Char, 37.
11. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l'invisible.
12. Eric Marty, "Ren Char: du texte l'oeuvre
*."
Chapter 7
1. The text of reference is the 1975 edition of The Cantos. References are to Canto
(Roman numeral) and page of this edition, unless otherwise noted. Other works by
Pound are cited by page number. ABC of Reading, Literary Essays, Selected Letters,
Selected Prose, Selected Poems, Spirit of Romance, Translations. The two central
references to The Cantos are A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, Carroll F.
Terrell, ed., and William Cookson, A Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound.
2. Guy Davenport, Cities on Hills: a Study of I-XXX of Ezra Pound's Cantos, 69 (cited
hereafter by page number in the text). Davenport would apparently have us believe that
Mussolini is saying: "Gee, this Pound is a fun guy!"
3. A number of great literary works were produced either during or shortly after and
dealing with confino. Among them Carlo Levi, Cristo si fermato a Eboli, and Cesare
Pavese, Lavorare stanca.
4. Carroll and Cookson both deny Pound's anti-Semitism throughout their respective
guides. In this they seem to follow the lead of Hugh Kenner, who says: "Hitler jailed no
Rothschilds and Pound thought that the poor Jews whom German resentment drove into
concentration camps were suffering for the sins of their inaccessible coreligionists" (The
Pound Era, 465). Kenner believes that this distinction is a positive one: "Correctly or not,
it attempted a diagnosis, and one tending rather to decrease rather than encourage antiSemitism" (ibid.). No Jews I know would accept this reasoning, or see it as anything

other than anti-Semitic in itself. James Laughlin argues the medical view: "Pound's
extreme anti-Semitism in the 1940s put a severe strain on my affection for him. But I
came to understand his obsession with more charity when Dr. Overholser, the head
psychiatrist at St. Elizabeth's Hospital, told me, 'You mustn't judge Pound

Page 190

morally, you must judge him medically.' He explained that Ezra was paranoid and that
anti-Semitism is a recognized element in paranoia. Pound could not control himself"
(Pound as Wuz, 15). That Laughlin should choose to believe this says more about
Laughlin than about Pound. For a contrasting view of the medical side, see E. Fuller
Torrey, The Roots of Treason. Also, Eliot Weinberger, "Pound After Torrey & Other
Futures." Weinberger shows well the consistently anti-Semitic rant of Pound, as well as
of Cummings, Williams, perhaps even of American modernism as a movement.
5. Ezra Pound, In The New Age 26 (Nov. 27, 1919): 6061. Quoted in Ronald Bush, The
Genesis of Ezra Pound's Cantos, 224; cited hereafter as Genesis.
6. Jean-Michel Rabat, Language, Sexuality and Ideology in Ezra Pound's Cantos. He
says, for example, "The impossible task Pound sets out for his poem is the writing of the
suture at the juncture of the imaginary and symbolic realms. It leaves him only one object
which eludes him, whether he calls it money or the gods: that trace of an inexpressible
radiance coming at the place of the real" (28).
7. For a serious consideration of these questions from a theoretically rigorous point of
view, see Jean-Joseoph Goux, Les monnayeurs du langage.
8. As a concrete example in Pound's case, see Pound/Zukofsky: Selected Letters of Ezra
Pound and Louis Zukofsky, ed. Barry Ahearn, especially the editor's comments. For a
dynamic analysis of filiation, see Edward Said, "On Repetition," in The World, the Text
and the Critic. For a feminist model of filiation, see Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No
Man's Land (vol. I): The War of the Words, 17071 passim.
9. Some of this theory is addressed in the discussion of Derrida's work, especially in
relation to Husserl's theory of the sign, in my Introduction, Chapter 1.
10. This work, which Davenport chose to publish, bears a copyright date of 1983. The
model of transparency continues to dominate Davenport's more recent discussions of
Pound, such as the celebrated essay, "Persephone's Ezra," in The Geography of the
Imagination, 14164. In discussing "the achievement upon which the success of the poem
depends," Davenport invokes "its rendering time transparent and negligible, its dismissing
the supposed corridors down which the historian invites us to look" (15051).
11. On Pound's masculinism, reflected here by his student, see Gilbert and Gubar, 156,
16162.
12. Kenner even says: "The poem is not its language" (The Pound Era, 150).
13. "Blindness" and "insight" are of course associated with the deconstructive project of
Paul de Man in his book of that title. See also

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Jerome McGann's analysis of Pound's "blindness" in his, "The Cantos of Ezra Pound:
the Truth in Contradiction."
14. Cf. Kay Davis, Fugue and Fresco: Structure in Pound's Cantos, 19.
15. James Wilhelm, Dante and Pound: The Epic of Judgement, 7585. The major loci for
Pound's investigations into Cavalcanti are: The Spirit of Romance, "Cavalcanti" (Literary
Essays, 149200), "Cavalcanti Poems" (Translations, 15141), and the "Donna mi prega" as
translated in Canto XXXVI (17779). My text of reference is G. Contini, Letteratura
italiana dalle origini, 17175.
16. A readily available English version of Grosseteste's "De luce" is in Philosophy in the
Middle Ages, ed. Hyman and Walsh, 47480, translated by C. G. Wallis. I wish to thank my
former colleague James Rhodes for leading me to this reference, as well as providing
some helpful notes on the philosophy of Grosseteste.
17. The later Cantos will be increasingly influenced by Richard of St. Victor (cf. Selected
Prose, 7374).
18. The Cantos in history is broadly speaking Jerome McGann's approach in Social
Values and Poetic Acts. He says, for instance, quoting George Kearns's Guide to Ezra
Pound's Selected Cantos: "It has been wittily (and justly) said that 'The eleven Pisan
Cantos were written at a time when the poem including history found itself included in
history' (149). In truth, however the Cantos was always 'included in history,' as the
production history of the poem emphasizes" (238).
19. Cookson makes the connection with the Rome broadcasts: "The Adams Cantos were
written in 19381939, so these lines, which Pound emphasised with a black line, are
prophetic. He considered Roosevelt had manoeuvered America into the Second World
War unconstitutionally and contrary to the principles of Adams and Jefferson. It was, in
part, on these grounds that Pound justified his broadcasts from Rome during 19411943."
20. I find the slip "English poem" for what McGann must intend, "poem in English,"
inexcusable.
21. The title of Wilhelm's previously cited work, Dante and Pound: The Epic of
Judgement, sets up expectations in this regard that I find disappointed, especially in his
summary conclusion (15559).
22. Pound uses the phrase "furious from perception" again in Canto XC (606). See
Michael Andr Bernstein's discussion, in The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the
Modern Verse Epic, 156. Bob Perelman cites the phrase in passing (as though it were clear
what it means), in "Good & Bad / Good & Evil: Pound, Cline and Fascism," 7.

23. McGann's narrow view of Kant's view of art as "disinterested" totally bypasses the
sublime, which is Kant's most important category (Social Values and Poetic Acts, 43).

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24. Lyotard, Le Postmoderne expliqu aux enfants: Correspondance 19821985, 32 (my

trans.). I use this same passage in Chapter 2 in order to distinguish between "modern" and
"postmodern" in works of Larbaud, Fargue, and Saint-John Perse.
25. Though I find the interpretations, among which McGann's, of Pound's famous silence
as his own judgment on The Cantos both selfserving and sentimental: "In the end he
decided it was a failure and he lapsed into the stony silence of the final years" (McGann,
"Truth in Contradiction," 5).
26. "Error" functions throughout Rabat's analysis (see esp, 3340), The Cantos as a tragic
work forms the center of Rabat's conclusion: "The 'Pisan Cantos' can therefore be
described as the moment when the epic structure finds a resolution and an opening in
tragedy . . ." (292 et seq.).
27. Marjorie Perloff's discussion points in this direction, for example, when she says:
"The Cantos is one of the first modern poems to question the centrality of personal
emotion" (The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage, 199). Michael Andr
Bernstein in his work on The Cantos mobilizes an impressive theoretical matrix, yet in the
end conforms to the model I have been terming inferiority. He says, for example, "I
suppose that what distinguishes a modern verse epic from its classical predecessors is the
necessity, in a society no longer unified by a single, generally-accepted code of values, of
justifying its argument by the direct appeal of the author's own experiences and emotions"
(180). This is finally why I cannot accept Bernstein's term "modern verse epic," preferring
instead simply the "modern long poem.'' As my whole study is designed to suggest,
something else is going on than simply extending the epic into the twentieth century
through reliance on the "persona" of the individual speaker.
28. Kenner's Pound Era seems to me the most significant effort to prove the
"transparency" of Pound's text.
29. Charles Bernstein, Artifice of Absorption.
30. It is tempting to assert that this would be Pound's view: "The best criticism of any
work, to my mind the only criticism of any work of art that is of any permanent or even
moderately durable value, comes from the creative writer or artist who does the next job;
and not, not ever from the young gentlemen who make generalities about the creator"
(Literary Essays, 406).
31. ". . . cette potique irrductiblement graphique tait, avec celle de Mallarm la
premire rupture de la plus profonde tradition occidentale. La fascination que
l'idogramme chinois exerait sur l'criture de Pound prend ainsi toute sa signification
historiale [ . . . this irreducibly graphic poetics was, with that of Mallarm, the first break

in the most entrenched Western tradition. The fascination that the Chinese ideogram
exercised on Pound's writing may thus be

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given all its historical significance]" (Derrida, De la grammatologie, 140; Spivak

trans., 92).
32. Gary Snyder, "Arts Councils," in Axe Handles.
Chapter 8
1. Charles Olson, "Mayan Letters," in Selected Writings.
2. The works of Olson and the direct commentary on the Maximus series cited in the text
are The Maximus Poems, ed. George Butterick; The Collected Poems of Charles Olson,
ed. George Butterick; Human Universe and Other Essays, ed. Donald Allen; Poetry and
Truth: the Beloit Lectures and Poems; George Butterick, A Guide to 'The Maximus
Poems' of Charles Olson.
3. Cf. Albert Cook, "Maximizing Minimalism: the Construct of Image in Olson and
Creeley," in Figural Choice in Poetry and Art, especially where he refers to "the
theoretical mounting that can be taken to precede the poem" (150).
4. Sherman Paul, Olson's Push: Origin, Black Mountain and Recent American Poetry,
136; cited hereafter by page number in the text.
5. At least as early as the "Letter to Elaine Feinstein," in May 1959 (Human Universe,
9598).
6. Most notably, John Clarke, From Feathers to Iron.
7. From "ABCs (2)" (Olson, Collected Poems), the whole passage is what Cook's
previously cited statement introduces, and is of course one of Olson's most celebrated
aesthetic formulations: "of rhythm is image / of image is knowing / of knowing there is / a
construct."
8. "One must ask that any act of yours or my life or anyone else's, be not actually that life
but its act or production" (Olson, Poetry and Truth, 45).
9. One recalls Olson's brilliant discussion of Ahab, as another analogue, in Call Me
Ishmael.
10. See Charles Olson, Charles Olson and Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St. Elizabeths.
11. The full range of Olson's achievement in versification, as well as its background, has
been brilliantly described by Albert Cook, in "Projections of Measure: the Continued
Synergies of Pound and Williams."
12. My argument here runs exactly counter to that of Robert von Hallberg, who sees the
move into a more personal subjectivity at the beginning of Volume II as both a mistake

and a signal of Olson's overall downturn as a poet. Charles Olson: The Scholar's Art.
13. See Charles Stein, The Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum.
14. Albert Cook has written of Olson's practice (Olson is a "sixth-phase practitioner," the
most advanced, in Cook's own theoretically rigorous study, which would be impossible
to summarize adequately): "In

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Olson's system there remains of myth only its axis of combinationand axes are also
pivotal in Lvi-Strauss's reading of myth. The procedure underlying myth is not
transposed into a third-phase abstract philosophy but itself used for a sort of
transumptive myth-making, an energic mediation between myth and language where
the story-properties of myth have been stripped away while the canons of logic are
used only for their combinatory energy." Myth and Language, 66.
15. For an account of the editor's labor in assembling Volume 3, see Butterick's
introduction (Guide, xlivlv). Among other questions Butterick discusses is the status of
certain poems written in the aftermath of the death of Olson's wife, Betty, in 1964. For a
moving portrait of Olson's last months, see Charles Boer, Olson in Connecticut.
Chapter 9
1. Gertrude Stein, Stanzas in Meditation and Other Poems. Reprinted in The Yale
Gertrude Stein, ed. Richard Kostelanetz, 316436. Louis Zukofsky, "A."
2. For example, Eric Mottram, referring to the political content of"A" 8, remarks, "Since
Zukofsky's syntax obscures as much as it makes for precision" (''19241951 Politics and
Form in Zukofsky," 95). Catharine Stimpson, placing Stein in the context of women's
writing, says: "However, for modern women, the possibilities for the public exercise of
consciousness were still fresh enough to breed anxiety, the nervousness of the historical
novelty. The texts such women generated were often coded rather than open; sublimated
rather than straightforward; hazy with metaphors and silence rather than lucid" ("The
Mind, the Body and Gertrude Stein," 505; my italics).
3. Wayne Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction; J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics
of Reading, to cite only two prominent examples. In a recent review of works by and
about Paul de Man, I cite as a reminder a statement by Geoffrey Bennington: "The idea
that taking a 'position' on ethical and political issues is, however necessary, somehow
sufficient to come to terms with the nature of the ethical and political" ("Aberrations: de
Man (and) the Machine," in Reading de Man Reading).
4. Marianne DeKoven, A Different Language: Gertrude Stein's Experimental Writing;
Randa Dubnick, The Structure of Obscurity: Gertrude Stein, Language and Cubism;
Wendy Steiner, Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of
Gertrude Steinare three recent works that make use of the by-now standard division of
Stein's work into three periods: up to Tender Buttons; between Tender Buttons and The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (the experimental period); and from the autobiography
to the end of

Page 195

her life. All further citations from these works will be by page number in the text.
5. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; reprinted in Selected Writings
of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten, 226.
6. "A Translantic Interview" (1946), in Robert B. Haas, ed., A Primer for the Gradual
Understanding of Gertrude Stein, 34.
7. Louis Zukofsky, "William Carlos Williams," in Prepositions, 51. Also "A" 12, 143.
8. For the Einstein translation, Hugh Seidman, "Louis Zukofsky at the Polytechnic
Institute of Brooklyn (19581961)," in Louis Zukofsky: Man and Poet, ed. Carroll F.
Terrell, 99.
9. Louis Zukofsky, A Test of Poetry.
10. Harold Schimmel, "Zuk. Yehoash David Rex," in Louis Zukofsky: Man and Poet, 237.
"Poem beginning 'The'" in Louis Zukofsky, All: the Collected Short Poems, 1222.
Schimmel calls this the "German" spelling because the word occurs in a passage by Heine
(line 269); the standard American spelling is "Kaddish."
11. Michael Hoffman, Gertrude Stein, 96.
12. Richard Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces, 213.
13. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man's Land (vol. II): Sexchanges, 25256.
14. I deal at some length in my final chapter with what I view as the negative
consequences of Gilbert and Gubar's dismissal of literary experimentation, especially as
this relates to feminist literary theory.
15. Stein, for example, in "Poetry and Grammar," says that "poetry is essentially the
discovery, the love, the passion for the name of anything" (140).
16. These works can all be found conveniently in The Yale Gertrude Stein, ed.
Kostelanetz; dates are those indicated there. The first two poems were originally
published in Bee Time Vine; the latter in Stanzas in Meditation. My page citations will be
to the Kostelanetz edition; page numbers in Stanzas in Meditation can be found by
subtracting 313.
17. DeKoven, 9. Chomsky, "Some Methodological Remarks on Generative Grammar."
18. Ruddick, "A Rosy Charm: Gertrude Stein and the Repressed Feminine," in Hoffman
(ed.), Critical Essays on Gertrude Stein, 328. I regret that Ruddick's full-length work,
Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis, appeared too late for me to take account of
its argument in this book.

19. John Ashbery, "The Impossible." He takes his title from Stein's famous dictum, "If it
can be done why do it?" (Ashberry, "The Impossible," 253).
20. In the next chapter, I argue for a shift in Ashbery's work around the time of The
Double Dream of Spring (1971), where the agency is

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humor and the result is an increased openness toward the experience of others.
21. Number theory and counting to three will be crucial to Zukofsky's project in "A" as
well. I say number "theory" to implicate the necessarily interpsychic dimension identified
by Lacan. For a straightforward interpretation of Lacanian number theory, see Ellie
Ragland-Sullivan, Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, 133ff. She, in
turn, cites Stuart Schneiderman's useful discussion, Jacques Lacan: The Death of an
Intellectual Hero.
22. It is likely that the flowers mentioned in "Stanzas" are coded references to sexuality.
Likewise, "coming," which I discuss as code for understanding, carries unavoidably the
meaning of sexual climax.
23. This is the argument, very briefly stated, of Emmanuel Levinas, as in Totalit et infini:
essai sur l'extriorit.
24. Zukofsky does this several times in "A"notably in sections 8, 12, and 24.
25. Louis Zukofsky, Bottom: On Shakespeare.
26. Celia Zukofsky, A Bibliography of Louis Zukofsky; updated in Louis Zukofsky: Man
and Poet, 38592.
27. Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of Zukofsky's privileged texts (cf. Bottom, esp. 4598), says
something remarkably similar in a work that would not have been available to Zukofsky
in 1946: "What should strike us about this expression is the phrase 'always I.' Always
who?For, queer enough I don't mean: 'always L.W.' This leads us to considering the
criteria for a person" (The Blue and Brown Books, 61). Wittgettstein continues this line of
thinking by saying it is the continuity of bodily existence, resemblance of one's body to
itself over time, that gives a false sense of identity and thus masks the lack of identity in
the elocutory instance.
28. Barry Ahearn, Zukofsky's "A": An Introduction, 203.
29. Michael Heller likewise makes a strong case for the ethical thrust of Zukofsky's work:
"One's language in all its manifestations (poetry, prose, etc.) has affect, and its use,
therefore, requires ethical considerations. This flavor of ethical concern permeates every
aspect of Zukofsky's work. Objectification and sincerity are not simply tools to write
good poems with; they represent forms of value, aspirations, and mediations of
experience between poet and reader" (Conviction's Net of Branches, 29). This is a fine
statement on Zukofsky's ethicity. But I find that Heller's position is weakened when he
conflates ethics with communication: "The entangled meaning and music of poetry is,
above all, communicative, or in Zukofsky's words, 'specific information about existence'"

(28; my italics). I would question whether Zukofsky's words necessarily lead to Heller's
qualification of"communicative." In other words, I feel Heller collapses the ethical
directedness of poetry as openness to surrounding reality

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with its "communicative" function. This in turn stems, I believe, from the major
weakness in an otherwise outstanding book: that Heller collapses all of the
"Objectivists" into the same model of poetic practice. This was just the danger that
Zukofsky himself foresaw in 1932. From my perspective, the later works of George
Oppen, which I admire as much as Heller does, are nothing like the later movements of
Zukofsky's "A" as they evolved during roughly the same time period (late fifties into
the early seventies). Heller doesn't seem to want to acknowledge that ethical practice
can take different forms. (For a moving account of Zukofsky and Oppen's personal
estrangement, see Charles Tomlinson, Some Americans.)
30. Louis Zukofsky, Catullus; Louis Zukofsky, 80 Flowers. Burton Hatlen has written on
the radical language practice in Zukofsky's Latin translations, "Zukofsky as Translator," in
Louis Zukofsky: Man and Poet, 34564. David Levi-Strauss has an interesting approach to
80 Flowers in Code of Signals, ed. Michael Palmer, 79102.
31. See above, Chapter 5, for Saint-John Perse's use of the quincunx.
32. Ahearn expresses this: "The unsettling thought that mankind exists only to implement
the transmutation of nature into words may come to anyone familiar with the pervasive
and powerful dominion of language" (190). His ear plays him wrong, in my view, when
he hears "words earth" as simply a pun on Wordsworth (194).
33. The end of Cavalcanti's "Donna mi prega," in my translation, reads:
You may go securely, oh my song
wheresoever you wish, so have I adorned you
that your skillwill be praised
by all thosewho have understanding:
You have no desire to be with any others.

Chapter 10
1. All quotes are from "Fragment," the final poem in The Double Dream of Spring. The
phrase "the ironization of the self" is Albert Cook's. Referring to Harold Bloom's notion
that Ashbery's "strong precursor" is Wallace Stevens, Cook says: "As Harold Bloom has
said, Ashbery starts from Stevens. And it is all of Stevens that he starts from: the initial
determinant of rhetorical philosophizing, the deep emphasis on the image and the
meaning of the image, the ironization of the self in a way that evades a radical
ironization of the utterance" (Figural Choice in Poetry and Art, Chap. 8, "Expressionism
Not Wholly Abstract: Ashbery and O'Hara,'' 187; my italics). Harold Bloom, Figures of
Capable Imagination, Chap. 9, "John Ashbery: The Charity of Hard Moments"; and
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence. Charles Altieri tries to "save" the element of

personal sensibility through an appeal to Ashbery's multiple strategies

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of ironizing the personal: "This concern for multiple levels of motivations invites a
Derridean vocabulary, but it cannot be reduced to Derrida's characteristic themes. In
Ashbery the complexity of motives derives from the interplay between the voices of a
writing self and the pressures on the empirical self in a concrete situation it cannot
control. By rendering this complexity, Ashbery creates a dramatic field where he can
explore the ironic combination of creative freedom and existential pathos" (Self and
Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry, 149).
2. The phrase "negativization of narcissism" is Alice Jardine's from "Opaque Texts and
Transparent Contexts: The Political Difference of Julia Kristeva," in The Poetics of
Gender, ed., Nancy Miller, 96116.
3. Janet Bloom and Robert Rosada, "Craft Interview," New York Quarterly, reprinted in
The Craft of Poetry, William Packard, ed. Ashbery's full statement regarding the ten-line
stanza is: "That again was the way I decided the poem was going to look before I wrote it;
it wasn't that I felt it had any particular significance but that was going to be the form in
this particular case. Also I had been reading Maurice Scve, the sixteenth-century poet
who wrote in dizains and I was impressed with the fruitful monotony of his form as over
and over again he says very much the same thing in hundreds and hundreds of ten-line
stanzas, constantly repeating the form and yet adding something a little new each time,
and the ultimate cumulative effect of these additions is something I was aiming at,
although I didn't use the ten-line stanza with any very definite aim in mind or desire to
imitate Scve particularly. It also seemed like a good in-between length; lacking the inthe-round effect of a sonnet and longer than a quatrain; a purposely stunted form which
is ideal for these repetitions with minimal variations" (Bloom and Rosada, "Craft
Interview," 12526). I have dealt elsewhere with Ashbery's use of cumulative structuring
repetition as it represents what I call "the act of knowing'' (see Baker, Modern Poetic
Practice, 15166). Alan Williamson finds the repetition in "Fragment" annoying. He speaks
of "the wasteful redundancy of their essential content" (Introspection and Contemporary
Poetry, 134).
4. "When Maurice Scve published the Dlie in 1544, he imitated for the first time in
French poetry the global project of Petrarch's Canzoniere: the composition of a sequence
of love poems ostensibly directed to an inaccessible, mythologized woman" (Deborah
Lesko Baker, Narcissus and the Lover: Mythic Recovery and Reinvention in Scve's
Dlie, 1).
5. The translation is my own. I here give the French text, in the edition of Franoise
Charpentier. The widely accepted critical edition is I.D. McFarlane, ed., The 'Dlie' of
Maurice Scve.

6. There is, however, an emblem of Narcissus between Dizains LIX

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and LX (Charpentier, 85), and Dizain LX deals clearly enough with the myth (Deborah
Lesko Baker, 25).
7. Freud, "On Narcissism" (1914), translated by Cecil M. Baines, in General
Psychological Theory.
8. Julia Kristeva, Histoires d'amour, translated under the title Tales of Love, 4344. "La
pulsion de mort, et son quivalent psychologique, la haine, est ce que Freud dcouvrira
aprs s'tre arrt chez Narcisse. Le narcissisme et sa doublure, le vide, sont en somme
nos laborations les plus intimes, les plus fragiles et les plus archaques, de la pulsion de
mort. Les vigiles les plus avancs, les plus courageux et les plus menacs, du refoulement
originaire" (47).
9. I return to some of these questions in my final chapter.
10. See Bloom and Rosada, "The Craft Interview," and the interview with Piotr Sommer,
in Code of Signals, ed. Michael Palmer, 295314.
11. Bloom says the poem "is the elegy for the self of the imperfect solipsist, who wavered
before the reality of another self, and then withdrew back into an interior world" (Figures
of Capable Imagination, 193). Williamson disagrees with Bloom: "It seems fairly clear to
me that 'she,' 'you,' and 'I' are a triangle" (134).
12. As discussed in the previous chapter, Ashbery's article on Stein's "Stanzas in
Meditation" (Poetry 1957) shows him reacting very, perceptively to this aspect of Stein's
work and thus points to Stein as an important source for Ashbery's continuing
explorations into the possibilities pronouns present for representing poetic
intersubjectivity.
13. The classic loci for Stevens would be the prefatory, poem to "Notes Toward a
Supreme Fiction," Collected Poems, 380; or "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,"
524. Bloom, as opposed to Cook, discounts the role of irony in Ashbery, saying that
Ashbery is "rhetorically most himself when least ironic" (Figures, 177). For a larger view
of irony as an "ethics of intersubjectivity,'' see Gary Handwerk, Irony and Ethics in
Narrative.
14. Ashbery's "cool" tone, hip and distant, provides one link for his work with that of
Michael Palmer, which I discuss in the next chapter.
15. I disagree with Bloom that the opening image of the stanza concerns Ashbery's
rejection of compulsory heterosexuality (Figures of Capable Imagination, 198)though of
course in a larger sense sexual identity is deeply implicated in the negativization of
narcissism that is my larger subject here. David Bergman has discussed the issue of gay

identity with respect to Ashbery's work. Bergman sees the complex intersubjectivity
Ashbery achieves as the result of Ashbery's purposeful acceptance of a "weak ego
identity" which, in turn, Bergman claims as one of several possible models for a
specifically gay subjectivity ("Choosing Our Fathers: Gender and Identity in Whitman,
Ashbery and Richard Howard," 397).

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16. Lacan, Sminaire VII: thique de la psychanalyse, 87.

17. Two examples (from many other possible ones) that prize The Tennis Court Oath to
the exclusion of the later work are: Bruce Andrews, "Misrepresentation (a text for The
Tennis Court Oath of John Ashbery)," and Barrett Watten, Total Syntax, especially 8891.
18. I deal with the work of Coolidge, Michael Palmer, and Bernadette Mayer in the next
chapter, in the context of experimental writing.
19. Clark Coolidge, The Maintains.
Chapter 11
1. I discuss some of these problems in the following chapter, which deals explicitly with
the theory of the "Language" movement. The standard way to identify who qualifies as a
"Language" writer is to list the table of contents of any of the anthologies that I discuss in
the following chapter. In one move away from the "Language" label, Charles Bernstein
has outlined what he calls the "constructive'' mode: "In contrast, a 'constructive' mode
would suggest that the mode itself is explored as content, its possibilities of meaning are
investigated and presented, and that this process is itself recognized as method" ("Writing
and Method," in Content's Dream, Essays 19751984, 227).
2. Hartley argues for a more explicitly political orientation to "Language" writing, in
Textual Politics and the Language Poets. The poets he discusses are six self-declared
Marxist writers, Ron Silliman, Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten, Charles Bernstein, Bruce
Andrews, and Steve McCaffery:
3. As an example of how reductive Hartley's approach becomes, he says, "Poetic practice
thus must be seen as a form of class struggle" (30). As another sign of our differences, I
have to say that I don't find much poetic interest in many of the passages Hartley cites,
although I have read with great interest individual works by the poets in question. This
strictly ideological focus seems to me to be one of several ways writers explicitly
associated with the movement bracket the question of how one judges the value of a
given text. Though, of course, "value" is the term that emerges as a diffrend between our
respective approaches.
4. In a powerful piece on marginality and silence, Paul Mann argues for a much different
sense of the position of the discursive margin, concluding: "Silence is the only margin,
and only because it is possible is marginality conceivable. In the light of silence, all other
meaning is white" ("Invisible Ink: Writing in the Margin," 822). Interestingly, Mann never
intended this article for publication (personal communication, 1987). See also the stances
on marginality taken by various

Page 201

writers in the issue on "Marginality: Public and Private Language," Poetics Journal 6
(1986).
5. As Lyotard says, "a work cannot become modern unless it is first postmodern" (Le
Postmoderne expliqu aux enfants, 30; my trans.). This has come to encapsulate for me
the strange, retrograde feel there is to most of what the major publishing houses handle in
the way of contemporary poetry. Not only is the work not experimental, it is not even
really "modern" by the admittedly high standard set by Pound, Moore, Stevens, et al.
Many talented younger poets, not to mention the ''new formalists," seem to be operating
under the assumption that the goals of modernism, once achieved, can safely be either
assimilated or ignored. Art as a "difficult liberty" (Char) no longer seems so compelling
under this new tyranny of the plain style.
6. Michael Palmer, Notes from Echo Lake, 4147. Mallarm, OEuvres
* compltes; "Igitur," 43351.
7. For a discussion of Mallarm in the context of Romanticism, see Albert Cook,
"Mallarm: The Deepening Occasion," in Thresholds: Studies in the Romantic
Experience, 16278. Mallarm is one of the two primary, examples (for all of the problems
this has caused in the discourses of feminism) in Julia Kristeva, Rvolution du langage
potique.
8. See Michael Palmer's other major collections: The Circular Gates; Without Music;
First Figure; Sun.
9. "Certainement subsiste une prsence de Minuit. L'heure n'a pas disparu par un miroir,
ne s'est pas enfouie en tentures, voquant un ameublement par sa vacante sonorit" (435).
10. Palmer discusses radical poetics as alternative forms of "knowing" in "CounterPoetics and Current Practice." I discuss Saint-John Perse's poetics of "knowing" in
Chapter 5.
11. Coolidge, The Crystal Text. This work represents only one of Coolidge's major
experimental modes. I discuss his much more austerely experimental work The Maintains
(1974) in the previous chapter. Significantly, this earlier book is the only text by Coolidge
that Hartley discusses (Hartley, 2122).
12. Bernadette Mayer, Midwinter Day. I discuss additional texts by Mayer, including
Memory (1975), in my next chapter.
Chapter 12

1. It should be understood that I do not endorse the term "Language" poetry or "languagecentered" writing (see previous chapter). For that matter, neither do most of the writers
grouped under that rubric. The classic attack on the term is Jackson Mac Low,
"Language

Page 202

Centered" (1980), reprinted in Ron Silliman, ed., In the American Tree, 49195; I use the
term here strategically, to focus the debate on language.
2. I discussed this question more directly in a presentation, "'Normative' Feminism and
Experimental Writing by Women," at the annual convention of the Modern Language
Association, December 29, 1990.
3. Bernadette Mayer, Memory. Cited by page number in the text. This book, along with
most of the other books discussed so far, can be obtained through The Segue Foundation,
303 E. 8th St., New York, N.Y., 10009. Segue, Inland Books (Connecticut), and Sun &
Moon (Los Angeles) do a fine job of keeping these important works in circulation.
4. A significant exception to this statement would be the work by George Hartley, Textual
Politics and the Language Poets. In the context of the present discussion, I think it
important to note that the six poets he concentrates on are all male.
5. Charles Bernstein, Content's Dream, 397.
6. Alan Davies, Signage; Barrett Watten, Total Syntax; Ron Silliman, The New Sentence;
Rachel Blau DuPlessis, The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice; Charles Bernstein
and Bruce Andrews, eds., The L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E Book; Michael Palmer,
ed., Code of Signals: Recent Writings in Poetics; as well as Silliman, ed., In the
American Tree.
7. Charles Bernstein, Artifice of Absorption. Pope and Horace, to cite only two wellknown examples, have used this form as well.
8. I agree with Joseph Simas that, as he says, "Bernstein's 'real' argument is an ethical one
as opposed to an aesthetic one" (review of Content's Dream, 132).
9. For a historicist criticism sympathetic to the movement, see Jerome McGann,
"Contemporary Poetry, Alternate Routes," in Social Values and Poetic Acts, 197220.
10. One would therefore expect a more thorough examination of Derridean criture,
which sees "writing" in the larger sense as just this imbrication of social and discursive
structures. But this expectation, as expressed for example in Libration, July 17, 1986, in
a review of 21 + 1 American poets today, does not find expression in much of the
writing, except implicitly.
11. For my critique of the model of "transparency," see Chapter 7, "Pound's Cantos and
the Myth of Transparency." In a sense, ''transparency" is the term I use that corresponds
to Bernstein's "absorption," while a term such as "obduracy" would correspond to
Bernstein's "impermeability." Clark Coolidge uses "obduration" in a similar sense in some
notebook entries (Code of Signals, 17284); by

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implication Coolidge's The Crystal Text exemplifies obduracy (see previous chapter).
12. Another article by Armantrout, carrying the provocative title "Mainstream
Marginality," takes dead aim at the masculinist assumptions underlying Dave Smith and
David Bottoms's Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets. Powerful theoretical
approaches to experimental writing by women have likewise been worked out by Susan
Howe, My Emily Dickinson; and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, The Pink Guitar: Writing as
Feminist Practice.
13. Douglas Messerli has edited the most commercially available anthology of this work:
"Language" Poetries, an Anthology.
14. Originally published in L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E (1978); reprinted in The L
= A = N = G = U = A = G = E Book, 8083, and in In the American Tree, 55760.
15. As a political position, I agree with Toril Moi when she says, in response to statements
by Ken Ruthven in his Feminist Literary Studies: "While sharing his view that men in
principle can be feminist critics, I disagree with his far too rash dismissal of the political
reasons why they ought not to try for a leading role in this particular field today"
(Sexual/Textual Politics, 174n.).
16. Here I am in agreement with the position of bell hooks, when she says: "To emphasize
that engagement with feminist struggle as political commitment we could avoid using the
phrase 'I am a feminist' (a linguistic structure designed to refer to some personal aspect of
identity and self-definition) and could state 'I advocate feminism.'" Feminist Theory:
From Margin to Center, 29.
17. Kristeva, La Rvolution du langage potique; translated under the title Revolution in
Poetic Language.
18. As part of my theoretical study in progress, I have written on the ethical turn in
Kristeva's writing beginning in the early eighties with works such as Pouvoirs de
l'horreur and Histoires d'amour. Continuing her tendency to confound expectations,
Kristeva in these "later" works moves more into individual psychology, as in her study of
abjection, and the representation and experience of love from a psychoanalytical
perspective. While moving away from socialist politicsand so inevitably disappointing
activists like MoiKristeva's work has opened up a profound area of ethical concern
largely absent from her earlier "semiotic" inquiries.
19. Moi, cited above; Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision; Chris Weedon,
Feminist Practice & Poststructuralist Theory. A useful collection of British and
American theory that highlights the differences within Anglo-American feminism is Mary
Eagleton, ed., Feminist Literary Theory. All these works are cited henceforth by page

number in the text.

Page 204

20. Significantly, Moi is the editor of The Kristeva Reader. See especially her
introduction, 122.
21. A recent American study by a woman, not explicitly presented as feminist yet with
implications for feminism, is Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy
of Psychoanalysis.
22. Weedon expresses this more fully by drawing on Althusser's notion of
"interpellation": "The individual who has a memory and an already discursively
constituted sense of identity may resist particular interpellations or produce new versions
of meaning from the conflicts and contradictions between existing discourses. Knowledge
of more than one discourse and the recognition that meaning is plural allows for a
measure of choice on the part of the individual and even where choice is not available,
resistance is still possible" (106).
23. Jane Gallop, The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis; and Reading
Lacan; Naomi Schor, Breaking the Chain: Women, Theory and French Realist Fiction;
and Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine; Alice Jardine, Gynesis:
Configurations of Woman and Modernity.
24. I realize that I am omitting discussion of a "third" important, just as clearly nonnormative, feminist discourse in this country, what might be called "third-world
feminism." bell hooks reminds us that "marginal" is a social reality before it is a
discursive category (Preface, ix). Gayatri Spivak positions herself as "outside'' Western
bourgeois discursive practice. See especially, her "French Feminism in an International
Frame," in In Other Worlds.
25. Alicia Ostriker, Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in
America; Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man's Land, vol. 1.
26. Marjorie Perloff has discussed this problem with Ostriker's work as it represents what
Perloff calls the "myth of inclusiveness." (See "Canon and Loaded Gun: Feminist Poetics
and the Avant-Garde," in Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric,
Chap. 2, pp. 3151; p. 36.) Perloff's essay, which originally appeared in American Poetry
Review (1986), takes up the work of Susan Howe and Lorine Niedecker as exemplary
omissions from the feminist redefinition of the canon of American poetry.
27. In my "'Normative' Feminism . . ." talk (see Chapter 12, note 2) I discuss Gilbert and
Gubar's highly paradoxical reliance on the patriarchal theory of the logos, especially the
work of Walter J. Ong, to support the development of their literary-theoretical fantasy.
See Ong, The Presence of the Word.

Afterword
1. When I wrote a version of Chapter 11, I sent copies to each of the

Page 205

poets. Mayer's copy came back stamped "Addressee unknown." This pleased me
somehow: she was still on the loose.
2. John Ashbery, in an interview with Piotr Sommer, says: "And also in my case, I said to
an interviewer recently that I was getting a little jealous of the reputation of my poetry,
because it gets more attention than I do. When will people pay attention to me for awhile.
Once, as I was falling asleep, I sort of imagined a debate between two critics, one of them
was saying, 'I don't wanna raise my children in a world where John Ashbery can win the
Pulitzer Prize'" (Palmer, Code of Signals, 300).
3. They certainly do not need any help from me. To think they did would be to reinscribe
the model which Diana Fuss has criticized trenchantly as "critical chivalry," in Essentially
Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (26).

Page 207

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Page 217

Index
A
Adams, John (The Adams Cantos), 88-89, 191n.
See also Pound, Ezra, The Cantos
Agassiz, Louis, 79-81.
See also Pound, Ezra
Ahearn, Barry, 125-27, 130, 131, 133, 190n, 197n.
See also Zukofsky, Louis, "A"
Altieri, Charles, 179n, 187n, 197n
Aristotle, 12, 85, 111, 129, 130, 163
De Memoria, 12
Armantrout, Rae, 165, 203n
Ashbery, John, xi, 10, 134-49, 150, 177, 187n
and burden of fame, 205n
and gay subjectivity, 199n
and Clark Coolidge, 157
and "language" poets, 147-48, 150, 200n
and Michael Palmer, 152, 153
as reader of Maurice Scve, 134-37, 145, 198n
as reader of Gertrude Stein, 114-16, 195n, 199n
and Wallace Stevens, 140, 142-43, 197n
Works:
The Double Dream of Spring, 135, 148, 195n, 197n
"Fragment," 10, 134-49, 198n
Houseboat Days, 135

"Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror," 135, 140, 144

The Tennis Court Oath, 148, 200n
Three Poems, 135
B
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 111, 130
Baker, Deborah Lesko, 136, 137, 198-99n
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 66, 165-66, 179-80n
Barnabooth, A. O., 14-18.
See also Larbaud, Valery
Benson, Steve, 163, 164
Bergman, David, 199n
Bernstein, Charles, 91, 163, 164, 166, 171, 179, 191n, 192n, 200n, 202n
Bernstein, Charles,
Works:
Artifice of Absorption, 163-64, 202n
Content's Dream, 202n
Blanchot, Maurice, 42, 44, 47, 53, 70, 71, 185n
Bloom, Harold, 137, 138, 140, 142, 175, 179n, 197n, 199n
Bonnefoy, Yves, 185n
Boss, The. See Mussolini, Benito
Bridgman, Richard, 112
Browne, Sir Thomas, 188n
Browning, Robert, 83, 92.
See also Poetry, narrative
Bush, Ronald, 82, 83, 92
Butterick, George (editor, Guide to the Maximus Poems), 101, 103, 193n, 194n.
See also Olson, Charles, The Maximus Poems

Byrd, Don, 125

C
Caillois, Roger, 32, 55, 56, 58, 186n, 188n
Casey, Edward S., 12-14, 18, 22, 25, 27, 181n
Remembering: A Phenomenological Study, 12-14
See also: Memory
Phenomenology Cavalcanti, Guido, 85-88, 133, 191n
"Donna mi prega," 86-88, 197n
Czanne, Paul, 4

Page 218

Char, Ren: 7, 65, 66, 70-75

and art as "difficult liberty," 201n
Friedrich Nietzsche, 180n
and Arthur Rimbaud, 70
and Surrealism, 188-89n
Works:
"A Faulx contente," 73-75
"Rougeur des matinaux," 70, 71-73, 74
Chomsky, Noam, 113, 114
Community, 1, 7, 8, 59, 184n
in Ren Char, 70-73
in Dante, 84
in Bernadette Mayer, 158
postmodern, 65-66, 69-73, 84, 132, 158, 184n
in Saint-John Perse, 66-67, 69-70
in Louis Zukofsky, 132
Confine (It.). See Confino
Confino (It.), 78, 189n
Contemporary poetry, 1, 65, 150, 179n, 198n, 201n, 202n
Cook, Albert S., 104, 105, 139, 140, 148, 179n, 187n, 189n, 193n, 197n, 199n, 201n
Cookson, William, 88, 189n, 191n.
See also Pound, Ezra, The Cantos
Coolidge, Clark, xi, 135, 150, 159-61, 177, 201n, 202-3n
Coolidge, Clark,
Works:
The Crystal Text, 155-57, 201n, 203n

The Maintains, 135, 148, 201n

Corman, Cid, 130, 131
Crane, Hart, 47-48, 186n
Creeley, Robert, 163, 193n
Crusoe, Robinson, 22-26.
See also Saint-John Perse, "Images Cruso"
Cumulative (structuring) repetition, 54, 64
D
Dante, 83-85, 191n
Dasein (Ger.) 3, 4. See Heidegger, Martin
Davenport, Guy, 77, 80-81, 83, 189n, 190n
Davies, Alan, 163
Deconstruction, 2, 5, 6, 11
de Gaulle, Charles, x
de Man, Paul, 190n, 194n
DeKoven, Marianne, 113-14, 117, 194n
Dlie. See Scve, Maurice
Derrida, Jacques, xi, 2, 5, 6, 76, 93, 177, 185n, 190n, 192n, 198n
Derrida, Jacques,
Works:
Glas, 7
Of Grammatology, 5
Descartes, Ren, 3, 12
Dickinson, Emily, 97, 203n
Dubnick, Randa, 113, 194n
Duras, Marguerite, 172
E

Einstein, Albert, 109, 110, 195n

Eliot, T. S., 18, 31, 57, 186n, 190n
and impersonality 1, 179n
"The Straw Men," 60, 184n
as translator of Anabase, 26, 184n
The Waste Land, 174.
See also Saint John Perse, Annbase
Ellman, Maud, 179n
Epic, 1, 2, 10, 57, 66, 88, 179n, 191n, 192n
Epistemology, 2, 7, 54, 57, 65, 123.
See also Postmodern literary practice
Ethical, the:
and community, 70-75
and exteriority, 11, 71, 75, 155, 177.
See also Ethicity; Ethics
Ethical criticism, 6-7, 77, 194n
Ethical expression, ix, 10, 73, 125, 131, 150
Ethical practice, 9, 65, 111, 172, 183n, 196-97n, 203n
Ethical responsibility, 108, 109, 123, 134, 146, 156
Ethical subject of disclosure, 2, 118, 135, 138
Ethical values, 124
Ethicity, xi, 2, 11, 108, 123, 138, 150, 196n
Ethics, 76, 111, 123
and communication, 126, 129-30, 196n
of difference, 7
of exteriority, 94, 135, 177
and irony, 199n

Levinas's philosophy of, 6

of poetic practice, 157, 169
of psychoanalysis, 143.
See also Ethical, the; Ethicity

Page 219

Exile, x, 8-9, 41-45, 56, 78

Exteriority, ix, 4, 9, 11, 76-77, 125, 149, 150, 154, 155, 162, 164, 172, 177, 185n
ethics of, 7, 77, 94, 149
and poetic subject, 1-2, 22, 35, 41, 47, 53, 75, 94, 135
poetics of, 66, 70-71, 179-80n
and psychoanalysis, 143
"radical" exteriorly, 39, 44, 53
and sexual difference, 30, 37.
See also Ethical, the; Ethicity; Ethics; Interiority
F
Fargue, Lon-Paul, 7, 12, 18-21, 24, 182n
and Stphane Mallarm, 18-19
and Saint-John Perse, 7, 18, 20
and Wallace Stevens, 181-82
Fargue, Lon-Paul,
Works:
"De la tendresse . . . ," 19
"Ils entrrent au crpuscule . . . ," 20-21
Feminism (feminist theory), 162-65, 177
and ethical criticism, 6
of filiation, 190n
and Luce Irigaray, 33, 183n
men in, 203n
normative, 162-65, 172-75, 176
and psychoanalysis, 204n
and Saint John Perse, 40

and Gertrude Stein, 113-14

theoretical, 138, 168-72, 201n
"third-world," 204n.
See also Armantrout, Rae; DeKoven, Marianne; Fuss, Diana; Gallop, Jane; Gilbert,
Sandra; Gubar, Susan; hooks, bell; Irigaray, Luce; Jardine, Alice; Kristeva, Julia; Moi,
Toril; Ostriker, Alicia; Perloff, Marjorie; Rose, Jacqueline; Ruddick, Lisa; Sacotte,
Mireille; Schor, Naomi; Weedon, Chris
Ferrini, Vincent, 97
Freud, Sigmund, 5, 6, 13, 55, 137, 138, 170, 183n, 199n
Fuss, Diana, 205n
G
Gallop, Jane, 171
Gaudier-Brzeska, 9
Geninasca, Jacques, 32, 33, 182n
Gilbert, Sandra, 112, 113, 173-75, 190n, 195n, 204n
No Man's Land, 173, 190n.
See also Feminism; Gubar, Susan
Gloucester, 95, 97-99, 101-3.
See also Olson, Charles
Grosseteste, 85-88, 191n
Guadeloupe (birthplace of Saint-John Perse), x, 22, 23, 28.
See also Saint-John Perse
Gubar, Susan, 112, 113, 173-75, 190n, 195n, 204n
No Man's Land, 173, 190.
See also Feminism; Gilbert, Sandra
H
Hartley, George, 150, 154, 200n, 201n, 202n.
See also "Language" poetry

Heidegger, Martin, 3-5, 12, 14, 43, 45, 72, 92, 180n, 185n
Heller, Michael, 196-97n
Hermeneutics, 3, 6
Hermeticism, 11, 108, 124
Hocquard, Emmanuel, 174, 202n
hooks, bell, 203n, 204n
Husserl, Edmund, 3-5, 12, 180n, 190n
I
Interiority, ix, 9, 11, 177, 192n
and John Ashbery, 137, 154
and Ezra Pound, 92
and Romanticism, 1
and Saint-John Perse, 27-28, 34, 39, 41, 47, 53
and theory of the subject, 5, 41, 47, 53, 92, 64, 185n, 186n.
See also Exteriority
Intersubjective violence, xi, 6, 11, 177n.
See also Derrida, Jacques; "Writing"
Intersubjectivity, 9, 10, 150, 151, 177
in John Ashbery, 135, 146, 157, 199n
in Clark Coolidge, 157, 158
and gay subjectivity 199n
in Bernadette Mayer, 161
in Michael Palmer, 153
in Saint-John Perse, 24, 25
In the American Tree. See Silliman, Ron

Page 220

Irigaray, Luce, 6, 33, 34, 37, 67, 168, 169, 183n.

See also Feminism
J
Jardine, Alice, 7, 138, 171-73, 177, 198n
Gynesis, 171.
See also Feminism; Modernism
Jarrell, Randall, 183n
Joyce, James, Ulysses, 15, 175
K
Kant, Immanuel, 3, 91, 191n
Keats, John, 94, 96, 97
Kenner, Hugh, 80, 179n, 189n, 190n
The Pound Era, 192n
Kerouac, Jack, 166
Kierkegaard, Sren, 3
"Knowing" (the act of), 7, 8, 54, 65, 153, 201n
Kristeva, Julia, 6, 11, 138, 143, 168, 169, 175, 180n, 182n, 198n, 199n, 201n, 203n, 204n.
See also Feminism, theoretical
L
Lacan, Jacques, 4-6, 143, 145, 170, 196n, 204n
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 4.
See also Psychoanalysis
Laden, Richard, 61, 187-88n
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, 10.
See also "Language" poetry
"Language" Poetries (an anthology), ed. Douglas Messerli, 173, 203n.

See also "Language" poetry

"Language" poetry, 150-61, 162-68, 200n, 201-2n, 203n
and John Ashbery, 92
and normative feminism, 173, 175-76
and Ezra Pound, 92
and Gertrude Stein, 134
and theoretical feminism, 171
and Louis Zukofsky, 134
Larbaud, Valery, 7, 12, 14-19, 24
relation of, to Saint-John Perse, 7, 15, 17, 21-22
Larbaud, Valery,
Works:
A. O. Barnabooth, ses oeuvres
* compltes, 15
"Europe," 17
"Journal intime," 15
"Nuit dans le port," 16
"Ocean indien," 16
"Ode," 15
"Yaravi," 16-17
Laughlin, James, 189-90n
Lawrence, D. H., 174
Leger, Alexis (Saint-John Perse), x, 8, 20-23, 40, 41, 72.
See also Saint-John Perse
Leger, Saint-Leger, 21. See Saint-John Perse
Levinas, Emmanuel, xi, 6, 179, 196n

Little, Roger, 27, 34, 182n, 186n

Lyotard, Jean-Franois, 2, 18, 21, 27, 30, 40, 65, 91, 151, 180n, 184n, 188n, 192n, 201n.
See also Postmodern literary practice
Lyric speaker, 1, 7, 136, 137, 139, 145, 147
M
McGann, Jerome, 77, 89-93, 191n, 192n, 202n
MacLeish Archibald, 44
Mallarm, Stphane, 8, 175
and John Ashbery, 144
and Lon-Paul Fargue, 18-21, 181-82n
"Igitur," 151, 153
and Charles Olson, 99
and Michael Palmer, 151-54
and Ezra Pound, 93, 192n
Mann, Paul, 200n
Marginal, marginality, 46, 158, 161, 162, 169, 175, 176
and "language" poets, 10, 150-51, 161, 162, 165, 176
"Mainstream Marginality" (Armantrout), 302n
and Bernadette Mayer, 158
and Toril Moi, 169
and normative feminism, 162, 165, 175, 176
and Michael Palmer, 153
and Saint-John Perse, x, 8, 40
and silence (Mann), 200-201n
as social reality (hooks), 204n
Marty, Eric, 73
Marxism, xi, 124, 150, 171, 176, 200n

Maximus. See Olson, Charles, Maximus persona, The Maximus Poems

Mayer, Bernadette, xi, 150, 157-62, 165-67, 171, 175-77, 201n, 202n, 204-5n
Mayer, Bernadette,
Works:
Memory, 162, 165-68, 171
Midwinter Day, 157-61, 165, 201n
Studying Hunger, 166, 167
Mazars, Pierre, 54, 55

Page 221

Memory, 7, 8, 12
and Edward S. Casey, 12-14
and Lon-Paul Fargue, 18-21
and Valery Larbaud, 14-18
and Bernadette Mayer, 157-58, 160
and Friedrich Nietzsche, 180n
and Michael Palmer, 153
and phenomenology, 12-14
and Ezra Pound, 86-87
and Marcel Proust, 13, 16-18, 182n
and Saint-John Perse, 21-29.
See also Phenomenology
Memory. See Mayer, Bernadette
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 4, 9, 12, 13, 56, 72, 164, 180n, 187n
Merleau-Ponty,
Works:
Phenomenology of Perception, 4
The Visible and the Invisible, 4
Messerli, Douglas, 165, 173, 203n
Modernism, modernist practice, modernity, 1, 2, 6, 7, 11, 56, 125
modernist aesthetics as ideology (McGann), 77, 91
and Charles Altieri, 179n, 187n
early modernism (Fargue), 14
Gilbert and Gubar's critique of masculinist tendencies in, 174-75
Alice Jardine on, 7, 171-72
leading critics of, 197n (see also Altieri, Charles; Bloom, Harold; Cook, Albert; Kenner,

Hugh; Perloff, Marjorie)

nostalgia as characteristic of (Lyotard), 17-18, 91
Olson's understanding of Pound's break with, 94
Pound's break with, 92-93, 94
Saint-John Perse's break with (Paulhan), 66
Zukofsky's break with, 125.
See also Feminism; Modern poetry; Poetry; Postmodern literary practice
Modern long poem, ix, 2, 92, 177, 179n, 192n
Modern poetry, 1, 179n
Moi, Toril, 169-71, 203n
editor of The Kristeva Reader, 204n.
See also Kristeva, Julia
"Montage," 56.
See also Merleam-Ponty, Maurice
Mottram, Eric, 124, 194n
Mussolini, Benito, 77, 78, 189n
N
Napoleon, 54
Narcissism, 135, 137, 138, 140, 142-44, 149, 198n, 199n.
See also Psychoanalysis
Narcissus, 137-39, 198n
Nardi, Bruno, 86, 87
Neoplatonic philosophy, 83-85
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 2, 71, 180n
Normative. See Feminism, normative
O
Obduracy, 7, 142, 156, 176, 202n, 203n

Obdurate, 9, 105, 155

O'Hara, Frank, 166, 181n, 197n
Olson, Charles, xi, 10, 94-107, 125, 177, 193-94n
and Gloucester (as setting of The Maximus Poems), 95, 98, 99, 103
and John Keats, 94, 96, 97
and Maximus persona, 95-98, 100-101, 103-5
on proprioception, 95
and Ezra Pound, 92, 94, 97, 98
tropos (as self-orienting subjectivity in the work of), 10, 94-95, 98, 100, 103, 105-7
Works:
"Beloits" (The Beloit Lectures, Poetry and Truth), 95, 100, 105, 106
Call Me Ishmael, 103, 193n
The Maximus Poems, 10, 94-107, 193n, 194n
Ong, Walter J., 204n
Oppen, George, 197n
Ostriker, Alicia, 173-74, 204n
Stealing the Language, 173.
See also Feminism; Poetry, women's
P
Palmer, Michael, xi, 150-55, 161, 177, 197n, 199n, 201n, 205n
Palmer, Michael,
Works:
Notes for Echo Lake, 152
"Seven Lines of Equal Length," 151-55
Paracelsus (Baron von Hohenheim), 130
Pascal, Blaise, 3
Paulhan, Jean, 66

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Perloff, Marjorie, 76, 92, 179n, 192n, 204n

Perse, Saint-John. See Saint-John Perse
Phenomenology, 2-7, 12, 173
Picasso, Pablo, 82, 109
Pinsky, Robert, 179
Poe, Edgar Allan, 157
Poetics:
Ezra Pound's, 81-83, 87
Saint-John Perse's, 44-45, 50, 54-55
Gertrude Stein's, 113, 118
Louis Zukovsky's, 123-25, 127, 129.
See also Poetry.
Poetry:
American, and Saint-John Perse, 9
Char's poetry of ethical responsibility, 70, 73-74
and exteriority, 39
"language" poetry, 150-61, 162-68
as locus of value, ix
love poetry (traditional), 68, 85, 137
modern and contemporary, 1-2
narrative, 83, 92
women's poetry, 173-74
and "writing," 41
See also Contemporary poetry; Exteriority; "Language" poetry; Modern poetry; Poetics;
"Writing"
Ponge, Francis:

"The Oyster," 3
Taking the Side of Things, 3
Postmodern literary practice, xi, 1-2, 6-9, 11, 70, 76, 161, 177
and John Ashbery, 149
and community, 65
and Clark Coolidge, 157
and epistemology, 54
and feminism, 170-72
Lyotard's theory of, 17, 40, 91, 201n
and Saint-John Perse, 21.
See also Community; Epistemology; Feminism; Modernism
Pound, Ezra, xi, 9-10, 18, 57, 76-93, 127, 128, 177, 189-93nn, 201n
and anti-Semitism, xi, 78, 98, 189-90n
ethics in, 73
filiation in, 80-82
and impersonality, 179n
and light philosophy, 73, 82-88
and medieval poetry, 82-88
misogyny in, 174
and Charles Olson, 94, 97, 98
and pedagogy, 79-81
and politics, xi, 73-78, 88-91
and transparency, 9-10, 73-82, 88, 92-93
and Louis, Zukofsky, xi, 92, 190n
Works:
ABC of Reading, 79
The Cantos, 9, 10, 76-93, 174, 189n, 191n, 192n

Literary Essays, 80, 85, 86

Selected Letters, 84
Selected Poems, 88
Selected Prose, 82
Spirit of Romance, 82
Proprioception, 95.
See also Olson, Charles
Proust, Marcel, 13, 16-18, 182n
Psychoanalysis, 4, 143, 170, 196n, 204n
Q
Quincunx, 61, 62, 126, 128, 129, 188n, 197n
R
Rabat, Jean-Michel, 79, 84, 87, 92, 93, 190n, 192n
Raybaud, Antoine, 42, 47, 55, 56
Rimbaud, Arthur, x, 1, 11, 19, 21, 22, 24, 34, 43, 70, 94, 185n
Rimbaud, Arthur,
Works:
Illuminations, 19, 24
"La Ville," 24
"Villes," 152, 183n
Romanticism, 1, 34, 153, 201n
Rose, Jacqueline, 169-71, 203n
Ruddick, Lisa, 114, 195n
S
Sacotte, Mireille, 31, 33, 35, 37, 39
Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Leger), ix-xi, 7-10, 12, 20-29, 30-40, 41-53, 5464, 65-70, 71, 72, 75, 125, 177, 180-88nn

anagrams in the work of, 8-9, 45, 47-52, 58

and Ren Char, 7, 65-66, 70, 71, 72, 75
and choice of pseudonym, 8, 40
and colonial persona, 22-23
community in work of, 65-70
enunciation in work of, 7, 33-39
and T. S. Eliot, 26, 31, 184n
exile in life and work of, x, 8-9, 41-45, 56 (Callois)
exteriority in work of, 9, 22, 30, 35, 37, 41, 47, 53, 66, 70-71, 75, 76-77
and Lon-Paul Fargue, 7, 18, 20
language difficulties in work of, x, 54-55
and

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Valery Larbaud, 15, 17, 21-22

life of, x, 8, 41
and Stphane Mallarm, 8
Nobel Prize for Literature (1960), x
Nobel Prize speech by, 18, 55, 181n
as "poet of childhood" (Larbaud), 21-22
as poet of memory, 22-29
as postmodern, 7-8, 21, 40, 65
and Arthur Rimbaud, x, 21-22, 24, 185n
sexuation of poetic language in, 8, 30-31, 34, 38, 67, 168
the Stranger as figure in work of, 31, 35, 37-39, 43, 44
and "writing" (concept of), 42, 43, 46, 52, 186n
Works:
Amers, 7, 41, 42, 66-70, 72, 182n, 188n
Anabase, 8, 26, 30-40, 41, 43, 44, 58, 66, 67, 168, 184n, 186n
"Les Cloches," 23
"crit sur la porte," 22
loges, 21, 22, 26, 27-29
"Etroits sont les vaisseaux," 67-70
Exil, 9, 10, 41-53, 58, 186n
"Le Livre," 25
Nobel Prize speech, 18, 55, 181n
"Pour fter une enfance," 22, 26-27
Vents, 7, 41, 54-64, 184n, 187n
St. Elizabeth's (Hospital), 78, 98, 189n.
See also Pound, Ezra

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 3-5, 11

Saussure, Ferdinand de, 5
Scve, Maurice, 136, 137, 140, 145, 198n
Dlie, 136, 137, 140, 198n
Schor, Naomi, 171
Sexual difference, 6-8, 30, 34, 38, 67, 69, 170, 183n
Sexuation of poetic language, 8, 30, 31, 34, 39, 67, 168, 176, 183n
Shakespeare, William, 123, 128, 129, 134
Sherry, James, 164
Silliman, Ron, 163, 164, 168, 174, 200n, 202n
(editor) In the American Tree, 164, 174, 200n, 202n
Snyder, Gary, 92, 93
Spinoza, Baruch, 129
Stein, Gertrude, xi, 11, 108-23, 127-28, 132, 134, 150, 177, 194-96n
and John Ashbery, 114-16, 195n, 199n
feminist criticism of, 112-14
and hermeticism, 108
and "language" poets, 10, 150, 164
and Michael Palmer, 152, 153
and philosophy of composition, 108-10
and political conservatism, xi, 124
and relationship with Alice B. Toklas, 112, 118
Works:
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 108, 112, 113, 120, 121, 194n
"Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded," 114
"Lifting Belly," 113, 116
The Making of Americans, 109, 110, 113

"Patriarchal Poetry," 113

"Stanzas in Meditation," 11, 108, 112-23, 126, 131, 134, 195-96n, 199n
Tender Buttons, 113, 194n
Stevens, Wallace, 126, 140, 142, 143, 145, 181-82n, 197n, 199n, 201n
Subjectivity, xi, 1-2, 6, 9-11, 22, 177, 179n, 180n, 185n
and the ethical, 118
and feminism, theoretical, 170-71, 173
gay subjectivity, 199n
in Olson's Maximus Poems, 94-97, 99-101, 103-7, 193n
in Perse's Exil, 41-42, 44
of the reader, 164
Sutherland, Donald, 115
T
Taylor, Mark C., 44, 46, 53, 185n, 186n
Terrell, Carroll F., 77, 78, 90, 189n, 195n
Companion to the Cantos (editor), 90, 189n.
See also Pound, Ezra, The Cantos
Thomson, Virgil, 112, 134
Toklas, Alice B., 112, 118.
See also Stein, Gertrude, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Torrey, E. Fuller, 78, 190n
Transparency, 9-10, 76-80, 82, 87-89, 92-93, 159, 162, 164, 171, 190n, 192n, 202n.
See also Pound, Ezra