Attention Equals Life

Attention Equals Life
The Pursuit of the Everyday in
Contemporary Poetry and Culture

Andrew Epstein

1
 1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

© Oxford University Press 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Epstein, Andrew, 1969– author.
Title: Attention equals life : the pursuit of the everyday in contemporary poetry and culture /
Andrew Epstein.
Other titles: Pursuit of the everyday in contemporary poetry and culture
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2016. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015042160 (print) | LCCN 2016014047 (ebook) | ISBN 9780199972128 (cloth) |
ISBN 9780199972159 (updf)
Subjects: LCSH: American poetry—20th century—History and criticism. |
American poetry—21st century—History and criticism. | Civilization in literature. |
Banality (Philosophy) in literature. | Realism in literature. |
Attention—Social aspects—United States. | Realism—Social aspects—United States.
Classification: LCC PS310.C586 E67 2016 (print) | LCC PS310.C586 (ebook) |
DDC 811/.5409355—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015042160

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
For Casey and Dylan
 { Contents }

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: The Poetics of Everyday Life Since 1945 1
1. The Crisis of Attention, Everyday-​Life Theory, and
Contemporary Poetry 41
2. “Each Day So Different, Yet Still Alike”: James Schuyler
and the Elusive Everyday 70
3. “The Tiny Invites Attention”: A. R. Ammons’s Quotidian Muse 110
4. Writing the Maternal Everyday: Bernadette Mayer
and Her “Daughters” 156
5. “There is No Content Here, Only Dailiness”: Poetry as Critique
of Everyday Life in Ron Silliman’s Ketjak 197
6. Everyday-​Life Projects in Contemporary Poetry and
Culture: Kenneth Goldsmith, Claudia Rankine, Brenda Coultas,
Harryette Mullen, and More 229
Conclusion: Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and Beyond 272

Notes 279
Works Cited 323
Index 347
 { Acknowledgments }

Writing this book has been a long journey, but one of the many pleasures of
completing it is at last having the opportunity to thank the many colleagues,
friends, and family members who have done so much to assist in its coming
into the world. I count myself very lucky to have had many remarkable teach-
ers and mentors—​especially my mother, Ellen Epstein, who taught high school
English for decades and first kindled my fascination with books and poetry,
along with Edward Solecki at Far Brook School, Howard Glatt at Columbia
High School, Kimberly Benston at Haverford College, and Jonathan Levin at
Columbia University—​a ll of whom led me to a life in literature and provided
much inspiration and guidance along the way.
Many friends and colleagues from far and wide have discussed this proj-
ect with me, helped me refine my ideas, or generally offered encouragement
and practical advice, including Ben Lee, Lisi Schoenbach, Jonathan Eburne,
Brian Glavey, Daniel Kane, Mark Silverberg, Libbie Rifkin, Susan Rosenbaum,
Michael Sheringham, Rachel Galvin, Liesl Olson, Siobhan Phillips, Don
Share, Alan Golding, Brian McHale, Aldon Nielsen, David Kaufmann, Charles
Bernstein, Robert Archambeau, Eric Bulson, Paul Stephens, Raphael Allison,
Caleb Crain, Kevin Killian, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Christopher Schmidt, Evan
Kindley, Stephen Burt, Kaplan Harris, Michael Thurston, Gillian White, Lloyd
Pratt, Steve Evans, Jennifer Moxley, Robert Zamsky, and Lytle Shaw. I con-
tinue to be deeply grateful to Marjorie Perloff for her abundant generosity and
her unflagging belief in my work over the course of many years.
Thanks as well to Rachel Malkin for inviting me to present a portion of
this book as part of the American Literature Research Seminar at Oxford
University’s Rothermere American Institute, and to Jiří Flajšar, who invited
me to give a talk drawn from this study at Palacký University in the Czech
Republic. I  am especially grateful to Stephen Fredman for his very helpful
comments on portions of the manuscript, and to the other three, anonymous
readers for Oxford University Press, whose sharp and insightful feedback did
a great deal to enhance this book. Portions of this study have been published
previously as articles or book chapters, and I wish to thank the editors and
peer reviewers for Contemporary Literature, Jacket, Jacket2, The Wallace Stevens
Journal, and New Perspectives on American Poetry, edited by Jiří Flajšar.
I also count myself incredibly fortunate to have been a longtime member
of the vibrant and supportive community of scholars, writers, and students
xAcknowledgments

that is the English Department at Florida State University. I am indebted in

particular to the two chairs who have gracefully led our department during the
time I worked on this project for their unstinting encouragement and guidance
and for helping me with the resources and time needed to finish it: R. M. Berry
(from whom I’ve also learned so much about Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Stanley
Cavell, the avant-​garde, and so much else) and Eric Walker (who I must also
thank for his insights into A. R. Ammons and for giving me access to his won-
derful collection of Ammonsiana). Special thanks to Leigh Edwards, for being
an ever-​supportive colleague, friend, and sounding board. For their support,
friendship, and intellectual camaraderie, I  wish to thank my FSU colleagues,
including David Kirby, Barbara Hamby, Ned Stuckey-​French, Elizabeth Stuckey-​
French, Stan Gontarski, Barry Faulk, Robin Goodman, Meegan Kennedy, Robert
Stilling, Dennis Moore, Anne Coldiron, David Johnson, Candace Ward, Erin
Belieu, Jimmy Kimbrell, Robert Olen Butler, Kathleen Yancey, Diane Roberts,
Helen Burke, Jim O’Rourke, and many others, along with several former col-
leagues, including Paul Fyfe, Cristobal Silva, Daniel Vitkus, and Tim Parrish.
I  am especially grateful to Paul Outka (now at the University of Kansas), for
helping me think through many of the ideas in this book and for being a model
of intellectual engagement, generosity, and friendship.
I have benefitted enormously from the many students who have hashed
out ideas about the role of the everyday in literature and culture with me
over the years, especially those who were part of the graduate seminars and
undergraduate honors seminars I  have taught on this topic. There are too
many wonderful students to name here, but I would be remiss if I were not to
mention Peter Kunze, Caitlin Newcomer, Christopher Higgs, Scott Ortolano,
Amber Pearson, Stacey Suver, Adam McKee, Andrew Walker, Paul Ardoin,
Nick Sturm, Aimee Wilson, Tana Jean Welch, and Tom Bevilacqua. My
gratitude as well to my research assistants, Catherine Altmaier and Andrew
Walker, for all of their help.
I am also grateful to my old college friends Ashby Jones, Matt Easton,
and George Anderson and the rest of the crew from Haverford College, who
have heard me talk about this book for years and often offered suggestions
and helpful outside perspectives. Much gratitude to Jane McPherson and Jon
Jefferson for their friendship and for inviting me to use their lovely home as
my own private Yaddo at a crucial time.
It has been a true pleasure to work with my editor at Oxford University
Press, Brendan O’Neill; I  wish to thank him for believing in this project
from the start and for his encouragement, advice, and refreshing candor and
humor at every stage of the process. Thanks as well to everyone else at Oxford
for their expert assistance in bringing the manuscript to life.
I simply cannot thank my family enough for all their love and encour-
agement. I  am profoundly grateful to my amazing parents, Leonard and
Ellen Epstein, for their steadfast and enthusiastic interest in every aspect of
Acknowledgments xi

my work. Thank you for always making it seem as if a life devoted to read-
ing, writing, teaching, art, music, and culture was valuable and achiev-
able. My sister Laura Rosen has been an enduring source of inspiration and
wisdom for as long as I can remember, and I thank her and her husband
Larry Rosen for all their love, advice, and support. I am very thankful to
my wonderful, generous in-​laws Phyllis and Steven Gross, and to Jason and
Canty Gross.
My deepest gratitude is reserved for my wife Kara Gross, who I must thank
for … well, everything. But I am particularly grateful for her sharp editorial
eye, her critical acuity and judgment, and for the seemingly infinite amounts
of love and support she has given me for a very long time, which made this
book, and so much else, possible in the first place. Finally, I dedicate this book
to my endlessly inspiring children, Casey and Dylan Epstein-​Gross, who have
essentially grown up alongside it. Thank you for your brilliant and hilari-
ous insights into the world, your cheerful patience and understanding, your
delightful companionship, boundless curiosity, enthusiasm, and humor, and
for making it impossible for me to forget for even a single day the pleasures
and depths of everyday life.
Attention Equals Life
 Introduction
The Poetics of Everyday Life Since 1945

Poetry as a Form of Attention at its Most Intense

In 1950, Frank O’Hara wrote a short poem and gave it a simple yet suggestive
title: “Today.” An exuberant celebration of the mundane, of seemingly “unpo-
etic,” everyday objects, O’Hara’s poem amounts to an ars poetica, a young
poet’s declaration of purpose:

Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!

You really are beautiful! Pearls,
harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all
the stuff they’ve always talked about
still makes a poem a surprise!
These things are with us every day
even on beachheads and biers. They
do have meaning. They’re strong as rocks.
(Collected, 15)

By stressing that these ordinary, even banal “things”—​like movie theater

candy, glittery sequins, and chocolate sodas—​really are beautiful and do have
meaning, O’Hara seems to be responding to a familiar complaint about the
appropriate subject matter for art: there is no room in poetry for trivial and
frivolous junk like aspirins and harmonicas; poetry must be about grand sub-
jects, weighty issues, timeless themes. With its conversational voice, its tone
of fizzy affirmation, its exuberant pledge of allegiance to lowly, odd, and mass-​
produced contemporary objects, this poem makes a provocative claim about
the content of poetry, as well as about poetic style and form. But “Today” is
more than just a quintessential example of a camp aesthetic that revels in the
“low” and relishes the banality of pop culture. As the quiet references to the
2Introduction

Normandy beachhead and the funeral biers of D-​Day and World War II sug-
gest, O’Hara declares that the immediate elements of our daily lives, of today,
are with us even in the midst of historical catastrophe and personal tragedy.
The everyday is not only full of beauty and meaning; it is also the inescapable,
natural foundation of human experience.
Poised at the exact midpoint of the twentieth century, O’Hara articulates
a stance—​a poetics of everyday life—​that would come to dominate American
poetry over the next sixty years. To put this vision into practice, O’Hara devel-
ops a distinctive brand of everyday-​life poetry that has exerted enormous influ-
ence on contemporary American poetry.1 Perfecting what he half-​jokingly
referred to as the “I do this I do that” poem, O’Hara wrote disarmingly casual
works, like the famous “The Day Lady Died,” which chronicles the poet’s mun-
dane actions and thoughts as he walks through the crowded New York City
streets during his lunch hour (“It is 12:20 in New York a Friday /​three days after
Bastille day, yes /​it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine”) stopping to get a ham-
burger or chocolate malted and observing the minutiae of daily life (Collected,
325). In a piece he wrote about the renowned dance critic and poet Edwin
Denby, O’Hara praised his friend with this formula: “somehow, he gives an
equation in which attention equals Life, or is its only evidence” (Standing, 184).
This remark, which I have borrowed for the title of this study, crystallizes the
creed underlying O’Hara’s own aesthetic, as well as so much twentieth-​cen-
tury poetry and art: the idea that attention is such a crucial aesthetic, and
human, faculty that in some ways it is life itself, if only because it alone has the
ability to provide proof and documentation of human existence.
This book examines why a quest to pay attention to daily life has increas-
ingly become a central feature of both contemporary American poetry
and the wider culture of which it is a part. The reorientation of poetry to
the everyday that O’Hara spells out is now widespread, at times even syn-
onymous with poetry today. Indeed, the idea that contemporary American
poetry often trains its eye on everyday experience has become a truism and
a cliché, but scholars have yet to give this phenomenon the careful consider-
ation it deserves. In a 2001 review of a book by Billy Collins, the critic Adam
Kirsch argues that Collins “writes out, in a large and babyish hand, one of the
major poetic scripts of our time: the one that finds transcendence in the ordi-
nary, and sings hymns to the banal” (“Over Easy”). If Kirsch is correct—​that
singing the praises of daily life has become “one of the major poetic scripts of
our time”—​it is surprising how little critical attention it has received, and how
many of the questions it raises remain unexamined. Where does this preoc-
cupation come from? How and why did it become a “script” that poets follow?
Why is it so prevalent today? Is the goal of such poetry always an effort to
discover the exalted within the humdrum, as Kirsch asserts? What about the
important differences between various aesthetic approaches to the everyday—​
between, say, lyric poems that seek “transcendence in the ordinary” and more
Introduction 3

unusual, experimental projects that are suspicious of aestheticizing and sac-

ramentalizing the everyday, works that prefer to pay tribute instead to the
ordinariness of the ordinary?
To answer some of these questions, Attention Equals Life provides a geneal-
ogy of the fascination with the everyday in contemporary American poetry,
considers the variety of forms it takes, and examines its aesthetic, philosophi-
cal, and political ramifications. To do so, the book includes chapters on a
diverse group of writers, including exemplary poets associated with influen-
tial movements like the New York School, Language poetry, and Conceptual
writing, while at the same time exploring parallel developments in a variety
of media. This will entail discussion of the many points of contact between
literature and the visual arts, as well as the proliferation of everyday-​life
experiments and projects in various corners of culture, some quite distant
from literature or art.
Drawing on theories and debates about the nature of everyday life from
a number of fields across the humanities, this book will trace the modern
history of this preoccupation and consider why it is so much with us today.
Attention Equals Life argues that it is no coincidence that a thirst for everyday
life explodes in the post-​1945 period. This deep cultural need should be seen
as a reaction to the rapid and dislocating cultural, political, and social trans-
formations that characterize this epoch. As historians, media and cultural
theorists, and literary scholars have amply demonstrated, the mid-​t wentieth
century was marked by the unprecedented spread of new media, communi-
cation technologies, advertising, and popular culture, a set of transforma-
tions that fundamentally altered the nature of daily life and fostered potent
anxieties about the impact of new technologies (including movies, radio, and
the “idiot box”) on individual psychology and social behavior, on politics
and identity, on childhood development and education, on our basic ability
to concentrate or sustain any contact with the “real.”2
In recent years, a general consensus seems to have taken hold that our cur-
rent electronic age has only made matters worse, as it has ushered in a culture
of perilous distraction, interruption, and fragmented attention. As the writer
Leon Wieseltier put it in the New York Times: “Attention deficit disorder is
no longer a disorder in America. It is a norm. Attention is now the disor-
der” (“After the Flood”). In a 2008 book with a characteristically alarming
title, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, Maggie
Jackson paints a dire picture of how we live today—​“tossed and turned by
info-​floods, pummeled by clashing streams of rapid-​fire imagery, floating in
limitless cyber-​worlds”—​and issues a familiar warning about its costs: “Amid
the glittering promise of our new technologies and the wondrous potential of
our scientific gains, we are nurturing a culture of social diffusion, intellectual
fragmentation, sensory detachment. In this new world, something is amiss.
And that something is attention” (Distracted, 13).
4Introduction

In recent years, debates about the problem of attention have raged in the
popular media and in academia. We have seen endless hand-​wringing over
diminishing attention spans, fretting over the effects of new media on the
human brain (as Nicholas Carr famously asked in 2008, “Is Google Making Us
Stupid?”), and controversies over the pathologizing of distraction in the diag-
nosis and treatment of attention-​deficit disorder and attention-​deficit hyperac-
tivity disorder (which first appeared in the DSM as a disorder in 1980). We have
been inundated with articles and books that deplore (or, less often, celebrate)
the impact of technology on how we think, on our ability to focus and pay
attention. These range from academic tomes, to books for the general reader,
to self-​help guides, with titles like The Shallows:  What the Internet is Doing
to Our Brains; Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?; The Economics of
Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information; Rapt: Attention and the
Focused Life; and Staying Focused in the Age of Distraction: How Mindfulness,
Prayer, and Meditation Can Help You Pay Attention to What Really Matters.3
The celebrated novelist Jonathan Franzen recently proclaimed that “the actual
substance of our daily lives is total electronic distraction” (quoted in Winer,
“Our Distraction”). It seems safe to say that by the early twenty-​first century,
profound anxiety about the fate of attention has become one of the defining
issues of our time.
In this book, I argue that the contemporary “crisis of attention” is also
profoundly connected to another ubiquitous feature of our culture: a pre-
occupation with the everyday. The recent near-​panic about attention has
sparked a phenomenon I call “everyday hunger,” a powerful craving for closer
contact with the most taken-​for-​granted and familiar aspects of the quotid-
ian, a desire for greater knowledge and more thorough documentation of our
own daily lives.4 Today’s crisis of attention seems to have profoundly exacer-
bated a problem that is perhaps as old as civilization itself—​the worry that
“man is estranged from that with which he is most familiar,” as the Greek
philosopher Heraclitus put it over two millennia ago. Thanks to the prolifera-
tion of mass media, television, and new communication technologies, this
worry re-​emerged with particular force in the period following World War
II, which might explain why, in the 1950s, the poet Charles Olson seized on
Heraclitus’s remark about our alienation from the familiar and called for new
forms of poetry that might counter that estrangement (Selected, 245). With the
dawning of the digital age, this concern has only become more pronounced
and pervasive, arising in many different spheres of our culture over the past
several decades, from reality TV to poetry, from hyper-​realist fiction to new
technologies like Facebook or wearable computers that encourage us to moni-
tor and document our daily lives.
A fascination with everyday life and fears about our alienation from it are
of course not unique to the period I am discussing, as the ancient comment
by Heraclitus makes clear. Surely scholars from virtually any period would
Introduction 5

be quick to remind us that the everyday has been a perennial concern of lit-
erature and art from the beginnings of cultural expression, and abundant
and fascinating examples can be gleaned from Homer to Chaucer, Virgil to
Shakespeare and Bruegel, Dante to Vermeer. But there do seem to be signifi-
cant differences, in both degree and kind, beginning around the dawn of the
nineteenth century and finding full expression in the twentieth, in how writ-
ers, artists, and thinkers conceive of and represent the everyday—​differences
this book will trace and explore. On the broadest level, the enormous changes
that have swept across Western cultures during the past several centuries, that
together usher in what Max Weber calls “the disenchantment of the world”—​
including the entrenchment and evolution of industrial capitalism, the scien-
tific revolution, the erosion of traditional religion and surge of secularism—​a ll
prompt a newfound recognition that the everyday, the here and now, is per-
haps the primary arena of human experience. In terms of literary history, this
change can be seen surfacing in central tenets of British romanticism and the
“American Renaissance,” in the subsequent rise of realism and naturalism,
and finally in the flowering of modernism and postmodernism.5
Despite this extended history, it is only in the twentieth century that phe-
nomena such as “the everyday,” “the ordinary,” and “the nature of attention”
seem to become codified and reified, turned into topics of overt concern
for poetry, philosophy, psychology, and science. For example, even though
nineteenth-​century poets certainly began to prize the mundane as a subject
for poetry, it is telling that the words everyday, ordinary, attention, quotid-
ian, mundane, and dailiness never appear in the Lyrical Ballads of William
Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, nor do they pop up in the volu-
minous pages of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.6 In contrast, these terms
and concepts become central to the way poetry is conceived, defined, and
talked about during the twentieth century, where one finds Wallace Stevens
worrying about “the malady of the quotidian,” Gertrude Stein noting “there
is no more than yesterday and ordinary,” writers such as A. R. Ammons, Rae
Armantrout, and Kay Ryan all composing poems titled “Attention,” James
Schuyler regularly referring to “the everyday,” “dailiness,” and “daily life,”
and Ron Silliman insisting “there is no content here, only dailiness.”7 During
the twentieth century, the everyday qua everyday suddenly comes into ques-
tion. It takes its place as both a central topos and a recurring theme for poetry
and aesthetics, and a philosophical and political problem to be worked
through in literary works.8
Given these developments, it is not surprising that the turn away from
the extraordinary, the exotic, or the heroic toward the mundane, the small,
and the everyday has been hailed as a central feature of twentieth-​century
literature and art as a whole. As several recent books on modernist litera-
ture of the earlier twentieth century have demonstrated, “modernism takes
ordinary experience as its central subject,” a theme evident in the work of
6Introduction

writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Wallace Stevens, and Gertrude
Stein (Olson, Modernism, 3).9 Although, as these studies argue, standard
accounts have often overlooked the strength of modernism’s investment in
the everyday, a deep and abiding concern with the everyday runs through
the heart of the modernist canon.10 It can be seen in Ezra Pound’s Imagism
(with its fear of abstractions and call for “direct treatment of the thing”) and
T. S. Eliot’s portrayal of a tawdry, commonplace, urban reality (replete with
“grimy scraps,” “newspapers from vacant lots,” and “muddy feet that press /​
to early coffee stands”), in Woolf’s urging us to “examine for a moment an
ordinary mind on an ordinary day” and at the heart of Joyce’s Ulysses, which
radically alters the epic tradition’s wide-​angle focus to depict a single day in
the life of modern Dublin. It is present in everything from William Carlos
Williams’s humble “Red Wheelbarrow,” upon which “so much depends,” to
Wallace Stevens’s probing of “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” from the
newspaper fragments pasted onto Pablo Picasso’s cubist collages to Marcel
Duchamp’s readymades fashioned from everyday things like urinals and
shovels and Stein’s hymns to humble domestic objects and food in Tender
Buttons.
But in the wake of modernism, during the period after World War II,
something happens to the everyday-​life aesthetic tradition: it seems both to
shift into high gear and, in some ways, to turn in new directions. The most
tangible and important sign of this change, for our purposes, is the emergence
of the “New American Poetry” in the early 1950s, which I see as a pivot point
in the story of twentieth-​century everyday-​life poetics. In his groundbreak-
ing 1960 anthology The New American Poetry: 1945–​1960, the editor Donald
Allen gathered together a large collection of “anti-​academic,” avant-​garde
poets who began writing after World War II, and divided them into a num-
ber of groupings that have, for better or worse, largely stuck as convenient
labels:  the Beats (Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso), the Black
Mountain School of poets (Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov,
Robert Duncan), the New  York School of poets (O’Hara, Schuyler, John
Ashbery), and the San Francisco Renaissance (Jack Spicer, Philip Whalen).
Although there are abundant differences between these poets and these
groups, in general the New American poets collectively rejected the version of
high modernism that had hardened into orthodoxy by mid-​century—​a New
Criticism–​inspired formalism based on Eliot’s doctrine of impersonality and
reliance on myth, allusion, and erudition, a nostalgia for order, a disdain for
mass culture, an insistence on the poem’s self-​contained autonomy, and an
emphasis on mastery of craft and formal technique (rhyme, meter, wit, irony).
In response, the young New American poets espoused radically open, organic
forms more attuned to quotidian temporality and flux, began to write about
raw, personal experience and daily life in shockingly colloquial language, and
reached “across the great divide” to popular culture and the “low” in all its
Introduction 7

forms, including vulgarity, drugs, sex, and the messy realities and pleasures
of the body.
One could argue that this development is merely a deepening of the already
extant modernist interest in the everyday. But it also signals a distinctive new
aesthetic with different practices and goals. Despite their fascination with the
everyday, the modernists still retained a greater emphasis on epic ambitions,
on the mythic dimensions of the daily, on epiphany and the special moment,
and on the need to disrupt rather than explore habit, than one finds in a good
deal of postwar poetry. This goes even for many of the most quotidian mod-
ernist works. After all, the “ordinary day” of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway hinges
on a dramatic suicide and reaches its climax with an emotional, unexpected
reunion of friends and ex-​lovers who have not seen one another in years;
Joyce’s Ulysses chronicles a day that is far from uneventful (in light of the
wild Nighttown scene alone); and the poetics of Williams and the Imagists
depends upon isolating and heightening what Pound calls “magic moments.”
In contrast, as my brief opening discussion of O’Hara suggests, the post-
war New American poetry differs from modernism in that it inaugurates a
new, more extreme orientation to everyday life as everyday, in terms of both
form and content. In fact, it is common to view this as a basic distinction
between modernism and post-​1945 poetry. For example, in a useful thumb-
nail discussion of the differences between the two halves of the century, Jahan
Ramazani observes that
contemporary poets have wanted to make their forms more responsive
to accident, flux, and history, less inwardly molded and self-​enclosed. …
Their long poems, instead of unfolding sequentially toward a destination,
are often organized serially, in modular units that have a tentative relation
to one another. Prose genres such as the diary or notebook are the model
for many such poems, sometimes dated to indicate their contingency, their
immersion in history. The contemporary poem places itself within—​not
above or outside or beyond—​the open-​ended course of everyday experi-
ence. (Norton Anthology, xlvi)11
The reasons behind contemporary poetry’s more extreme embrace of the
everyday and its contingency and flux are various and complicated, and I
will be discussing them throughout the chapters to come. But one might start
by acknowledging that this turn has its roots in an array of factors unique
to the postwar period: the shattering effects and aftermath of World War II,
Auschwitz, and Hiroshima; the influence of a Cold War culture marked by
conformity, material prosperity, and hyper-​ consumerism, McCarthyism,
and fears of nuclear annihilation; the pervasive influence of Buddhism and
eastern religions, with their call for mindfulness and attention to immedi-
ate experience; and the tumultuous political and social changes of the 1960s
(including the rallying cry that “the personal is political”).12 Perhaps most
8Introduction

important, the New American poetry’s fascination with dailiness can be seen
as an early response to the explosion of popular culture, mass media, com-
puters, and other technological changes that contributed to our estrangement
from the familiar, forever transformed the experience of daily life, and intro-
duced new threats to our capacity for sustained attention.
In short, for a variety of reasons, over the past half-​century both poetry
and culture in general have become ever more preoccupied with the everyday
and the commandment to pay attention to it. During this period, writers,
artists, and filmmakers begin to develop more and more outlandish, innova-
tive, and challenging ways of apprehending the everydayness of the everyday,
the boredom and distinctive temporality of daily life: for instance, Samuel
Beckett writes a play in which (as a critic famously said), “nothing happens,
twice,” as two men stand around throughout the first act endlessly waiting for
an event that never occurs, and then do the exact same thing all over again
in the second act. The composer John Cage creates a piece of music, in three
movements, that entails a pianist sitting motionless before an open piano
for four minutes and thirty-​three seconds, compelling audiences to attend
to ambient noises of daily experience and to recognize the “music” that sur-
rounds us at each moment. The New American poet Robert Creeley writes a
radically minimalist poem that reads, in its entirety:

One day after another—​

Perfect.
They all fit.
(Collected, 564)

Andy Warhol makes a five-​hour movie, depicting nothing more than a man
sleeping in real time and calls it Sleep; Jean-​Luc Godard films an exhausting
15-​minute scene that depicts an endless traffic jam in one continuous track-
ing shot, and Chantal Akerman makes a movie, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du
Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, filled with interminable scenes of a woman going
about her daily activities, like chopping vegetables and preparing dinner, in
what seems to be real time.
Despite this flowering of radical everyday-​life aesthetics in the post-
war period, previous studies have rarely questioned why a compulsion to
represent the everyday becomes so predominant in the decades after mod-
ernism, nor why it has so often led to unusual, challenging projects and
formal innovation, nor why poetry, in particular, might be an everyday-​life
genre par excellence. This book is one of the first to account for the rather
surprising persistence of the everyday—​t he re-​emergence of material, con-
crete, ordinary reality—​as a primary concern for poetry in an era that we
have long been told is marked by a postmodernist suspicion of realism and
representation.
Introduction 9

In making this case, this study aims to debunk the widely held idea that
the “avant-​garde” is diametrically opposed to “realism.” Instead, the works
I investigate constitute a hybrid tendency, one that I refer to as a “skeptical,”
“experimental,” or “avant-​garde realism.” Such works refuse to accept the
strict binary that would pit realism’s concern for immediate and ordinary
experience against the avant-​garde’s formal experimentation and skepticism
about language and representation. Instead of viewing these as mutually
exclusive concerns, adventurous poets of the everyday choose both.
From the early stirrings of modernism forward, practitioners and propo-
nents of experimental writing have frequently portrayed realism as the enemy.
Associated with naïve or old-​fashioned ideas about representation, mimesis,
and the transparency of language, realism has long been cast as the fussy and
outmoded other—​the antithesis to daring, difficult, progressive, and subver-
sive writing and art.13 This deeply engrained binary, however, has made it
hard to see that the realist impulse continues to haunt the period after mod-
ernism, particularly within the avant-​garde more broadly and poetry in par-
ticular. We need to understand why realism continues to lurk around—​why,
like the undead, it keeps popping up as a justification behind recent inno-
vative writing and art. For example, when the contemporary poet Kenneth
Goldsmith explains the motives driving his own controversial avant-​garde
works of conceptual writing, which consist of things like verbatim transcrip-
tions of weather and traffic reports, where does he turn? “Inspired by Zola,
Conceptual Writing is a realism beyond realism,” Goldsmith has written,
albeit with tongue characteristically in cheek. “It’s hyperrealist, a literary
photorealism, an embodied and enacted simulacrum” (“If I were”). Similarly,
in their book Notes on Conceptualisms, two of Goldsmith’s fellow conceptual-
ists, Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman, refer to the practices that interest
them as forms of “radical mimesis” (28).14
To be sure, those seeking to create a form of “realism beyond realism”
remain deeply wary of traditional models of mimesis and sustain an ongoing
quarrel with the assumptions and certainties of conventional realism. This is
one reason I find it useful to refer to this approach as skeptical realism. Even
as these writers insist on the importance of attending to and presenting the
real, they are acutely aware that we have no access to an unmediated reality,
that the “real” can never be disentangled from how it is constructed and imag-
ined via our languages and forms of representation. For example, Place and
Fitterman emphasize this paradox when they argue that “radical mimesis is
radical artifice: there is nothing so artificial as an absolutely faithful realism”
(Notes on Conceptualisms, 28). This belief in realism’s inescapable artificiality,
this skepticism about the fidelity of any kind of representation to some objec-
tive, external truth, lends tension and force to their work. Their poems flaunt
their artifice and cast doubt on their own mimetic goals, as when Silliman
acknowledges that “art is a mirage” (Age of Huts, 97) or that “all depiction’s
10Introduction

false” (What, 27) or, when Schuyler interrupts a meticulously described scene
to admit “I /​can’t describe the color /​of that tree. Imagine—​/​no, I can’t do
it” (Collected, 329).
This hybrid mode allows for poets and artists to have their cake and eat it,
too—​it permits them to bring together, in a tense amalgam, representation
and abstraction, mimesis and constructivism, realism and anti-​realism (or
surrealism), “reality” and “imagination” (to use Wallace Stevens’s lexicon), or,
in philosophical terms, empiricism and rationalism, at once. Undeterred and
even energized by this awareness of its impossibility, they still have an urgent,
underlying commitment to realism’s goals. This leads them to seek out new
forms that often seem antithetical to traditional realism in an effort to achieve
what they envision to be a new and improved brand of realism, one both chas-
tened and strengthened by its built-​in self-​consciousness and skepticism.15
Lyn Hejinian argues that “when the term realism is applied to poetry,”
it speaks to “the strangeness that results from a description of the world
given in the terms ‘there it is,’ ‘there it is,’ ‘there it is’ that restores realness
to things in the world and separates things from ideology” (Language of
Inquiry, 158). Which brings me to a second reason I refer to this mode as
skeptical realism: the devotion to everyday experience, the desire to restore
the realness of things by repeatedly saying “there it is,” is not only tinged
with skepticism about language and representation. It can also be under-
stood as a response to skepticism itself, in the same way that the philosopher
Stanley Cavell argues that “the resettlement of the everyday,” the recovery
of “the uncanniness of ordinary,” is a necessary and powerful “answer to
skepticism” (In Quest, 176). In other words, the poetics of everyday life
pushes back against the threat of philosophical skepticism, with its para-
lyzing doubts about the existence of the world and the “realness” of the
real. The fourth section of Rae Armantrout’s poem “Locality” illustrates
this aspect of skeptical realism:

Wires dip obligingly

between blanched poles,
slightly askew.
Any statement I issue,
if particular enough,
will prove
I was here
(Versed, 23)

Armantrout suggests that an art of the concrete and particular, one that
observes, names, and documents the local, the ordinary, and everyday, may
serve as a proof of existence, a stay against doubt (“I was here”: the world is,
Introduction 11

and this statement demonstrates that I saw it). Or Armantrout at least points
to our wish that it might be such a proof—​a characteristic irony and skepti-
cism about the capacity of language to do what it claims to be doing tugs at
the poem’s confident assertion. As Hejinian says of Armantrout, in her work
the poet “discovers not epiphanies but dilemmas.”16
The powerful return of the “real” in contemporary literature and art in
the form of a self-​conscious, skeptical realism can be viewed, in part, as a
retort to the radical doubt, pessimism, and nihilism often associated with
our own era, with its postmodernist vision of reality as thoroughly socially
constructed and its post-​structuralist belief (following Jacques Derrida) that
“there is nothing outside of the text” (Of Grammatology, 158).17 The aesthetic
mode I discuss in this book suggests that in the midst of this period there
persists a belief in the necessity and recalcitrance of the everyday, and often a
kind of hopefulness about the value and meaning to be found there.
Furthermore, I will argue that this invigorated poetics of the everyday
arises in response to the crisis of attention ​roiling contemporary culture.
Everyday-​life poetry attends to, and in some cases decries, the very rhythms,
practices, and structures of daily life that our sped-​up, addled culture threat-
ens to obscure. For example, it forces us to think about the ways in which power
and capitalism shape and affect tiny details of everyday life, the micropolitics
of daily interaction and economic inequality, the realities of everyday sex-
ism and racism, the effects of consumerism and advertising on our minds
and actions, and the existence of alienation in the day-​to-​day workplace. As
Armantrout puts it: “I write to keep myself awake and alive. … Writing …
is a way to stay awake and alive in a society that discourages that, a society
where, as Victor Hernandez Cruz says, ‘every stupidity is made available just
to jam the circuits’ ” (Collected Prose, 120). In other words, the strenuous effort
to attend to the material conditions of everyday life is not just the product
of a culture of distraction and spectacle—​it is also a forceful response to the
deprivations that culture has wrought.18
This book begins with the premise that poetry is an important, and per-
haps unlikely, cultural form that has mounted a response, and even method
of resistance, to a culture gradually losing its capacity to pay attention. To
make this claim raises some questions that this book will seek to answer: why
poetry, of all things? Is there something special about poetry as a genre, as
opposed to, say, the novel or other aesthetic forms, that has made it particu-
larly well suited to respond to contemporary concerns about attention and a
hunger for everyday life?
For one thing, at least since romanticism, poetry has been a medium
that often expressly focuses on processes of perception and attention. From
Wordsworth and Coleridge to Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore, from
John Ashbery to Jorie Graham, poetry has staked out as its own special prov-
ince the complex interaction between mind and world, between individual
12Introduction

consciousness and immediate, concrete experience. Freed from the exigen-

cies of narrative—​such as plot, story-​telling, setting, characterization, rising
action and the resolution of conflict, and other conventions of the novel—​
poetry steps forward as perhaps the quintessential genre for the rendering of
concrete, everyday experiences and objects, for an investigation of the work-
ings of attention, and for a method of responding to the moment-​by-​moment
unfolding of daily time.
Thus, it is not a coincidence, I argue, that poetry—​perhaps more so than
any other literary genre or art form—​has increasingly been conceptual-
ized using the language of attention. In fact, many writers and critics today
seem to define the genre itself as a mode of attention. For example, several
years ago, Edward Hirsch, the well-​k nown poet and former president of the
Guggenheim Foundation, defended the value of poetry in precisely these
terms when he noted that current cultural conditions have made poetry more
important than ever: “We get things from poetry that we can’t get from other
places. We live in an unprecedented situation of celebrity culture, 24-​hour
newsmedia, 840 cable channels and an amazing amount of technology. But
no one is really paying attention. Poets pay attention” (quoted in “Youth and
Experience”).
Behind Hirsch’s comments lurks an important set of ideas and assump-
tions that have been little understood or examined: the notion that what poets
do is pay attention, even more so than other people; the idea that poetry itself
can be an urgently necessary, even ethical form of staying awake and alert
to our immediate, everyday lives; and the conviction that poetry can serve
as a crucial antidote for the acute case of cultural attention-​deficit disorder
brought on by today’s media saturation and information overload.19
The notion that poetry itself might be defined as a form of attention, a
heightened mode of attentiveness to the world, seems to be a feature of our
age. For instance, Donald Revell titled his 2007 book of prose about poetics
The Art of Attention: A Poet’s Eye. On its first page Revell explains “And now
I see that poetry is a form of attention, itself the consequence of attention” (5).
Contemporary poets and critics frequently draw upon this vocabulary of
attention, especially to express an intrinsic link between attentiveness, on
the one hand, and the everyday, on the other. For example, the former Poet
Laureate Ted Kooser has declared his poetry an effort to cultivate habits of
attention in his readers: “I write for other people with the hope that I can help
them to see the wonderful things within their everyday experiences. In short,
I want to show people how interesting the ordinary world can be if you pay
attention” (“Ted Kooser”).
Similarly, in a 2012 collection of essays, What Light Can Do, another for-
mer Poet Laureate, Robert Hass, writes that “If there is a sky for me in this
collection, it is the act of attention itself, trying to see what’s there, what light
can do” (xi). At the start of the book, he underlines a connection between
Introduction 13

attention and aesthetic form that this book will stress as well:  “attention,
Simone Weil said, is prayer, and form in art is the way attention comes to
life” (ix). Hass suggests that attention can serve as an antidote to our age of
distraction—​as Laura Collins-​Hughes writes in a review of the book for the
Boston Globe: “Our ability to pay attention isn’t what it once was. We’ve let
that muscle go flaccid. Readers now of glowing screens, we click from one
page to another, following link upon link, not bothering to finish whatever it
was we started.” What Hass’s book “compels the reader to do is pay attention,
and that—​as the title of the book suggests—​is Hass’s objective. To read him
is to notice, in art and in the wider world around us, the layers beneath the
surface where he coaxes us to look.”
Another example of this rhetoric can be found in an anthology of experi-
mental ecopoetry, The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral,
published in 2012. In the volume’s introduction, Joshua Corey suggests that
the poetry gathered in his anthology demonstrates “our best hopes for what
poems can be: vessels of attention to the world and to language, attention at
its most intense” (Corey and Waldrep, Arcadia, xxiii). Throughout this book,
I argue that this recurring idea—​that “poetry is a form of attention” at “its
most intense,” that poems should aim to be “vessels of attention”—​is not a
timeless or “natural” definition of poetry. It is, rather, historically condi-
tioned and specific to our time and place, a reflexive response to widespread
fears that “our ability to pay attention isn’t what it once was.” As such, it is an
important new chapter in the history of poetry as a genre.
In what follows, I focus on a number of poets—​including James Schuyler, A. R.
Ammons, Bernadette Mayer, and Ron Silliman—​who began to explore the con-
nections between poetry, attention, and the everyday in the period between the
1950s and the 1970s. I focus on this crucial period because it is precisely
the moment when popular culture, mass media, television, and other forms
of technology were becoming pervasive and inescapable features of American
culture, sparking concerns about the effects of distraction and mediation on
our grasp of everyday reality. I also do so to demonstrate that poets and art-
ists like these serve as canaries in the coalmine (or, as Ezra Pound would have
it, “antennae of the race”), wrestling with the problem of attention at a time
when it was just beginning to become an inescapable part of our cultural con-
versation. These poets seem to sense the increasingly dire crisis of attention as
it unfolds. They anticipate the large-​scale cultural concerns about distraction
and alienation from everyday life that have become so pervasive in the past
several decades, and ponder methods that poets, and people in general, might
use to ameliorate those problems.
Focusing on the period from the 1950s through the 1970s also gives us the
opportunity to locate an overlooked turning point in the story of American
poetry: a moment of sea change when the idea that poetry is a form of atten-
tion, a mode of attending to daily experience, begins to take hold and become
14Introduction

dominant. For example, it is during this period that Ammons defines poetry
as a “focusing of the attention when the mind is fully awake, fully focused
and penetrating.” Like many others in these pages, he sees poetry’s aim as
twofold: to “heighten one’s own attention” and “to alert, to freshen, to awaken
the energies” of the reader (Grossvogel, “Interview,” 48). Around the same
time, Schuyler instructs readers to pay attention to the present, quotidian
moment—​“Attune yourself to what is happening /​Now, the little wet things,
like washing up the lunch dishes” (Collected, 219)—​and Bernadette Mayer
tells us, similarly, to “Look at very small things with your eyes / &
​ stay warm”
(Bernadette Mayer Reader, 32).
“Attention is all,” Silliman writes repeatedly in his long poem Ketjak, a
phrase that could be a guiding mantra for poets and artists of the every-
day. For the figures I discuss in this book, the difficult task of attending to
daily life becomes a powerful motive for writing, and even an ethical com-
mandment. As O’Hara proclaims, “It’s my duty to be attentive” (Collected,
197). In a 2003 commencement address, Susan Sontag offers graduates some
stirring advice that seems to echo O’Hara’s “equation in which attention
equals Life”: “Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or
society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying atten-
tion. Attention is vitality” (Cotter, “On Sontag”). As these remarks make
clear, over the past half-​century contemporary poets and thinkers have
increasingly come to view sharp attentiveness and alert observation, rather
than, say, imagination or linguistic creativity, as essential ingredients for
poetry and art. One of my chief goals in Attention Equals Life is to explore
why this little-​noticed shift has taken place and to examine its far-​reaching
implications.

“Everyday Life Studies” and Experiments with Poetic Form

Throughout this book, I use the phrase “everyday-​life aesthetic tradition” to

refer to the ongoing lineage of writers and artists devoted to the quotidian
that features at its heart central figures like Joyce, Woolf, Williams, Stevens,
Stein, Duchamp, Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Samuel Beckett, John Cage,
Elizabeth Bishop, Frank O’Hara, Andy Warhol, and Georges Perec, among
many others. Alongside this line of descent in literature and the arts runs
a parallel and far-​flung tradition of intellectual and philosophical inquiry
that I loosely call “theories of everyday life.” This lineage includes a disparate
group of thinkers who, in one way or another, take the everyday to be an
essential issue and problem, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James,
John Dewey, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin,
Agnes Heller, Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, Guy Debord, Michel de
Certeau, Raymond Williams, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Rancière, and Stanley
Introduction 15

Cavell. These thinkers obviously stem from a diverse group of disciplines and
traditions, but over the past two decades, scholarly interest in this body of
thought has begun to coalesce into a nascent interdisciplinary field some-
times referred to as Everyday Life Studies.
There is no question that the concept of everyday life has become an impor-
tant organizing principle and theoretical problem in a number of fields, includ-
ing literary and cultural studies, philosophy, sociology, art history, popular
culture, and media studies—​and across the humanities in general. In 2002,
the scholar Ben Highmore observed that “we are witnessing something of an
academic boom in everyday life,” and he was right (Everyday Life Reader, 28).
Just since 2000, three excellent book-​length accounts of the major theories
of everyday life have appeared:  Michael Gardiner’s Critiques of Everyday
Life (2000), Highmore’s Everyday Life and Cultural Theory:  An Introduction
(2002), and Michael Sheringham’s Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from
Surrealism to the Present (2006). In 2002, New Literary History devoted a spe-
cial issue to “Everyday Life,” and a special issue of Cultural Critique with the
same focus appeared the same year. A sign of the consolidation of the field
of Everyday Life Studies can be seen in the publication of The Everyday Life
Reader, edited by Highmore in 2002, an interdisciplinary anthology that
consists of key theoretical texts on everyday life by a wide variety of think-
ers. Although the everyday has been particularly important within cultural
studies and studies of popular culture, scholars devoted more specifically to
literature—​and especially to modernism—​have gotten into the act, too, as
can be seen in a spate of studies that have appeared in the past half-​decade by
Liesl Olson, Bryony Randall, Siobhan Phillips, and others.20
Although this book builds upon recent work that addresses such theo-
ries and applies them to literature and culture, it seeks to fill several gaps.
First, as I have mentioned, recent studies of the everyday in literature—​most
prominently Olson’s Modernism and the Ordinary and Randall’s Modernism,
Daily Time, and Everyday Life—​have focused on modernist literature during
the first half of the twentieth century.21 While I frequently refer back to ear-
lier developments in the history of everyday-​life aesthetics, my focus is on a
fairly recent chapter in this story, one that scholars have yet to fully address:
the renewed and very potent fascination with the quotidian that emerged in the
postwar years, reached a fever pitch in the 1970s, and has continued up to the
present, with an apparent intensification in the past two decades.22
Second, although they are informed by everyday-​life theory, these recent
studies of literature and the everyday tend to pull away from it for various
reasons; in general, they have been less interested than the present book in
examining similarities and connections between the theoretical and the aes-
thetic explorations of the everyday that are happening more or less simulta-
neously.23 Third, unlike other studies, I argue that the surge of literature and
art about the everyday coincides with a range of other cultural practices and
16Introduction

concerns devoted to daily life, including many extra-​literary ones, all against
the backdrop of growing anxieties about the problem of attention in an age
of distraction. Therefore, I  argue that “attention” has been overlooked as a
keyword and central concept for everyday-​life’s theory and practice. Lastly,
literary scholars have only just begun to bring the critical discourse about the
everyday to bear on our understanding of poetry in particular.24 Given the
centrality of everyday life and the problem of attention to twentieth-​and
twenty-​first–​century poetry, this seems like a missed opportunity, one that
this book seeks to redress by exploring why poetry, in particular, might be
a genre especially well suited to an engagement with the quotidian and the
nature of attention.
Although theories of everyday life vary widely, in general these thinkers
offer a powerful retort to the denigration of the everyday they find in much
Western philosophy, social theory, art, and literature. Convinced that our
blindness to the everyday undermines our ability to live fully and freely, they
declare that no act or element of daily life is devoid of information or lacking
in value, meaning, or political resonance. In their work, they present a variety
of approaches to critically understanding—​and even possibly transforming—​
the nature of everyday life in modernity. For some within these overlapping
traditions, attending to everyday life is viewed as a task endowed with serious
political urgency. Informed by, and often critically responding to, Marxist
thought, many of these theorists advocate forms of radical critique that would
force us to be more conscious of the connections between lived daily expe-
rience in the twentieth century and the oppressive economic and political
conditions of our modern capitalist society.
More so than some other studies, this book stresses that these two
developments—​the lineage of everyday-​life aesthetics and the philosophical,
critical tradition—​run in tandem. Rather than conceiving of the theory as
something separate, a set of ideas that one might apply to literature or culture,
I argue that the two strands are parallel and interrelated, and they should be
historicized as paired phenomena. They both exemplify the broad turn to
the everyday that has rippled across American and European culture since
the 1800s. In other words, it is no mere fluke that the emergence of everyday
life as a category of analysis in the middle decades of the twentieth century
coincides so closely with the period that is my focus. It is no coincidence, for
example, that in the 1950s, Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, and Raymond
Williams begin to assess capitalism’s subtle insinuation into the smallest
details of everyday life, at the same time as a poet like Frank O’Hara develops
a new mode of everyday poetics attentive to acts of consumption and urban
experience.
As we will see, intriguing points of direct contact and influence exist
between the poets and the philosphers, including Ammons’s engagment
with William James and pragmatism, Schuyler’s proximity to Wittgenstein
Introduction 17

(through Fairfield Porter), Silliman’s immersion in a wide range of theory and

philosophy (from Marx and Wittgenstein to Foucault and Barthes), Brenda
Coultas’s overt nod to Benjamin’s Arcades Project, and Goldsmith’s explicit
interest in thinkers like Benjamin, de Certeau, and Debord. However, I am
less interested in proving that the poets I discuss actually read or are directly
influenced by these philosophers than in arguing that everyday-​life theory
and everyday-​life aesthetics emerge from the same intellectual and cultural
preoccupations and respond to the same material conditions, including the
dawning crisis of attention that has come to define contemporary society.
I argue that the insights and debates at the heart of everyday-​life theory can
help us provide a better account of the obsession with everyday life in poetry,
as well as in the broader culture and the philosophical, political, and aes-
thetic dimensions of this predilection. Furthermore, I stress the importance
of bringing together several strains of thought: first, earlier twentieth-​century
European philosophy that insists on the importance of the everyday and ordi-
nary (Heidegger and Wittgenstein); second, the Marxist-​influenced and pri-
marily French critique of everyday life (Benjamin, Lefebvre, Debord, and de
Certeau); and last, the American philosophical investigation of the ordinary,
habit, attention, and the primacy of experience (Emerson, Thoreau, James, and
Cavell). By bringing this American strain into the same conversation, I hope
to further open up a new dimension of everyday-​life studies, one particularly
useful for understanding American poetry of the everyday, which so often
participates in a pragmatist lineage.25 Furthermore, my aim is to explore not
only how the theory can be useful for reading the poetry but also how reading
the poetry can illuminate the theory, even exposing some of its blindspots and
limitations, particularly regarding certain implicit, essentialist assumptions at
the heart of everyday-​life aesthetics and theory about race, gender, and the
universality of the quotidian.
I elaborate on these points as my discussion moves forward. But in the
broadest sense, critical studies of the everyday can remind us to never take the
idea of “the everyday” or the “ordinary” for granted when discussing works
of literature, or in general, as the meanings of such commonplace words are
far less obvious and settled than they might at first appear. This, in fact, is a
recurring theme at the heart of this theoretical tradition: the idea that the
concept of “everyday life,” once it has become an object of study and aesthetic
activity, appears to be surprisingly ambiguous. As Lefebvre observes, it is “the
most obvious and best hidden” of concepts (“Everyday and Everydayness,” 9).
“Everyday life is the most self-​evident, yet the most puzzling of ideas,” Rita
Felski has written. It “is synonymous with the habitual, the ordinary, the
mundane, yet it is also strangely elusive, that which resists our understanding
and escapes our grasp” (“Invention,” 78). In Maurice Blanchot’s words, “the
everyday escapes. This is its definition” (“Everyday Speech,” 15). “The every-
day offers itself up as a problem,” Ben Highmore argues in his study Everyday
18Introduction

Life and Cultural Theory, “a contradiction, a paradox: both ordinary and

extraordinary, self-​evident and opaque, known and unknown, obvious and
enigmatic” (16). As Michael Sheringham points out, for theorists and writers
of the everyday, the quotidian is “all around us, yet we cannot ‘arise and go’
there, in Yeats’s phrase; it is where we already are, although we do not see it.
Rather, we only see it when it weighs heavily on us, and we are led to depreci-
ate it; or else when we glorify it into something it usually is not” (Everyday
Life, 21).
As this recurring emphasis on the maddeningly paradoxical nature of the
everyday suggests, any effort to analyze and represent this realm of human
experience, one that seems almost by definition to be beyond representation,
is a difficult, if not impossible, task. As Sheringham suggests, for theorists
like Lefebvre and for many twentieth-​century writers, everyday life “eludes
all attempts at institutionalization” and “evades the grip of forms” (Lefebvre,
Everyday Life in the Modern World, 182). Highmore sums up this central para-
dox: “The everyday represents an impossibly evasive terrain: to attend to it is
to lose it” (Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, 20).26 How does one
represent, scrutinize, or record the everyday without killing it, robbing it of its
vitality and elusiveness, its inconspicuousness, its refusal to be categorized—​
the very things that make it the everyday in the first place?
It is precisely because of this paradox that writers and artists of the every-
day have been driven to break with conventions of representation and to
experiment with unusual, challenging new forms. Thus, Highmore and oth-
ers have made the case that “describing the everyday might require formal
experimentation,” arguing that avant-​garde strategies have often seemed bet-
ter suited for approaching the quotidian than conventional aesthetic forms
and traditional “realism” (22–​23).27 In what follows, I  take this insight as a
starting point: there is a deep yet understudied connection between the pur-
suit of everyday life and an eagerness to experiment with form. I suggest that
theories of everyday life can supply useful conceptual tools that can help us
recognize and understand that relationship.
One potent motive for that formal experimentation, I argue, is the belief
that forms can serve as “traps for the attention” (to borrow a phrase from
poet-​critic Douglas Crase)—​as snares that can harness the attention and reg-
ister and document the flow of daily life.28 (Recall Robert Hass’s claim that
“form in art is the way attention comes to life” that I mentioned earlier.) The
figures in this study often turn away from familiar, conventional poetic forms
and modes of representation—​such as the emphasis on closure and epiph-
any often associated with the well-​wrought lyric poem, the use of symbols
or metaphors to hitch daily details to transcendent meanings, the presen-
tation of a unified voice and linear narration—​because they are convinced
that these devices do not foster a keen enough attentiveness to the actual,
complex realities of everyday life. Instead, they draw on a whole battery of
Introduction 19

new and innovative forms and procedures that might arrest the attention and
help it come to life—​that might give shape to the information and percep-
tions that attention yields. These include an evasion of closure and epiphany;
the use of fragmentation and collage, along with extreme repetition, listing,
cataloging, and other methods of presenting and documenting everyday life;
the use of found objects, found language, and the appropriation of existing
texts and images; and the mixing of media and blurring of genres to create
hybrid works. These writers also turn to works of extreme length and scale,
especially in the shape of the long poem—​a form deployed by virtually every
poet I discuss in these pages. By analyzing poems such as Schuyler’s “Hymn
to Life,” Ammons’s Tape for the Turn of the Year, Silliman’s Ketjak, Mayer’s
Midwinter Day, Goldsmith’s Soliloquy, Coultas’s “The Bowery Project,”
Harryette Mullen’s Urban Tumbleweed, and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, I
explore how the long poem becomes a crucial arrow in the everyday-​life aes-
thetic quiver. I argue that the long poem holds special appeal because it seems
to promise a more fitting, more expansive and multifaceted response to the
complexity and breadth of the quotidian, one that avoids artificial moments
of revelation and gestures of closure, and better suits the rhythms of daily
time.29 This book also contends that rule-​bound, procedural, playful concep-
tual and performative projects (often taking the form of long poems), which I
discuss in more detail later, play a central role in the poetics of the everyday.
This reorientation of poetry as a vehicle for attentiveness to everyday life
has thus entailed an ongoing re-​imagining and stretching of the boundaries
of poetry as a genre. Indeed, many of the works I discuss in this book hardly
resemble lyric poetry at all—​we see book-​length works in prose, hybrid works
that combine text and image, works that are staged as performances or are
the result of the poet’s performing some task in the real world, texts that are
lists or archives or storehouses of information or found language, and so on.
And yet their creators still insist that what they have made should be called
“poetry.” Why is it important for the authors, and the publishers and packag-
ers of these works, to call them “poems”? What does it mean for Gertrude Stein
to call Tender Buttons, her collection of disjunctive prose paragraphs devoted
to ordinary objects, a book of poetry? Why is it important that Kenneth
Goldsmith refers to his book Day, an 840-​page prose transcription of a single
day’s edition of the New York Times, as a poem? Why does Ron Silliman call
his long prose works like Ketjak or “Sunset Debris” (a prose poem written
entirely in questions) works of poetry rather than, say, experimental prose?
Calling such works poetry has several effects or goals: first, by saying
“this too is poetry,” these writers insist on the need to reconceive poetry as
a much more multidimensional and elastic genre. The gesture indicates both
an impatience with rigid, traditional generic definitions, and also a belief that
our understanding of what a poem is must change, must adapt to new con-
ditions, to better respond to everyday life in modernity. Second, by labeling
20Introduction

such works as poems, these writers highlight the fact that poetry as a genre
has had an especially longstanding and potent commitment to rendering the
everyday and processes of attention, as I have argued. When Goldsmith calls
Fidget, a prose work he created by recording every moment his body made
during the course of a day, a poem, he forces us to consider it in the tradi-
tion of, say, Frank O’Hara’s “I do this I do that” poems; when Ammons calls
“Shit List,” his lengthy exercise in tallying up different types of feces, a poem,
it takes its place in a lineage that stems from the catalogs of ancient epic to
Whitman’s enumerations and beyond. By quite deliberately titling a book that
is mostly made up of prose and images Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia
Rankine makes a forceful comment on the need to expand our definitions of
“lyric”; at the same time, she presses us to consider how even this work, with
its blocks of prose and photographs, might have something profoundly in
common with the lyric tradition itself.30
Although I  have been making the case that American poetry since 1945
as a whole has been preoccupied with the everyday in a variety of ways, in
what follows I take a special interest in precisely this kind of boundary break-
ing and genre stretching. Delving into examples where poetry has been re-​
imagined as a form of radical attention to the quotidian, this book argues
that the pursuit of the everyday over the past half-​century has had a profound
and thus far underexamined effect on both poetic form and poetic content.
By exploring the use of innovative strategies, unusual projects, and new tech-
nologies as methods of attending to dailiness, Attention Equals Life seeks to
uncover an important strain of everyday-​life poetics at the heart of twentieth-​
and twenty-​first–​century literature.

Resisting the Transformation Trope

One reason this strain needs uncovering is that discussions of contemporary

poetry too often treat writing concerned with everyday experiences and ordi-
nary objects in an uncritical, superficial manner, lumping together a wide
variety of works and eliding the substantial differences between them. This is
where the insights, concepts, and debates at the heart of everyday-​life stud-
ies come in so handy: to put it simply, theories of everyday life can help us
revise the dominant critical vocabulary used to discuss contemporary poetry
and provide a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of what has
become “one of the major poetic scripts of our time.”
As I mentioned at the outset, the idea that contemporary poetry sings
“hymns to the banal” is now something of a given, an accepted fact. And
there is good reason for this, because a fascination with daily life is endemic
to our period and its poetry, across a wide range of poetic schools and
approaches, as one might gather from the quite disparate set of poets I have
Introduction 21

cited, which includes Ted Kooser and Edward Hirsch alongside Ron Silliman
and Bernadette Mayer. But in practice, this idea has become little more than
a convenient shorthand, a truism that fails to shed much light on the poetry
itself or on the wide range of approaches to the everyday that poets exhibit.
In recent reviews, blurbs, and jacket copy for books of poetry, clichés abound
about how the poems “discover the extraordinary within the ordinary” or
“transform the everyday” into something rich and strange. One of the goals
of this book is to question the pernicious influence of this ubiquitous, one-​
size-​fits-​a ll notion, which I refer to as the “transformation trope.”
One can see this transformation trope at work in a 2014 piece in the
Huffington Post that champions Billy Collins because his writing “transcends
the mundane to something larger, more philosophical and mysterious”
(Chang, “13 Poetry Collections”). It underlies an unsigned 2008 New Yorker
review of a book by Arda Collins, which praises her for “lulling us with a litany
of the mundane (vacuuming, turkey burgers, Celine Dion) and then blindsid-
ing us with the sublime” (“Briefly Noted”). It can be found on the back cover
of Richard Newman’s 2005 collection Borrowed Towns, where the poet Albert
Goldbarth says that Newman’s poems exist in the terrain “half-​way between
the marvelous and the mundane,” because they “remind us constantly of the
everyday magic where, for example, a simple handful of spare change is trans-
formed into ‘dirty charms /​chiming in the dark pockets of the world.” The
Boston Review hails Marie Howe’s 2009 book The Kingdom of Ordinary Time
for finding the spiritual and the holy shining within the humdrum quo-
tidian: “Marie Howe’s long-​awaited third collection seeks out the hints of
divinity that lie beneath the routines of everyday life. These are poems of the
workaday realm (they are rooted in newspaper headlines, automated phone
systems, the Discovery Channel), yet they are wholly, vitally committed to
the coexistence of the mundane and the transcendent” (Safronoff, Review).
The cover of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize-​winning volume Delights & Shadows by
Ted Kooser, a former U.S. Poet Laureate, declares that Kooser “has a genius
for making the ordinary sacred” and that he “draws inspiration from the
overlooked details of daily life. Quotidian objects like a pegboard, creamed
corn and a forgotten salesman’s trophy help reveal the remarkable in what
before was a merely ordinary world.”
Clearly, the language of the quotidian is omnipresent in contemporary
poetry, to the point that it has threatened to become merely a trite formula
for praising the qualities of a poet’s work. But this rhetoric is also freighted
with unstated and problematic assumptions about the nature of the every-
day, about realism, and about the relation between everyday life and art—​
assumptions that quietly dominate our understanding of this phenomenon.
Over and over, these blurbs and reviewers claim that successful poetry man-
ages to “transcend” the “merely ordinary,” finds divinity and magic hiding
beneath daily routines, and turns the everyday into something sacred, poetic,
22Introduction

or beautiful. One can clearly see this trope at work in a final example, the
description on the back of Billy Collins’s 2003 volume Nine Horses:

The poems in this collection reach dazzling heights while being firmly
grounded in the everyday. Traveling by train, lying on a beach, and listen-
ing to jazz on the radio are the seemingly ordinary activities whose hid-
den textures are revealed by Collins’ poetic eye. With clarity, precision
and enviable wit, Collins transforms those moments we too often take for
granted into brilliant feats of creative imagination.

Again, we are told that the poems manage to soar to great heights while being
“grounded” in the everyday, as if poems need to burst forth from the daily
into shimmering upper reaches beyond normal experience. The poet and his
eye are lauded for being able to “reveal” the “hidden textures” of the “seem-
ingly ordinary,” as if things that are ordinary are not really ordinary at all if a
poet can just uncover what is hidden within them. Art, in this view, is a type
of alchemy, a magical process that turns the dross of daily life into poetic
gold, or a handful of dimes and pennies into “dirty charms /​chiming in the
dark pockets of the world.” With their “brilliant feats of creative imagina-
tion,” artists miraculously turn the everyday into something other, something
clearly beyond the everyday itself.
The problem with this pervasive transformation trope is that it tells us lit-
tle about the differences between competing forms of representing the daily.
And it offers scant insight into the variety of aesthetic and political goals driv-
ing such efforts. There is a world of difference between, say, a Ted Kooser
poem that “makes the ordinary sacred” and a Kenneth Goldsmith poem that
transcribes a year’s worth of weather reports verbatim or a Claudia Rankine
piece that reports on a flare-​up of racist aggression in the most ordinary of
situations, but you wouldn’t know it from the language often used to discuss
poetry and the everyday. The usual approach fails to address the profound
ambiguity and complexity of “everyday life” as a philosophical or artistic con-
cept. And it offers us little help in interpreting works—​like those discussed
in this study—​that so often refuse to romanticize, heighten, or idealize daily
experience. The familiar rhetoric does not give us the tools to understand
how this thirst for the quotidian relates to particular historical and cultural
contexts nor why it has surged in our own era. And it overlooks entirely the
question of form and its relationship to an aesthetic of dailiness.
It is not hard to see where this rhetoric and set of assumptions come
from. A great deal of twentieth-​and twenty-​first–​century American poetry
depends on the sacralization of the humble, the denigration of the tedious or
trivial in favor of isolating magical, privileged moments, especially through
the use of epiphany and other tactics that understandably prompt the kind of
blurbs and reviews I have just discussed. Perhaps James Wright’s influential
Introduction 23

1963 poem “A Blessing” can serve as a representative example for this mode.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, feeling dissatisfied with his early work (the
highly crafted, rhyming, formalist poems he had written under the influence
of the New Criticism), and under pressure from the example of the “New
American poetry,” Wright—​like Robert Lowell and many other poets of his
generation—​dramatically changed his style. Influenced by Spanish surreal-
ism, he began to write looser, more personal, free-​verse poems in a plain-
spoken, conversational idiom punctuated by sudden leaps and mysterious
images that often seem associated with universal, Jungian archetypes. This
new mode, which came to be known as poetry of the “Deep Image,” would
prove extremely influential for American poetry in the later 1960s and 1970s,
and still reverberates today.
In “A Blessing,” Wright depicts a roadside encounter in an unassum-
ing, not conventionally “poetic” place—​“ just off the highway to Rochester,
Minnesota.” Wright relates an anecdote in which not much, on the surface,
happens: a man and his friend stop their car along the road and see two ponies
grazing in a field; they approach the horses and the speaker reaches out and
touches one’s ear (Collected, 135). This quiet, ordinary scene, in the eyes of
the poet, suddenly turns magical. In the celebrated—​perhaps notorious—​
conclusion of the poem, Wright portrays a transcendent, romantic moment
of epiphany:

Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.
(Collected, 135)

Overcome with a powerful longing to escape his body and transcend the
here and now, the speaker desires to merge with the beauty of the nonhuman
world. Wright’s poems frequently close with this kind of “suddenly I realize”
moment—​as in the famous conclusion to another emblematic poem, “Lying
in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm In Pine Island, Minnesota,” which
leaps without warning from describing a mundane moment to the statement
“I have wasted my life” (Collected, 114). Wright’s poems often depict quotid-
ian, uneventful scenes, but the point is almost always to show the stuff of the
daily imaginatively converted into something significant or “beautiful.” This
transformation trope reaches its most tangible apotheosis, perhaps, in “Lying
in a Hammock,” when horse shit is literally transfigured into treasure: “the
droppings of last year’s horses /​Blaze up into golden stones” (Collected, 114).
The template Wright perfects in these poems quickly spread throughout
American poetry and became increasingly formulaic and conventional. One
can see it at work in Stephen Dunn’s “Toward the Verrazano,” which begins
with a similarly unlovely scene—​“Up from South Jersey and the low persistent /​
24Introduction

pines, pollution curls into the sky /​like dark cast-​off ribbons”—​and moves
past the stinking heaps “where garbage trucks /​work the largest landfill in
the world” (Halpern, Antaeus Anthology, 108). The poem doesn’t linger with
garbage or accept it as it is, but instead relies on figurative language to beau-
tify it—​notice how Dunn turns smog into dark ribbons and sanctifies some
scavenging gulls, who now “rise like angels.” The poem builds to a soaring
conclusion devoted to the miracle of the Verrazano Bridge, which lifts the
poet out of the doldrums and into the empyrean realms of poetry:

In the distance there it is, the crown

of this back way in, immense, silvery,
and in no time we’re suspended
out over the Narrows by a logic linked
to faith, so accustomed to the miraculous
we hardly speak, and when we do
it’s with those words found on picture postcards
from polite friends with nothing to say.
(Halpern, Antaeus Anthology, 108)

Like Wright’s, the poem tells a tightly constructed anecdote that takes an
everyday moment and humble, even degraded, materials, and climaxes with
a moment of epiphany (“there it is,” the speaker exclaims, the “immense, sil-
very,” “crown” of the bridge!)—​presenting a revelation, perhaps one with Hart
Crane’s exultant “Bridge” in the background urging it on, which transports
both speaker and reader (“and in no time we’re suspended”). Dunn works
hard to turn this everyday moment into a spiritual awakening, charging
it with an influx of “faith” and “the miraculous” so powerful it leaves “us”
speechless, as he widens the poem into a meditation on a universal experience
of witnessing the divine in the daily (“we hardly speak”).
Many poems by the immensely popular Mary Oliver follow a similar pat-
tern, moving from observation of the ordinary and humble (usually, in her
case, found in the natural world) to moments of recognition and transcen-
dence. In “The Black Snake,” the speaker comes across a dead snake on the
road, “looped and useless /​as an old bicycle tire,” and stops to move him into
the bushes (Ramazani, Norton Anthology, 653). No sooner has she done so than
the speaker announces that she is “thinking /​about death: its suddenness, /​its
terrible weight, /​its certain coming.” But the poem immediately counters that
dark thought with another, “the story of endless good fortune” which “says to
oblivion: not me!” Oliver uses the quotidian encounter with the dead snake as a
vehicle for a meditation on the “terrible weight” of mortality and for an affirma-
tion of the joyous energy of creation itself, “the light at the center of every cell.”
Edward Hirsch’s poem “I’m Going to Start Living Like a Mystic”
can serve as a last example of this dominant strain in twentieth-​and
Introduction 25

twenty-​fi rst–​century American poetry (Living Fire, 173). Hirsch begins with
the familiar move of narrating a mundane activity—​“ Today I am pulling
on a green wool sweater /​and walking across the park in a dusky snow-
fall”—​but almost immediately starts to sacralize and mystify the everyday.
Trees morph into prophets on a holy pilgrimage and all becomes charged
with mystical meaning:

The trees stand like twenty-​seven prophets in a field,

each a station in a pilgrimage—​silent, pondering.
Blue flakes of light falling across their bodies
are the ciphers of a secret, an occultation.
I will examine their leaves as pages in a text
and consider the bookish pigeons, students of winter.
I will kneel on the track of a vanquished squirrel
and stare into a blank pond for the figure of Sophia.
I shall begin scouring the sky for signs
as if my whole future were constellated upon it.
I will walk home alone with the deep alone,
a disciple of shadows, in praise of the mysteries.
(Living Fire, 173)

Hirsch holds up the details of the ordinary as extraordinary and miraculous,

vibrating with hidden significance (they are “the ciphers of a secret, an occul-
tation”). Building on the title, the poet charts the discovery of his true voca-
tion, as he realizes it will be his task to “scour” the quotidian for “signs” and
portents of meaning. The poem closes with an epiphany that reveals, despite
the speaker’s profound solitude, his connection to some cosmic loneliness, a
recognition that he will, like a mystic, continue to lavish praise on the “mys-
teries” of ordinary existence.
Not surprisingly, critics have commended Hirsch’s poetry for doing just
that. In a 2010 New York Times Book Review piece on Hirsch’s selected poems,
the poet and critic Peter Campion writes “certainly, his poems work to dig-
nify the everyday. But they do more than that. What makes Hirsch so singu-
lar in American poetry is the balance he strikes between the quotidian and
something completely other—​an irrational counterforce, the ‘living fire’ that
gives its name to his new selected poems” (“Between Ordinary”). Campion’s
glowing assessment of Hirsch rests upon an implicit assumption: for poetry
to be successful it must “do more than” merely dignify the everyday; it must
display “a balance” between the quotidian and “something completely other,”
“between the ordinary and the ecstatic,” the “everyday and the otherworldly.”
26Introduction

The merely ordinary is not enough on its own; it must be set in tension with
some dark mystical power, some transcendent or ecstatic meaning, to redeem
it or make us care about it.
To put it simply, this view is utterly anathema to the poets I discuss in this
book. They remain deeply wary of the poetry of epiphany, especially in its
more formulaic, clichéd, and hokey form.31 In a 1966 review of a book by Philip
Booth, John Ashbery took sarcastic aim at this bête noire: “Rare is the grain of
sand in which he can’t spot the world; seagulls, dories, and schools of herring
are likewise windows on eternity, until we begin to suspect that he is in direct,
hot-​line communication with it” (Perloff, Poetics of Indeterminacy, 252).32
Many poets in the lineage I am tracing share Ashbery’s skepticism. For exam-
ple, in a 1988 manifesto, a group of writers associated with Language poetry
(Ron Silliman, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Steve Benson, Bob Perelman,
and Barrett Watten) attacked this epiphanic mode with special vigor, arguing
that its formula depends on “the transcendent elevation of carefully scripted
incidents” in “brief narratives with moralizing codas” (Silliman, Harryman
et al., 266, 263). In such poems, they argue, “experience is digested for its moral
content and then dramatized and framed; at the same time, the transcendent
moment dissolves back into the sentimental and banal” (264).33
Clearly, poets such as James Wright, Mary Oliver, and Stephen Dunn are
drawn to the ordinary and everyday; their work certainly exemplifies the
hunger for the everyday that I have argued is specific to this historical period.
But their conception of what the everyday consists of, what it means, and how
it should be represented differs sharply from poets attracted to the strain of
experimental realism I have identified. To put it another way, vast numbers of
poets since 1945 share an interest in the humble and quotidian, but the nature
of the everyday itself and how to represent it remain in question, a site of con-
testation and struggle. This again underscores the need for a more sensitive
taxonomy, a richer understanding, of the range of approaches to the everyday
in contemporary poetry.
As we will see in the chapters to come, some poets instead seek to pres-
ent the everyday in all its everydayness, refusing to trim away its boredom,
idealize its blemishes, redeem its banalities, or smooth over its contradic-
tions. The poets I focus on here tend to be secular and empirical in outlook
rather than spiritual or mystical. Pragmatist, materialist, and skeptical, their
work is horizontal rather than vertical, deeply committed to the inexhaust-
ibility of the here and now rather than the metaphysical or sublime. But these
predilections are less the hallmark of any one particular school and more a
tendency or orientation toward the everyday—​one that is shared by a variety
of poets, from a diverse set of traditions and poetic movements, and that even
surfaces in some parts of a given poet’s work and not in others. It may be
useful to think of approaches to the everyday as existing along a continuum
rather than being features of opposing camps.
Introduction 27

Poetry in the mode I am describing frequently staves off closure and climax
and avoids freezing and privileging certain ordinary moments as especially
miraculous, numinous, or transcendent. It usually declines to treat them as
symbols or metaphors, or as springboards for generalizations and grand con-
clusions about life, death, or the human condition. In an attack on the epiph-
anic mode, Silliman complains that “a trowel is not a trope” (Silliman’s Blog,
October 27, 2002). Instead, these poets want a trowel to be, simply and won-
derfully, a trowel, or a bridge just a bridge, or a snake just a snake. They opt for
the particular rather than the general, the concrete over the abstract, the local
over the universal, diversity over unity. They have little interest in elevating
what William Wordsworth referred to as “spots of time,” Walter Pater called
“the single moment,” Joyce named the “epiphany,” Woolf labeled “moments
of being,” or what Pound titled the “magic moment”—​“the moment of meta-
morphosis, bust thru from quotidien into ‘divine or permanent world.’ ”34
At the same time, these poets are always conscious that any effort to rep-
resent the overlooked and mundane in art inevitably turns it into art, fram-
ing it, aestheticizing, and preserving it. Thus, they too indulge or flirt with
moments of epiphany (only to sometimes ironically deflate them); inevitably,
they too are vulnerable to the charge that their work heightens or transforms
everyday materials into art. However, unlike other poets in the vein of, say,
Wright or Oliver, they more often register how inescapable this problem is,
and frequently work their awareness of it into the fabric of their poems. In
other words, they cast doubt on the realist project even as they engage in it,
creating the hybrid form that I have named “skeptical realism.”
In general, these poets utilize the innovative and challenging methods
mentioned earlier so as to ironically undermine the heroic, the spectacular,
and the monumental, preferring to create an effect of inconsequence, noncha-
lance, and casualness. To do so, they often use a device that I refer to as the
“reversal of hierarchies.” This move compels us to reconsider, to level, or over-
turn the hierarchies of significance and value that undergird our sense of the
world and how we pay attention to it. Over and over in this lineage one finds
a distinctive rhetorical formula: the writer creates an intentionally surprising
or provocative contrast expressing more love for the ordinary, the small and
lowly, or the modern or urban, or the human body, or garbage and waste, or
for the domestic rather than for the sacred, the high aesthetic, the canoni-
cal, or the conventionally “beautiful.” This rhetorical figure of reversal can be
seen in “Song of Myself,” when Walt Whitman provocatively exclaims that
“the scent of these arm-​pits is an aroma finer than prayer” (Leaves of Grass, 49).
A half-​century later, F. T. Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto” provides the histor-
ical avant-​garde’s version of this sentiment, pitting the products of industrial
modernity against the stale masterpieces that clog the museums: “a racing car
whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—​a
roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot—​is more beautiful than the Victory
28Introduction

of Samothrace” (Caws, Manifesto, 187). Nearly a half-​century after that, Frank

O’Hara draws upon quite similar rhetoric in his poem “Memorial Day 1950,”
when he claims “a locomotive is more melodious than a cello,” or when he
insists that sequins and chocolate sodas “really are beautiful” and “do have
meaning,” even in comparison to D-​Day and fallen soldiers (Collected, 18, 15).
One can see the same formula at work in many of William Carlos Williams’s
poems, from the famous declaration in “The Red Wheelbarrow” about how
much depends on the mundane, to “Pastoral,” which provocatively raises the
debased over the spiritual: “the old man who goes about /​gathering dog-​lime
/​walks in the gutter /​without looking up /​and his tread /​is more majestic
than /​that of the Episcopal minister /​approaching the pulpit /​of a Sunday”
(Collected, 71). It appears, too, in Francis Ponge’s “Introduction to the Pebble,”
when he explains why he chose to focus so much of his energy on a minuscule
stone by characteristically proclaiming his preference for the insignificant
over the grand: “This pebble won the victory (the victory of existence—​indi-
vidual, concrete; the victory of coming into my sight and coming to life with
the word) because it is more interesting than the sky” (Voice, 95). The same
gesture appears throughout the work of thinkers like Lefebvre, Debord, and
de Certeau, as when the Situationist writer Raoul Vaneigem proclaims “There
are more truths in twenty-​four hours of a man’s life than in all the philoso-
phies” (Revolution, 6).
One also finds similar sentiments in the work of many postwar avant-​garde
artists, such as Jean Dubuffet, who wrote in 1957 that “A crack in the ground,
sparkling gravel, a tuft of grass, some crushed debris, offer equally worthy
subjects for your applause and admiration”; or Allan Kaprow, who declared
that “a walk down 14th Street is more amazing than any masterpiece in art”;
or Claes Oldenburg, when he elevated dog crap over cathedrals: “I am for the
art of underwear and the art of taxicabs. I am for the art of ice-​cream cones
dropped on concrete. I am for the majestic art of dog-​turds, rising like cathe-
drals.”35 As the references to dog poop and debris indicate (in the William
Carlos Williams, Dubuffet, and Oldenburg examples), one common iteration
of the reversal of hierarchies—​one that we will return to repeatedly in what
follows—​is the deliberately unsettling, shocking recuperation of waste, gar-
bage, and even excrement as worthy of artistic representation and reflection.36
The philosopher Jacques Rancière sees the gesture I have been describing
as the cornerstone of “the aesthetic regime of art,” a phase he associates with
modernity itself (Dissensus, 116).37 As Ben Highmore puts it in a discussion
of Rancière and the ordinary, “the aesthetic regime of art is founded on an
indifference to a hierarchy of significance (the water pump is as glorious as
the cathedral organ) and on a concomitant sensual pedagogy (the material
recognition of the water pump as a potentially glorious noise)” (Ordinary, 46).
This all sounds well and good in theory, but in practice, the ruthless
obliteration of hierarchies often provokes discomfort and antagonism: not
Introduction 29

everyone enjoys being forced to question assumptions about what we deem

important and what tedious. This means that works of experimental real-
ism are often met with resistance, cries of boredom, and “Is it even art?” The
closer a work gets to the elusive boundary between “art” and “life,” to what
often seems like the third rail of modern literature and art, the more strenu-
ous the objections often are. Many of the more extreme works of everyday-
life literature and art—​from John Cage’s notorious piece of “silence,” 4′33′′, to
Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, to Kenneth Goldsmith’s transcriptions of traffic
reports—​have been greeted with howls of protest, derision, and incompre-
hension: “It’s not literature, it’s just a diary!” or “If I wanted to see an experi-
ence like my own ordinary life depicted in real-​time I wouldn’t open a book
or go to a movie!” or “Why would I want to see something in a museum that
is literally garbage, someone’s cast-​off trash?” Attention Equals Life explores
this enduring irony of everyday-​life aesthetics: that audiences continually,
and increasingly, long for depictions of unadulterated “real” daily life in all
its gritty actuality, but recoil if a work is perceived to present the everyday
without enough transformation or sufficient evidence of artistic selection
and creation.

“Everyday-​Life Projects” in Poetry and Beyond

In 1973, the French writer Georges Perec composed an unusual text that
he called “An Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and Solid Foodstuffs
Ingurgitated By Me in The Course of the Year Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-​
Four” (Species, 244–​50). The work is a five-​page catalog that does exactly what
its title foretells, tallying up every item Perec ate and drank over the course
of the year, a surprisingly massive set of data that the author arranges into
categories. To create his book London Orbital, the British author Iain Sinclair
traveled the entire span of the M25, the highway that encircles London, not
in a speeding car but on foot; similarly, Le Meridien de Paris (1997), by the
French writer Jacques Réda, “logs the author’s attempt to follow the line of the
Paris meridian … even though it ‘traverses’ boulevards, parks and buildings
of all kinds and even ‘crosses’ the Seine” (Sheringham, Everyday Life, 390).
Ron Silliman used a related but different kind of procedure to create his poem
“Skies”: “every day for one year I looked at the sky & noted what I saw,” com-
posing one sentence per day and stitching them all together to constitute a
prose poem (Alphabet, 1060). In 2011, Catherine Wagner published a series
of poems called “Exercises,” which, she explains, were “written between sets
of physical therapy exercises, one line per set” (My New Job, 116). Gabriel
Gudding recently composed a long poem in a notebook while he was driving
(literally), chronicling in exhaustive detail a series of car trips back and forth
between Illinois and Rhode Island, the result being the 436-​page poem called
30Introduction

Rhode Island Notebook, in which each trip to and fro constitutes another sec-
tion of the poem.
Despite their differences, each of these works relies on another key method
of “trapping the attention” that I focus on in the pages that follow. They are
all examples of a phenomenon I refer to as the “everyday-​life project” or, after
Michael Sheringham, the “project of attention” (Everyday Life, 386). Loosely
defined, everyday-​life projects are artificial, rule-​bound, performative experi-
ments that call for the individual undertaking the project to engage in cer-
tain activities, usually for a set amount of time, with the goal of channeling
attention to one or more aspect of everyday experience. The conditions and
parameters of the project are usually predetermined, and the project itself is
an experiential process—​an embodied performance, a practice—​rather than
simply an aesthetic object or product. The results of the project are also often
recorded, documented, and circulated in some way.
Although not all the poets I discuss engage in such experiments, I return
repeatedly in the chapters that follow to the flourishing of the everyday-​life
project because I see it as one of the defining but least-​noticed elements of the
poetics of everyday life. However, any discussion of this phenomenon must
acknowledge that it has a considerable history, one that recent practitioners
are aware of and to which they often respond. For example, one could trace
the modern project of attention to the example set by Henry David Thoreau’s
Walden (1854). To write Walden, Thoreau set up certain conditions and con-
straints: he decided to leave behind the comforts of his normal existence and
live for two years and two months in the woods of Concord, Massachussetts,
in a cabin he built himself. Distressed by the speed and superficiality of “this
restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century” (Walden, 264), he asks
“Why should we live with such hurry and such waste of life?” sounding an
alarm that could fit in quite well with the worries about the crisis of attention
in our own manic, sped-​up culture (76).
To escape the materialism and consumerism, the conformity and noisy
chatter, of his own day, Thoreau decided to work with his hands, grow his
own food, and observe the natural world around him with great care and
heightened attention. Thoreau refers to this project repeatedly as “my experi-
ment” (34, 260): it is a self-​conscious, “deliberate,” and time-​limited under-
taking intended to alter perceptions and behaviors that have grown habitual
with the goal of enhancing his ability to savor existence. As he writes in per-
haps the book’s most famous passage: “I went to the woods because I wished
to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could
not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discovered that
I had not lived” (74).
Thus, Walden is in some ways a quintessential everyday-​life project:  a
self-​consciously experimental work that is the result of a practical, experien-
tial project designed to heighten the creator’s own alertness to daily life and
Introduction 31

immediate experience, and to teach us to do the same, with the finished work
serving as a record of the experiment.38 Throughout the twentieth century,
projects of attention evolved and proliferated, whether in the experimental
activities of Dada and surrealism or in the projects of attention devised by
John Cage, the Fluxus movement, Andy Warhol, and conceptual art.
I return to some of these precursors in what follows, but for now, suffice it
to say that “projects” seem to be ubiquitous in contemporary poetry and in
our culture more broadly. Within poetry, this development can be seen most
readily in the recent and controversial emergence of “conceptual poetry,” a
self-​described avant-​garde movement inspired by conceptual art and other
avant-​garde sources. The movement is most closely associated with Kenneth
Goldsmith, whose long list of everyday-​life projects includes recording every
word he said for a week by using a hidden microphone and then transcrib-
ing the results and publishing them as a massive long poem called Soliloquy
(1996). But constraint-​based projects focused on the daily have become per-
vasive far beyond the confines of Goldsmith or the movement he has led. For
example, in 1996, David Lehman set himself a task to write a poem a day,
and continued at it for two years, resulting in the book The Daily Mirror: A
Journal in Poetry (2000). Harryette Mullen recently published a “diary” book
of daily poems called Urban Tumbleweed (2013) that consists of exactly a year
and a day’s worth of three-​line poems, one per day, each triggered by a daily
walk. Jena Osman’s 2012 book Public Figures also grew out of a self-​assigned
research project: “Photograph the figurative statues that populate your city.
Then bring the camera to their eyes (find a way) and shoot their points of
view. What does such a figure see?” (Public Figures, 2).
Outside of the poetry world, project-​based works in which the author
engages in some kind of predetermined activity for a certain period of time
and then writes about the experience have multiplied as well. Recent years
have seen a proliferation of works that are born from time-​based (often year-​
long) experiments the creator engages in and then reports on, like Morgan
Spurlock’s Super Size Me, an experiment in eating McDonald’s three times
a day for a month. Various names have been given to this phenomenon in
recent years: “schtick lit,” “gimmick lit,” “method” or “stunt” journalism. In
2009, the BBC coined the term “annualism” to refer to this trendy genre of
journalistic works “where protagonist endures ordeal, usually for year, then
writes book about it” (among the examples given are Kath Kelly’s How I Lived
A Year On Just A Pound A Day and Neil Boorman’s Bonfire of the Brands, “in
which the protagonist burned all his branded goods and then lived for a year
without them,” and Hephzibah Anderson’s Chastened: No More Sex in the
City, “which details the year she spent without having sex”) (cited in Rohrer,
“Just What”).39
The trend was undoubtedly helped along by the wildly successful memoir
(and subsequent movie) Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything
32Introduction

Across Italy, India and Indonesia (2006) by Elizabeth Gilbert, which tells
of the author’s life-​changing year spent studying “three different aspects
of her nature amid three different cultures.” Others include Julie Powell’s
extremely successful Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously (a mem-
oir of a year spent cooking every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of
French Cooking that has since been made into a movie with Meryl Streep),
and a number of books by A. J. Jacobs, including The Know-​It-​All: One Man’s
Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World (a comic memoir
of a year the author spent reading the entire Encyclopaedia Brittanica), and
his follow-​up, The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow
the Bible as Literally as Possible. Similarly, Gretchen Rubin’s recent bestseller
The Happiness Project chronicles the author’s decision, after something of a
midlife-​crisis epiphany, to focus on “the things that really matter” by devot-
ing a year to self-​improvement with the goal of achieving happiness in her
everyday life.40 By 2007, the fad had become ubiquitous enough that Emily
Gould declared “The Stunt Book Trend Must Die,” grumbling that “the whole
‘Set Time Period During Which I Tried To Make Myself A More Interesting
Or More Debilitated Person’ thing is over, or should be” (“The Stunt Book”).
At the same time, everyday-​life projects, many deploying digital tools and
new media, seem to be proliferating in our culture, often in areas that have
nothing to do with either avant-​garde poetry and art or more commercially
viable “stunt” or “gimmick lit.” These practices are emanations from what
Henry Jenkins refers to as “vernacular culture”; we might even think of them
as examples of what Darren Wershler-Henry has called “conceptualism in
the wild.”41 Indeed, we seem to be living in an “age of the project,” a cultural
moment that finds not only writers and artists but also so-​called ordinary
people engaging in a wide variety of experiments, often using new media and
digital technologies, in which certain conditions and rules are established
and actions undertaken, tasks accomplished, results recorded, documented,
and circulated. For example, a viral YouTube video erupted several years ago
called everyday, in which a man named Noah Kalina took one picture per
day of himself over a six-​year period, and created a video in which he stitched
together the thousands of self-​portraits sequentially while a morose melody
played in the background. The video has spawned an enormous number of
photo-​a-​day imitations, variations, and parodies.42 Several years ago, the New
York Times reported on the popularity of photographic food diaries (with-
out, unfortunately, mentioning Perec’s wonderful inventory), in which people
take a photo of every single thing they eat each day and post the pictures on
blogs and sites like Flickr and Instagram (Murphy, “First Camera”).
Our culture seems to have a voracious appetite for such endeavors: every
week seems to bring new accounts in the media or on the web that detail
these kinds of experiments and projects. Slate published a piece by a man
who, after having been laid off and breaking up with his girlfriend, came up
Introduction 33

with a plan: to visit thirty airports in thirty days and write about the experi-
ence. In 2012, a writer for the New York Times devised an unusual project: he
would travel the 26.2 miles of a marathon but instead of running, he would
walk his dog continuously around his own block in Brooklyn for precisely
that distance; in the resulting article, he wrote about how the fifteen-​hour
project offered him “a glimpse at a day in the life of my neighborhood” and its
“quotidian rhythms” (A. Newman, “Block-​a-​Thon”).
New technologies have enabled “ordinary” people, individuals who are not
necessarily professional writers and artists, to engage in similar everyday-​life
projects of their own, filming, documenting, tracking, and circulating images
and details about their daily lives to an eager audience. Over the past decade,
we have seen an explosion of tools associated with Web 2.0, which enable users
to log reflections on day-​to-​day life and document and share every aspect of
the quotidian:  digital photography and video, blogging, Facebook, Twitter,
and Instagram have become wildly popular and dramatically altered the
nature of daily life itself. People use these tools to share their every move with
a large group of friends and acquaintances (Facebook) or even the general
public (via Twitter or Flickr), or to broadcast their whereabouts via “check-​
ins” using apps like FourSquare.
These technologies seem to have introduced a new set tools for the under-
taking of everyday-​life projects that are available to virtually anyone with
access to a digital camera and the Internet, as a plethora of popular phenom-
enon suggest: for example, the 365 Project, a photo-​a-​day service that boasts
having over “130,000 members” who are “documenting the special moments
in their lives” in order to “capture otherwise forgotten moments.” Another
example is One Second Everyday, an app that allows users to record a single
second of video for each day and mashes the fragments together into a con-
tinuous video. (By suturing brief fragments of daily life paratactically, the
resulting collage-​like videos oddly resemble the experimental long poems
this book discusses, like Silliman’s Ketjak).43
This broad cultural trend also includes the emergence of the “Quantified
Self” movement—​a name given to the recent explosion of new technologies
(like FitBit and other forms of wearable computing) that individuals can use
to monitor and accrue data about their own daily lives. An article in Slate
wryly noted, “Down the line, when our smartphones are writing our cul-
tural histories, they may pinpoint 2013 as the year the quantified self move-
ment started to go mainstream… . [T]‌he practice soared this year thanks to
apps that chart your insulin levels, your stress levels, your sleep cycle, your
cholesterol, the calorie count on your baked potato, the number of steps you
took on your morning run, and more” (Waldman, “The Year”). In 2010, the
New York Times Magazine covered the same phenomenon in a lengthy trend
piece cover story called “The Data Driven Life.” The article examined the
increasing popularity of “personal data projects,” in which people use (and
34Introduction

often wear) digital devices to quantify and track the minute fluctuations of
daily and bodily experience: “Sleep, exercise, sex, food, mood, location, alert-
ness, productivity, even spiritual well-​being are being tracked and measured,
shared and displayed” (Wolf, “Data-​Driven”).
The sheer quantity and variety of these experiments, stemming not only
from the world of arts and letters but also from across our culture as a whole,
point to a host of questions that I feel literary criticism and cultural theory
have not yet adequately addressed. Why has this fascination with the every-
day, this everyday hunger, intensified and grown exponentially in recent
years? Is it a reflexive response to the cultural conditions of postmodernism,
global neoliberal capitalism, and our media-​saturated consumer culture?
Furthermore, if new technological advances and digital media are to blame
for making us feel estranged from the everyday, as we so often hear, why have
they paradoxically also given us so many new ways to attend to and record
the quotidian?
In addition, many commentators have observed that our culture’s preoc-
cupation with using new forms of technology to record and share elements
of daily life has troubling implications, as such widespread practices call for
individuals to hand over vast swaths of private, personal data to corporations
that can store and use it for profit. A New York Times article in 2010 about the
ominous trend of new start-​up tech companies encouraging the sharing of
mundane personal detail in order to profit from it noted that “people are not
necessarily thinking about how long this information will stick around, or
how it could be used and exploited by marketers” and quoted an entrepreneur
observing that “These companies are betting they take this data, monetize it
or resell it” (Stone, “Web’s New Wave”). If this is the case, can works of con-
temporary everyday-​life poetry that mirror and even use new technological
methods avoid merely being complicit in systems that seek to control and
exploit what they would otherwise wish to contest?
Another curious aspect of this development is that so many of these latter-​
day projects—​for example, individuals exhaustively blogging every meal they
eat for a year—​resemble earlier avant-​garde experiments, like Perec’s year-​
long inventory of the foods he ingested. Clearly, techniques and concerns long
associated with the avant-​garde have begun to spread to the wider culture
and are now thriving “in the wild.” But why? And why have constraint-​based
or rule-​governed procedures held such allure for those wishing to pay closer
attention to the everyday in the first place?
It may also seem counterintuitive to suggest that contrived, artificial proj-
ects put one in closer contact with the everyday, because engaging in such
an experiment would, by its nature, seem to be nearly the opposite of the
unconscious, unrecognized behaviors and experiences that characterize daily
life. But one reason they have been an attractive tool for the pursuit of the
quotidian is that they offer us the chance to take active steps to resist powerful
Introduction 35

effects of distraction that are otherwise difficult to resist. If everything, from

the nature of habit and its deadening effects to the culture of information
overload, conspires against our being able to notice the everyday, we cannot
just expect to improve our ability to attend to it without deliberately chang-
ing our habits and practices. By forcing us to take concrete steps and follow
prescribed procedures that give us no choice but to change the nature of our
attention, projects seem to offer a practical antidote to the crisis of attention.
I explore the appeal and contradictions of such projects in the chapters
that follow (especially in c­ hapter 6), and by doing so, I hope to understand
the origins, effects, and cultural significance of this development. My point
is neither to celebrate nor to decry the rise of the “project” in contemporary
poetry but, rather, to investigate what happens to our conception of poetry as
an art form—​its capacities and utility as a genre—​when projects become cen-
tral to it. For one thing, this trend reconfigures poetry as an exploratory and
documentary mode—​a task, a practice, something one does—​rather than a
vehicle for introspection or self-​expression, or as a well-​wrought urn that one
makes. This view re-​imagines poetry as a method of paying attention, espe-
cially paying more careful attention to the ordinary and daily. The turn to the
project also entails different ideas about what a poem can be: in this scheme,
a poem need not resemble the self-​contained, lineated, lyric poems of self-​
expression that have long seemed synonymous with poetry itself. Instead,
“poetry” becomes an expanded field. A poem might be nothing more than a
proposal or concept for an imagined work, or the record of an experiment the
poet has completed. A poem can now be an enormous piece of prose, or a list
of instructions, or a documentary catalog of things seen or gathered. A poem
might be a task to be undertaken or the result of one, or it could be a tool for
research or quasi-​scientific study. It might even be a performance, or a “real
life” experience (like a walk or bus ride) that the reader or audience partici-
pates in. In the age of the everyday-​life project, the nature of the poet shifts,
too. We are used to thinking of a poet as an inspired creator, a seer, a preacher
of truths, an eloquent articulator of personal emotions, or an imaginative
conjurer. But now a poet can also be more of an ethnographer, a collector, an
archivist, an observer or witness, a curator of language, data, and material.

Rationale and Scope

The list of poets one could include in a discussion of poetry and the everyday
feels nearly endless. Virtually every writer or artist stands in some relation
to the everyday—​whether he or she views it as a subject of great interest or
a sphere best avoided. One can imagine the understandable objections: how
can an account of American poetry and the everyday not have a chapter
on William Carlos Williams, or Gertrude Stein, or Robert Frost, or one on
36Introduction

George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker and the Objectivists, Elizabeth Bishop, or

poet X or poet Y? This problem is exacerbated by the fact that a preoccupa-
tion with the everyday can even be seen as a definining feature of American
poetry since 1945, a broad, historically conditioned concern that can be found
across a wide gamut of the poetry of this period. However, this study is not
intended to be comprehensive or exhaustive, and I am painfully aware of the
omissions caused by the need to be selective. My hope is that the approach
and argument I develop here will spark further explorations of a wide range
of poets, from various time periods and backgrounds.
But, alas, one must narrow such a capacious field in some manner, and
there is a logic guiding my selection of these poets. Most important, my focus
is on poets whose work in some way perpetuates the particular lineage of
skeptical realism and everyday-​life poetics I have been discussing, even while
I stress that this body of writing is but one strand in the much broader fas-
cination with dailiness in contemporary poetry I have outlined. Also, to be
included in this study, a poet must take the everyday to be a central, rather
than secondary or marginal, problem that his or her work reflects on and
wrestles with. In addition, each of these figures stretches or breaks conven-
tions of form and content in one way or another as part of his or her pursuit
of the quotidian. Many, though not all, of the poets I discuss also engage in
constraint-​based everyday-​life projects.
Even while I  acknowledge the widespread and international nature of
this phenomenon, and frequently refer to figures from other cultural and
national backgrounds, the poets I discuss are primarily American. I decided
to limit my primary focus to poets from the United States, as well as poets
who emerged after World War II, to make this study more feasible and coher-
ent, but also to underscore that this body of work grows out of conditions
and developments particular to American culture from 1945 to the present.
Furthermore, the traits I am describing do not belong to a single school or
aesthetic tendency; to convey the breadth and variety of this phenomenon,
I  have deliberately chosen writers who hail from different aesthetic camps
and poetic movements, including the New  York School (James Schuyler,
Bernadette Mayer), Language poetry (Ron Silliman), and conceptual writ-
ing (Kenneth Goldsmith). Alongside these figures, I discuss others who are
less easily situated in aesthetic camps, like the unclassifiable but supposedly
neo-​romantic, less experimental poet A.  R. Ammons and various writers
associated with the “hybrid” poetries of the past two decades.44 These include
a number of innovative poets concerned with gender and race (Harryette
Mullen, Claudia Rankine, Hoa Nguyen, Laynie Browne) and with everyday-​
life conceptual projects (Brenda Coultas) and in most cases, with both.
I focus primarily on two different time periods—​the 1950s to the 1970s, and
the mid-​1990s to the present—​because I view these as historical moments in
which the everyday as everyday becomes a particularly potent question and
Introduction 37

concern. As I discussed earlier, the former is a pivotal and formative period

in which a turn to more radical and extreme everyday-​life aesthetic forms
coincides with, and responds to, an era of dramatic social change, as well as
unprecedented levels of distraction and information overload sparked by the
proliferation of mass media. My discussions of Ammons, Schuyler, Mayer,
and Silliman are rooted in this period, as I explore how these figures and oth-
ers devise unusual new methods and forms of pursuing and representing the
quotidian.
While I delve into many works from the 1950s and 1960s (by Schuyler
and Ammons, in particular), if there is a chronological heart to this book it
lies in the 1970s, when a number of trends, artistic practices, and sociopo-
litical developments came together and then spun off in myriad directions.
The art critic Peter Schjeldahl has recently characterized this moment as
“a phase of artistic sensibility that was coincident with early minimalism
and Pop, and is still in need of a name. Call it the Age of Paying Attention,
or the Noticing Years” (“Shades of White”). During this “Age of Paying
Attention” a series of unusually ambitious, influential works devoted to
the everyday appeared, including Bernadette Mayer’s Memory (1971),
James Schuyler’s “Hymn to Life” (written in 1972), Robert Creeley’s A Day
Book (1972), Silliman’s breakthrough poem Ketjak (written in 1974), John
Ashbery’s Three Poems (1972) and his most experimental and most insis-
tently “everyday” book, The Vermont Notebook (1975), A.  R. Ammons’s
Sphere (written in 1973) and The Snow Poems (1975), Georges Perec’s Species
of Spaces (1974), Mayer’s Midwinter Day (1978), and Lyn Hejinian’s My Life
(1980), along with theoretical works like Michel de Certeau’s landmark
study, The Practice of Everyday Life (1980). As this book will show, the 1970s
stands as an important chapter in the story of everyday-​life aesthetics, a
time of frenzied activity and unprecedented innovation that still serves as
a foundation for contemporary explorations of the quotidian.45
The second period I  highlight encompasses the past two decades, char-
acterized by unsettling social and political changes associated with 9/​11, the
war on terror, the Internet age, and new technologies that have transformed
daily life and fostered grave worries that attention is in mortal danger. These
conditions seem to have deepened the everyday hunger that I contend flared
up in the period from the 1950s through the 1970s. As I  will argue, recent
poetry consciously builds upon—​and at times comments critically on—​the
writing of that earlier moment. For example, to explore these continuities
and differences, my chapter on Bernadette Mayer places her work in dialogue
with a series of younger poets, like Nguyen, Rankine, and Browne, who have
adopted and updated her feminist poetics of the everyday and motherhood
for the new millennium. Similarly, c­hapter  6 argues that rule-​governed,
constraint-​based everyday-​life projects have re-​emerged and spread since
the 1990s as a pointed response to the crisis of attention. The recent turn to
38Introduction

poetry-​as-​project can be seen as an attempt to recover the ordinary in an age

of unprecedented mediation and distraction; at the same time, such works
often self-​consciously extend and at times critique the experimental realism
and everyday-​life poetics of the postwar years.
By bringing together poets from different poetic movements and dis-
tinct historical moments, I  hope to reveal various parallels and differ-
ences that might not have been apparent before. If one assesses poets on
the basis of how they approach the everyday rather than simply taking it
as a given, entrenched divisions begin to fall away. For example, I  argue
that the desire of literary critics to place poets in well-​defined camps has
obscured the fact that A. R. Ammons’s innovative poetry of the quotidian
bears an instructive family resemblance to many works more commonly
deemed avant-​garde. Why have Ammons and Schuyler, whose work has a
host of interesting similarities and differences, never really been discussed
together? Why is it nearly unthinkable to consider the rather striking par-
allels between the project-​based long poems of daily life by Ammons and
those of the Language poet Ron Silliman?
Furthermore, as I discuss, one of the shortcomings of both the everyday-​
life theoretical and aesthetic traditions has been their attraction to essential-
ist and universalist discourse. This can be seen in their tendency to view the
everyday in terms of white, male, educated, middle-​class, straight, and often
urban experience, which they implicitly treat as the universal prototype for
dailiness. To both avoid and investigate this blindspot, I  consider writing
that stems from a range of subject positions, backgrounds, and locations
(although I am hardly claiming my selections are somehow truly representa-
tive, even if such a thing were possible). In these pages, for example, I dis-
cuss a gay white male poet who writes mostly in rural East Coast settings or
from a stationary spot by a Manhattan apartment window (Schuyler) along-
side a politically radical, straight white male poet who writes while travel-
ing around San Francisco on public transit (Silliman), a black woman poet
writing about the microaggressions of everyday racism endured by people
of color (Rankine), a Vietnamese-​American woman living in Texas writing
poems about mothering her bi-​racial children, ecological crisis, and class
(Nguyen), a Canadian lesbian poet writing about nursing her baby (Susan
Holbrook), and so on.
In other words, this book is not about the everyday but, rather, everyday-​
ness as a necessarily plural concept and phenomenon—​never monolithic or
universal, always contradictory and contingent, contested and political. Any
discussion of the everyday must inevitably contend with a string of ques-
tions about identity, politics, and difference, including most centrally: Whose
everyday? As recent critical theory has made abundantly clear, the every-
day is not—​despite assertions to the contrary—​a “universal” category that
transcends markers of identity and difference; it is, rather, inseparable from
Introduction 39

such categories as class, gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and so on.
Because any poetry of the everyday is entangled in these facets of experi-
ence rather than standing apart from or above them, my argument frequently
explores how gender, class, and political and cultural forces profoundly inflect
the representation and experience of everyday life.
Many of these poets also have interesting connections to one another,
including, in some cases, shared influences, social affiliations, and aesthetic
affinities. Some are in direct dialogue with one another personally or textu-
ally (like Browne and Nguyen with Mayer, or Mayer herself with Schuyler
and Silliman). As I suggested, others use their work to push against or correct
certain aspects of the others. For example, we will see how Mayer extends and
challenges the New York School’s male-​centered poetics of daily life from the
perspective of a woman writer, a feminist, and a mother; similarly, I explore
how Silliman strives to correct postwar New American poetry’s failure to
achieve an adequate everyday-​life aesthetic, owing to what he sees as its focus
on imitating “natural” speech, its attraction to the romance of the self, and
its reliance on engrained habits of attention and perception. I  argue that
Kenneth Goldsmith intends for his unusual projects of attention to expose
the weaknesses of the earlier everyday-​life tradition that he builds upon,
just as Harryette Mullen’s experiment with the “walk poem” highlights and
revises the racial assumptions undergirding the figure of the flâneur.
Ultimately, I hope to show that closely examining everyday-​life forms and
projects can re-​orient our familiar taxonomies of cultural production. For
instance, contemporary poetry appears less rarefied and esoteric when poems
of the everyday are set  alongside developments like Pop Art, documentary
film, and reality television. Poetry can feel much less like a world apart when
an outlandish project undertaken by a poet is juxtaposed with a similar proj-
ect undertaken by an imaginative nonwriter with a YouTube account. When
we recognize contemporary poetry’s profound concerns with the problem of
attention and its obsession with everyday life, the distance between poetry
and the wider culture shrinks considerably. Poetry, so often marginalized
and maligned as elitist and irrelevant, becomes both a vital expression of and
a fascinating response to cultural conditions of our moment.
For many of the figures in this book, the poetics of everyday life is not, at
heart, merely about surface effects or matters of style and content; it is not
just a question of which subject matter to include in a poem, or how to make a
poem more “earthy” or “gritty,” or about the benefits of exploiting the riches
of ordinary language. Instead, the poets discussed in this book view the quest
to make the quotidian legible as an urgently necessary endeavor, an invalu-
able method of gaining profound insight into the nature of existence; to bor-
row a phrase from James Schuyler that I return to later, their “art is one that
values the everyday as the ultimate, the most varied and desirable knowledge”
(Selected Art, 16).
40Introduction

In other words, these poets often seem driven by a central conviction: that
(pace Socrates) the unexamined daily life is not worth living. They frequently
make this belief tangible by expressing it with images of dawn, morning, and
awakening, as if to underscore the idea that nothing is more important than
waking up to the life we are living, to those things we forget to, or are taught
not to, notice. Some of these figures are energized by a related, more specific
belief: if we sleepwalk through our days, if the everyday remains natural-
ized and mystified, then spectacle and alienation triumph, and those forces
that benefit from our distraction—​usually aligned with the dominant social
order, with power and capitalism—​continue unchallenged. In the face of
this danger, contemporary everyday-​life poetry implores us to wake up. It
offers new modes of heightened attention, of wakefulness, that seek to revise
and alter the existing “distribution of the sensible,” to use Jacques Rancière’s
phrase (Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 24–​25). By doing so, such poetry has the
potential to change the way we understand—​and even how we live—​our own
everyday lives.
If it is true that today more than ever our ability to pay attention to
what lies before us is in grave peril, as innumerable observers have warned,
then understanding and practicing an aesthetics of the everyday is all the
more urgent and timely. In the end, Attention Equals Life maintains that
this attempt—​which can at best be an approach to everyday life, a pur-
suit but never an arrival—​is an aesthetic, political, and ethical task of the
highest order.
 { 1 }

The Crisis of Attention, Everyday-​Life Theory,

and Contemporary Poetry

Hunger for the Everyday in an Age of Distraction

“In or around June 1995 human character changed again. Or rather, it began
to undergo a metamorphosis that is still not complete, but is profound—​and
troubling, not least because it is hardly noted.” So began a widely discussed 2013
piece in the London Review of Books by the writer Rebecca Solnit (“Diary”).
Updating Virginia Woolf’s famous comment about the momentous shift that
occurred at the dawn of the twentieth century (“On or about December 1910,
human character changed”), Solnit addresses the dramatic changes technol-
ogy has wrought on our experience of daily life in the years since the advent of
the Internet and mobile devices. She reminisces about the simplicity of daily
life in that halcyon moment before the fall: “That bygone time had rhythm, and
it had room for you to do one thing at a time; it had different parts; mornings
included this, and evenings that, and a great many of us had these schedules
in common.” In contrast, Solnit tallies the costs (as well as a few of the gains)
of the digital age (“Our lives are a constant swirl of information”), offering an
almost textbook expression of current anxieties about our age of distraction:
Nearly everyone I know feels that some quality of concentration they once
possessed has been destroyed. Reading books has become hard; the mind
keeps wanting to shift from whatever it is paying attention to pay attention
to something else. A restlessness has seized hold of many of us, a sense that
we should be doing something else, no matter what we are doing, or doing
at least two things at once, or going to check some other medium. … The
fine art of doing nothing in particular, also known as thinking, or mus-
ing, or introspection, or simply moments of being, was part of what hap-
pened when you walked from here to there alone, or stared out the train
window, or contemplated the road, but the new technologies have flooded
those open spaces. Space for free thought is routinely regarded as a void,
and filled up with sounds and distractions. (“Diary”)
42 Attention Equals Life

The litany of worries Solnit articulates may have a familiar ring, as it echoes
any of the hundreds of trend pieces, newspaper articles, and books that have
appeared over the past two decades.1 As I  argued in the introduction, the
roots of the situation Solnit laments lie in the not-​so-​halcyon days of the
postwar period, when new technologies and mass media began to irrevo-
cably transform American culture and daily life, and raise concerns about
distraction, information overload, simulacra, and our estrangement from
the “real.”
But the crisis of attention Solnit so vividly captures has intensified since
the mid-​1990s, and it has given rise to an increasingly powerful desire to
reconnect with daily life that I refer to as “everyday hunger.” I adapt this term
from the novelist and essayist David Shields, whose much-​debated 2010 book
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto argued that our hyper-​mediated, postmodern
existence has led to a cultural craving for the “real.” Shields brings together
a range of phenomena that he associates with the condition named in his
title, including the recent vogue for creative nonfiction and memoir, reality
TV, sampling in hip-​hop, VH1’s Behind the Music series, and so on. Shields
acknowledges at the outset that “every artistic movement from the begin-
ning of time is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the
artist thinks is reality into the work of art” (3). His own “manifesto” (largely
composed of fragments drawn from appropriated texts) is an “ars poetica for
a burgeoning group of interrelated (but unconnected) artists in a multitude of
forms and media (​lyric essay, prose poem, collage novel, visual art, film, tele-
vision, radio, performance art, rap, stand-​up comedy, graffiti) ​who are break-
ing larger and larger chunks of ‘reality’ into their works” (3).
The new “artistic movement” Shields senses taking shape in our time is
devoted to “a deliberate unartiness: ‘raw’ material, seemingly unprocessed,
unfiltered, uncensored, and unprofessional,” along with “randomness, open-
ness to accident and serendipity,” “self-​ethnography,” “anthropological auto-
biography; a blurring (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between
fiction and nonfiction: the lure and blur of the real” (Reality Hunger, 5). Shields
casts a broader net than I do in this book; he is also less concerned with the
everyday per se and much more with the blurring of real and fictive, authen-
tic and inauthentic, original and copy than I am here. Nevertheless, many of
the aesthetic strategies he highlights and examples he draws on are relevant
to my discussion of everyday-​life poetics and the experimental realism that I
see as one of its most important modes. I am particularly drawn to Shields’s
understanding of the cultural conditions that give rise to this “reality” crav-
ing, if only because his argument echoes so many discussions of attention and
the everyday in contemporary literature and culture. My focus on everyday
hunger zeroes in on a subset of the broader situation he describes: in short, a
potent longing for an increased connection to the everyday, and for greater
knowledge about daily life.
Crisis of Attention, Everyday-Life Theory, and Contemporary Poetry 43

Over the past several decades, this trend has taken many forms, but a
constant theme has been a concerted effort to focus on the “real,” an impa-
tience with illusion and fiction, a curiosity about how “ordinary” people
live, and a seemingly bottomless desire to see and read about everyday
experiences (even when, or especially when, they are clearly mediated and
artfully constructed). One of the more complex and ironic aspects of this
development is that the technological changes that define our contempo-
rary moment have proved to be a double-​edged sword in terms of the status
of the everyday. On the one hand, innumerable contemporary commenta-
tors, like Solnit, cast digital media and new technology as the villain—​t he
sinister source of our inability to pay attention to our immediate experi-
ence. On the other hand, the development of these new technologies has
both fostered an intensified interest in the everyday and provided invalu-
able tools for attending to it.
Perhaps the most obvious sign of this trend is the dramatic rise of real-
ity television, which took off in the 1990s and has become one of the most
dominant genres of our era. The phenomenon is usually linked to the debut
of The Real World (1992) (which, in turn, took inspiration from the innovative
1973 show An American Family). Promising to deliver “true” stories and access
to “real” life, the show created an artificial environment in which a group
of supposedly average young people live together and have every moment of
their daily lives recorded and aired on national television (as can be seen in
the iconic words spoken during its opening credits: “This is the true story of
seven strangers picked to live in a house, work together, and have their lives
taped to find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting
real”). The wildly successful show led to an explosion of reality programming
in the late 1990s and early 2000s, including other documentary-​style shows
focusing on the everyday and domestic lives of supposedly ordinary people,
as in the shows Big Brother, Laguna Beach, the various Real Housewives series,
Jersey Shore, and countless others.2
During the same period, a parallel trend can be seen in the turn toward
the everyday and the mundane within scripted programming—​witness, for
example, the tremendous popularity of shows like Seinfeld (which famously
declared itself to be “a show about nothing”) and The Office (a hit show in the
form of a faux documentary about the day-​to-​day grind of bureaucratic office
life, which ran for nine seasons (2004–​2013)). The everyday-​life aesthetic that
drove that series is summed up in the last words spoken in the show’s finale:
“I thought it was weird when you picked us to make a documentary, but all
in all, I think an ordinary paper company like Dunder Mifflin was a great
subject for a documentary. There’s a lot of beauty in ordinary things. Isn’t that
kind of the point?”
This trend can also be seen in the spread of websites and blogs that satisfy
the thirst for information, images, and mundane details of other people’s
44 Attention Equals Life

everyday lives, such as the highly successful magazine and website called
Found. Here is how the creators describe its mission:  “We collect found
stuff: love letters, birthday cards, kids’ homework, to-​do lists, ticket stubs,
poetry on napkins, doodles—​a nything that gives a glimpse into someone
else’s life. Anything goes.” People find and submit these found objects, and
each day, the site posts another torn-​up letter, Post-​it note with odd draw-
ing, or notebook page with scrawled life goals, often accompanied by an
amusing or wry caption. Another popular blog, Overheard in New  York,
does something quite similar with fragments of amusing and odd over-
heard speech, primarily for comic purposes.3 It is not incidental that the
appropriation of found materials and the citation of overheard speech are
also key tactics in everyday-​life art and poetry as far back as Duchamp and
T. S. Eliot, which only underscores my point: such artistic strategies have
increasingly spread from the avant-​garde to various corners of vernacular
culture, to a much wider, mainstream audience that seems to be eagerly eat-
ing up whatever is produced.
Another example is the tremendously popular phenomenon called Humans
of New York, the creation of young bond-​trader-​turned-​amateur-​photographer
Brandon Stanton, who posts photographs of random, “ordinary” people he
sees and meets on the streets of New  York, usually paired with comments
that the subjects make about their lives. In addition to becoming a book,
Stanton’s blog and Facebook page have gone viral. Humans of New York enjoys
an enormous, devoted social media following—​his Facebook page had over
16.5 million followers as of December 2015—​and each time he posts a photo,
thousands will comment within seconds, often remarking on the immense
value to be found in seeing these glimpses of the daily life of strangers.
Clearly, there are abundant signs of a public desire to consume represen-
tations of everyday life, but a slightly different trend has emerged as well,
which I discussed in the introduction: the ever-​growing use of new technolo-
gies for self-​monitoring, personal data tracking, and recording of informa-
tion about our own daily lives. The rise of the Internet, digital photography
and video, and social media have provided an array of instruments that
anyone can use to record, document, and circulate the details of daily life,
from blogs to Facebook, Instagram to YouTube. Recently, a battery of new
tools has appeared that give users the power to create photo montages and
store an enormous amount of data about everyday life. In my introduction, I
mentioned an app called One Second Everyday, which allows users to merge
brief daily video clips into a continuous movie of their lives. To take another
example, a new product called Narrative Clip features a tiny camera that can
be clipped unobtrusively onto one’s shirt. Its purpose is to take and store pic-
tures every 30 seconds of one’s life. Such devices and apps point to contem-
porary culture’s seemingly insatiable appetite for seeing, storing, and sharing
Crisis of Attention, Everyday-Life Theory, and Contemporary Poetry 45

elements of everyday experience. Furthermore, this development suggests the

use of various tools, experiments, and projects for enhancing attention to the
quotidian is no longer the sole province of the artist; they are now portable
and accessible to all.
All the microblogging, self-​documentation and life-​logging, the daily
and hourly updates, and the photographic food diaries have given rise to
another version of this everyday hunger that comes at the quotidian from
different angle: a pervasive cultural discourse that mourns the loss of it.
This has sparked a wave of interest in boredom as a phenomenon. Dozens of
trend pieces have recently appeared lamenting the lost art of simply doing
nothing, of being bored—​a rticles called “The Joy of Quiet,” “The Thrill
of Boredom,” “In a Constantly Plugged-​In World, It’s Not All Bad to Be
Bored,” and “Homage to the Idols of Idleness” appeared in the pages of the
New York Times just between 2011 and 2013.4 Within the world of poetry,
Kenneth Goldsmith has been busily channeling the spirit of Andy Warhol,
that great prophet of postmodern boredom, proclaiming himself to be “the
most boring writer who ever lived” and theorizing about the nature of bore-
dom in widely discussed essays like “Being Boring.” More broadly, there has
been a spate of books on boredom and its history and meaning, like Peter
Toohey’s general audience book Boredom: A Lively History (2011) and Lars
Svendsen’s more academic study, A Philosophy of Boredom (2005), which
argues that boredom is a distinctly modern phenomenon. There was even
a recent conference held in London called “Boring 2010” that was entirely
devoted to boredom (as the Wall Street Journal reported, “for seven hours
on that Saturday, 20 speakers held forth on a range of seemingly dreary
diversions, from ‘The Intangible Beauty of Car Park Roofs’ and ‘Personal
Reflections on the English Breakfast,’ to ‘The Draw in Test Match Cricket’
and ‘My Relationship With Bus Routes’ ” (Naik, “Boredom Enthusiasts”).
The rhetoric driving such developments, the rationale given for them, con-
stantly argues for the need to slow down, to fight the static and distraction of
our wired and fast-​paced lives, so that we can simply pay attention. The Wall
Street Journal article about the “Boring 2010” conference quotes one partici-
pant saying as much: “We’re all overstimulated. I think it’s important to stop
all that for a while and see what several hours of being bored really feels like”
(Naik, Boredom Enthusiasts”). Two New  York Times film critics, Manohla
Dargis and A. O. Scott, collaborated on a pair of articles in 2011 called “In
Defense of the Slow and the Boring,” that stuck up for movies that others
judge as “slow” or “tedious,” in part because such movies are better equipped
to capture the feel of daily life than fast-​moving conventional films: “Long
movies,” Dargis writes, “take time away even as they restore a sense of dura-
tion, of time and life passing, that most movies try to obscure through con-
tinuity editing.”
46 Attention Equals Life

“Slowness” has even become a rallying cry for those invested in what has
come to be known as the “slow movement.” The most prominent example
is the “slow food” movement, which opposes fast food and emphasizes tra-
ditional and regional cuisines and the use of locally sourced and organic
ingredients. Other examples include “slow parenting, “slow travel,” and
“slow TV” (as the BBC reported in 2013, “Pioneered in Norway, so-​called
Slow TV has featured an eight-​hour knitting epic and a six-​day ferry jour-
ney through the fjords”). 5 A counterpart to this trend can be seen in the
fervor for long-​a rc, slow-​moving television shows like Mad Men and an
interest in various other forms of “slow art.”6 In a 2013 piece subtitled
“The Inroads of Slow Art in a Fast Culture,” David Zweig wrote: “As the
technologically-​induced speed of everything continues to exponentially
increase, people will desire, indeed, require, time-​ slowing havens to
ground us, let us pause, and reposition how we experience and interpret
the world” (“This is a Longreads”). Convinced that “whether we like it or
not, the Internet has caused a revolution in the way we read,” David Mikics
has recently made an eloquent case for the necessity of Slow Reading in a
Hurried Age (3).7
The current appeal of “slowness” may help explain the sudden fame of the
Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard, a writer the book critic Dwight
Garner has called “contemporary fiction’s alchemist of the ordinary” (“The
Bad Father”). My Struggle, Knausgaard’s six-​volume novel, has been hailed for
its almost uncanny ability to make the most minute and banal details of the
author’s own life fascinating. “Little of obvious import happens in these books,”
Garner writes, “but Mr. Knausgaard manages, seemingly without effort, to
make a trip to the grocery store, or an evening’s conversation around a dinner
table, as involving and gravity-​laden as another writer’s account of the assas-
sination of Osama bin Laden.” His books, which “combine a microfocus on the
granular detail of daily life (child care, groceries, quarrels with friends) with
earnest meditations on art, death, music and ambition,” have been heralded
as the most exciting and best literary works of recent years (Schillinger, “His
Peers’ Views”).8 It is worth noting that they have frequently been framed and
praised in terms of attention: in the New York Times, the author Hari Kunzru,
who deeply admires My Struggle, is quoted as saying that Knausgaard’s work
may prove influential on other writers: he “offers the novelist a path: that close
attention to life as it actually is lived” (Schillinger, “His Peers’ Views”).
This everyday hunger, and the many far-​flung, diverse manifestations of
it across our culture, is too vast a topic to fully do justice to here, but I hope
it will suffice to say that profound concerns about the fate of attention in an
age of distraction have been greeted with a powerful desire for images and
knowledge and data about everyday life, an urge that has surfaced in every-
thing from television to Facebook status updates, from viral YouTube videos
to critically acclaimed novels.
Crisis of Attention, Everyday-Life Theory, and Contemporary Poetry 47

Theories of Everyday Life and the Study

of Contemporary Poetry

If this thirst for the quotidian can be seen reverberating across our culture
as a whole, one of the more surprising places where it appears with partic-
ular intensity is in the realm of contemporary poetry. The idea that recent
American poetry focuses on the everyday has become a given, but our under-
standing of this phenomenon remains superficial and not fully historicized.
To remedy this, I find it useful to turn to theories of everyday life associated
with a wide range of thinkers, including Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau,
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes,
Guy Debord, William James, Stanley Cavell, and Jacques Rancière. As I men-
tioned in the introduction, rather than viewing everyday-​life theory as wholly
distinct from modern literature’s preoccupation with the everyday, I prefer
to see these as intertwined discourses, sharing foundational obsessions and
responding to the same historical pressures.
Philosophical and theoretical discussions of the everyday can help us
more fully understand the sources and ramifications of both the contem-
porary hunger for the everyday and everyday-​life poetry, for the following
reasons: first, because they insist we recognize the quotidian as the primary
sphere of human experience, rather than secondary or negligible; second,
because they provide conceptual tools and a vocabulary that allow us to take
the everyday seriously as an object of critical inquiry, urge us to consider the
history and construction of the everyday as a category, and explore its philo-
sophical and political meanings and contradictions.
While recent studies of twentieth-​century literature and the everyday have
drawn upon everyday-​life studies, the links between these various think-
ers, as well as the conversation between their work and the poetry and art
being produced alongside it, could use some more elaboration.9 By bringing
together thinkers from several different fields and traditions, I  take a cue
from an important caution advanced by Rita Felski, who noted in 2002 that:
while the French tradition associated with Lefebvre and de Certeau has
dominated recent work on everyday life in the humanities, an interest in
the ordinary binds together many other writers as different as Bourdieu,
Habermas, Heidegger, Blanchot, Husserl, Geertz, Heller, Benjamin, Simmel,
William James, Dewey, Wittgenstein, Raymond Williams, Benjamin,
Goffman, Cavell, Schutz, Elias, Merleau-​Ponty and Dorothy Smith. And yet
there is a surprising lack of cross-​referencing or acknowledgment amongst
scholars influenced by these disparate thinkers. (Introduction, 613)
Felski usefully divides these thinkers into two broad categories. First, there’s
a more militant and politicized French lineage centered on Lefebvre and
tied to a modernist avant-​garde rhetoric of shock and disruption; she argues
48 Attention Equals Life

this line is devoted to defamiliarization and the radical transformation of

everyday existence. Second, there’s a group associated with phenomenology,
sociology, and pragmatism—​schools of thought that Felski finds “much less
censorious of habit” and more accepting of the dailiness of the everyday (“The
Invention of Everyday Life,” 90). Felski chides literary and cultural studies
scholars for ignoring the connections and similarities between these different
approaches, and holds up the latter as a useful and necessary corrective to the
excesses of the former and the field of cultural studies it has fueled. Whereas
contemporary cultural theory tends to either “overpoliticize the routines of
everyday life,” viewing daily life and habit “as nothing more than a vehicle of
ideology,” or prizes only those aspects of the quotidian that resist order and
disrupt routine, phenomenology and pragmatism, in contrast, take “seriously
the ordinariness of everyday life without idealizing or demonizing it” (94).10
Despite their manifold differences, the work of these diverse thinkers
collectively constitutes a philosophical front in a broad cultural movement
toward the everyday that has swept across a variety of spheres of culture and
thought since the 1800s. Prior to that time, the history of ideas, and of philos-
ophy in particular, is often marked by an aversion to the everyday, or at least
saw a gulf between the realm of daily life and its finite, concrete activities and
concerns on the one hand, and the higher plane where philosophical truth
and speculation reside, on the other. Wallace Stevens, for example, sensed
this tension, observing that “the quotidian saps philosophers” (Collected, 42).
Michael Gardiner offers a useful summary of this position, held by Lefebvre
and other theorists of the everyday:
According to Lefebvre, the everyday has traditionally been regarded
as trivial and inconsequential in Western thought at least since the
Enlightenment, which has valorized the supposedly ‘higher’ functions of
human reason as displayed in such specialized activities as art, philosophy
and science. In particular, philosophers have often thought of themselves
as occupying a realm of ‘pure thought’ unconnected to the messy vaga-
ries of daily existence and the petty concerns of the common person. In
Descartes’s philosophy, for example, the paradigm of certain knowledge
lay not in the evidence of the senses or the experiences of the body, but
in the abstract propositions of mathematics. These axioms were located
within a purely mental space surveilled by the imperious, rational Mind,
the famous cogito. To Lefebvre’s way of thinking, this Cartesian mind-​body
dualism, as with similar idealist philosophies, represented a systemic deni-
gration of everyday life and of the lived experience of time, space and the
body. (Critiques of Everyday Life, 75)
Stanley Cavell makes a similar point when he observes that “philosophers
find it their intellectual birthright to distrust the everyday, as in Descartes’s
second meditation” (This New Yet, 33).
Crisis of Attention, Everyday-Life Theory, and Contemporary Poetry 49

By the mid-​nineteenth century, figures within a variety of intellectual tra-

ditions and disciplines, from Emerson and Marx to Freud and James, began
to shift their attention to the everyday and commonplace, to the body and
lived experience, to new approaches like dialectical materialism and radical
empiricism. For example, in the 1830s, Emerson articulated a philosophic and
aesthetic commitment to the everyday in a fiercely American key:
I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or
Arabia; what is Greek art or Provençal minstrelsy; I embrace the common,
I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into
to-​day, and you may have the antique and future worlds. What would we
really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan;
the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form
and the gait of the body. … We have listened too long to the courtly muses
of Europe. (Essays and Lectures, 68–​69)
Emerson’s enormously influential embrace of the ordinary and the local
exemplifies the devotion to experience and empiricism that becomes the hall-
mark of the American intellectual tradition he does so much to establish.11 As
John E. Smith argues, what distinguishes “America’s philosophical vision” is
precisely its attention to the immediate and concrete, its “account of experi-
encing that is far more in accord with what actually happens in our encounter
with the world” (quoted in Jay, Songs of Experience, 266).
Building upon Emerson, American pragmatist philosophers like William
James and John Dewey develop a new form of philosophy founded on a
devotion to experience and a fascination with the ordinary, habit, and the
everyday. James writes that the pragmatist is one who “turns away from
abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori rea-
sons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and ori-
gins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards
action and towards power” (Writings, 379). Pragmatism posits that “truth”
is not a permanent entity, but an unfolding, temporal process created in the
course of everyday life: “For pluralistic pragmatism, truth grows up inside of
all the finite experiences. They lean on each other, but the whole of them, if
such a whole there be, leans on nothing. All ‘homes’ are in finite experience;
finite experience as such is homeless. Nothing outside of the flux secures the
issue of it” (457).
Throughout his work, James delights in probing what Martin Jay calls
“the messiness, ambiguity, and uncertainty of the experience whose vital-
ity he hopes to recover beneath the crust of convention and the rigidities of
conceptual thought” (Songs of Experience, 277–​78). Above all, James felt that
philosophy should both be an inquiry into “real life” and a useful tool in liv-
ing our daily lives. In “Philosophy and Its Critics,” James ventriloquizes a
common complaint—​that his chosen discipline has long been cut off from the
50 Attention Equals Life

quotidian: “Philosophy is out of touch with real life, for which it substitutes

abstractions. The real world is various, tangled, painful. Philosophers have,
almost without exception, treated it as noble, simple, and perfect, ignoring the
complexity of fact” (Writings, 482). This criticism of the philosophical tradi-
tion, James responds, is “historically valid, but no reason appears why philos-
ophy should keep aloof from reality permanently… . In the end philosophers
may get into as close contact as realistic novelists with the facts of life” (482).
As we will see, James’s devotion to immediate, concrete particulars, his explo-
ration of the nature of attention, and his call to approach the world by means
of “radical empiricism” will reverberate through developments in the poetics
of everyday life.12
Around the same time, in the early decades of the twentieth century, two
of the most important modern philosophers took part in the same intellec-
tual turn to the everyday. Heidegger and Wittgenstein each mounted a dif-
ferent yet related challenge to the bias against the everyday they believed had
plagued the history of Western philosophy. Unlike previous philosophers,
they start from the premise that ontological and epistemological questions
are grounded in concrete, material practices, things, events, and phenom-
ena. As Stanley Cavell observes, despite their many differences, Heidegger
and Wittgenstein are both philosophers “for whom the obvious is the subject
of philosophy” (In Quest, 6). Heidegger, for example, “started his phenom-
enological investigation by capturing the phenomenon that all philosophers
before him had ‘passed over’ as trivial and not worth the theorist’s attention,
namely, everyday existence” (Frede, “The Question of Being,” 54).13 Thus,
Heidegger’s Being and Time focuses obsessively on the meaning and value
of what he calls “average everydayness,” the realm of existence within which
humans predominantly live and which, according to him, they fail to notice,
appreciate, or put into question (38).14
To be sure, Heidegger casts the everyday in more negative terms than most
figures in the tradition I am sketching, viewing it (in Felski’s words) as “inau-
thentic, gray, aesthetically impoverished” (“Invention,” 79).15 But he remains
a crucial figure in theories of everyday life because his entire philosophy rests
on a reorientation of Western thought toward the supreme importance of tak-
ing quotidian experience into account, even if some would argue he views it
too pessimistically. As Michael Sheringham observes, Heidegger conceives
of the everyday “as the indispensable pre-​ontological ground for the experi-
ence of Being,” and insists on “constantly keeping everydayness in view and
affirming its importance as a route towards Being,” at the same time that he
believes that “true Dasein involves transcending the ordinary averageness of
the everyday” (Everyday Life, 397).
Wittgenstein’s body of work is similarly driven by what Cavell calls a
“preoccupation with the ordinary and the everyday” (In Quest, 6). In his
Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein famously announced that “What
Crisis of Attention, Everyday-Life Theory, and Contemporary Poetry 51

we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use”

(41, #116). His approach forces us to question the most obvious and common-
sensical elements of our ordinary language, to see their strangeness, and to
recognize how much the meaning of ordinary sentences depends on contexts
and situations. Like other everyday-​life theorists, Wittgenstein argues that
we are blind to the familiar and obvious, even though these features of our
experience are actually the most significant to our existence: “The aspects of
things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplic-
ity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something—​because it is always
before one’s eyes.) … And this means:  we fail to be struck by what, once
seen, is most striking and most powerful” (Philosophical Investigations, 43).
For Wittgenstein, Cavell notes, this is a debilitating error: “our stupefaction
results from an insufficient capacity to cleave to the everyday” (“Ordinary,”
192). Wittgenstein’s importance to later literature and art has of course been
profound, in part thanks to its quotidian orientation. Hailed by Charles
Bernstein as a “poet of the everyday” (D. Benjamin, “Poetry Is a Form”).
Wittgenstein has exerted a powerful influence on everything from the work
of John Cage and Fairfield Porter to conceptual art to Language poetry.16
Thanks to the contemporary philosopher Stanley Cavell, the connections
between the two strains I have been discussing—​the Emersonian philosophi-
cal tradition and Heidegger and Wittgenstein—​have become apparent, rec-
ognizable as unexpectedly related branches of a broad “philosophy of the
ordinary” (In Quest, 153). Since the 1970s, Cavell has been making a power-
ful case for the congruence between these divergent intellectual traditions
that, before he entered the picture, were rarely discussed in the same breath.17
Uneasy with previous philosophers who fundamentally “distrust the every-
day,” Cavell prizes those thinkers most who refuse to do so, and has developed
his own influential philosophy founded on the “recovery of the ordinary”
(This New Yet, 33–​34). But even though Cavell’s thought resonates in myriad
ways with both theories of everyday life and the literary tradition, it has yet to
find a central place in many critical discussions on this topic.18
Key to Cavell’s thought is the notion that recovering the everyday is of
supreme importance, because it alone offers a viable response to the potent
threat of skepticism. For Cavell, skepticism names the crushing doubt about
the existence of the external world or of other minds that has plagued both
humanity, and philosophy more specifically, for centuries; even more deeply,
skepticism is “a reflection of the inescapable finitude that characterizes every
human life. Skepticism is thus an existential condition that is inevitably lived,
whether destructively or productively” (Eldridge and Rhie, Stanley Cavell, 1).
Cavell credits ordinary language philosophy with the “discovery that the
answer to skepticism must take the form not of philosophical construction but
of the reconstruction or resettlement of the everyday” (In Quest, 176). He calls
this reinhabitation of the everyday and ordinary an act of “acknowledgment,”
52 Attention Equals Life

an appreciation of the world as it is and an acceptance of human limitation

and finitude. As Richard Fleming explains, “Cavell concludes that we must
live our skepticism; we must live with our recognition of human finitude …
we address the problem of skepticism (both epistemological and metaphysi-
cal) by accepting it and living it. We live our (accept our, express our) finitude,
our everydayness, our ordinariness” (Fleming and Payne, The Senses, 289).19
Cavell describes his own philosophy (and Heidegger’s) as an exploration of
“the uncanniness of the ordinary,” a response “to the fantastic in what human
beings will accustom themselves to, call this the surrealism of the habitual”
(In Quest, 154). In his account, poetry, too, struggles to achieve this “recovery
of the world,” an effort that parallels “the philosophical effort to recover from
skepticism” (45). Furthermore, Cavell insists that this effort is of the great-
est importance and urgency. “The everyday is not merely one topic among
others that philosophers might take an interest in,” he argues, “but one that
a philosopher is fated to an interest in so long as he or she seeks a certain
kind of response to the threat of skepticism” (171). However, even though the
everyday is our very “habitat,” even though it forever surrounds us and is
truly all we know, we remain fundamentally alienated and estranged from
it. Therefore, Cavell believes that simply acknowledging and recognizing the
ordinary is a never-​ending, never-​easy “quest.” As he eloquently puts it, “The
everyday is what we cannot but aspire to, since it appears to us as lost to us… .
There is nothing beyond the succession of each and every day; and grasping
a day, accepting the everyday, the ordinary, is not a given but a task” (171).
Cavell’s powerful conviction that grasping a day is “an achievement”—​his
belief that apprehending the ordinary is both a practical act and a difficult but
necessary task—​echoes throughout the poetics of everyday life that I discuss
in the chapters to come (This New Yet, 39).
The other major strain in theories of the everyday resides in the full-​blown
concern with the everyday within the Marxist-​inspired intellectual tradition
of the mid-​twentieth century. For example, a fascination with everyday life,
and especially the workings and political meanings of mass media and popu-
lar culture, moves to the fore in the work of Frankfurt School thinkers like
Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and especially for our purposes, Walter
Benjamin. Benjamin’s landmark essays on aesthetics, surrealism, popular
culture, and literature; his sense that the experience of distraction is fun-
damental to modernity; and his monumental, experimental study of urban
modernity and the flâneur, published posthumously as The Arcades Project,
are inescapable contributions to everyday life studies.
By the mid-​twentieth century, the study of the everyday as a distinct cat-
egory finds its fullest expression in the writing of the French philosopher
and sociologist Henri Lefebvre, a thinker whose rich and far-​reaching work
remains less known and discussed in the United States than that of his more
illustrious contemporaries, such as Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Jacques
Crisis of Attention, Everyday-Life Theory, and Contemporary Poetry 53

Derrida, and Jean Baudrillard. However, Lefebvre has increasingly become

a central figure in discussions of the everyday, and interest in his work has
soared.20 In a series of books published under the title Critique of Everyday Life
that appeared in three volumes (in 1948, 1961, and 1981), Lefebvre calls for a
radical new sociology that would adapt Marx’s theory of alienation and apply
it with much greater rigor and nuance to the whole range of mundane actions
and behaviors that make up everyday life in modernity. The kind of “critique”
of everyday life Lefebvre has in mind sets out to expose, and oppose, the ways
in which an increasingly bureaucratic society and mass media administer
and manage the everyday lives of its citizens.
Although Lefebvre is keenly aware of the dehumanizing repetition, rou-
tinization, and boredom inherent in modern daily life, and the difficulties
of overcoming that condition, his approach differs from the kind of ideol-
ogy critique found in orthodox Marxism or much Frankfurt School critical
theory, which is marked by a much more negative assessment of everyday life,
viewing it as little more than endless subjugation and false consciousness at
the hands of “the culture industry.” A deeply dialectical thinker who sees the
everyday as “at once empty and miraculously full” (Sheringham, Everyday
Life, 143), Lefebvre again and again returns to the paradoxical nature of the
everyday, calling for “a philosophical inventory and analysis of everyday life
that will expose its ambiguities—​its baseness and exuberance, its poverty and
fruitfulness—​and by these unorthodox means release the creative energies
that are an integral part of it” (Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World,
13). Ultimately, Lefebvre holds to an essentially utopian philosophy of every-
day life—​despite all its deprivations, “everyday life harbours within itself the
possibility of its own existential or ontological transformation” (Sheringham,
12). It is the critic’s or artist’s job to tease out “the power of resistance con-
tained in the everyday” (149) and elaborate on “the idea of the everyday as
residue, as resistance, as fountainhead of creativity” (174).
It is precisely this conviction that the everyday contains within itself the
possibility of resistance, creativity, and even revolution that connects Lefebvre
to Guy Debord and the movement he led, the Situationist International.
Situationism’s starting point would seem to be Lefebvre’s belief that “everyday
life has literally been ‘colonized’ ” by the iniquities and delusions of capital-
ism (Critique, 2:11).21 The only way to overcome the dehumanizing form of
sleepwalking that we call daily life is to engage in an active, radical “ ‘revolu-
tion’ in everyday life” itself—​an awakening made possible by the use of cer-
tain experimental techniques, devices, and subversive practices intended to
disrupt and draw attention to the nature of everyday life. A prime example
of what Debord called “concrete techniques for shaking up the ambiences of
everyday life” is the dérive, or “drift” (quoted in Sheringham, Everyday Life,
163). As Debord explained, “in a dérive one or more persons during a cer-
tain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their
54 Attention Equals Life

other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn
by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there” (Debord,
“Theory,” 62). In Debord’s words, the dérive is “a technique of rapid passage
through varied ambiences” (“Theory,” 62), a form of subversive play within
and against the urban environment, a “controlled, and in principle, collective
(in small groups) form of movement through several areas of the same city
in order to distinguish, as objectively as possible, differences in ambience or
atmosphere” (Kaufmann, Guy Debord, 108).
The Situationists insisted that these unpredictable and unconventional
movements through urban space could help expose and combat the rigid,
oppressive structures that modern city planners foist upon the organic,
unruly flux of everyday life. The dérive is also a cornerstone element of “psy-
chogeography,” by which Debord means “the study of the specific effects of
the geographical environment (whether consciously organized or not) on the
emotions and behavior of individuals” (Knabb, Situationist International, 52).
One of the goals, therefore, of experimental projects based on the dérive is to
awaken participants to the reality of how urban spaces are used and how they
differ from one another, how they are shaped by ideological forces, and how
they influence and even determine the psyches of those who experience them.
The tactics and goals of the Situationists continue to be vital and increasingly
visible resources for contemporary explorations of the everyday.22
Following in the wake of Lefebvre and the Situationists, the historian
Michel de Certeau wrote The Practice of Everyday Life, which has become a
foundational text for Anglo-​American cultural studies. The field has seized
on de Certeau’s influential account of the consumer as a producer, one who
creatively appropriates (“poaches”) from the dominant culture. De Certeau
sets up his argument as a riposte to Michel Foucault’s generally pessimistic
belief that individuals are dominated and repressed by the microtechniques of
discipline and power. Drawing a distinction with Foucault, de Certeau argues
that “if it is true that the grid of ‘discipline’ is everywhere becoming clearer
and more extensive, it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire soci-
ety resists being reduced to it, what popular procedures (also ‘miniscule’ and
quotidian) manipulate the mechanisms of discipline and conform to them
only in order to evade them” (The Practice, xiv). As Highmore points out, for
de Certeau, “the everyday presents an obstacle (and a residue) to systematic
forms of government and domination” (Everyday Life, 149). In effect, his work
declares “the impossibility of the full colonization of daily life by the system”
(quoted in Highmore, Everyday Life, 150).
To explain the resistant and creative elements of daily life, de Certeau calls
for a close examination of the most mundane everyday activities—​walk-
ing, cooking, reading, stealing paper clips and taking them home from the
office—​arguing that these “practices” function in quietly subversive ways
to challenge, mock, and evade established orders and ideologies. As he puts
Crisis of Attention, Everyday-Life Theory, and Contemporary Poetry 55

it, “the tactics of consumption, the ingenious ways in which the weak make
use of the strong, thus lend a political dimension to everyday practices” (The
Practice, xvii). Rather than being manipulated, passive dupes of the culture
industry or helplessly subjected to regimes of decentralized power and dis-
cipline, de Certeau’s consumers are wily, even quietly dissident agents who
rely on a battery of “tactics” in their daily lives to elude the strictures of order
imposed by an administered society.23 The influence of de Certeau’s belief
in the productive nature of consumption on studies of popular culture and
other forms has been enormous, but his work can also shed light on elements
of resistance and subversion in poems that are attuned to everyday practices.
Another closely related strain of critical inquiry into the everyday emerges
in the 1950s and 1960s in the form of British cultural studies. Initiated by
Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, and developed by Stuart Hall, Dick
Hebdige, Angela McRobbie, and others associated with the influential Centre
for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, cultural
studies begins with the premise that, as Williams argues in the title of a 1958
essay, “Culture Is Ordinary.” “That is where we must start,” Williams asserts
(Highmore, Everyday Life Reader, 92). As Graeme Turner puts it:
What we wear, hear, watch, and eat; how we see ourselves in relation to
others; the function of everyday activities such as cooking and shopping:
all of these have attracted the interest of cultural studies. Emerging from a
literary critical tradition that saw popular culture as a threat to the moral
and cultural standards of modern civilization, the work of the pioneers in
cultural studies breaks with that literary tradition’s elitist assumptions in
order to examine the everyday and the ordinary: those aspects of our lives
that exert so powerful and unquestioned an influence on our existence that
we take them for granted. (British Cultural Studies, 2)
Like de Certeau, British cultural studies scrutinizes the details and practices
of everyday life—​from clothing, television watching, and graffiti to football
fandom and dating rituals—​and tends to celebrate the ingenuity, creativity,
and subversive potential of everyday behavior and cultural activity. Building
on Antonio Gramsci and his notion of hegemony, and echoing de Certeau,
cultural studies is particularly attuned to how marginalized and economi-
cally disadvantaged groups respond to the workings of power and resist the
oppressive conditions of capitalism and the dominant ideology. As Turner
notes, “the focus on popular culture has quickly become a focus on how our
everyday lives are constructed, how culture forms its subjects” (2–​3). Although
cultural studies has been criticized for over-​emphasizing everyday resistance,
its call for the careful analysis and appreciation of “the very material of our
daily lives, the bricks and mortar of our most commonplace understandings,”
has been extremely influential across the humanities and throughout con-
temporary culture (Paul Willis, quoted in Turner, 2).24
56 Attention Equals Life

In reading post-​1945 American poetry of the everyday, I find it useful to

draw from the full gamut of insights and vocabulary associated with the pre-
ceding strains of everyday-​life theory, and I do so in the chapters to come. The
more sociological and political French tradition and its British cultural stud-
ies counterpart call for cultural critique and analysis of micropolitics in daily
life; they often celebrate, and strive for, revolutionary resistance to power
structures and transformation of the everyday. The American vein, much like
the Heideggerian and Wittgensteinian one, is more philosophical in focus,
less directly political, less concerned with uncovering the insidious presence
of capitalism in everyday life. More attuned to the workings of attention, habit,
and ordinary language, the American counterpart conceives of our efforts to
achieve a greater attentiveness to the ordinary and everyday as therapeutic,
as a necessary and ethical task that can lead to personal and intellectual dis-
covery, psychological health, and emancipation. (Nevertheless, I do not mean
to dismiss the political or ethical dimension of the latter strain, which I dis-
cuss shortly, but it is surely less overtly political than the Marxian lineage of
Benjamin, Lefebvre, Debord, de Certeau, or British cultural studies).
Taking into account these various approaches is particularly helpful for under-
standing the contemporary poetics of everyday life because the poetry I discuss
so often plays both sides of this field: at times, and in the hands of certain poets,
the pursuit of the everyday is fiercely political, an attempt to make visible the
workings of power, gender codes, capitalism, and consumerism in the smallest
details of everyday life. We see this mode in action, for example, in the work of
Ron Silliman, in the poetry of motherhood written by Bernadette Mayer, in the
work of an array of younger poets, and in various recent projects of attention, like
Alexandra Nemerov’s “First My Motorola” or Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, which I
discuss in my final chapters. At other times—​for example, in the work of James
Schuyler or A. R. Ammons—​politics is much less of an overt concern; the poetry
is more philosophical, more concerned with perception, attention, the nature of
dailiness and its relationship to art, or the importance of accepting the world as it
is and not as we wish it to be or dream it may be.
For some of these poets, then, everyday-​life aesthetics is less a means to
cultural revolution or of resistance to capitalism, and more a tool for recovery
of the concrete and material world—​a project that I argue has its own ethical
valence. Even for the less “political” of these poets (Schuyler and Ammons,
for instance), the effort to recognize that even the most lowly thing or crea-
ture is magnificent with being, that even garbage has value and meaning,
that what is in directly in front of us is “enough,” that each day is simultane-
ously alike and unique—​this effort is an essential task if one wishes to be fully
awake and alive. Later in this chapter, I discuss in greater detail the ethical
and political stakes inherent in a poetry dedicated in this manner to fostering
new modes of attention.
Crisis of Attention, Everyday-Life Theory, and Contemporary Poetry 57

Gender, Race, and Everyday-​Life Theory

At the same time that this book examines poetry in light of everyday-​life the-
ory, it also considers how developments within poetry and poetics can illu-
minate some of the limitations of philosophical investigations of the everyday
and ordinary. For example, my discussion of poetry and motherhood in
Chapter 4 highlights the fact that daily life has often been constructed and
represented in gendered terms. Fortunately, critics have recently explored the
problematic role of gender in philosophical and aesthetic investigations of
the everyday. For example, in his book Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, Ben
Highmore reluctantly acknowledges that in the tradition he is tracing, “the
masculinist perspective predominates”: “the sphere of everyday life is seen as
quintessentially urban” and “it is the street rather than the home that is seen
as the privileged sphere of everyday life” (12). “For the most part,” Highmore
notes, “women are absent” (74).
The realm of the city has, of course, often been gendered male. From Charles
Baudelaire to Walter Benjamin to Frank O’Hara, the male flâneur—​the wan-
derer who drifts through the city streets, both within and apart from the
crowd—​has been portrayed as the living embodiment of the modern, urban
everyday.25 In her book Modernism and the Ordinary, Liesl Olson argues that
theorists like Lefebvre, de Certeau, and Debord and the Situationists take
“as their ideal figure the rootless urban man”: “The life of urban, pedestrian,
alienated modern man … constitutes the everyday for these theorists” (16).26
The flipside of this idealization of the male experience of urban moder-
nity is the tendency to equate domestic daily life with women and femininity.
As Felski notes, “some groups, such as women and the working class, are
more closely identified with the everyday than others” (“Invention,” 79). This
predilection also rests on a set of deeply engrained assumptions and biases:
“women, like everyday life, have often been defined by negation,” Felski notes.
“Their realm has not been that of war, art, philosophy, scientific endeavor,
high office. What else is left to a woman but everyday life, the realm of the
insignificant, invisible yet indispensable?” (80).27 These theories often link the
everyday’s negative connotations—​routine, drudgery, constriction, habitual
and unreflective automatic and even primitive behavior—​with women, the
feminine, and the domestic.
The most notorious example of this linkage can be found in Lefebvre’s
work. “Everyday life weighs heaviest on women,” Lefebvre wrote in 1968, in
his book Everyday Life in the Modern World. “Some are bogged down by its
peculiar cloying substance, others escape into make-​believe, close their eyes to
their surroundings, to the bog into which they are sinking and simply ignore
it… . [T]‌hey are the subject of everyday life and its victims or objects” ( 73).
Lefebvre goes so far as to argue that even though women suffer the
58 Attention Equals Life

deprivations and contradictions of the everyday most sharply, “they are inca-
pable of understanding it” (73).
Not surprisingly, feminist scholars like Laurie Langbauer and Rita Felski
have bristled at this sweeping claim. As Liesl Olson points out, these crit-
ics have challenged Lefebvre’s treatment of gender, taking “issue with his
intensely masculinist assumptions about domestic and intellectual spheres of
labor” and his belief that “women are not aware of the economic and cultural
complexities of their daily work” (“Everyday Life Studies,” 179).28
Some feminist scholarship has taken an approach that is diametrically
opposed to the Lefebvre model: it has also connected the everyday to women,
but has instead valorized the quotidian domestic sphere in hopes of reclaim-
ing it and bestowing privileged status upon it.29 Felski points out that in some
feminist scholarship,
everyday life has been hailed as a distinctively female sphere and hence
a source of value. The fact that woman traditionally cook, clean, change
diapers, raise children, and do much of the routine work of family repro-
duction is perceived by some feminists as a source of strength. Because of
this grounding in the mundane, it is argued, women have a more realistic
sense of how the world actually operates and are less estranged from their
bodies and from the messy, chaotic, embodies realities of life. Thus, from
the perspective of feminist standpoint theory, women’s connection to daily
life is something to be celebrated. (“Invention” 94)
However, Felski and other recent feminist critics of the everyday find this
argument to be nearly as problematic as the Lefebvre model. Because both
approaches link women with the everyday, they share “a romantic view of both
everyday life and women by associating them with the natural, authentic, and
primitive” (Felski, “Invention,” 94). Bryony Randall is similarly wary of this
move; she argues that by claiming (as Susanne Juhasz does) that “dailiness mat-
ters most to women,” feminist scholarship unfortunately “contributes to a con-
struction of women as somehow more ‘everyday’ than men” (Modernism, 18).
“By suggesting everyday life is particularly gendered female,” Randall asserts,
such studies “risk staying within structures of power which construct gender
in a binary fashion, by simply changing the polarisation of ‘everyday life,’​
making it a good thing rather than a bad thing” (19).
In response to the failings of these various critical models, recent femi-
nist scholars of the everyday warn us to resist the “dichotomy that associates
women with domestic ordinariness and men with the epiphanic revela-
tions of urban life” (Olson, “Everyday Life Studies,” 179). Rather than strip-
ping women of “effective agency and critical consciousness,” and allowing
the rhetoric of the everyday’s “universality” and “commonality” to erase its
ineradicable basis in difference, Langbauer suggests viewing the everyday as
“a site of conflict that makes consensus—​about ‘our’ shared sense of lived
Crisis of Attention, Everyday-Life Theory, and Contemporary Poetry 59

experience as well as ideas about such everyday experience’s transformative

potential in culture—​difficult if not impossible” (“Cultural Studies,” 52).
Similarly, Felski suggests that feminist scholars, as well as those interested
in the everyday in general, should recognize the everyday as precisely the
kind of contested terrain Langbauer describes. They should retire the bravura
claims so dear to both cultural studies and the avant-​garde, about subversion
and resistance, defamiliarization and the shattering of habits, at the same
time that they resist idealistic claims about the female sphere as more authen-
tic and better (since “to affirm women’s special grounding in everyday life is
to take at face value a mythic ideal of heroic male transcendence”) (Felski,
“Invention,” 94). For Felski, it is time to reclaim several crucial categories,
“repetition,” “home,” and “habit”—​a ll vital components of the daily that have
long been too closely associated with women and unnecessarily maligned.
Instead, we must realize that both men and women are “embodied, embedded
subjects who live, for the most part, repetitive, familiar, and ordinary lives”
(“Invention,” 94). We should understand these phenomena as fundamental
parts of every human life, while not forgetting that they are of particular
importance to women’s experience and are worthy of being analyzed as such.
One goal of this book is to argue that the kind of critique I  have been
outlining does not only appear in recent literary criticism and theory. In
­chapter  4, I  argue that Bernadette Mayer’s poetry of the 1970s anticipates
and puts into practice exactly this kind of feminist challenge to canonical,
dominant approaches to the everyday found in both literature and critical
theory. Mayer, along with the other, more recent women poets who follow in
her wake, questions in several ways the familiar equation of the everyday with
the male, urban sphere. Sometimes they upend expectations by writing about
and within the city as women, exploring how women, too, experience the
urban quotidian. And sometimes they insist on the three-​dimensionality and
value of women’s domestic, nonurban daily lives. Either way, they are care-
ful to neither idealize nor demonize women’s quotidian experience. Instead,
they attempt to show the irreducible complexity and variety of women’s daily
lives. Far from being incapable of understanding the everyday and their roles
as subjects shaped by cultural and ideological forces, pace Lefebvre, poets
I discuss exhibit an intense awareness of daily life, especially as it is lived by
a woman in our culture—​its contradictions and limitations, its imbrication
with ideology and political forces, and its pleasures and significance.
Just as some poets I  examine in this study raise questions about deeply
engrained, implicitly gendered constructions of the everyday, others explore
the role of race in thinking and writing about the quotidian.30 As we will
see, poets of color, like Claudia Rankine, Hoa Nguyen, and Harryette Mullen,
challenge the idea that white everyday experience is normative or universal,
reminding us that daily life is always an embodied, situated phenomenon. In
her celebrated 2014 book Citizen, which I discuss in this book’s conclusion,
60 Attention Equals Life

Rankine powerfully evokes the traumatic experience of “everyday racism,”

documenting microaggressions that continuously interrupt and punctuate
daily life for people of color. Rankine’s project shares some critical goals with
many theories of everyday life that seek to expose the workings of power and
ideology in everyday practices, but with a twist, as she discovers that the quo-
tidian in American culture is deeply, often invisibly, marked by racist behav-
iors and attitudes, an insight largely absent from or peripheral to this body
of theory.

Attention and the “Invisible Gorilla” of the Quotidian

If, as I have argued, the contemporary hunger for the everyday is inextricably
tied to anxieties about attention in a culture of distraction, it is surprising
that the concept of “attention” itself has not been more central to theories
and studies of the everyday. It lurks on the margins, but “attention” is not
yet a key term or foundational issue for many discussions of the everyday in
philosophy or literary and cultural studies, and the two issues—​attention and
the everyday—​have mostly been isolated from one another in critical discus-
sion.31 I argue, though, that they are closely related, intertwined, and equally
grounded in conditions of our historical moment. On the one hand, critical
and literary discussions of the everyday focus obsessively on the inability to
notice it and the need to pay better attention to it. On the other hand, discus-
sions of attention often take attention’s object or goal to be the perception
of immediate, daily experience; nevertheless, treatments of attention rarely
foreground the everyday as a salient category.
We can better understand the link between the everyday and the problem
of attention, and the preoccupation with both attentiveness and the quotidian
in contemporary poetry, if we have a fuller sense of the history and nature of
attention itself. Despite the ubiquity of contemporary concerns about atten-
tion that I have been tracing, the concept and history of attention have not
yet garnered much sustained discussion, particularly within literary studies,
a lacuna this book seeks to redress. In her 2012 book Poetry of Attention in the
Eighteenth Century, Margaret Koehler argues that
The history of attention as a philosophical, psychological, and literary con-
cept has received remarkably little treatment. In a culture that expresses
widespread anxiety about attention—​its diagnosable disorders, its mass
disruption by electronic media, its mindful cultivation as an antidote to
stress, its legal ramifications for multitasking behaviors like texting while
driving—​it is unfortunate to find so little examination of the concept’s his-
tory. … Rarely is attention regarded as a culturally and historically condi-
tioned concept, whose features and domains of operation vary over time
Crisis of Attention, Everyday-Life Theory, and Contemporary Poetry 61

… and whose past incarnations might surprise us with both their alien and
familiar qualities. (Poetry of Attention, 15)
As Koehler suggests, “attention” has a history, and in fact, only became solidi-
fied as a concept and an object of study fairly recently. As Jonathan Crary
points out in his important genealogy of attention, “it is in the late nineteenth
century, within the human sciences and particularly the nascent field of scien-
tific psychology, that the problem of attention becomes a fundamental issue,”
for figures ranging from William James and John Dewey to Henri Bergson
and Sigmund Freud (Suspensions of Perception, 13).32
Once established as a field, the functioning of attention quickly has
become a central and highly fruitful area of study for cognitive psychol-
ogy and neuroscience in the twentieth and twenty-​fi rst centuries. 33 In
their introduction to the science of attention, Johnson and Proctor divide
the history of research on attention into five important periods: (1) “phil-
osophic work preceding the founding of the field of psychology” in the
nineteenth century; (2) the groundbreaking research that occurs between
the founding of the field of psychology and 1909; (3) the period from 1910
to 1949, “during which behaviorism flourished and interest in attention
waned to some extent”; (4) by “the resurgence of widespread interest dur-
ing the period of the cognitive revolution from 1950 to 1974”; and (5) the
explosion of “contemporary research dating from 1975 to the present”
(Attention, 2–​3). It is worth stressing that the resurgence of scientific inter-
est in attention coincides with the period this book chronicles, from the
1950s to the present, which in terms of literature features a distinctive turn
to a poetics of attention. 34
Alongside the intense interest in attention in the fields of cognitive psy-
chology and brain science, scholars in a number of overlapping disciplines,
including philosophy, sociology, art history, literary studies, cultural studies,
education, and media studies, have begun to examine the nature and history
of attention and its evolution as a distinct category.35 For example, Crary’s
Suspensions of Perception:  Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (1999),
mentioned earlier, attempts “to sketch some outlines of a genealogy of atten-
tion since the nineteenth century and to detail its role in the modernization
of subjectivity” (2). An art historian and critical theorist, Crary frames his
book as an attempt to better understand where our current concerns about
attention come from: as the jacket copy puts it, the book “provides a histori-
cal framework for understanding the current social crisis of attention amid
the accelerating metamorphoses of our contemporary technological culture.”
Arguing that attention is a historically contingent phenomenon and concept,
Crary observes that “ideas about attention and perception were transformed
in the late nineteenth century alongside the emergence of new technological
forms of spectacle, display, projection, attraction, and recording” (2); in this
62 Attention Equals Life

manner, “attention becomes a specifically modern problem” (4) and a “con-

tested notion” (2).
One of the most important thinkers leading the charge on this issue in the
late nineteenth century was William James, a figure with special importance
to American poetry and many of the writers considered in this study. From
his landmark book The Principles of Psychology (1890) forward, James was fas-
cinated by the nature of attention, a concern he shared with Henri Bergson,
another crucial philosopher of modernism, who wrote to James: “The more
I think about the question, the more I am convinced that life is from one end
to the other a phenomenon of attention” (quoted in R. Richardson, William
James, 430).36
In The Principles of Psychology, James explores a slew of questions raised
by attention: for example, what makes an object interesting to us? How many
things can we attend to at once? How does voluntary attention, which we
control by will, differ from other forms? What is inattention and what causes
us to be unconscious of so many aspects of our lives? In the book, he provides
an early, well-​k nown definition of attention:
Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind,
in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously
possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of con-
sciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in
order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real
opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is
called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German. (Principles of Psychology,
381–​82)
As this definition suggests, James was fascinated above all by the selectivity
of attention. Crary points out that for James and other pioneering figures in
the field, “attention as a process of selection necessarily meant that perception
was an activity of exclusion, of rendering parts of a perceptual field unper-
ceived” (Suspensions of Perception, 24–​25). In The Principles of Psychology,
James argues that attention functions as a crucial filter: “millions of items of
the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into
my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is
what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind—​
without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos” (403).
Because attention is, by definition, partial, James insists that we remain
utterly oblivious to great swaths of our immediate experience. “What is called
our ‘experience’ is almost entirely determined by our habits of attention.
A thing may be present to a man a hundred times, but if he persistently fails to
notice it, it cannot be said to enter into his experience” (Briefer Course, 156). To
illustrate this, James notes that different people will take home entirely differ-
ent impressions of a trip to Europe: “Each has selected, out of the same mass
Crisis of Attention, Everyday-Life Theory, and Contemporary Poetry 63

of presented objects, those which suited his private interest and has made his
experience thereby” (157).
William’s brother Henry may have preached that art requires the most
intense attention when he famously advised that a writer must “try to be one
on whom nothing is lost,” but William acknowledged the difficulties of that
commandment, because in his view almost everything is lost on us anyway.
He was fascinated by how much we fail to notice:
One of the most extraordinary facts of our life is that, although we are
besieged at every moment by impressions from our whole sensory surface,
we notice so very small a part of them. The sum total of our impressions
never enters into our experience, consciously so called, which runs through
this sum total like a tiny rill through a broad flowery mead. Yet the physical
impressions which do not count are there just as much as those which do,
and affect our sense-​organs just as energetically. Why they fail to pierce the
mind is a mystery, which is only named and not explained when we invoke
die Enge des Bewussteins, ‘the narrowness of consciousness,’ as its ground.
(Briefer Course, 192)
James was deeply interested “in the power of habit, in the way in which atten-
tion defines and limits—​indeed constitutes—​our interests” (R. Richardson,
William James, 60). For James, “Each of us literally chooses, by way of attend-
ing to things, what sort of a universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit”
(Principles of Psychology, 424).37
James also argues that the mysterious prevalence of inattention is a con-
stant and utterly necessary part of human existence:
We do not notice the ticking of the clock, the noise of the city streets, or
the roaring of the brook near the house; and even the din of a foundry or
factory will not mingle with the thoughts of its workers, if they have been
there long enough. … The pressure of our clothes and shoes, the beating
of our hearts and arteries, our breathing, certain steadfast bodily pains,
habitual odors, tastes in the mouth, etc., are examples from other senses,
of the same lapse into unconsciousness of any too unchanging content.
(Principles of Psychology, 455)
One could lament, as many do, the heavy costs that stem from the partial-
ity of perception and the narrowness of consciousness caused by habits of
attention. James, however, often views the selective and habitual nature
of attention as our salvation—​our only hope of surviving and making sense
of the world without being swamped by stimuli and drowned in chaos.
Because it is also an inevitable feature of human existence, we must therefore
accept and learn to better understand its workings, especially since our sense
of the world, of “reality” itself, is dependent on attention. Such a view directly
anticipates Frank O’Hara’s remark that I have borrowed for the title of this
64 Attention Equals Life

study:  “an equation in which attention equals Life, or is its only evidence”
(Standing, 184).
Attention—​especially attention to the small, everyday, and marginalized
aspects of our experience—​becomes a cornerstone of James’s entire philo-
sophical project, not only a fundamental part of his study of psychology and
consciousness but also key to his ideas about radical empiricism and pragma-
tism. For example, it is linked to pragmatism’s investment in locating mean-
ing and value in the everyday and ordinary.38 An alertness to the ordinary
is the key lesson of James’s work as a whole, as John J.  McDermott argues
in his introduction to James’s work:  “the philosophy of William James …
teaches us to be always alert to the complications and surprises which inevi-
tably attend even the most ordinary aspects of our lives” (James, Writings,
xiii); his work, McDermott promises, “will cast light on the human situation
and especially on those often neglected recesses of human life where we are
most distinctively ourselves” (xii). This sounds a great deal like the argument
poets of the everyday so often make:  art can teach us to be more alert, be
more attentive, to the complexity and strangeness of the quotidian and the
“neglected recesses of human life.”
James’s understanding of attention proved to be prescient, as it became
the cornerstone for a great deal of research in cognitive psychology, as well
as a preview of contemporary debates in our culture about the nature of
attention in a perilously distracted age.39 Today, the American Psychological
Association defines attention as “a state of focused awareness on a subset of
the available perceptual information,” and Johnson and Proctor begin their
textbook on attention with an image that echoes James’s famous description
of the world’s “booming, buzzing confusion,” as well as his notion of atten-
tion as a process of selection and filtering:
at any moment in time, we are bombarded with various stimuli, only some
of which are relevant to our current goals and only a few of which will
ever reach our consciousness. The many stimuli present may each require
a different action—​actions that often are incompatible with each other. …
The study of attention is concerned with how people are able to coordinate
perception and action to achieve goals. (Attention, 1)
Developments in neuroscience and psychology have only further con-
firmed what James intuited about the nature of attention.40 In 1998, Arien
Mack and Irvin Rock introduced the notion of “inattentional blindness”—​
the inability to perceive something that is within one’s direct perceptual
field because one’s attention is focused elsewhere.41 This phenomenon, also
known as perceptual, or attention, blindness, is vividly illustrated by the
well-​k nown “invisible gorilla test” developed by psychologists Christopher
Chabris and Daniel Simons in the late 1990s. Chabris and Simons describe
their experiment thus:
Crisis of Attention, Everyday-Life Theory, and Contemporary Poetry 65

Imagine you are asked to watch a short video in which six people—​t hree
in white shirts and three in black shirts—​pass basketballs around. While
you watch, you must keep a silent count of the number of passes made by
the people in white shirts. At some point, a gorilla strolls into the middle of
the action, faces the camera and thumps its chest, and then leaves, spend-
ing nine seconds on screen. Would you see the gorilla? Almost everyone
has the intuition that the answer is “yes, of course I  would.” How could
something so obvious go completely unnoticed? But when we did this
experiment at Harvard University several years ago, we found that half
of the people who watched the video and counted the passes missed the
gorilla. It was as though the gorilla was invisible. This experiment reveals
two things: that we are missing a lot of what goes on around us, and that we
have no idea that we are missing so much.42 (“Invisible Gorilla”)

Cathy Davidson’s 2011 book, with the very au courant title Now You See It: How
the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and
Learn, begins by invoking the gorilla test as an illustration of the problem of
attention and distraction in contemporary culture. She draws upon it to illus-
trate the idea that our attention is necessarily fragmented and partial: “That’s
how the visual cortex is structured. We think we see the whole world, but we
actually see a very particular part of it. For a lot of neuroscientists, that’s the
cautionary message of the gorilla experience: we’re not nearly as smart as we
think we are” (2).43
Like Davidson, I view the invisible gorilla test as both a fascinating scien-
tific study and a handy metaphor for the problem of attention. Writers and
artists have long sought to combat this attention blindness, with increasing
fervor since romanticism and the nineteenth century. In his famous 1917
essay “Art as Technique,” the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky wrote: “If
we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception
becomes habitual, it becomes automatic… . And so life is reckoned as noth-
ing. Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear
of war” (in Adams, Critical Theory, 799–​800). As Shklovsky declares, one of
the primary aims of art is to make us newly aware of that which normally
passes beneath notice, through tactics like defamiliarization:

And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make
one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the
sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The
technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult,
to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of
perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. (800)

In our own age of distraction, however, the goal Shklovsky outlines

has become exponentially more difficult and more and more urgent and
66 Attention Equals Life

necessary. As this book will argue, what contemporary poetics of everyday

life so often tries to make us notice is the “invisible gorilla” of the quotidian,
standing right in the middle of things, thumping its hairy chest, undetected
and ignored.

Shifting Geometries of Attention: Reconceptualizing

Attention as Ethics

If one believes that combating attentional blindness and shifting of habits

of attention are primary goals of art, it lends the aesthetic a vital ethical, at
times political, dimension. This conviction lies at the heart of the avant-​garde
everyday-​life aesthetics that is the focus of this book: it matters, deeply, which
aspects of experience we notice and which we fail to register. If, as James
claims, “My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which
I notice shape my mind” (Principles of Psychology, 402), then it stands to rea-
son that changing what one notices will change the shape of one’s mind and
alter one’s experience of the world.
A theme running through the works I discuss in this book is that everyday-​
life art and poetry can provide us with the practical tools and instruments we
need to pay better attention to the daily. This belief lends everyday-​life aes-
thetics a pedagogical, or even mildly didactic, thrust. Try this, they seem to
say, and you too can awaken to your own daily life and become less estranged
from that which is most familiar. In a discussion of John Cage, Gerald Bruns
argues that Cage’s work shows us “how to listen, not just in the music hall, but
in everyday life. Aesthetics has, in effect, been reconceptualized as ethics”
(“Francis Ponge,” 206). Susan Sontag suggests something similar when she
observes that “art is a technique for focusing attention, for teaching skills of
attention” (“Aesthetics of Silence,”13).
In her 2003 book The Poethical Wager, the poet and critic Joan Retallack
provides a useful framework and vocabulary for understanding this aspect of
avant-​garde aesthetics, one that I trace through this book. Bringing together a
number of concerns central to my study—​poetry, the avant-​garde, attention,
realism, ethics, and everyday-​life aesthetics—​Retallack begins with the prem-
ise that “Every philosophy, every narrative, every poem, every piece of visual
art or music organizes our noticing according to its implicit and enacted
geometries of attention” (175).44 She isolates an avant-​garde tendency that she
calls “a poethics of complex realism,” a mode that “reconfigures” those geom-
etries, creating “new vectors of attention” that can alter and expand our sense
of the real (184).
Retallack takes John Cage as her exemplary figure for this mode because
Cage so powerfully demonstrates that “the transformation of the nature
Crisis of Attention, Everyday-Life Theory, and Contemporary Poetry 67

of attention was the key to the constructive transfiguration of experience”

(Poethical Wager, 176):

John Cage has given us two major figure/​ground revolutions. Because of

his work we are able to hear noise as music. We are also able to hear silence
as sound and, more generally, as those presences (natural and cultural) we
have not been attending to. This enlargement of the scope of our noticing
allows one to understand aesthetic, meditative, and social silences as all
having to do with qualities and choices of attention (184–​85)

Cage’s aesthetics of “heightened attention” is driven by the command-

ment: “Notice where you are, Look around, Listen.” Implicitly following the
Jamesian model that deems attention to be selective and partial, Retallack
points out that

This is more complicated than one might think, not just a matter of swivel-
ing the head. Every structure embodies a geometry of attention that ren-
ders some things audible/​v isible and others inaudible/​invisible. Cultures
do their orientational work in large part unconsciously/​unintentionally in
naturalized figure-​ground relations that appear to be simply the way things
are. Habits of perception are difficult to inspect. … The question that must
be continually addressed, if one is to live in one’s times, is how to invite the
most recalcitrant, even hazardous silences into the conversation. This is a
complicated figure-​ground puzzle that involves reconfiguring geometries
of attention. (175–​76)

Retallack argues that art must constantly contend with, and challenge, cul-
tural and political forces that create those rigid geometries of attention.
By foregrounding certain things and concealing, silencing, and margin-
alizing others, dominant systems and discourses actually determine our
sensible reality.
Retallack’s vocabulary here tacitly echoes the work of the French philoso-
pher Jacques Rancière, as Tom Fisher points out in an essay on the politics of
Language poetry. For Rancière, art and politics are united in “reconfiguring
the distribution of the sensible which defines the common of a community,
to introduce into it new subjects and objects, to render visible what had not
been, and to make heard as speakers those who had been perceived as mere
noisy animals” (Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 25). As Fisher notes,
Rancière argues that

within an established distribution of the sensible, certain people and things

are simply not seen or heard. … For Rancière, it is precisely art’s capacity
to intervene on, interrupt, and redetermine the established ‘distribution
of the sensible’ that constitutes the ground of the political. Indeed, like
68 Attention Equals Life

politics itself, the aesthetic for Rancière redistributes the sensible to make
new sense possible. (Fisher, “Making Sense,” 164)

To alter the “coordinates of perception” in this way has political implications—​

to this way of thinking, the aesthetic is, like politics, a form of “dissensus.”
It challenges the given and naturalized “cartography of the sensible and the
thinkable” and, in effect, creates “a new partition of the perceptible” (Rancière,
Dissensus, 143, 122).45
Building on Rancière and Retallack, this book presents a model of everyday-​
life poetics that relies on three interrelated ideas: (1) for the elusive everyday to
become legible and its elements perceptible, a reconfiguration of the geometry
of attention is often necessary; (2) form matters—​certain aesthetic styles and
forms, experiments and projects, are designed to achieve this “enlargement of
the scope of our noticing,” this “redistribution of the sensible”; and (3) achiev-
ing this repartitioning is an act that potentially has real-​world, off-​the-​page,
political implications: if such poetry can disrupt the established distribution
of the sensible, it has the power to redetermine “what (and who) can be heard
and seen” and unconceal “what would otherwise remain silent in the figure-​
ground patterns of history”—​for example, the realities of poverty and depri-
vation, the lives and voices of oppressed and marginalized, the workings of
power or capitalism in everyday life, and so on (Fisher, “Making Sense,” 171n5;
Retallack, Poethical Wager, 10).
This mindset explains the ethical imperative that seems to drive many fig-
ures in this book: the fervent belief in the necessity for improving our atten-
tion to the daily, the ordinary, and the lowly. For example, A. R. Ammons
laments in a notebook entry that “there aren’t as many people paying attention
as there are needing it” (“Selected Letters,” 616). In one of most well-​k nown
poems, “Still,” the speaker comes across a beggar with “stumps for legs” and
realizes that “nobody was paying /​him any attention: everybody went on by.”
“I nestled in and found his life,” he writes, a moment which sparks the real-
ization that everything is “magnificent / with being!” (Ammons, Collected,
140–​41).
The notion that expanding the narrowness of consciousness can be an
ethical or political act is key to the everyday-​life poetics that I  address in
this book. For example, as I  argue in my discussion of Bernadette Mayer
and other women writers in ­chapter 4, poets of the maternal everyday seek
to disrupt established geometries of attention that have rendered the condi-
tions and experiences of women’s lives, especially their daily lives as moth-
ers, largely invisible. In response, these women poets develop a quotidian
poetics that is driven by a desire to reallocate attention, to enlarge the scope
of our noticing—​a llowing the concrete details, the material conditions, and
the micropolitics inherent in being a mother and woman to become visible.
The poet Lisa Robertson takes up the same idea, and explicitly draws on
Crisis of Attention, Everyday-Life Theory, and Contemporary Poetry 69

Rancière’s vocabulary, in her book of poems Cinema of the Present, where

she states:  “Feminism wants to expand the sensorium” (24). Similarly, Ron
Silliman’s poetry devotes itself to the act of noticing “ignored areas of expe-
rience,” which often involve the nearly imperceptible operations of race,
class, and gender in everyday life. Recent works by poets Brenda Coultas
and Alexandra Nemerov redirect our noticing so that we might witness the
effects of contemporary capitalism and the media on daily life, while Claudia
Rankine makes visible the usually unnoticed microaggressions people of
color experience every day.
Contemporary poetry, then, develops new structures and forms that
might realize and dramatize the political implications of a Lefebvrean
approach to the quotidian. The critique of everyday life, in this lineage,
strives to give us insight into the deprivations and inequities of modern
daily life, and perhaps even some tools that might help us resist its coloniza-
tion by capitalism. As Laurie Langbauer argues, “attention to the everyday
is important because it is there that we can we can see how society works”
given that “everyday life is one medium through which capitalism estab-
lishes itself ” (“Cultural Studies,” 50). For some theorists and writers, “atten-
tion to the everyday therefore becomes a form of ‘cultural revolution’ ” (50).
Rae Armantrout speaks to this goal in regard to her own poetry: “I could
call what I  do a sort of ‘poetry of witness’—​except, instead of witnessing
great events, I  tend to focus on the interventions of capitalism into con-
sciousness” (Collected, 120). By the same token, everyday-​life poetics makes
clear the risks of inattentiveness to the quotidian:  not only do we miss
out on noticing and understanding perhaps the most crucial and valuable
sphere of human experience, but we may also remain oblivious to the ways
in which our lives are governed by politics, ideology, power dynamics, and
other forces.
Not all the poets I  discuss are overtly concerned with the invasion of
everyday life by capitalism and ideology. However, even the less “politi-
cal” of these poets, like Schuyler and Ammons, view the act of noticing as
important, vital, and politically and ethically necessary, a theme common
to many poets of the everyday. Charles Bernstein goes so far as to define
poetry itself in these terms:  “poetics is an ethical engagement with the
shifting conditions of everyday life” (Attack, 78). This could almost stand
as a motto for the aesthetic tendency I discuss in what follows. As we will
see, everyday-​life poets often view their job as offering their audiences a
toolkit for how to exist and respond to the world, one that individuals can
potentially adopt for themselves: how to listen, look, pay attention, not just
in the concert hall or while reading a book but also in the course of day-​
to-​day life itself.
 { 2 }

“Each Day So Different, Yet Still Alike”

James Schuyler and the Elusive Everyday

James Schuyler has long been viewed as a quintessential poet of the everyday,
hailed for his charming, inspiring attentiveness to the here and now. One of
the founding members of the New York School of poets, Schuyler has been
described as “quietly Whitmanic, a planetary celebrator,” and as “a poet of
the immediate, of views out of train and restaurant windows, of lawns and
plants,” whose “subject matter, ostensible and real, is the flux of everyday life”
(Lehman, Last Avant-​Garde, 266; Moss, “James Schuyler,” 14). His poems are
routinely praised for the fresh and inventive ways they track the minute fluc-
tuations of the weather and the sky, observe the ordinary goings-​on outside a
window, catalog and praise the ephemera of his daily existence.1
The usual short-​hand estimations of James Schuyler as a poet dedicated
to an exact rendering of the ordinary and “real” are by no means wrong, but
they do threaten to reduce the complexity of his work. When we think of
Schuyler as primarily a poet of realism and mimesis, the quotidian snap-
shot, and the limpid lyric, we overlook some of what makes his poetry so
powerful, lasting, and timely. At every turn, Schuyler’s work remains skepti-
cal of the classic realist project and distrustful of claims to objectivity, mas-
tery, and transparency in language and representation. For all his interest in
descriptive exactitude, Schuyler continually finds himself crashing into the
limitations of language and the impossibility of representational fidelity: in
his elegy for Frank O’Hara, “Buried At Springs,” Schuyler describes a view
of the bay and islands on the coast of Maine with characteristically meticu-
lous detail—​“ feathery ripe heads of grass, /​an acid-​yellow kind of /​golden-
rod glowing or glowering/​in shade”—​only to suddenly interrupt himself in
frustration: “It is not like this at all” (Collected, 43). To some extent, Schuyler
was simply uninterested in conventional “realism.” In fact, he resisted the
idea that his goal was transparent mimesis or accurate description in the first
place; for instance, when an interviewer asked him “Is your aim to precisely
James Schuyler and the Elusive Everyday 71

render the realistic scene?” his blunt reply was “No, I hope not” (Thompson,
“Interview,” 116).
Just as Schuyler’s writing is hardly the apotheosis of an aesthetic dedica-
tion to representing “things as they are,” it is also not merely the exuberant
celebration of the daily and ordinary that it is so often praised as being. It is,
rather, an aesthetically and philosophically complex body of work, shaped
by a profound sense of the everyday’s paradoxes and ambiguities. In this
way, Schuyler’s approach to the everyday resembles Henri Lefebvre’s belief
in the everyday as a bundle of contradictions: “In one sense there is noth-
ing more simple and more obvious,” Lefebvre writes; “nothing could be
more superficial: it is banality, triviality, repetitiveness. And in yet another
sense nothing could more profound” (Critique 2: 47). As Maurice Blanchot
observes: “Always the two sides meet: the daily with its tedious side, pain-
ful and sordid (the amorphous, the stagnant), and the inexhaustible, irre-
cusable, always unfinished daily that always escapes forms or structures”
(“Everyday Speech,” 13).
Schuyler’s poems relentlessly explore the set of contradictions proposed
by Lefebvre, Blanchot, and other philosophers:  that the everyday is always
both impoverished and bountiful, boring and fascinating, forgettable and
memorable, repetitive and different, familiar and surprising at the exact same
time.2 For example, his late long poem “A Few Days” begins by announcing
the task that propelled his poetry from the start while also acknowledging
what makes that goal so difficult to achieve:
A few days
are all we have. So count them as they pass. They pass
too quickly
(Collected, 354)

The poem recognizes some questions nagging at any everyday-​life aesthetic:

     A few days: how to celebrate them?

  It’s today I want
to memorialize but how can I? What is there to it?
  Cold coffee and
a ham-​salad sandwich?
(Collected, 356)

For Schuyler, the urgent need to attend to and capture the passing day is
always at war with two powerful counter-​forces: the very dailiness and incon-
sequentiality that make it ordinary in the first place (“what is there to it?”)
and a nagging sense that the effort to memorialize or pin down the daily itself
is an impossible one:
72 Attention Equals Life

It’s cool
  for August and I
can’t nail the days down. They go by like escalators, each alike,
   each with its own
message of tears and laughter.
(Collected, 358)

“I /​can’t nail the days down”: the admission is a rather poignant one for a
poet who has staked his entire life’s work on the prospect of using daily life as
the basis for art. It illustrates precisely why any account of Schuyler’s poetry
that casts him as a poet whose work represents the things of the world with
uncanny precision, or as a celebrator of the daily, doesn’t quite do justice to
his poems or the beliefs that underlie them. Over and over, Schuyler con-
fronts the paradox that the everyday life is both repetitive and ever-​changing.
As he puts it in one poem:

Each
day so different
yet still alike
in waiting weather.
(Collected, 177)

How can one adequately render the passing days if they go by “like escala-
tors, each alike, /​each with its own /​message”? (358). By writing poetry that
explores the everyday as a knot of opposites, that both insists on the every-
day’s supreme importance and acknowledges that it largely confounds our
attempts to represent and understand it, Schuyler puts into practice many
of the themes of everyday-​life theory. For these reasons, he can be seen as an
exemplary figure for the lineage of everyday-​life poetics this book traces.
In what follows, I argue that Schuyler’s fascination with the everyday, its
elusiveness and complexity, also leads him to create a body of work that is
more formally various, more radically experimental, more influenced by col-
lage and other disruptive avant-​garde strategies, than it is often taken to be. In
particular, I highlight the crucial connection between Schuyler’s longstand-
ing love for the assemblages of the Dada artist Kurt Schwitters and the collage
aesthetic he develops in his poetry, in which the poet’s selection and juxtapo-
sition of everyday materials and detritus is of the utmost importance.
Rather than thinking of Schuyler in terms of transparency, immediacy,
clarity, or conventional realism, I argue for a new way of seeing Schuyler—​
as a radical empiricist, a materialist, a practitioner of experimental realism,
deeply skeptical of transcendence, idealism, sentimentality, and mimesis,
and drawn to formal experimentation, self-​reflexivity, and practices of col-
lage and appropriation. For all his wariness of pretension or pomposity,
James Schuyler and the Elusive Everyday 73

Schuyler’s poetry embodies a quite serious philosophical and ethical stance

toward everyday life, one that his poems both meditate upon and put into
practice. At its heart, Schuyler’s philosophy of the everyday is founded on an
acceptance of the ordinary as it is (an outlook that resembles key motifs
in the work of philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell),
which leads him to resist at nearly every turn the temptation to romanticize,
heighten, or idealize experience. For this reason, any critical approach that
depends on what I have called the “transformation trope,” which praises art
for uncovering the extraordinary within the ordinary and for allowing us
to transcend the mundane, offers little purchase in reading Schuyler’s work,
which is so steadfast in its devotion to the everydayness of the everyday itself.
As John Koethe observes, in Schuyler’s work “the commonplace is not trans-
figured, but remains defiantly ordinary” (“A Brief Appreciation,” 33).
In doing so, Schuyler’s poetry both builds on and revises the everyday-​life
aesthetic tradition. Adopting its fascination with the ordinary and drawing
upon many of its moves and devices, Schuyler also resists the familiar gender-
ing of the everyday that has often served as a foundation for discussions of
the quotidian. Rather than equating the everyday with the “male” preserve of
the city, Schuyler elevates (and, one might say, queers) the domestic, the inti-
mate spaces of home and body—​long seen as the province of the “feminine”
daily—​and proudly stakes them out as his own aesthetic territory. Schuyler’s
poems are set in gardens (they are suffused with flowers) or on a porch sofa
overlooking the sea, in an apartment by a window or in kitchens or bath-
rooms or in bed. At the same time, though he is a wonderful poet of the city,
he almost entirely eschews viewing daily life through the figure of the male,
urban flâneur: the speakers of his poems are almost never darting about the
city à la Frank O’Hara or Ted Berrigan but, rather, observe the dynamism
of New York City from a stationary spot by a window. If, as Rita Felski has
argued, everyday-​life studies has too often ignored some of the key features of
the everyday—​especially “repetition,” “home,” and “habit”—​or, worse, nega-
tively portrayed them as somehow lesser, or inherently “feminine,” Schuyler’s
body of work consistently explores and recuperates these categories; he
adapts them to mirror his own experience as a gay man and explodes the
idea that they should be closely identified with women’s experience (Felski,
“Invention”).
Schuyler’s recognition of the problems at the heart of any everyday-​life
aesthetic—​such as the urgent necessity to pay attention to the everyday and
the simultaneous impossibility of capturing or rendering it, the strange and
contradictory nature of the quotidian—​provokes him to experiment with both
form and content to better convey its unusual qualities. It leads him, for exam-
ple, to explore the use of parataxis, fragmentation, and found materials and
overheard, “ordinary” language; to interweave hyper-​precise observations of
experience with tart skepticism about the fidelity of any kind of representation;
74 Attention Equals Life

and to use catalogs and lists and other tools that aim for maximum inclusiv-
ity. It causes him to blur the genre boundaries between poem, diary, and let-
ter, and to develop a new kind of long poem that depends on a continuous
seriality that avoids climax and closure. Although Schuyler’s long poems do
not seem to have been composed according to specific, predetermined rules
or constraints, they are akin to other “everyday-​life projects” I discuss in this
book because they seem to have arisen from a willful process of daily addition,
in which the poet continuously adds to the poem each day over a period of
time. Furthermore, as we will see, Schuyler found such projects intriguing and
even partook in some, as he suggests in poems like “Salute” and “Trash Book,”
which detail the poet’s collage-​like, procedural experiments in gathering and
cataloging ordinary objects and detritus based on predetermined rules.
In general, Schuyler’s recognition of the everyday’s paradoxes provokes
him to adapt and reinvent a whole battery of forms and modes—​the pastoral,
the ekphrastic, the elegy, the letter poem, the to-​do list, the long poem—​as
tools in his pursuit of the quotidian. For Schuyler, such tactics function as
“traps for the attention,” to borrow a compelling and apt phrase from Douglas
Crase’s discussion of Schuyler’s work that I mentioned in my introduction
(“Voice Like the Day,” 231). His work is both driven by a burning need to pay
attention to immediate, quotidian experience, and a constant awareness of
how much easier said it is than done. Like other writers in this book, Schuyler
probes the limitations of attention and the threat of distraction, even as he
attempts to develop new modes of harnessing and directing the attention. At
the same time, Schuyler worries about the problem of what to do with what
one attends to: how to give shape to the everyday, how to convert the day, each
and any day, into form, language, and poetry without falsifying it, distorting
it, or sapping its vitality and strangeness and contradiction.
In recent years, Schuyler’s work—​long overshadowed by his fellow New York
School poets Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery—​has become an increasingly
important touchstone for contemporary poets. Although Schuyler is hardly a
household name, even within the confines of contemporary poetry, there has
been a recent burst of attention to his work, whether in the form of younger
poets paying tribute to his example, as in a pair of poems written “After James
Schuyler” in Jennifer Moxley’s critically praised 2009 book, Clampdown, or a
book-​length poem by the conceptual poet Robert Fitterman, which “borrows
its poetic form, loosely, from James Schuyler’s ‘The Morning of the Poem,’ to
orchestrate hundreds of found articulations of sadness and loneliness from
blogs and online posts” (Hamilton, Review of Fitterman).3 We have seen the
2010 publication of Schuyler’s Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems by a major
commercial press (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), and various reappraisals of his
work and its contemporaneity, such as a recent celebration of his writing on
the widely read Poetry Foundation website (Ziegenhagen). In just the past few
James Schuyler and the Elusive Everyday 75

years, a spate of sophisticated critical essays have appeared that investigate vari-
ous aspects of Schuyler’s work after a long period of relative critical neglect.4
I take this flurry of interest in Schuyler to be a sign that his poetry speaks
to contemporary concerns and is in touch with the Zeitgeist in some salient
ways. Schuyler’s poetry incorporates the pleasures and interruptions of tele-
vision (“Some-​/​one is watching morning /​TV. I’m not reduced to that /​
yet” [Collected, 256]) and pop and rock music in the 1960s and 1970s (with
poems name-​checking Janis Joplin and the Who and “Carly Simon /​on the
juke” [149–​51]). Buffeted by the effects of the increasingly mediated culture
of the postwar period, Schuyler responded by prizing careful observation of
immediate, concrete experience and views writing and art as opportunities to
carve out a space in all that teeming stimulation where the small gestures and
pleasures of daily life (which include the inevitable impingements of media
and other forms of distraction) can be preserved and made meaningful. In
other words, Schuyler’s work continues to be relevant in part because of its
groundbreaking and prescient approach to the everyday and its concerns
about the problem of attentiveness in an age of distraction. Key aspects of the
poetry—​his conviction that the minutiae of daily life is tremendously valu-
able, his efforts to document and share personal details about his own life
(including his experiences as a gay man and his struggles with mental illness),
and his self-​consciousness about the process of making art from daily experi-
ence—​foreshadow trends in contemporary culture that were only beginning
to emerge in the period between the 1950s and 1970s when he wrote the bulk
of his poetry.5 Schuyler offers us insight into how and why our contempo-
rary preoccupation with the daily evolved. He provides both an enlightening
investigation of the everyday and a stirring, memorable example of how to
engage with it creatively—​without lapsing into sentiment and bathos, with
healthy doses of irony and self-​awareness, and by refusing to simplify the
daily by reifying it or turning it into its opposite.

“To Be as Attentive as Possible”: James Schuyler, Fairfield Porter,

and the Everyday as the Ultimate Form of Knowledge

The poet and critic Douglas Crase, a friend of Schuyler’s, once hinted at the
seriousness of Schuyler’s investment in the quotidian when he recalled that
Schuyler was “our own moralist of the everyday. He didn’t so much teach as
exemplify, which is the way it should be, since even the wisest lessons sound
like drivel” (“Voice Like the Day,” 226). What Schuyler exemplifies, the moral
stance his poetry models, is how one can—​as well as why one should—​lead
a life buoyed by an attentiveness to daily life. Although many writers turn
to ordinary experience as vital subject matter for their writing, Schuyler
goes further, consciously adopting the everyday as a central category and
76 Attention Equals Life

conceptual term for his thinking about art, as well as for his own poetry.
“Daily life,” “the day,” “the everyday,” “the ordinary”—​these are not just ideas
critics can apply to Schuyler’s work after the fact but also frequently recurring
phrases, keywords, and concepts that the poet himself uses overtly through-
out his poems and his extensive body of art criticism.
One of the most distinctive features of Schuyler’s poetry is his penchant
for making the day itself a tangible presence in—​even the protagonist of—​his
poetry. In a 1989 introduction to one of the few live readings Schuyler ever
gave, Bill Berkson highlighted this unusual aspect of Schuyler’s work: “in the
poems, the heroic figure is more often than not the day itself, its motions,
light, weather, objects, people, memories, its luck just to be there posing and
gesticulating for such a poet” (Introduction).6 In poem after poem, Schuyler
writes apostrophes to the day, so that it becomes something to converse with,
inspect, caress, criticize, and meditate upon:
I think
I will write you a letter,
June day. Dear June Fifth,
you’re all in green, so
many kinds and all one
green, tree shadow on
grass blades and grass
blade shadows.
(Collected, 161)

Or:

Evening of a day in early March,

you are like the smell of drains
in a restaurant where pâté maison
is a slab of cold meat loaf
damp and wooly. You lack charm.
(Collected, 36)

Or:

O Day!
 literal
and unsymbolic
      day:
silken: gray: sunny:
(Collected, 128)
James Schuyler and the Elusive Everyday 77

By giving “the day” a tangible form, by endowing it with agency and per-
sonality, Schuyler combats the usual inconspicuousness and insignifi-
cance of the everyday, of each passing day. A day can even become a poem,
as can be seen in the titles of so many Schuyler poems named after specific
dates, like “3/​23/​66” and “Dec. 28, 1974.” In “The Morning of the Poem,”
he writes:

  This day, I want to

Send it to you, the sound of stirring air, soft
  sunlight, quivering trees
That shake their needles and leaves like fingers
   improvising on a keyboard
Scriabin in his softest mood, and the wind
   rises and it all goes Delius,
The sky pale and freshly washed, the blue flaked
   off here and there and
Showing white, flat and skimpy clouds haunting
   a bright green, a soft blue day.
(Collected, 275)

In this manner, Schuyler sets up a reciprocal equation: a day can lend a poem
a shape, just as a poem can give form to a day:

       The sun
puts on its smile.
The day had a bulge
around three p.m. After,
it slips, cold and quiet,
into night.

(166)

By depicting the day’s “bulge,” Schuyler tracks the day’s progress, and finds
a form for the shape he perceives. With such gestures, Schuyler foregrounds
that strange alchemy by which days become poems.
Schuyler seems to arrive at this commitment to the daily, this devotion to
the “literal/​and unsymbolic/​day,” in one of his most important early poems,
“February,” which catches the poet at the very moment of a conversion to
an everyday-​life aesthetic. Written in 1954, the poem seems to have been a
breakthrough for Schuyler, ushering in his mature style and set of concerns;
years later, he decided to give it pride of place as the second poem in Freely
Espousing, his debut full-​length collection, published in 1969.7 “February” is
one of the first of Schuyler’s many “window” poems; it sets out to recount
exactly what could be seen from his apartment window in New York during a
78 Attention Equals Life

wintry sunset, at precisely 5 p.m. “on the day before March first.” Fortunately
for us, Schuyler discussed the composition of this poem in a letter he wrote
(and apparently never mailed) to a woman (“Miss Batie”) who had written a
fan letter to him about his poems. In the letter, he explains that
the day on which I wrote the poem I had been trying to write a poem in
a regular form about (I think) Palermo, the Palazzo Abatelli, which has
splendid carved stone ropes around its doors and windows, and the chapels
decorated by Serpotta with clouds of plaster cherubs; the poem turned out
laborious and flat, and looking out the window I saw that something marvel-
ous was happening to the light, transforming everything. It then occurred
to me that this happened more often than not (a beautiful sunset I mean)
and that it was “a day like any other,” which I put down as a title. The rest of
poem popped out of its own accord. Or so it seems now. (Just the Thing, 240)
By deciding to abandon the other, unwritten hymn to Palermo and Serpotta’s
baroque cherubs, and by choosing to write “February” instead, Schuyler
seems to have stumbled upon a recognition about subject matter, about atten-
tiveness to daily life, and about form.
Schuyler describes a sudden decision to reject the “laborious and flat” exer-
cise he had been working on, a poem in a traditional, inherited form that took
for its subject an exotic location and a masterpiece of Western art (traits, clichés
even, associated with the dominant New Critical mode of mid-​century verse).
Instead, he realizes a poem could be born simply from paying close attention
to the present and immediate, to what was happening outside his window: an
ordinary evening in New York City at sunset. By doing so, Schuyler enacts
the movement Emerson calls for in “The American Scholar”—​he turns away
from the remote and the antique, and toward the common, the low, and the
familiar. Suddenly aware that this kind of “marvelous” event happens “more
often than not,” that it literally occurs every day, and that only our inattention
obscures it from view, Schuyler discovers a new, more vital mode of writ-
ing, one highly attuned to what is happening right in front our noses, all the
time. In a way, the anecdote about the genesis of Schuyler’s “February” neatly
recapitulates the emergence of the New American Poetry in the 1950s more
broadly, which saw poets like Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer,
Allen Ginsberg, and Frank O’Hara rejecting what they saw as the stultifying,
artificial conventions of mid-​century poetry and embracing organic form,
quotidian experience, and colloquial language.
Interestingly, the resulting poem itself serves as both the fruit of that rec-
ognition and a meta-​commentary on it. Defiantly spurning what he calls (in
the letter to Batie) “regular form,” Schuyler instead writes a free-​verse poem
in a colloquial voice, with enjambed lines, surprising line breaks, quick asso-
ciative leaps, and repetition (as in the last four lines), using precise and fresh
images to notate how the speaker’s eye perceives the minute and shifting
James Schuyler and the Elusive Everyday 79

details of an ordinary dusk in Manhattan. For example, he carefully recreates

the way the pink of the tulips on the windowsill echoes the colors of the set-
ting sun in the sky and building façades, and vividly etches the gritty details
of the urban scene. At the same time, the poem allows the present to mingle
with memories of the past—​in particular, glimpses of the Mediterranean
are interwoven with the Manhattan scene—​in an associative fashion that is
meant to mirror the way consciousness actually moves in daily life.
Then, in the middle of the poem, the speaker’s jaw drops open at the won-
derful, accidental congruence of this contingent everyday moment: “I can’t
get over /​how it all works in together /​like a woman who just came to her
window /​and stands there filling it /​jogging a baby in her arms” (Collected, 5).
Rather than dwelling, or concluding the poem, on this moment of insight or
revelation, as many other poets might have done, the poem ends:

It’s getting grayer and gold and chilly.

Two dog-​size lions face each other
at the corners of a roof.
It’s the yellow dust inside the tulips.
It’s the shape of a tulip.
It’s the water in the drinking glass the tulips are in.
It’s a day like any other.
(Collected, 5)

Schuyler deliberately leaves open what “it” is meant to refer to—​is “it” the
meaning of this specific everyday moment? February? Life? Poetry? The every-
day? While the reference remains loose and indeterminate, the passage, with its
insistence underscored by repetition, makes a declaration about what is valuable,
what is worth noticing, as it zooms in like a telephoto lens to see the dust inside
the flowers and then pulls back to consider the entire, ordinary day in which
all these things occur. It also registers the mixture of repetition and variety in
everyday life that will so fascinate Schuyler throughout his career. Despite, or
perhaps because of, all its richness and vitality, this day is, in the end just “like
any other.”8 The poem’s conclusion turns the everyday—​and everydayness—​
into its central theme and subject, as well as an object of representation.
Critics have often, and understandably, associated Schuyler’s poetry and
its interest in rendering daily life with the work of the painter Fairfield Porter,
along with that of other postwar New York artists who experimented with
figurative painting during the age of abstraction, like Jane Freilicher and
Larry Rivers. After meeting in 1952, Schuyler and Porter quickly became close
friends and aesthetic allies, and spent the next two decades working (some-
times literally) side by side and developing a relationship that was in some
ways even a collaborative or symbiotic one.9 David Lehman observes that “of
the poets in the New York School, Porter was closest to Schuyler personally
80 Attention Equals Life

and in artistic temperament. There is a sense in which Porter’s paintings and

Schuyler’s poems amount to a largely unconscious collaboration of kindred
sensibilities” (Last Avant-​Garde, 328).10
During the heady days of Abstract Expressionism’s ascendancy, Porter
and other painters in their circle rejected Clement Greenberg’s proclama-
tion that abstraction was the only viable approach for truly modern art and
scoffed at his prohibitions against figurative painting. They defiantly chose
to work in a more representational mode at the very moment that Abstract
Expressionism was at its peak in the 1940s and 1950s. But they did so only
after absorbing its innovations. Like Schuyler, the painters returned to figura-
tion after prolonged exposure to avant-​garde experimentation with disjunc-
tion and abstraction, an experience that only deepened their obsession with
the simultaneous allure and impossibility of representation. Together, Porter
and Schuyler hit upon a style of rendering the everyday whose power and
novelty came from its ability to tensely balance the representational and the
abstract—​a mode I refer to as experimental or skeptical realism.
Porter not only developed a distinctive style of painting that was committed
to the representation of daily life and ordinary experience, but he also became
an important critic who thought and wrote extensively about the problem
of the everyday and the importance of attentiveness. Profoundly concerned
with ideas, an avid reader of philosophy (especially Alfred North Whitehead
and Ludwig Wittgenstein), fiction, and poetry (Wallace Stevens served as an
important influence for Porter and Schuyler alike), increasingly dismayed by
the encroachment of technology, actively involved in environmental causes,
Porter was truly what his biographer refers to as a “philosopher-​artist”
(Spring, Fairfield Porter, ix).11
From studying philosophy, poetry, aesthetics, and the history of art, Porter
became convinced that the cornerstone of artistic practice is attention—​in
particular, an assiduous attentiveness to immediate experience. Attention, in
Porter’s eyes, is the primary and most effective vehicle by which the obvious,
familiar, and generic can be not only recognized and revealed but also per-
ceived as different, various, and important. As he wrote in an essay:
Discovery and composition in art and science, and of course in all acts of
life, follow from holding oneself open to chance. It isn’t the result of a ratio-
nal plan—​though planning may help to prepare favorable conditions of
work. It is the result of attentiveness to things and to what happens. There
are no rules to follow. … Artistic perception perceives the significance of
the contingent. (Art on its Own Terms, 276–​27)
Rather than emphasizing control, planning, or predetermined goals, Porter
insists on the importance of chance, openness, and a continuous “attentive-
ness to things and to what happens,” to the contingency and randomness of
immediate experience.
James Schuyler and the Elusive Everyday 81

This was Porter’s message; it was what he preached in his work and to
everyone around him, including Schuyler himself. As the poet David Shapiro
remarks in a memoir about his friendship with Porter, the painter once said
“that he would start every sermon with the following words: Pay attention,
pay attention to the ultimate reality” (quoted in Spring, Fairfield Porter, 322).
Porter recalled having learned from Whitehead that “the whole question
of art is to be wide awake, to be as attentive as possible” (quoted in Spring,
Fairfield Porter, 38). As I have suggested, morning—​the figures of dawn and
awakening—​frequently appears as a trope for the active attentiveness sought
by writers, artists, and thinkers who take the everyday as their province.12
Both Porter and Schuyler insist on the importance of wide-​awake attention—​
which they each associate with morning and a “morning sensibility”—​as the
best, or only, way to make the everyday visible and perceptible (Crase, “Voice
Like the Day,” 233). By conceptualizing art in terms of attentiveness, Porter
and Schuyler exemplify and anticipate the broader turn toward an aesthetics
of attention that I discussed in the introduction and first chapter of this book.
Porter developed a whole aesthetic creed based on attention and imme-
diacy, the particular and the concrete, the material and the contingent. In a
1964 piece with the characteristic title “Against Idealism,” Porter spells out
how an art devoted to the immediate and material can liberate one from the
false allure of the ideal and transcendent: “Art permits you to accept illogi-
cal immediacy, and in doing so, releases you from chasing after the distant
and the ideal. When this occurs, the effect is exalting” (Art on its Own Terms,
106).13 Porter was convinced that such an outlook, which Jed Perl calls a “no-​
ideology ideology” (New Art City, 537), could serve as an antidote to the dan-
gers of idealism, ideological dogma, totalization, and imposed wholes and
foundations, as well as to the lure of sentimentality and the urge to romanti-
cize. As Crase writes (in reference to the same conviction in Schuyler’s work),
“the aim of paying strict and immediate attention, as Porter once said in
reference to Eakins, was to strike through sentimentality” (“Voice Like the
Day,” 228).
In his recent study of postwar art in New York, Jed Perl complicates the
usual picture of Porter as a retrograde realist in a heroic age of abstraction by
locating “certain strong parallels” between Porter’s work and that of minimal-
ist sculptor Donald Judd of all people, suggesting that “Porter’s own painting
could be said to define one powerful direction in 1960s empiricism” (New Art
City, 499). Noting that Porter was “in love with happenstance, accident, pro-
pinquity” (500), Perl argues that Porter’s everyday life aesthetic is very much
a part of the turn toward a “new empiricism” in early 1960s avant-​garde art
that would come to include “earthworks, site-​specific works, photo-​realism,
and experiments with video and film” (501). The “hunger for objectivity” and
the rejection of any “spiritual overlay” at the heart of the New Realism that
emerges during this period grew out of a reaction to the excesses of Abstract
82 Attention Equals Life

Expressionism and its mystical, romantic rhetoric (502). The empiricism and
tough, anti-​romantic skepticism of transcendence and spirituality that one
finds in Schuyler’s poetry, as well as in the poetry of his New  York School
affiliates, exemplifies this turn.
Alongside Porter, Schuyler develops his own version of this general philo-
sophical and aesthetic stance. Although he issued few pronouncements or
statements of poetics, Schuyler did occasionally reflect in his prose on the
everyday as a concept and subject of artistic representation, especially in
his writings on art. In an important 1967 essay for Art News, Schuyler most
forcefully articulated his views on the everyday. The occasion was Schuyler’s
defense of Fairfield Porter from the accusation that his painting—​with its
sumptuous depictions of the domestic comforts of the Porter’s life and his
Hamptons and Maine milieus—​was too “bourgeois.” Schuyler was roused
to write the piece in response to class-​based, politicized critiques of Porter’s
work, which were growing increasingly common in the charged climate of
the later 1960s.
To open the essay, Schuyler uses an epigraph from Wallace Stevens’s “Adagia”
that encapsulates the skeptical realism he and Porter shared:  “Realism is a
corruption of reality.” The essay then levies a powerful defense of Porter’s
work. Schuyler argues that in Porter’s paintings,
What we are given is an aspect of everyday life, seen neither as a snapshot
nor as an exaltation. Its art is one that values the everyday as the ultimate,
the most varied and desirable knowledge. What these paintings celebrate
is never treated as an archetype: they are concentrated instances. They are
not a substitute for religion, they are an attitude toward life. (Selected Art
Writings, 16)
As Robert Thompson has argued, each component of this paragraph sheds
light on Schuyler’s own poetry: for example, the notion that an aesthetics of
the everyday like Porter’s (and Schuyler’s) strives to be neither a mimetic doc-
umentation (a snapshot) nor a naïve celebration of the ordinary’s riches (an
exaltation); or the idea that such art has no interest in presenting archetypes
or generalities about life but, rather, only concrete particulars, “concentrated
instances.” But what interests me most is Schuyler’s claim that such an art
“values” the everyday as “the ultimate, most varied and desirable knowledge.”
In his own subtle way, Schuyler is making a rather strong and startling
claim here: like Henri Lefebvre, Stanley Cavell, and other theorists of every-
day life, Schuyler offers a powerful retort to the refusal to take everyday life
seriously as a meaningful level of human experience found in much Western
philosophy, social theory, art, and literature. Far from being a marginal,
insignificant realm of human experience, inferior to climactic events, heroic
or barbaric actions, and “higher” or more specialized activities or forms of
knowledge, Schuyler insists that the everyday is the place we must go to find
James Schuyler and the Elusive Everyday 83

the most important, most diverse, and most urgently needed information
about existence.
Furthermore, he implies that to arrive at this knowledge we must not only
turn to everyday events and things themselves but also to art, to artworks that
accept daily life in all its dailiness—​in other words, to representations that
seek to register the non-​idealized everyday itself. At the end of the essay, he
says of Porter’s paintings that “their concern is with immediacy: ‘Look now. It
will never be more fascinating’ ” (17). As with the imperative “Attune yourself
to what is happening /​Now” (Collected, 219) that appears several years later in
“Hymn to Life,” this directive—​like Wittgenstein’s famous injunction “Don’t
think, but look!” (27)—​is as much an ethical principle as aesthetic advice.

Poetry as a Form of Leaving the World

Alone: Schuyler’s Wittgensteinian Poetics

At the heart of the ethical and philosophical stance Schuyler and Porter share
is a rejection of the human tendency to interfere with the world and a bracing
commitment to accept the world as it is. Unlike so many other poets and art-
ists, Schuyler and Porter do not seek to transform or to transcend the mun-
dane, ugly, plain, or unpoetic features of everyday life. Their goal, more often
than not, is simply to leave the world as it is. Schuyler’s characteristic posture
of acceptance can be seen when he says, in one poem, “Things /​take the time
they take” (Collected, 80). This noninterventionist approach to experience
leads him to relinquish again and again the temptation to arrange, master,
and make sense of the everyday or to pronounce on its significance. In the
poem “The Cenotaph,” Schuyler once more hints at this belief: “Getting the
most out of a stone might be to leave it alone” (95).14
In such passages, it is striking how close Schuyler sounds to Wittgenstein,
the philosopher who felt that, in Timothy Gould’s words, “writing philoso-
phy can be a form of leaving the world alone” (“Names of Action,” 50). In
Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein writes that “We must do away with
all explanation, and description alone must take its place… . The problems
are solved, not by reporting new experience, but by arranging what we have
always known” (40). For Wittgenstein, “philosophy may in no way interfere
with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it… . It leaves
everything as it is” (42).
As I  discussed in the previous chapter, for Wittgenstein, the goal of the
philosophic quest should be acknowledgment rather than knowledge or mas-
tery. This means that the philosopher (and for our purposes, the poet) aims
not to intervene or alter the world, not to arrive at a transcendent or over-
arching explanation of it, but instead recognizes the necessity of “having to
accept the given” (Cavell, This New Yet, 43). In his article “Leaving the World
84 Attention Equals Life

Alone,” Jonathan Lear explains Wittgenstein’s “doctrine of noninterven-

tion”: “The task of philosophy, for Wittgenstein, is to understand the world,
not to change it… . Whatever its value, philosophy should leave our linguistic
practices and, in particular, our theory of the world as they are” (382).
This Wittgensteinian outlook underlies the theory and practice of John
Cage (who counted Wittgenstein as his favorite philosopher).15 Cage’s entire
aesthetic depends on what Jill Johnston calls an “abdication of the will” and
an insistence on “letting sounds be themselves” (quoted in Perloff, “Difference
and Discipline”). As Cage argues in Silence, “the responsibility of the com-
poser” has changed in the twentieth century “from making to accepting”
(129–​30). In his Year from Monday, Cage famously said that art is “not an
attempt to bring order out of chaos … but simply a way of waking up to the
very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s
desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord” and he preached that
“[We must] open our eyes and ears each day seeing life as excellent as it is… .
To accept whatever comes regardless of the consequences, is to be unafraid or
to be full of that love which comes from a sense of at-​oneness with whatever”
(quoted in Higgins, Fluxus Experience, 83).
This Wittgensteinian and Cagean stance also finds an aesthetic counter-
part in the guiding outlook, the philosophy of experience, at the heart of
Schuyler and Porter’s work, which rests on a belief in the need “to accept the
given” as it is, not as one might wish it to be. Although recent critical work
has begun to connect contemporary poetry to Wittgenstein, much of it—​as in
Marjorie Perloff’s path-​breaking Wittgenstein’s Ladder—​has focused on ana-
lyzing how poets defamiliarize ordinary language and thereby draw attention
to its poetic potency and strangeness. Thus far, there has been little discussion
of the importance of a Wittgensteinian approach to everyday experience, to
daily life as such, in contemporary poetry and aesthetics.
One of Wittgenstein’s key interpreters, Stanley Cavell, has called this
approach to experience in Wittgenstein (and, in different ways, Heidegger) a
form of “acknowledgement” (In Quest, 8), a necessary acceptance of the world
as it is.16 He argues that such an approach is central to a philosophy com-
mitted to a “recovery of the ordinary” (This New Yet, 34) as one of the only
viable responses to the threat posed by skepticism.17 “Philosophers before
Wittgenstein had found that our lives are distorted or waylaid by illusion.
But what other philosopher,” he asks, “has found the antidote to illusion”
in “tracking the humble uses of words, looking philosophically as it were
beneath our feet rather than over our heads?” (34). For Cavell, Wittgenstein’s
philosophy of the everyday proposes “a practice that takes on” the everyday
as a “scene of illusion and loss,” but approaches it “intimately enough to turn
it, or deliver it.” What Wittgenstein shows us is how to cope with that sense of
illusion and deprivation: “the direction out from illusion is not up, at any rate
James Schuyler and the Elusive Everyday 85

not up to one fixed morning star; but down… . Philosophy (as descent) can
thus be said to leave everything as it is because it is a refusal of, say, disobedi-
ent to, (a false) ascent, or transcendence” (46).
A version of this attitude—​this acceptance of the given and the ordi-
nary as the surest way to combat illusion, false ascent, or transcendence—​
is everywhere in both Porter and Schuyler. For example, according to his
biographer Justin Spring, Porter regularly saw that “the randomness of real
life is always much more expressive than any willed or intentional arrange-
ment” (Fairfield Porter, 305). As Porter explained in an interview, “Often in
still lifes—​a lmost always in still lifes—​I don’t arrange them. Usually it’s
just the way the dishes are on the table at the end of the meal strikes me
suddenly. And so I paint it. Part of my idea or my feeling about form that’s
interesting is that it is discovered” (quoted in Lehman, Last Avant-​Garde,
323–4).
Schuyler and Porter at times sound nearly interchangeable when discuss-
ing their ideas about the relationship between art and reality. When an inter-
viewer mentioned Howard Moss’s characterization of Schuyler as “a chronicler
of the haphazard,” Schuyler responded in a way that sounded almost exactly
like Porter himself:  “Yes, I  like that. I’ve always liked writing about things
just as you find them, you know, like painting a picture of just what’s on the
desk, not arranging it at all” (Little, “Interview,” 175). In a piece he wrote for
an exhibition catalog, Schuyler adopts terms familiar from Porter’s critical
writing to explain that Porter and other recent figurative artists are less inter-
ested in inventing new realities than in drawing attention to the obvious and
familiar: “the new reality that abstract painters create they find already there,
in changing light and weather; in seeing” (Selected Art Writings, 52).
Both Schuyler and Porter dedicate themselves to an art of the contingent,
accidental, and haphazard, rather than one that arranges, orders, or trans-
forms. In “Hymn to Life,” Schuyler further criticizes the human temptation
to interfere with the world instead of accepting it:

       I hate fussing with nature and would like the world to be
All weeds. I see it from the train, citybound, how the yuccas
and chicory
Thrive. So much messing about, why not leave the world alone?
(Collected, 218)

Rather than “fussing” and “messing” with the world, Schuyler, like Wittgenstein,
wishes to acknowledge, describe, account for it, but ultimately leave it alone.18
A particularly good example of this aspect of Schuyler’s work and world-
view appears in “A Vermont Diary,” an experiment with form that features a
hybrid sequence of dated entries partially in prose and partially in verse. In
86 Attention Equals Life

one section (dated “November 6”), Schuyler offers an account of a carefully

detailed walk in the New England woods, which concludes:
Two shaggy horses with heavy rumps were standing around looking sol-
emn, and a lot of long clouds like old-​fashioned trolley cars were going
along overhead, some kind of osier was a vineyard beside the road and
I thought, I wouldn’t want anything to be different about this day—​a sudden
wonderful feeling of accepting things as they are, even the things you don’t
like—​t he plain Jane new houses, or a rough-​looking dog that shot out,
fiercely barking at me as I passed a garage—​scary, even though chained. At
the top of the rise, in the shade of some trees beside a road to a field, there
was a little snow left from last night’s flurries, which had been rather hard
to believe in earlier, under the blue, and where this road turns off I  saw
through the leafless trees a pond, straight down below the fields, I never
knew was there before. (Collected, 108; italics added)
This description of a speaker’s unexpected encounter in a rural setting with two
horses and his reaction to it calls to mind a slightly earlier poem of the period,
James Wright’s 1963 poem “A Blessing,” which I discussed in my introduction.
Although Schuyler and Wright each focus on a quiet moment in which a speaker
encounters a pair of horses in a rural setting, the two poets obviously approach
the everyday moment and scene in markedly different ways that shed light
on the differing forms contemporary everyday-​life poetry can take. Suffused
with lyrical images, Wright’s poem anthropomorphizes the ponies (their eyes
“darken with kindness,” “there is no loneliness like theirs,” and so on) before
relating an epiphany—​“Suddenly I realize /​That if I stepped out of my body
I would break /​Into blossom” (Collected, 135)—​in which an unexpected image
(made all the more dramatic by the famous, surprising line break) conveys the
speaker’s longing to transcend earthly existence and be transformed.
In contrast, Schuyler simply notes the horses as part of a catalog of details
observed before expressing his realization that “I wouldn’t want anything to be
different about this day.” What he dwells on, momentarily, is “the sudden won-
derful feeling of accepting things as they are, even the things you don’t like.”
Schuyler declines to reach for a climactic epiphany: he does not use the horses
as a vehicle for a visionary moment, has no interest in imagining a romantic
union with nature, and does not use the poem to express a wish to escape
from the body, culture, history, or personal daily life. If the whole point of
Wright’s poem is to imagine a radical transformation of his self and the world,
Schuyler’s passage does something almost exactly the opposite: it expresses the
pleasure and value to be found in taking the world exactly as it comes.
Wright’s poems frequently transform the ordinary into the wondrous and
strange, as in the alchemical moment in “Lying in a Hammock,” when horse
poop turns magically into gold: “the droppings of last year’s horses /​Blaze up
into golden stones” (Collected, 114). By contrast, in Schuyler’s work, shit stays
James Schuyler and the Elusive Everyday 87

shit; the everyday remains resolutely everyday, unheightened, rarely prettified.

For Schuyler, it is crucial that even the things one does not like—​the banal, the
unlovely, the unpleasant, like “the plain Jane new houses, or a rough-​looking
dog that shot out, fiercely barking at me as I  passed a garage—​scary, even
though chained” (Collected, 108)—​are noticed, accepted, and presented.19
Furthermore, although Schuyler’s poem does record a kind of mini-​
epiphany (the realization that he wouldn’t want to change anything about
this moment), it is a grounded one, not something the poet dwells on. Nor is
it, in contrast to Wright’s skillfully crafted ending, used as the climax for the
poem in terms of its formal structure. Schuyler does not even stop to register
the recognition for very long before the prose continues on, moving (liter-
ally) to the “top of the rise,” to an observation of the snow from last night,
and a last glimpse of a pond “I never knew was there before.” If this final line
hints that new vistas have opened up, they are strictly empirical rather than
mystical or spiritual. As in Wittgenstein’s work, the observer is now able to
see something of vital significance that was right in front of him but he hadn’t
noticed before; like Heidegger, Schuyler arrives at an unconcealing of what
was always present in the first place. As Wittgenstein observes, “the aspects
of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplic-
ity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something—​because it is always
before one’s eyes)” (Philosophical Investigations, 43).
In this sense, Schuyler’s “A Vermont Diary” offers a “revelation of the obvi-
ous,” a Wittgensteinian phrase Porter used to describe what he loved about
the work of one of his favorite painters, Edouard Vuillard (quoted in Spring,
Fairfield Porter, 203). (As Cavell notes, Wittgenstein and Heidegger are “phi-
losophers for whom the obvious is the subject of philosophy” (In Quest, 6).
Such a revelation of the obvious and its potency (notably not a transforma-
tion) is quite the opposite of breaking out of one’s body and into blossom. “A
Vermont Diary” implicitly argues that its own mode of portraying daily life—​
wary of heightened or privileged moments, reluctant to build up to revelatory
climaxes, willing to ignore arbitrary divisions between poem and prose diary,
and so on—​is simply a truer, more honest response to the nature of everyday
experience than that found in many conventional lyric poems.

“Building a Nest out of Torn Up Letters”: Collage,

Trash, and Poetry

Although it is understandable that critics have highlighted Schuyler’s natu-

ral affinities with Porter and Freilicher and the brand of figurative painting
they developed, this tendency has unfortunately obscured Schuyler’s abid-
ing interest in avant-​garde techniques (an interest that his painter friends
shared as well). Indeed, one of the most important tools Schuyler took away
88 Attention Equals Life

from his early exposure to the avant-​garde was the practice of collage, which
plays a more central role in the evolution of his aesthetic than many critics
have acknowledged.20 Although he took pleasure in and wrote with sympa-
thy about a wide range of artistic practices, Schuyler was particularly fond of
various forms of collage, both visual and verbal, especially in the period when
he was first establishing himself as a writer in the early 1950s.21
Schuyler’s early love of collage was kindled especially by the work of Kurt
Schwitters, the German artist and Dadaist who pioneered the use of assem-
blage. Schwitters was a key figure in promoting the groundbreaking idea that
art could be made from detritus and junk. In the 1910s, Schwitters became
a central player in the emerging Dada movement when he began creating
delicate collage constructions, which he called “Merz,” out of mixed, found
materials. Reeling from the catastrophe of World War I, Schwitters believed
that the leftover, commercial waste of modern society could be gathered,
assembled, and converted into art; as he recalled, after the war finally ended,
I felt myself freed and had to shout my jubilation out to the world. Out of
parsimony I took whatever I found to do this, because we were now a poor
country. One can even shout out through refuse, and this is what I  did,
nailing and gluing it together. … Everything had broken down in any case,
and new things had to be made out of fragments. (quoted in Gamard, Kurt
Schwitters’ Merzbau, 26)
As he put it, “I don’t see why the used tickets, driftwood, cloakroom numbers
from attics and rubbish dumps couldn’t be used as painting materials just
like factory-​produced paints” (quoted in Neville and Villeneuve, Waste-​Site
Stories, 76–​77).22
Schuyler frequently cited the importance of Schwitters, and collage more
generally, to his own work, both as an inspiration for his experiments with
composing verbal collages in the early 1950s and for his overall aesthetic
sensibility. In an interview by Carl Little, Schuyler explained that his early
stint of writing collage poems came about because “I was very interested in
Dada, and I loved Schwitters’ work, the idea of using scraps and bits and
pieces” (Little, “Interview,” 179).23 He went on to acknowledge that “some-
times in other poems I’ve popped ‘found’ things in, but I don’t think it
shows” (179), a remark which suggests the persistence of his interest in col-
lage in his later writing. In a letter he wrote in 1969 to an admirer who
had asked whether Willem de Kooning was an important influence on
his poems, Schuyler explains in some detail his own aesthetic, explaining
that “I know that I like an art where disparate elements form an entity. De
Kooning’s work, which I greatly admire, has less to do with it than that of
Kurt Schwitters’, whose collages are made of commercial bits and ‘found’
pieces but which always compose a whole striking for its completeness”
(Just the Thing, 239).
James Schuyler and the Elusive Everyday 89

Schuyler’s admiration for Schwitters is also apparent in a brief review he

wrote for Art News in 1959 of an exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery, in
which he praised the artist’s “creative genius: the gift for making” (Selected
Art Writings, 281). He not only marveled at what Schwitters was capable of
doing artistically with pieces of garbage, but went further: “the high enduring
plastic merit he could create out of trash—​and the more ‘mere’ the trash the
better—​is, like the invisible splendor of Ad Reinhardt’s mature style, one of
the climactic paradoxes of modern art” (281).
Not surprisingly, Schuyler was also enthusiastic about other artists who
worked with collage and assemblage, like Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg,
and later, his close friend Joe Brainard. Like O’Hara and Ashbery, Schuyler
deeply admired Cornell’s box constructions and surrealist collages, as did
Fairfield Porter, who struggled for nearly a year to write an appreciative essay
about Cornell’s work. Cornell was so pleased with the essay that he gave Porter
one of his boxes as a gift, and after Porter died, his widow Anne Porter gave the
box to Schuyler (who, apparently, “sold it soon after,” most likely to deal with
his ever-​present financial woes) (as per Spring, Fairfield Porter, 278, 373n2).
Schuyler’s fondness for Cornell’s work appears in a number of places in his
correspondence as well: for example, in a 1966 letter, Schuyler told Ron Padgett
“I hope you & Pat go near the Guggenheim before the Cornell is over; one can
scarcely get too close to it” (Just the Thing, 162) and in another letter from 1971,
he told the artist Trevor Winkfield that “There is a new place in N.Y.C., by the
way, where they show all Cornell’s own movies—​all the collage ones & hand-​
tinted ones—​so you’d better come visit us” (331). In an interview, Schuyler also
mentions the tantalizing fact that he wrote but never published a poem “that
describes a Joseph Cornell box” (Little, “Interview,” 166). Presumably, Schuyler
felt a kinship with Cornell’s penchant for making entities out of disparate ele-
ments, his delight in everyday things, and his love for the details of daily life
in New York City.
Schuyler was also taken with Rauschenberg’s daring and controversial
work of the 1950s and 1960s. In a piece about Rauschenberg’s “Combines,” the
famous mixed-​media assemblages that he began making in the mid-​1950s,
Schuyler praises the artist in terms that express his own aesthetic goals:

Any archeologist of our own time and world, armed with the rosetta stone
of his sensibility, has an occasion for profound research. Rauschenberg,
as he works, is against imagination, which produces works that are much
more provocative for the imagination of others, for he leaves the objects he
agglomerates free to be themselves, generating the sufficiency of what they
are or endlessly suggesting. That is up to the looker. (Selected Art Writings, 84)

Like Rauschenberg, Schuyler loved the idea of the modern artist as a radi-
cal empiricist committed to objects drawn from the immediate present,
90 Attention Equals Life

whose job it is to gather things deemed sufficient in and of themselves,

not in need of being re-​i magined or transformed to be meaningful. In his
review, Schuyler mentions his fondness for “the shock of finding the real in
an imagined work,” as when one notices that “the stuffed fowl pacing on top
of [Rauschenberg’s] Satellite is really stuffed; the bed in Bed is a bed” (83).
This anticipates Schuyler’s own incorporation of what Marianne Moore
refers to as “real toads” in the “imaginary gardens” of his poems, as when
he inserts actual shopping lists, letters, and fragments of overheard speech
into his poetry.
In the early 1950s, at the same moment his fellow New York School poets
were engaged in all manner of radical experiments with disjunction, non-
linearity, and collage, including Kenneth Koch’s “When the Sun Tries to Go
On” and Frank O’Hara’s “Second Avenue,” Schuyler began composing poems
made entirely from fragments of found language. For example, to create the
1953 piece “The Times:  A  Collage,” Schuyler pasted together pieces of text
from the New York Times Magazine:

I’m not doing anybody

any good with my ideas
Buttering your face won’t help
Jacqueline Cochran
saw the connection
Shall we be able to hold her
and study her as a fixed star?
(Other Flowers, 18)

Although Schuyler moved quickly past this early flirtation with composing
poems of “pure” collage, his interest in the practice, and even a philosophy, of
collage throughout his career is fairly constant and central to his views about
his own work.
A more successful use of collage can be found in “Freely Espousing,”
another early poem that would become the title poem and lead-​off work in his
first book many years later (in 1969). It reads as a kind of manifesto for the joy-
ous art of “commingling” disparate materials and making linkages between
discordant things:

a commingling sky
      a semi-​tropic night
      that cast the blackest shadow
      of the easily torn, untrembling banana leaf
James Schuyler and the Elusive Everyday 91

or Quebec! what a horrible city

so Steubenville is better?
       the sinking sensation
when someone drowns thinking, “This can’t be happening to me!”
the profit of excavating the battlefield where Hannibal whomped
the Romans
the sinuous beauty of words like allergy
the tonic resonance of
pill when used as in
“she is a pill”
(Collected, 3)

Structured as a rapidly moving list of juxtaposed images, observations, and

fragments of quoted language, the poem is both about and is an example of
an approach to life based on a philosophy of collage and parataxis, in which
the world’s variety—​objects, words, experiences—​are freely espoused and
brought together. The poem exults in such linkages, in the “marriage” of this
with that, and hails the “new sensation” one can experience in the process:

Marriages of the atmosphere

are worth celebrating
        where Tudor City
catches the sky or the glass side
of a building lit up at night in fog
“What is that gold-​green tetrahedron down the river?”
“You are experiencing a new sensation.”
(Collected, 3)

From beginning to end, Schuyler’s work is driven by a fascination with gath-

ering, archiving, and juxtaposing disparate materials; a fondness for incor-
porating in art “real” things and found verbal shards in all their stubborn
materiality; the idea of creating a whole entity from incomplete fragments;
and the challenge to illusionism or mimesis collage poses.
Thus, as he began to develop his own mode of poetry, Schuyler found col-
lage to be not only a congenial formal device but also essential to his ideas
about how to present everyday experience in art. It even becomes a trope that
undergirds his conception of the everyday: a figure for how the artist, and by
extension any individual, might respond creatively to the multiform, contin-
gent, messy, fragmented, and ephemeral nature of contemporary daily life.
By forcing the writer to find and collect scraps of the actual, the practice of
collage also insists on the everyday’s basis in material things and experiences,
and compels us to pay close attention to otherwise overlooked, concrete facets
of our daily existence.
92 Attention Equals Life

For Schuyler, one of the most important kinds of material trace to which
one should be most attentive is language, which is why his poems, like “Freely
Espousing,” are so often woven out of the bits and pieces of language that he
has overheard, read, or recollected. Schuyler’s practice of archiving and using
such materials indicates his conviction that to be truly attentive to daily life
one must forever be on the lookout for strange, absurd, charming, or striking
examples of ordinary language, the flotsam and jetsam of everyday speech.24
Also crucial for Schuyler is collage’s insistence on the value to be found in
the cast-​off and overlooked, in recuperating objects normally considered to
be garbage and waste.25 In “Master of the Golden Glow,” Schuyler describes a
breeze doing something akin to what he does in his own poetry: “Somewhere,
out of the wind, /​the wind collects a ripe debris” (Collected, 34). In “The
Morning of the Poem,” he writes about longing to be on a beach after a
storm to “see the scattered wrack, fish and weed and /​(always) some cast-​up
surprise:  fishing /​Gear, net, an ominous object of red and orange plastic”
(Collected, 294). Ever alert to the “cast-​up surprise” to be found in scattered
junk, Schuyler places a high premium on the effort to collect such ripe debris,
and values trash in and for itself. A letter Fairfield Porter wrote to a friend
in 1960 about spending time with Schuyler further illuminates this aspect
of Schuyler’s artistic sensibility and eye: “We went often to the beach, where
he practically never swam, but picked up things which he invested with a
Rauschenbergian potential value” (quoted in Spring, Fairfield Porter, 254).
From the start, Schuyler was drawn to the idea that art could be, perhaps
should be, created by gathering such “things,” the material bits and pieces of
the world, including its “ripe debris” and detritus. Take, for example, his first
published and perhaps best-​k nown poem, “Salute,” which, as Schuyler often
recalled, was a pivotal work for his own development as a writer.26

Past is past, and if one

remembers what one meant
to do and never did, is
not to have thought to do
enough? Like that gather-​
ing of one of each I
planned, to gather one
of each kind of clover,
daisy, paintbrush that
grew in that field
the cabin stood in and
study them one afternoon
before they wilted. Past
is past. I salute
that various field.
(Collected, 44)
James Schuyler and the Elusive Everyday 93

The poem is a compact meditation on a whole host of issues central to

Schuyler’s work: the poet’s loving attention to nature and flowers, the refusal
to dwell in the past or linger with regrets, the complex relationship between
memory and forgetting, intention and failed ambition, and the implicit par-
allels between writing poetry and the act of gathering and trying to preserve
things of the world.
But “Salute” is also about a premeditated, rule-​governed experiment—​in
effect, an “everyday-​life project” of the sort I discussed in the introduction. It
describes an act of collage and assemblage that the poet once dreamt up (the
mission here being to gather one of each kind of flower in a meadow). Schuyler
not only refers to this ambitious archival project he had devised but also con-
fronts his failure to complete it. “Salute” amounts to an early statement of
what would become Schuyler’s life’s work: an aesthetics of the everyday whose
goal would be to gather and capture the concrete particulars of the various
field of experience, and to study, celebrate, and salute them, and their variety,
before they wilt and vanish. But at the same time, the statement of artistic
intent includes within it another element essential to Schuyler’s writing: an
acknowledgment of the continual failure or impossibility of the very project
he dreams up, combined with a refusal to succumb to regret for that failure
(“past is past,” he admits, but “I salute /​that various field” nonetheless).27
This conception of poetry reverberates throughout Schuyler’s work. For
example, in the poem “The Trash Book,” Schuyler again engages in, and
reflects upon, the making of a collage. In this case, it is a kind of scrapbook.
In the summer of 1970, Schuyler decided to make a gift for the artist and
writer Joe Brainard, whose own inventive and wonderful collages Schuyler
deeply admired and had written about with great enthusiasm. Writing to
Brainard from the Porters’ house in Maine where he was living for the sum-
mer, Schuyler explains:
As soon as I got here I started to make you a trash book out of an address
book I  had never used. I  thought it would take about an hour, but who
would guess that an address book, such a little itty bitty address book,
could have so many pages? Or that one’s trash runs out so soon? A trash
book, in case you’re wondering, is something like a scrap book, only, well,
you put trash in it. Which is not the same as garbage. That you put in boxes,
like a candy box, and call it a Garbage Box. Garbage Boxes are not quite so
nice as Trash Books. (Just the Thing, 298)
A couple of days later he told Brainard that he had completed the proj-
ect:  “Yesterday I  finished your little trash book. I’m rather pleased with it.
Partly because of its nothingness, partly because I didn’t think anybody else
would think of making one for you. You’ll get it soon” (304).
Clearly, the idea of creating a “trash book” would appeal to Schuyler, given
his love for Schwitters and Cornell and his fascination with the “idea of using
scraps and bits and pieces” to make art. Compiling a “trash book” is also
94 Attention Equals Life

another intriguing example of the kind of “everyday-​life project” I mentioned

when speaking of “Salute”: setting up a project and finding a form that would
force one to pay attention to the trivial and inconsequential in order to find
value in them, a form that might allow one to preserve remnants and frame
them in such a way as to make them meaningful, beautiful, or at least visible.
It also speaks to the impulse to collect that Walter Benjamin theorizes in his
work: projects like those reflected in “Salute” and “The Trash Book” are part
of “the struggle against dispersion” Benjamin pinpoints as “perhaps the most
deeply hidden motive of the person who collects”: “right from the start, the
great collector is struck by the confusion, by the scatter, in which the things
of the world are found,” and attempts to combat that dispersal by bringing
“together what belongs together” (Arcades Project, 211).28
A “trash book” is also a potent metaphor for the kind of work that so often
recurs in contemporary everyday-​life aesthetics. With its mixing of high art
with low, its re-​evaluation of debris and waste, its conviction that a book can
or should be a receptacle for garbage and waste, an archive for the cast-​off
and disregarded, Schuyler’s idea of a “trash book” resonates with many other
approaches to the daily that contemplate the relationship between art and
garbage: for example, Walter Benjamin’s image of the modern artist as “a rag-
picker, at daybreak” collecting modernity’s scraps; Wallace Stevens’s poet on
the junk heap in “Man on the Dump”; Joseph Cornell assembling his box
constructions out of discarded found materials; A. R. Ammons composing a
poem named “Shit List” or a book-​length work called Garbage (“garbage has
to be the poem of our time” [Garbage, 8]); Ron Silliman titling a poem “Sunset
Debris”; or Brenda Coultas creating catalogs of things pulled from dumpsters
in “A Bowery Project.”29
Schuyler not only made this little book for his artist friend; he also wrote a
poem about its creation and dedicated it to Brainard, as well. The poem opens
in media res, at a mid-​point in the process of creation:

Then I do not know what

to paste next in the
Trash Book: grass, pretending
to be a smear maybe or
that stump there that knows
now it will never grow
up to be some pencils or
a yacht even. A piece of
voice saying (it sounds like)
“I thought her did.” Or
the hum that hangs in only
my left ear. Or, “Beer” not
beer, all wet, the quiver
James Schuyler and the Elusive Everyday 95

of the word one night in

1942 looking at a cardboard
girl sitting on a moon in
West Virginia. She smiled
and sipped her Miller’s.
(Collected, 99–100)

The poem is especially interesting because it gives us a glimpse of the process

of making a collage out of ordinary materials. In particular, it zooms in on a
moment of artistic selection and the indecision that comes along with it. The
poem implies that not just anything can go into a trash book or collage: the
success of the project depends on what is pasted in next. Using the list as a
formal device as he often does, Schuyler runs through his options, including
the idea of including a bit of grass, or a tree stump, or a fragment of funny
and peculiar spoken language (“I thought her did”). By referring to the quote
as a “piece of voice,” he makes the verbal scrap into a tangible object to be
collected like any other ordinary thing, while also suggesting that overheard,
everyday speech is, for most people, akin to trash.
Furthermore, with its closing inclusion of an Miller beer advertising image
from Schuyler’s youth, the poem, like a collage by Schwitters or a Joseph
Cornell box or a piece by Joe Brainard, appropriates a fragment of found,
“commercial” material to incorporate in its own creation. In this sense,
Schuyler’s project, like the work of many other practitioners of art-​out-​of-​
junk, can be seen as a sly response to a culture of consumption and material-
ism: art as an act of collecting, arranging, and repurposing the leftover waste
of consumer culture.
Interestingly, the poem seems to unravel its own project as it goes forward,
because the things Schuyler lists as potential items to paste in quickly skitter
away from stuff that one could actually glue into an old address book. You
cannot literally glue a tree stump, or a “piece of voice,” or a hum heard in
one’s ear, into a physical book—​but you can include such things in a poem.
The poem entitled “The Trash Book” is therefore different, in kind, from the
physical book, and perhaps more wide-​ranging, more capacious and multi-​
sensory. Although we know from his letters that Schuyler has literally made a
three-​dimensional art object as well, “The Trash Book” as a poem, as a verbal
artifact, seems to hint that a poetic form made from collaging bits and pieces
of detritus is even more effective than a work of visual art at approaching
everyday experience. In that sense, Schuyler may be drawing a subtle contrast
between Brainard’s favored medium and his own, while also probing the ten-
sion between the actual “thing itself” and words about the thing itself.30
Nevertheless, Schuyler’s decision to make this little book, and to write the
poem about it, point again to his belief that a proper, even ethical relationship
to the everyday requires us to do something—​to take action, to devise forms
96 Attention Equals Life

that might serve as “traps” for the attention. As he writes in a critical piece
on Brainard’s work, collecting and making in this manner call for an act of
careful and sustained attention, one that takes patience and skill:  “It takes
a knack—​where to look and, when you get there, how to look” (Selected Art
Writings, 79).31
At the end of “An East Window on Elizabeth Street,” one of Schuyler’s most
memorable and powerful poems of urban everyday life, he subtly reflects on
the centrality of collage to his own poetics of daily life. As in his other “win-
dow poems,” the poem carefully renders a view from a window in New York
City onto an ordinary, unpromising scene that reveals itself to be a dynamic
and vibrant cityscape when carefully observed. It ends:

But why should a metal ladder climb, straight

and sky aspiring, five rungs above a stairway hood
up into nothing? Out there
a bird is building a nest out of torn up letters
and the red cellophane off cigarette and gum packs.
The furthest off people are tiny as fine seed
but not at all bug like. A pinprick of blue
plainly is a child running.
(Collected, 85)

Although Schuyler was, of course, deeply wary of poetry that relies too heav-
ily on symbolism—​“all things are real /​no one a symbol,” runs one oft-​quoted
line (Collected, 125)—​it is hard not to read the concrete details these closing
lines present both as “real” things and as suggestive of deep truths about
Schuyler’s work and vision. The “sky aspiring” ladder that climbs straight “up
into nothing” surely feels like an apt emblem of Schuyler’s skepticism of the
transcendent and romantic, his incredulity about aspirations toward heaven,
the mystical, or eternal. In effect, the moment is not unlike Robert Frost’s
“Birches,” where the pragmatist poet declares that “Earth’s the right place for
love: /​I don’t know where it’s likely to go better,” as he longs to climb a birch
tree “Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more, /​But dipped its top and
set me down again” (Frost, Road Not Taken, 108). In both poems, the “sky
aspiring” vehicle to transcendence goes nowhere; earth is where we must stay
and make the best of things.
It is quite fitting that the immediate response to the searching question
about this aspirational ladder that is literally a dead-​end is the image of the
bird building its nest from “torn up letters /​and the red cellophane off ciga-
rette and gum packs.” What Schuyler seems to have discovered outside the
window is a feathered collagiste, the avian equivalent of a Kurt Schwitters, a
Joseph Cornell, a Robert Rauschenberg, or a Joe Brainard, making its own
“trash book.” As David Herd has noted, “the bird is up to what Schuyler is
up to, making himself at home in his environment with the materials the
James Schuyler and the Elusive Everyday 97

environment provides, the scraps and fragments, the torn-​up letters and gum
packs” (Enthusiast, 174).
With this conclusion, “An East Window on Elizabeth Street” demonstrates
the turn away from the metaphysical to the everyday that is the keynote of
Schuyler’s entire literary project. Here Schuyler throws in his lot with a model
of poetry that resembles what Cavell called “philosophy (as descent),” one that
acknowledges the world as it is and is “disobedient to, (a false) ascent, or tran-
scendence” (This New Yet, 46). It is a poetics and an ethics that insists on the
value of the obvious and ordinary, of looking out at whatever is happening
outside one’s window rather than skyward. The poem itself, in all its vibrant
detail, provides a picture of what such an everyday-​life poetics might look
like, might accomplish. The nest-​building bird crafting its home from frag-
ments of trash emblematizes Schuyler’s trust in the ordinary and its concrete
traces—​it is an allegory for his own poetics of collage, his belief that a poem
can function as a kind of “trash book.”

“The Day Offers So Much, Holds So Little”:

The Everyday as Paradox

Although Schuyler clearly takes the everyday to be a central facet of human

existence, he never views it as one-​dimensional or as an easily understood
aspect of experience. Again and again he presents and probes the contradic-
tions posed by the daily and acknowledges his inability to grasp or capture it.
Perhaps no contradiction is more important to Schuyler than the paradoxical
yoking together of repetition and variation, sameness and difference that is
one of the everyday’s chief characteristics. Unlike some poets of the every-
day, who tend to praise, sacralize, and sentimentalize it, Schuyler does not
shy away from registering just how repetitive and boring daily life can be,
how interchangeable one day is from another: “why is /​each day dawning so
alike?” he asks in “The Morning of the Poem” (Collected, 264).
At the same time, Schuyler constantly insists that careful attention to that
repetition and sameness can reveal abundant difference and variety. In “A
Vermont Diary,” he notes that

    in repetition, change:

a continuity, the what
of which you are a part.
      The clouds are tinted
      gray and violet and shred
      the blue in other blues.
      Each weed as you walk
      becomes a rarity.
(Collected, 105)
98 Attention Equals Life

In the midst of the flow of days that make up “Hymn to Life,” he crystallizes
this contradiction that beats at the heart of his work: “the / Days tick by, each
so unique, each so alike” (223). This is, of course, an impossible paradox: each
day is unique and distinctive, each day is a carbon copy of every other day.
But this contradictory notion comes up with such frequency in Schuyler’s
work that it begins to look like an essential feature of the daily for him. In
one poem he observes that “Most things, like the sky, /​are always changing,
always the same” (Collected, 169). At the climax of his long poem “The Crystal
Lithium,” Schuyler offers a sweeping definition of “that which is” (existence,
presumably): it is “unchanging change” (119). In “The Cenotaph,” he posits
this paradox rather starkly: “The bay is 1) a continuum and 2) change” (97).
“In repetition, change,” Schuyler everywhere insists. When he describes
watching “repetitions /​of the sea, each one /​different from the last,” he could
almost be using this image of waves—​with their combination of repetition
and variation—​as a metaphor for the ever-​varied, ever-​repeating, ever-​pass-
ing days his poetry so intently observes (Collected, 193). His poems are like
waves, too: in their form and their subject—​each so often encapsulating a
day—​they resemble one another and yet each remains distinct from the last.
Alongside the idea that each day is simultaneously a rarity and identical,
Schuyler frequently conveys a related paradox: the notion that our everyday
lives are at once interminable (day after day after day in endless succession)
and fleeting (“a few days // are all we have. Count them as they pass” as the
opening of his last long poem has it) (Collected, 354). This is yet another con-
tradiction that haunts his writing—​the idea that in the infinite flood of days
rushing by we simultaneously confront both abundance and scarcity. In “A
Few Days,” he laments “These squandered minutes, hours, days. A few days,
spend /​them riotously” (357). At the end of the poem, which is ultimately
an elegy of sorts for his mother, he notes upon hearing of his mother’s death
“ninety years /​are still /​a few days” (379). Once more Schuyler views the
everyday as a “both/​and” proposition: as he puts it in one poem, “A day (so
many and so few) /​dies down a hardened sky” (236).
Another tension within the daily that Schuyler frequently foregrounds
is between what we remember of it and what we inevitably forget. From his
first mature poem, “Salute,” onward, Schuyler is as fascinated by the power-
ful dominion of forgetting as most poets are by the powers of memory. For
instance, at the end of the moving poem “Korean Mums,” he acknowledges
that even the unpleasant thought of an owl that his friend’s dog slaughtered
the previous evening, which haunts him at the moment, will not last:

      I’ll
soon forget it: what
is there I have not forgot?
Or one day will forget:
this garden, the breeze
James Schuyler and the Elusive Everyday 99

in stillness, even
the words, Korean mums.
(Collected, 232)

Again and again, Schuyler returns to this theme, circling around the discom-
forting notion that so many details, moods, events, and thoughts of our lives
are lost, both day to day, as we age, and, ultimately, when we die.
Wayne Koestenbaum observes that for Schuyler, poetry has the potential
to be “the enemy of loss” (“Epitaph,” 57). This is certainly true, but Schuyler
knows it is hardly an all-​powerful one. We might recall his fear that “I can’t
nail the days down”: poetry and other forms can attempt to memorialize fleet-
ing days and keep up the good fight against dispersion, but Schuyler never
glosses over the fact that so much—​nearly everything—​escapes. At one point
in “Hymn to Life,” he writes: “A /​Quote from Aeschylus: I forget. All, all is
forgotten gradually” (Collected, 216). At another point he asks: “Each day for-
getting: /​What is there so striking to remember?” (217). This admission would
seem to puncture the clichéd image of the poet of the everyday as one who
spends his career declaring each moment precious and urging us to savor the
little things. Instead, Schuyler’s poetry often conveys just how much of daily
life is marked by boredom and waiting, how much of what we experience will
be forgotten, and how maybe it was not even “striking” enough to remember
in the first place.
Schuyler constantly casts the quotidian in terms and images charged with
contradiction and paradox. In this way, the concept of the everyday becomes
destabilized in Schuyler’s work. Consider the opening lines of “Closed
Gentian Distances”: “A nothing day full of /​wild beauty and the /​timer
pings” (Collected, 102). What is “a nothing day” and how does it compare to
other days? Can there even be such a thing as a “nothing day,” if the timer
always pings (reminding us that each day is ephemeral, already vanishing),
if even a nothing day is full of the wildest beauty? Or consider the poem “In
earliest morning,” where Schuyler writes

The day
offers so much, holds
so little or is it
simply you who
asking too much take
too little? It is
merely morning
so always marvelously
gratuitous and undemanding,
freighted with messages
and meaning
(Collected, 83)
100 Attention Equals Life

A passage like this demonstrates how not straightforward Schuyler’s repre-

sentation of the everyday can be, as it raises questions left and right: how can
a day offer a great bounty and yet hold so little at the same time? How can
one take too little from it just as one is asking too much of it? Either way, the
lines suggest that something about the day, and especially our use of it, is not
quite right:  the day is both brimming with promise and yielding less than
one would hope. And why refer to it as “merely morning” and as “undemand-
ing,” if it is also “marvelously gratuitous” and “ freighted with messages and
meaning”?
My point is that the slippery, winding syntax and contradictory imagery
here allow Schuyler to present, rather than merely represent, the paradoxi-
cal mixtures that characterize everyday life through a combination of the
poem’s form and its content. Rather than deploring the everyday as a prison
of dullness or praising it as a cache of endless, hidden miracles, Schuyler’s
poetry often finds fresh ways to expose the everyday’s fundamental, fascinat-
ing ambiguity.

“Great Hunks of the World Will Fit”: “Hymn to Life”

and the Long Poem

As we have seen, Schuyler’s shorter poems experiment with a wide range of

forms and poetic strategies, each adapted to serve as devices in his everyday-​
life toolkit. Though he continues to write short poems as well, by the later
1960s Schuyler is increasingly drawn to the long poem as a form, as another,
perhaps more effective method for approaching dailiness. As I  argue
throughout this book, long-​form works become one of the most potent tools
for twentieth-​century poets invested in the daily. Schuyler, like so many other
writers, seems to find the wider canvas of a long or expansive work attractive
because it offers the formal means to create a poem in which “great hunks
of the world will fit,” as he puts it in one poem (Collected, 28). Like A.  R.
Ammons, Ron Silliman, Bernadette Mayer, and others I discuss in this book,
Schuyler is drawn to long works because they allow for a form that can mirror
and present the experience of time passing and the repetition, cycling, and
variation of days.
Between 1971 and 1981, Schuyler completed a series of four remarkable,
expansive long poems, each of which would become the title poem and the
anchor for the last four books of poems he published: “The Crystal Lithium,”
“Hymn to Life,” “The Morning of the Poem,” and “A Few Days.”32 Although
all four of these poems are masterful, fascinating works that are key to any
understanding of Schuyler and the everyday, I want to offer a brief discussion
of “Hymn to Life” because in my eyes it is one of Schuyler’s most radical and
most powerful everyday-​life works, and the one with the most far-​reaching
James Schuyler and the Elusive Everyday 101

implications for our contemporary preoccupation with the everyday. It is the

poem where Schuyler comes closest, perhaps, to articulating his aesthetic
and intellectual vision of the everyday, tying together many of the ideas that
I have been discussing.33
“Hymn to Life” can be seen as a quintessential everyday-​life poem for
a number of reasons: First, it focuses so relentlessly on representations of
the unremarkable and mundane. Second, its formal features—​its daunting
scale and use of parataxis, repetition, and accumulation—​become struc-
turing devices and analogies for dailiness itself. Third, it refuses epiphany,
climax, and moments of heightening or closure, and is composed by accre-
tion, achieving a non-teleological approach to the everyday. Fourth, it scat-
ters subjectivity and remains unwilling to settle into any one “voice,” thereby
challenging the lyric poem’s conventional methods for highlighting the daily.
And fifth, the poem’s self-​reflexivity about its own processes, its awareness
of the impossibility of representing the everyday, force us to wrestle with the
problems raised by any everyday-​life aesthetic. With these qualities, “Hymn
to Life” is actually much closer to the long experimental prose poems of fig-
ures like Ron Silliman or Lyn Hejinian than one might expect. Schuyler’s
most adventurous works, like “Hymn to Life,” can be seen as a largely unher-
alded bridge between the dailiness of the New American Poetry and that of
Language poetry and later experimental approaches.
Schuyler wrote “Hymn to Life” from March to May of 1972 while living
in the Porters’ house in Southampton, New York. He began the poem soon
after returning from a brief visit to Washington, D.C., and Charlottesville,
Virginia, with John Ashbery and the painter Anne Dunn; he continued work-
ing on it and adding to it over the course of the next two months. The question
Schuyler tries to solve in “Hymn to Life,” and in all of his long poems, is this:
How can one write a poem that gives a picture of the complex, elusive, and
contradictory phenomenon of daily life, including its ongoing ebb and flow
and its mixture of repetition and change, without carving it up into isolated
moments and dramatic events—​without monumentalizing it? And if the long
poem is the answer (and it surely is one), then: How do you write a long poem
that doesn’t have an imposed dramatic arc, linear narrative, climactic events,
or a teleological endpoint, but that still has a sense of direction or forward
movement, that still manages to sustain our interest?
With “Hymn to Life,” Schuyler hits upon a new kind of long poem.
Expansive, chatty, and digressive, it keeps rolling onward, rarely privileging
any event, image, or thought and dispensing with epiphany and climax. In
terms of its form and structure, “Hymn to Life” is a quite distinctive and
striking text: it is a poem of nearly 5,000 words arranged in 400 extremely
long lines of poetry without a single break—​in Schuyler’s Collected Poems, it
runs for nine unbroken pages—​which makes it appear on the page as a mas-
sive block of writing. Douglas Crase recalls the eye-​opening experience of
102 Attention Equals Life

first reading “Hymn to Life” in the April 1973 issue of Poetry: “I had not seen a
poem like this before. In one racing moment it altered the boundaries of form”
(“Voice Like the Day,” 232). As Crase suggests, the poem seems to intention-
ally upend our sense of what it is possible for a long poem to do. Schuyler uses
the poem’s form—​its sheer size, its long lines, its lack of line breaks or white
space, its headlong syntax and pacing—​to communicate important ideas and
impressions about his vision of the nature of everyday life: its combination
of repetition and difference, ennui and newness, past and present, and so on.
The poet in effect turns form into an analogy, or allegory, for daily experience.
As with other long poems I discuss in this book by poets like Silliman and
Ammons, Schuyler’s “Hymn to Life” is governed by a logic of accumulation
and repetition rather than hierarchy or teleology; it simply grows longer as time
passes, as days flow past. It accretes. This can be felt tangibly in the many instances
where Schuyler deploys phrases like “another day” or “days pass” as a way of
shifting gears, of marking the steady passage of daily time, of keeping the poem
going: “another day, for each day is subjective” (Collected, 215), “the days slide by
and we feel we must /​Stamp an impression on them” (218), “one day rain, one day
sun, the weather is stuck /​Like a record” (219), “another day, the sun comes out”
(219), “another day, and still the shines down, /​Warming tulips into bloom” (221),
“then another day brings back the sun and /​Violets in the grass” (222).
As the poem churns and flows on, a careful reading will detect that March
has given way to April (“And if you thought March was bad /​Consider April,
early April”) (Collected, 217), and then later, quietly, to May (“Thank you, May,
for these warm stirrings”) (223)—​but rather than announce the shift, or divide
the poem into sections defined by months as they pass, the poem’s structure
(or seeming lack thereof) deliberately evokes the fluid transit and blur of time
passing, the way the year evolves almost without our fully noticing. The poem’s
form thus embodies an essential feature Schuyler’s conceptualization of the
everyday: by refusing to privilege certain days or experiences, Schuyler refutes
the notion that our primary experience of life occurs through big moments,
cinematic montages of heightened experiences, culminating events, and so on.
“Hymn to Life” also deliberately experiments with poetic content, as
it challenges our expectations of “aboutness” in poetry. It does not really
have any defined subject or content and is not about any particular topic,
except the passing of days and flow of time as spring makes its yearly arrival.
Throughout its whirling, sprawling lines, the poet’s current daily life is jux-
taposed, often without warning or clear connection, with thoughts about his
recent trip to Washington, and by extension, about his childhood, since he
lived in the city until he was twelve and the visit evidently sparked memories
and associations from his youth. As the title suggests, its subject, if it can be
said to have one, is “life,” in the broadest sense: cycles of nature and human
life, the meaning of existence, aging and mortality, the irresolvable tension
between change and continuity.
James Schuyler and the Elusive Everyday 103

However, because it so insistently takes the everyday itself—​​and Schuyler’s

ideas about our relationship to the daily—​as its major concern the poem could
just as easily have been titled “Hymn to Daily Life.” Indeed, Schuyler’s favor-
ite word, day, and its variants (including today, yesterday, daily life) appears
over forty times in the space of nine pages. Even at the poem’s start, it is the
day who enters and speaks: “The day is cool and says, ‘I’m just staying over-
night’ ” (Collected, 214). As he often does, Schuyler repeatedly personifies the
day throughout “Hymn to Life,” giving it heft and weight and personality,
even turning it into the protagonist of his poem.
Although the poem ostensibly tracks the meandering, uneventful flow of
day-​to-​day life, a darkness lurks just outside the frame of the entire work,
the shadow of mortality and death (which is even more strongly the case in
the sequels to this poem, “The Morning of the Poem” and “A Few Days”):
“The threat /​Is always there, even in balmy April sunshine” (Collected, 220).
But even as Schuyler indicates that mortality opens its gaping maw in the
most innocent and insignificant of daily moments, he also insists that, despite
this recognition, life does indeed keep rolling on:

            Stopping in the city while the light

Is red, to think that all who stop with you too must stop, and
Yet it is not less individual a fate for all that. “When I
was born, death kissed me. I kissed it back.” Meantime, there
Is bridge, and solitaire, and phone calls and a door slams, someone
Goes out into the April sun to take a spin as far as the
Grocer’s, to shop, and then come back. In the fullness of time,
Let me hand you an empty cup, coffee stained.
(Collected, 220–1)

Confronted with the ever-​present silhouette of death, Schuyler’s response is

to dwell on the “meantime,” another name for the space where most of our
lives actually happen: where we go shopping, we wait, we play card games and
pass the time, get phone calls, do the dishes, and experience all the mundane,
concrete instances of daily life.
In another passage, just after discussing those times when “sharp attacks of
harsh reality” punctuate our lives, moments of crisis, tragedy, and pain, he writes:

   Times when religion would help: “Be merciful” “Intercede”

“That which I should have done …” Fear and superstition and some-​
Thing more. But without the conviction of a truth, best leave
It alone. Life, it seems, explains nothing about itself. In the
Garden now daffodils stand full unfolded and to see them is enough.
(Collected, 220)
104 Attention Equals Life

This passage crystallizes the lightly held philosophy behind so much of

Schuyler’s work:  although he acknowledges the allure of religion, how it
seems to promise a balm for suffering, he cannot seem to get past the fact that
it stems from “fear” and “superstition.” Thus, he rejects it as little more than
a fiction, something one would be better off without. What’s left, then? No
explanations, no grand meta-​narratives: just life itself, on its own terms. The
world does not explain anything about itself: it just is. But—​and this is key
for Schuyler’s affirmative stance—​“to see” things like the now-​open daffodils
in the garden “is enough”: ultimately, to simply pay attention, to see and to
appreciate the concrete, ever-​repeating, ever-​changing details of life, nature,
and the world will suffice. What matters is “an exhilaration that revives /​
Old views and surges of energy or the pure pleasure of /​Simply looking”
(Collected, 220).
In this way, “Hymn to Life” also eloquently expresses Schuyler’s convic-
tion that the daily can serve as a kind of refuge for us, a haven in a world of
suffering, pain, and mortality, where just seeing and attending to ordinary
experience is, as he puts it, enough. Our ability—​or, even more strongly, our
duty—​to respond to the everyday is sufficient reason to go on living. Although
discussions of this poem have rarely mentioned it, it is striking to realize that
“Hymn to Life” was composed only a few months after Schuyler experienced
one of the most profound and disturbing of his recurring mental collapses,
a period of intense psychological distress and illness that alarmed his close
friends and wreaked havoc on his life.34
The rather dramatic facts lurking just offstage raise questions about this
poem and its themes: what does it mean for a poet to embark on the creation
of an extended “hymn to life”—​especially one as affirmative and exuberant
as this one—​so hard on the heels of such personal calamity? Are there signs
of those struggles hovering, intentionally or not, along the margins of the
text? When one reads the poem within this context, certain clues and subtle,
depersonalized images float to the foreground, such as this moment near the
end of the poem:

In the mental hospital a patient is ready to be discharged. “I’m

So glad to be going home!” Where the same old problems wait;
Still, to feel more equal to them, that’s something.
(Collected, 222)

As this passage suggests, “Hymn to Life” is ultimately an understated ode to

survival. It is poem about the difficult but necessary task of getting on with
things, rather than dwelling on one’s suffering, turmoil, and “the same old
problems.” Although it acknowledges that pain and sorrow may very well be
intertwined with everyday life, it steadfastly, perhaps heroically, refuses to
James Schuyler and the Elusive Everyday 105

allow such things to define one’s daily life or block the ability to see and pay
attention to it.
For Schuyler, an upbeat dedication to the everyday seemed to be a kind
of bulwark against—​or, as some might argue, repression of—​severe personal
and psychological suffering. Once, when hospitalized in a mental institution
after one of his breakdowns in 1961, Schuyler wrote a poem about a painting
of Fairfield Porter’s, called “A Blue Shadow Painting,” which never appeared
in Schuyler’s lifetime and was only published for the first time in the collec-
tion of Schuyler’s letters edited by William Corbett in 2004 (and later in Other
Flowers). The poem describes in detail both the painting and the ordinary
evening Porter’s picture portrays, before ending with one of his little trade-
mark tributes to the “day”—​either the day depicted in the painting, the one
during which the poet writes the poem in his hospital room, or, perhaps, the
daily itself, writ large:

                  the day
is passing, is past: mutable and immutables, came to live
on a small oblong of stretched canvas. Blue shadowed day,
under a milk of flowers sky, you’re a talisman, my Calais.
(Other Flowers, 76)

The poet hails Porter’s painting of this blue, vanishing day as a kind of good-​
luck charm, a keepsake, one that shines like a beacon and offers protection
from harm. But, since he does not say “Blue shadowed painting” in the last
sentence but, rather, “day,” he also deliberately addresses the day itself. Why
would he describe the painting, the day and, I would suggest, the quotidian
itself as his “Calais”? The allusion is rich and suggestive, as it seems to cast the
day (and Porter’s painting about the daily) as a longed-​for destination, just
as Calais beckons across the English Channel from the white cliffs of Dover,
welcoming visitors to France.35
The gesture that closes “A Blue Shadow Painting” carries a sense of deep
pathos, which resounds just below the surface of all of Schuyler’s writing.
Institutionalized after a mental breakdown, the poet salutes this painting
as a kind of lucky charm. He also pays tribute to the very fact that art can
somehow allow days “to live /​on a small oblong of canvas” or on paper. This
conclusion neatly sums up Schuyler’s rather extraordinary relationship to the
everyday, his sense of the “day” as a destination to continually strive for, as a
kind of amulet against the ravages of mental illness, ordinary unhappiness,
and the inevitable oblivion that is the human lot.
At the end of “Hymn to Life,” Schuyler returns again to this theme, as it
closes with a meditation on what impels us to keep living day-​to-​day, in spite
of it all:
106 Attention Equals Life

                    Reluctantly
The plane tree, always late, as though from age, opens up and
Hangs its seed balls out. The apples flower. The pear is past.
Winter is suddenly so far away, behind, ahead. From the train
A stand of coarse grass in fuzzy flower. Is it for miracles
We live? I like it when the morning sun lights up my room
Like a yellow jelly bean, an inner glow. May mutters, “Why
Ask questions?” or, “What are the questions you wish to ask?”
(Collected, 223)

In the very last lines, we hear the personified voice of May, the embodiment
of spring (and perhaps its erotic potential), a sign of the renewed alertness
to daily life Schuyler always calls for. In this case, May declines to offer any
answers. Instead, it tosses the ball back to us: why ask questions, it wonders?
What do you need to know so badly? A few lines before, Schuyler has admit-
ted “Life, I do not understand. The / Days tick by, each so unique, each so
alike” (Collected, 223). He rejects any sense that he, or any writer or artist, is a
sage or seer. Instead, Schuyler chooses to look hard at simply what it feels like
as days slide by; he discovers no explanations or solutions to the conundrum
of dailiness, only the paradox of “unchanging change,” each day different yet
a repetition, an echo of every other but also somehow distinctive and new.
He also wonders whether we keep going, living from one day to the next,
because of “miracles.” The poem does not exactly answer this question, delib-
erately declining to define what it might mean by “miracle.” But if there are
any miracles that inspire our continuing existence they seem, for Schuyler, to
be embodied not in Christian theology, visionary spirituality, or in the sacral-
ization of the everyday. Instead, they come in the form of days that stay daily,
ordinary moments that stay ordinary, when we experience “the pure pleasure
of /​Simply looking” (Collected, 220)—​when we catch the flowering of spring
from the train window, suddenly recognize the turning of nature’s cycles,
appreciate the changing weather and feel the surge, “an exhilaration that
revives /​Old views” (220). As he so often does, Schuyler conveys the sheer,
contagious pleasure he takes in everyday life by confiding “I like it when …”;
in this case, it is that moment when the rising sun (which each day seems
new) floods his room, announcing yet another dawn.

Poems of the Morning

“Hymn to Life,” like so many other works I  discuss in this book, revolves
around a resounding image of waking up to the sun of a new dawn. In his
essay on Schuyler, Crase zeroes in on the author of The Morning of the Poem
as a poet of the morning: “Fairfield Porter said that in the history of the arts
James Schuyler and the Elusive Everyday 107

an afternoon sensibility of reflection was common, but a morning sensibility

of observation was unusual. Among morning sensibilities he included Sisley.
Jimmy’s poems, too, are like urgent morning experience” (“Voice Like the
Day,” 233). As Lee Upton has observed of Schuyler, “it is not surprising that
this poet favors mornings. Repeatedly, he enacts qualities associated with
mornings: newness and energy of awakening” (“Weather,” 120).
Before closing, I would like to consider briefly another hymn to an ordinary
morning, Schuyler’s “June 30, 1974” (Collected, 228). The poem, one of his many
“date” poems, is also about morning as a state of mind, a mode of wakefulness
and receptive attention to daily life. Crase refers to the poem as “an American
ode, to happiness,” which it certainly is. It also feels like a deliberate rewrit-
ing of Wallace Stevens’s great hedonistic hymn to the here and now, “Sunday
Morning.” Schuyler speaks rather directly about the deep, simple pleasures
of a “weekend Sunday /​morning in the country,” which “fills my soul /​with
tranquil joy.” As he so often does, Schuyler describes his immediate surround-
ings: the view of the dunes beyond the pond, his “favorite /​shrub (today, /​at
least),” the roses, “a millionaire’s / ​white chateau” next door, and, most of all, his
friends’ “charming” house, so “alive with paintings” (228–​29). But most of all,
he pays tribute to the pleasurable experience of spending a quiet morning alone
while his good friends sleep late, where he—​like Stevens’s woman with her “late
coffee and oranges in a sunny chair”—​can sit and “eat poached eggs /​and extra
toast with /​Tiptree Gooseberry Preserve /​(green)—​and coffee” (229).
The poem turns into a meditation on change when the speaker reflects
on the strange fact that the dinner table where he sat laughing with
friends the night before is also the exact same place as this quiet breakfast
table: “Discontinuity /​in all we see and are: /​the same, yet change, /​change,
change” (Collected, 230). The lines seem to encapsulate the paradox at the cen-
ter of Schuyler’s work—​the recognition that human experience is founded,
simultaneously, upon sameness and discontinuity in all one sees and is, each
day so alike and yet unique.
As is so typical of Schuyler’s poetry, the poem closes by happily accepting
the day as it is and all it brings:

       Enough to
sit here drinking coffee,
writing, watching the clear
day ripen (such
a rainy June we had)
while Jane and Joe
sleep in their room
and John in his. I
think I’ll make more toast.
(Collected, 230)
108 Attention Equals Life

Just as it was “enough” in “Hymn to Life” to simply look at the unfolded daf-
fodils in the garden, here Schuyler says it is “enough” to sit and watch the day,
June 30, 1974, “ripen.” By doing so, Schuyler further expounds on what might
be thought of as a philosophy of “enough,” a poetics of what will suffice—​a
worldview that again shades into a matter of ethics, of how to live.
Whereas Stevens’s own “Sunday Morning” reverie closes with the humble
yet lyrical image of pigeons making “ambiguous undulations as they sink, /​
Downward to darkness, on extended wings” (Stevens, Collected, 70), Schuyler’s
poem ends in a deliberately anti-​climactic fashion—​can one imagine a less
lofty close to a powerful poem than “I /​think I’ll make more toast”? This
is a far cry from how poems that depend on the transformation trope usu-
ally operate, like those I discussed earlier by James Wright, Edward Hirsch,
or Mary Oliver. These lines seem designed to “strike through sentimental-
ity,” something the poem certainly flirts dangerously with at its start (writing
that the morning “fills my soul / with tranquil joy” is about as sentimental as
Schuyler ever gets). The conclusion yanks the poem back down to earth, keeps
it firmly tied to the late coffee and sunny breakfast table with its poached eggs
and gooseberry jam. The nod to his plan to “make more toast” also brings
Schuyler back to the simple, saving ability one has to “make” (and to make
more of) something one enjoys, and finally, back to the day and the daily
itself.
Earlier in the poem, after Schuyler catches himself referring to coming
back to this house, which belongs to his friends, as “driving home,” he turns
to reflect on the concept itself:

Home! How lucky to
have one, how arduous
to make this scene
of beauty for
your family and
friends.
(Collected, 230)

Schuyler’s celebration of the domestic—​even the work that goes into making
the scene of the domestic—​a lmost feels like a tribute to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs.
Dalloway and its portrayal of Clarissa as an artist whose specialty is the cre-
ation and appreciation of the domestic everyday. Again, we see how Schuyler’s
poems keep coming back to those aspects of the daily Rita Felski called our
attention to: home, habit, repetition.
As a tribute to someone else’s ability to make a home, it also reflects on
Schuyler’s unusual, tenuous relationship to the very idea of home, as one who
never fully had one of his own, both literally and figuratively, who relied so
much on his friends for shelter and support. But given the tenor of the rest of
James Schuyler and the Elusive Everyday 109

the poem, and where it ends, it feels as if Schuyler is also suggesting that the
day, the everyday itself, is our home; in a sense, the poem acknowledges just
how lucky we are to be able to make ourselves at home in daily life, to respect
it for what it is. As Stanley Cavell argues, “the everyday is ordinary because,
after all, it is our habit, or habitat” (In Quest, 9). For Schuyler, and many other
explorers of the everyday I discuss in this book, the recovery of the ordinary
depends on this hard-​won realization: a recognition of what Cavell refers to
as “everydayness as home” (This New Yet, 32), as the only home we truly have.
In “A Few Days,” Schuyler’s last long poem, he expresses most baldly the
creed he espouses across the entire arc of his life and career:

Tomorrow is another day, but no better than today if

   you only realize it.
Let’s love today, the what we have now, this day, not
   today or tomorrow or
yesterday, but this passing moment, that will
   not come again.
(Collected, 362)

With the first-​person plural address and imperative tone, Schuyler invites
us into his poem and urges us to make an active choice: choose to embrace
and cherish the passing moment, leave off dreaming of rosy pasts or more
promising futures. We must recognize that this day itself is enough. Schuyler
knows that to follow through on this choice, to make a commitment to pay
serious attention to the “said to be boring things,” is a surprisingly “arduous”
endeavor. In this, his work echoes Stanley Cavell’s belief that the recovery
of the ordinary is both a “task” and an “achievement.” In this achievement,
Cavell says, “one’s humanity, or finitude, is to be, always is to be, accepted,
suffered” (This New Yet, 39).
Cavell could have been speaking about James Schuyler’s poetry when he
observed that “the everyday is what we cannot but aspire to, since it appears to
us as lost to us… . [T]‌here is nothing beyond the succession of each and every
day; and grasping a day, accepting the everyday, the ordinary, is not a given
but a task” (In Quest, 171). With its restless search for forms and practices that
could enable him, and us, to grasp and salute a day, each day, Schuyler’s body
of work powerfully illustrates how much can be achieved when one suffers
and accepts the everyday as it is.
 { 3 }

“The Tiny Invites Attention”

A. R. Ammons’s Quotidian Muse

It has not always been easy to see A. R. Ammons as a consummate poet of
the everyday. especially in contrast to poets like William Carlos Williams,
Frank O’Hara, or James Schuyler. Ammons has been pegged as a latter-​day
romantic, as a nature poet with little interest in human interactions or social
experience, and as an “Emersonian” poet, a misleading designation that
I  argue has done a disservice to Ammons’s work. Thanks in large part to
the critic Harold Bloom, whose championing of Ammons spurred the poet’s
ascension to the upper echelons of American poetry in the 1970s and virtually
ensured his canonization, Ammons has often been viewed as “the foremost
living representative of the American Romantic tradition in poetry” (Gilbert,
“A.R. Ammons”). Bloom stressed above all Ammons’s quest for a “purely
visionary poetry,” and many readers followed suit, declaring him to be “a
poet of religious vision,” a seer or mystic, striving for the transcendental, the
sublime, and the mystical oneness of all things (quoted in Kirschten, Critical
Essays, 10).
What are we to make of the fact that this supposedly visionary seeker of
the romantic sublime also so often writes passages like the following?

             shoveling the driveway,

warming up the coffee, going to the grocery store, opening
the cookie jar, washing, shaving, vacuuming, looking out
the window at the perilously afflicted, that is, snow-​loaded
bent evergreens, watching the pheasants walking across
the yard, plopping up belly-​deep in snow, wondering
if one can get the car out or, out, in: the Ceremony of
Puzzling over the Typewriter, of swishing off the dishes
and getting them in the washer, of taking out the trash
A. R. Ammons’s Quotidian Muse 111

and hearing the trash-​can lids snap and bang, opened or

squeezed shut: the considerable distance the universe
allows between brushing the teeth and helping John put
his fort together
(Collected, 355)

Devoted to the cyclical round of everyday acts and domestic chores, attuned
to the overlooked, supposedly unpoetic “ceremonies” of daily life as father
and husband and writer, Ammons’s work is an exemplary instance of the
poetics of dailiness I trace in Attention Equals Life. As we will see, Ammons’s
poetry uses a variety of formal methods to upend hierarchies of value that
dictate which aspects of life are considered more important and which are
less so: he insists, sometimes quite provocatively, on the importance of what
he refers to as the “lowly,” the “peripheral,” the insignificant and the mun-
dane, and rescues for our regard the tiny, the cast-​off, and even abject things
like trash cans, garbage, and excrement.
For Ammons, trying to pay careful attention to the minutiae of daily
life—​to “the considerable distance the universe allows” between, say, brush-
ing one’s teeth and building a fort with one’s son—​amounts to an ethical
stance, a salutary way of being in and responding to the world. To put this
vision into practice, Ammons develops an aesthetic of radical inclusivity
that is nearly unprecedented in American poetry in its attentiveness to the
details of domestic (middle-​class, white, heterosexual, male) daily experience:
the hot dogs and baked beans for lunch, the bill from the auto repair shop,
the lawn mowing and errand running, the dank moss under the leaves in the
backyard. In doing so, Ammons, like Schuyler, challenges the tendency found
in everyday-​life aesthetics to link the positive values of the everyday with the
stereotypically “male” spheres of the city and public life, and to treat the pri-
vate, domestic realm as feminized, dull, or imprisoning.
As this chapter demonstrates, Ammons’s pursuit of the everyday leads
him to experiment with poetic form and to embark on unusual projects of
attention that share some striking similarities with works usually consid-
ered much more avant-​garde than his own. Like other poets in this study,
Ammons views different forms as different methods for trapping the atten-
tion. His desire to find a more supple and capacious mode for pondering
and capturing the everyday—​its contingency and dynamism, its variety, its
contradictions—​provokes him to try out a wide range of poetic forms, from
extremely minimalist poems (like those he gathered together in The Really
Short Poems of A.R. Ammons), to massive book-​length epics, from irreverent
catalogs to fairly traditional-​looking lyric poems.
Despite all this restless experimentation, the tendency to tag Ammons
as a neo-​romantic nature poet, and the poet’s own lack of social affiliations
112 Attention Equals Life

with poetic groups and movements, has obscured his connections to avant-​
garde poetics, postmodernist writing, and other currents in postwar avant-​
garde poetry and art.1 It does seem rather absurd that Ammons—​author
of works like the experimental Tape for the Turn of the Year, which has so
much in common with postwar avant-​garde writing, or his signature work,
“Corsons Inlet,” which in so many ways embodies the central themes and
forms of postmodernism—​has been all but absent from discussions of the
experimental poetic tradition.2 Ammons’s use of experimental poetic forms
and constraint-​based, conceptual projects like Tape and The Snow Poems
reveals the important but overlooked connections between his work and
the New American Poetry and other strains of the postwar avant-​garde. The
exclusion of Ammons from narratives and groupings of postmodernism tells
us more about the effect of critical rubrics and personal connections on the
processes of canonization and critical categorization than about Ammons’s
work itself.
Though he is rarely seen as an innovative and sophisticated poet of the
everyday, readers do often note Ammons’s affection for the ordinary, his
down-​home and colloquial voice, and his Whitmanesque embrace of the
common and lowly.3 It is even common to observe that Ammons moves from
the intensely visionary, mystical poetry of his first book toward a greater and
greater earthiness. For example, Bonnie Costello helpfully locates a “tripar-
tite structure” underlying the poet’s work; she suggests we must “catch him
as he transfigures himself: from pilgrim, to sage, to ordinary man” (“A. R.
Ammons,” 248). Nick Halpern foregrounds the ongoing oscillation between
two modes or “voices” in Ammons’s work, which he refers to as the pro-
phetic and the everyday, and argues that “Ammons is constantly searching
for ways he can, in his poetry, be prophetic and everyday at once” (Everyday
and Prophetic, 46).4
However, despite these exceptions, Ammons’s preoccupation with the
everyday has remained surprisingly marginal to understandings of his work
and its importance. Often, critics treat the everyday as a mere foil to the poet’s
visionary flights, or as an anchor obstructing him from the heights of lyri-
cism and poesy. Conversely, it is cast as a healthy and welcome antidote to
the excesses of the visionary and spiritual, or a simple endpoint toward which
his work bends, rather than as a source of constant attraction and repulsion
that courses through Ammons’s work from beginning to end. Furthermore,
when it has been discussed in detail, the poet’s materialist devotion to the
empirical, to small-​scale and local realities, has most often been treated as a
sign of Ammons’s ecological commitments, or as an index of his training in
and fascination with science.5
In contrast, this chapter aims to take Ammons’s everyday seriously on its
own terms—​as a major preoccupation of his work and intellectual problem
in its own right. However, for all the similarities between his work and that of
A. R. Ammons’s Quotidian Muse 113

other poets of the everyday, his poetry provides an interesting counterpoint to

theirs, because few poets are as preoccupied as Ammons with pondering the
everyday’s relationship to its opposite, however that problematic binary is con-
ceived. Instead of just declaring an allegiance to quotidian reality and the here
and now, like many other noted poets of the everyday, Ammons constantly
explores his powerful attraction to what we might call the non-​everyday—​
the exalted, the visionary, the grand, and the sublime. Ammons’s devotion
to everyday particulars is always haunted by a contrary impulse to under-
stand the cosmos as a whole—​as David Kalstone notes, even when Ammons
is at his earthiest, his most quotidian, “the ghost of the visionary is always
there, hinting at unity, rueful and radiant” (“Ammons’ Radiant Toys,” 138).
Because this longing almost always shadows his hunger for the everyday and
lowly, Ammons’s poetry offers a suggestive contrast to the work of more reso-
lutely everyday poets, like a Frank O’Hara (who never lets us forget he is “the
opposite of visionary” [Collected,  256]) or a Lorine Niedecker, a Bernadette
Mayer, or a Ron Silliman.
An endless tug-​of-​war energizes Ammons’s poetry: on one side, a mate-
rialist, empiricist absorption in concrete, everyday reality; on the other, the
irresistible allure of more abstract, totalizing perspectives on reality. By obses-
sively exploring and deconstructing this binary, Ammons demonstrates that
these different modes of experience or perspectives are not actually oppo-
sites, but mutually inhering and intertwined. In this manner, his poetry gives
us fresh insight into the conceptual complexity of the everyday itself. As I
argue, Ammons’s fascination with this struggle is closely related to the guid-
ing terms and concepts of American pragmatist philosophy. More so than
many other poets, he comes to the everyday as a chastened ex-​romantic, a
transcendentalist-​turned-​pragmatist, a spurned or frustrated lover who has
trouble shaking his former flame.
Such a reorientation of Ammons as a poet in the pragmatist grain will make
clear what is most distinctive about his particular brand of everyday-​life poet-
ics. It will also help illuminate key features of Ammons’s philosophical out-
look and poetic practice: for example, his turn to a pluralistic worldview and
his aversion to generalizing or monist explanations of the world; his attrac-
tion to the singular, the individual, the distinctive; his cultivation of radical
empiricism as a poetic mode; and his awareness of attention as selective and
partial. By stressing this link, I mean to underscore one of the contentions of
this book: that twentieth-​century American poetry’s quotidian aesthetic can
be understood not only through the lens of theories of everyday life drawn
from European Marxist, cultural studies, and continental philosophical tra-
ditions, but also as an emanation from more homegrown sources: the “cult of
experience” in American philosophy, and its revaluation of the low, the com-
mon, and the daily, as manifested in the thought of Emerson, Thoreau, James,
Dewey, Rorty, and Cavell.6
114 Attention Equals Life

Ammons’s stance toward the everyday resembles in many ways the

other poets and theorists of the everyday discussed here. With his firm
belief in the value and inexhaustibility of the low, the tiny, and the daily,
he shares many of their philosophical, ethical, and aesthetic commitments.
He also shares with other everyday-​l ife poets a belief in the need to accept
the world as it is. In the previous chapter, I discussed Schuyler’s espousal
of a philosophy and poetics of “enough,” a non-interventionist stance that
I associated with Wittgenstein’s insistence on “having to accept the given,”
John Cage’s “sense of at-​oneness with whatever,” and Cavell’s idea of
acknowledgment (quoted in Higgins, Fluxus Experience, 83). Like Schuyler,
Ammons frequently reminds us (and himself) of the benefits to be found in
leaving the world alone. “Isn’t it time to let things be,” he asks in one poem
(Selected Poems, 1986, 116). In a passage in the long poem “Hibernaculum,”
he speaks of his “readiness to leave the world alone as /​currently consti-
tuted (but, of course, how could words//​do otherwise)” (Collected, 387).
In this manner, Ammons relinquishes the romantic emphasis on epipha-
nies and “privileged moments” so common to the more widespread, less
philosophically inclined poetry of the everyday I  discussed in the intro-
duction. Instead, he often favors a poetry based on the continuous accep-
tance of things as they occur. In a series of fascinating letters to Harold
Bloom in which the poet pits his own increasingly quotidian orientation
against his friend’s devotion to a mystical, visionary, romantic mode,
Ammons describes his belief that “one no longer need depend on privileged
moments—​a ll moments are evened out into a realization of the floating,
tidal energy this lovely show interfused around us: the privileged moment
doesn’t come and go, it remains constant, not in mad tension but in easy
acceptance, calm consideration” (“Selected Letters,” 634). As Roger Gilbert
notes, “here as in some of his other letters, Ammons argues for a kind of
Negative Capability (strongly influenced by the Taoism of Lao-​Tse) that
can accept given realities without straining after transcendence or epiph-
any” (“ ‘I Went,’ ” 176). The short poem “Way to Go” presents this idea in a
compact form:

West light flat on trees:

 bird flying
   deep out in blue glass
 uncertain wind
stirring the leaves: this is
  the world we have:
  take it
(Collected, 169–170)
A. R. Ammons’s Quotidian Muse 115

As Ammons tells Bloom, “It seems to me that it must be the greatest happi-
ness to look on our situation here and be able to say, It is the right the way it
is” (“Selected Letters,” 643).
Being capable of appreciating “the world we have” exactly the way it is
means accepting everything:  the given, the ordinary, warts and all. As we
saw with Schuyler, this calls for an approach to the everyday that is not sim-
ply reducible to affirmation and celebration, the mood critics have almost
always associated with the “earthy” side of Ammons’s work. Rather than
merely lavishing praise on the ordinary and romanticizing the everyday,
Ammons, like many other figures in this study, also registers its downsides,
its limitations: he, too, explores the boredom and repetition that character-
ize the quotidian, especially, as we will see, in his long poems. Even while
he is drawn to the concrete particulars of everyday experience, he worries
that they may be nothing more than a jumble of discrete, isolated facts, lack-
ing in meaning, without grandeur or significance, churning endlessly on. In
“Hibernaculum,” he notes that “hell is the meaninglessness of stringing out /​
events in unrelated, undirected sequences” (Collected, 361). “The Constant,”
a poem that finds an entire universe swirling in the water inside a seashell,
undercuts itself at the end by introducing a sense of the quotidian’s paradox:

I have had too much of this inexhaustible miracle:

miracle, this massive, drab constant of experience.
(Collected, 145)

Overwhelmed by the infinite reaches of the ordinary, and unconsoled by

any higher vision of its meaning, “experience” suddenly seems like an inces-
sant, undifferentiated, dull flow. Just as Henri Lefebvre and other theorists of
everyday life explore the everyday’s doubleness and contradiction—​both hid-
den and everywhere, crucial and trivial, charged with creative potential and a
site of mindless habituation—​Ammons’s poetry, like Schuyler’s, ambivalently
confronts the same paradoxes. In this poem, he even refers to daily experi-
ence as miraculous and drab in a single breath. Although he more frequently
finds everything to be “magnificent with being,” he also writes poems like the
rather Robert Creeley–​like piece “Unbroken,” which depicts a quiet moment
when “Evening falls: earth /​divides: /​insects waken” only to conclude:

out there, nothing

 happens
  everything is
 the
same
(Northfield, 63)
116 Attention Equals Life

The poetics of everyday life constantly makes us consider, as this poem

does, what happens when “nothing /​happens.” But it is also comfortable
acknowledging that the endless round of daily life is not all hidden magic
and miracles, but is also by definition marked by sameness, repetition,
and ennui.
Ammons also shares with Schuyler and other purveyors of skeptical realism
profound doubts about the ability of poetry to adequately render “reality”—
​especially mundane, concrete experience. As Roger Gilbert notes, Ammons
is “fundamentally skeptical of the powers of discourse to circumscribe
the real, and so values the poem for its untelling as much as its telling”
(“A. R. Ammons”). This linguistic skepticism ties his outlook not only to the
other poets in this study but also to Lefebvre, Maurice Blanchot, and other
theorists of the everyday. Like them, Ammons understands that “the every-
day escapes” and eludes the grip of forms (Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,” 15).
Thus, for Ammons, as for others drawn to skeptical realism, the everyday is
not just a subject poems might try to depict but also a test case for the conun-
drum of representation itself.7
Even though Ammons has long been viewed as a major literary figure,
some have felt that his work has seemed to recede from view since his death
in 2001. However, signs of a surge of renewed interest in his work in the past
several years have been apparent, as can be seen in the 2012 special issue of
Chicago Review devoted to his work, and in the writing of younger poets who
acknowledge his influence.8 One reason for this seems to be that Ammons’s
work feels more relevant and in tune with the moment than it did a decade
or two ago.9 First, he thinks deeply about the nature of attention itself—​
scientifically, philosophically, even politically—​and views it as a problem for
poets to contemplate and confront. Few poets write as overtly as Ammons
about attention as a crucial feature of human existence and consciousness,
or worry as directly about inattentiveness as a threat to our experience of
the everyday. After all, what other poet has poems titled both “Attention”
and “Distraction”? By anticipating our own cultural moment, with its hand-
wringing headlines about “the erosion of attention” and the “age of distrac-
tion,” Ammons seems to be sounding the alarm about an impending storm,
as he wrestles in the 1960s and 1970s with the very problem that would soon
come to dominate discussions around the turn of the twenty-​first century.
Second, his unusual projects—​like writing a diary poem on a continuous roll
of paper that tracks the day-​by-​day turning of the year—​can be seen as fore-
runners of a wide range of everyday-​life projects and current directions in
everyday-​life aesthetics. This may be why, for example, Tape for the Turn of
the Year seems to have gained new resonance and new readers of late, such as
the young poet Craig Morgan Teicher, whose first book features a long piece,
“Poem to Read at My Wedding,” that was inspired by Ammons’s poem and is
A. R. Ammons’s Quotidian Muse 117

in explicit dialogue with it. In the poem Teicher explains that after buying a
copy of Tape, he came home and

narrowed the margins

on my Word document
hoping to invoke the spirit
that let his imagination roam
so freely over
the crags and crannies
of the world in which
he saw himself.
(Brenda, 101)10

Poet as Pluralist: Ammons’s Radical Empiricism

Ammons’s commitment to the everyday, and his intensely dialectical approach

to it, resonate in our contemporary moment. However, to better understand this
dimension of his work, it can be valuable to challenge the narrow and distorted
way Ammons critics refer to his work as “Emersonian,” as if this label could simply
be a stand-​in for “transcendentalist,” or “romantic”—​another name for any mysti-
cal, idealist, or totalizing worldview, or the belief that one can achieve oneness with
the natural world. Among other problems, using the term “Emersonian” in this
way distorts Emerson himself by turning him into an anti–​everyday-​life idealist,
a familiar but still rather surprising misperception of a writer who so powerfully
demands that we sit “at the feet of the familiar, the low” (Emerson, Essays, 68).
Instead, I wish to resituate Ammons as a poet deeply vested in the American
pragmatist tradition—​the lineage that stems from the more grounded and skep-
tical side of the many-​faceted Emerson, moves through the thought of William
James and John Dewey, to modernist poets like Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost,
and Marianne Moore, down to the New American Poetry of the 1950s and
beyond. In recent years, many critics have examined the influence of pragma-
tism on modernist literature and on especially American poetry. Following the
lead of Richard Poirier, critics have argued for pragmatism’s importance to mod-
ernist figures like Henry James, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, and Gertrude
Stein, to the African-​American tradition of W. E. B. DuBois, Alain Locke, Ralph
Ellison, and Amiri Baraka, to the jazz and blues tradition, and to the postwar
poetry of Frank O’Hara, Ashbery, David Antin, Susan Howe, and others.11
But Ammons has been absent from those discussions, and his abundant
connections to pragmatist thinking and poetics have been strangely over-
looked by Ammons’s critics.12 This is a particularly curious omission, for two
118 Attention Equals Life

reasons: first, Ammons is often thought of as an explicitly philosophical poet,

who actually read philosophy, including the work of William James; and sec-
ond, his obsessions, even his vocabulary, are often strikingly similar to those
at the heart of the philosophy of James and other pragmatists—​the “one and
the many,” monism versus pluralism, the nature of attention and perception,
the importance of the local, small-​scale, and marginal, and so on.13
Everyone who has spent time with Ammons’s work quickly realizes that he
is an “obsessively dialectical thinker” (McGuirk, “A. R. Ammons,” 1). Much
like Wallace Stevens, who devotes his entire body of poetry to exploring, and
reexploring, the relationship between imagination and reality, Ammons’s
poetry endlessly weighs, tests, and ponders the dialectical tensions between
a set of interconnected binaries. In Willard Spiegelman’s words, “Ammons
tells us over and over that his main theme, perhaps his sole one, is the rela-
tion of the one and the many, and this old pre-​Socratic dichotomy, along with
variants (inside versus outside, up versus down, center versus periphery, free-
dom-​verging-​on-​entropy versus stability-​turning-​into-​imprisonment), is his
obsession” (Didactic Muse, 112).14 In poems, interviews, and essays, Ammons
announces that his poetry is one long meditation on the nagging philosophi-
cal problem of how to reconcile unity and diversity, the general and the par-
ticular, abstract ideas and concrete particulars.
Although virtually every reader of Ammons notes this obsession with the
One and the Many, it has not often been linked to either the poet’s investment
in the everyday nor to pragmatist philosophy. In contrast, I connect Ammons’s
lifelong fascination with the problem of the One and the Many to the work of
William James, who exhaustively explores this very question in his writings.
Indeed, Ammons seems to undergo something of a conversion in the late 1950s,
turning away from the visionary mode of his early poems to a more resolutely
everyday poetics, and I  argue that this transition can best be understood as
Ammons learning to embrace a pragmatist outlook on experience and reality.
Ammons’s poetry so directly maps onto the terms and concepts at the center of
James’s philosophy that his poems can often be read as a mini-​dramas that stage
the central debates—​between monism and pluralism, unity and multiplicity,
abstractions and particulars—​that James explores in such detail in his work.15
Furthermore, I argue that Ammons consistently equates the “many”—​the trope
he always uses to denote diversity, variety, flux, and concrete particulars, or all
that cannot be swallowed up by abstraction or unity—​with daily life itself.
As I mentioned earlier, critics have discussed Ammons’s gradual transition
from the visionary mode of his earliest work to a more here-​and-​now philos-
ophy. Ammons encouraged this reading of his work; looking back in a 1996
interview by Stephen P. Schneider, he discusses the trajectory of his career by
noting that his poems “have grown closer and closer to the ground through the
years. First it was wind—​very substanceless. The poems are far projected, highly
assimilated, mythological, distanced, and in the wind. And then very gradually
it comes closer and closer to where we are.” When Schneider adds “Until finally
A. R. Ammons’s Quotidian Muse 119

it gets transfigured into garbage,” referring to Ammons’s long poem by that title,
the poet replies: “And you’re in the earth, right. It is really kind of an astonish-
ing pilgrimage from the wind to the earth” (Schneider, “From the Wind,” 349).
One fruitful way of understanding the “astonishing pilgrimage” Ammons
describes is as an arduous process of arriving at a pragmatist poetics of every-
day life. In “What Pragmatism Means,” William James’s famously defines the
pragmatist as one who
turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from
bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended
absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy,
towards facts, towards action and towards power. That means the empiri-
cist temper regnant and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means
the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality, and
the pretence of finality in truth. (Writings, 379).
The same arc could be said to describe the movement of Ammons’s career.
Many of Ammons’s poems movingly chronicle the gradual and painful
movement James describes, as they trace the poet’s own transformation from
monist to pluralist, or from transcendentalist to pragmatist. Poem after poem
can be read as a parable of this process. “Mountain Talk,” for instance, rejects
a monolithic mountain’s “symmetry and rest,” its “changeless prospect” and
its “unalterable view” (read: fixed principles, closed systems, dogma, pretense
of finality in truth) and accepts, instead, “open air and possibilities”—​here
literalized in a striking, tangible image of pluralism: “so I went on /​counting
my numberless fingers” (Collected, 182).
In Essays in Radical Empiricism, Pragmatism, A Pluralistic Universe, and
other works, James returns again and again to the problem of “the One and
the Many” that would trouble Ammons for decades—​the conundrum that
James called “the most pregnant of all the dilemmas of philosophy, although
it is only in our time that it has been articulated distinctly. Does reality exist
distributively? or collectively?—​in the shape of eaches, everys, anys, eithers? or
only in the shape of an all or whole?” (Writings, 258). In one of several chap-
ters he titled “The One and the Many,” James points out that “Philosophy has
often been defined as the quest or the vision of the world’s unity… . But how
about the variety in things? Is that such an irrelevant matter?” (406). James’s
work offers a powerful and lucid case for why pluralism and empiricism are
preferable to the false wholes and absolutes proffered by monism and ratio-
nalism. Even though “pluralism, accepting a universe unfinished, with doors
and windows open to possibilities uncontrollable in advance, gives us less
religious certainty than monism, with its absolutely closed-​in world” (269),
James finds the idea of overarching unity, or reality as a whole, impossible to
swallow and therefore embraces uncertainty and contingency.
As Louis Menand explains, “one of the consequences of the pragmatic
way of thinking for James ‘was that the universe is better thought of as
120 Attention Equals Life

a ‘multi-​verse,’ something that is never completed, never synthesized into

a stable whole. Things are strung together, James argued, but their dif-
ferences are never—​as absolutists, or monists, believe—​completely tran-
scended” (Pragmatism, xxvii). For James, “there is no possible point of
view from which the world can appear an absolutely single fact” (James,
Writings, 135). Thus, he remains incredulous about imposed forms of clo-
sure, final answers, or even sentences that come to a full stop, as if they had
solved anything: “Things are ‘with’ one another in many ways, but nothing
includes everything, or dominates over everything. The word ‘and’ trails
along after every sentence. Something always escapes. ‘Ever not quite’ has
to be said of the best attempts made anywhere in the universe at attain-
ing all-​inclusiveness” (806). Ammons manages to turn this Jamesian philo-
sophic insight into a poetic practice by cultivating a distinctive style that
avoids periods, relies on the colon, strings together observations and reflec-
tions without hierarchy or teleology, and insists that “there is no finality of
vision” (Collected, 151).
James’s answer to the quarrel between the rationalists and the empir-
icists, the monists and pluralists, is a philosophical approach he dubbed
“radical empiricism,” “a mosaic philosophy, of plural facts” (Writings, 195).
James took pains to distinguish his own version of empiricism from the
“bugaboo empiricism” dreamt up by pragmatism’s “traditional rationatlist
critics”: that kind of empiricism “is accused of chopping up experience
into atomistic sensations, incapable of union with one another” (Writings,
808). In fact, such a view was anathema to James. As John McDermott, the
editor of The Writings of William James, explains, “James was always both-
ered about the dangers in a disconnected or atomistic view of the uni-
verse” (Writings, xlvi). The reason he saw his own version of empiricism
as “radical” was that it sought to avoid such pitfalls by taking into account
the conjunctions and relations between things, by honoring the continuity
of experience as well as its disjunctiveness. In other words, radical empiri-
cism is just as willing to consider the ways in which the parts of the world
seem to hang together as it is to stress their disconnection. Ammons’s
sympathy with such an outlook can be found throughout his work. In
Sphere, he succinctly describes something like the radical empiricist’s
awareness of the unresolved dialectic between part and whole: “the mind
rides the cycle from all things enchanted and / s​ ummoned into unity, a
massive, shining presence, to all / t​ hings diffused, an illimitable, shining
absence” (69).
But Ammons did not start out as a pluralist or pragmatist, willing to
embrace “all things diffused,” nor as a poet of the quotidian. His earliest
poems display a dramatically different stance toward the everyday than one
finds in his later work, as they contemplate the quotidian world of concrete
A. R. Ammons’s Quotidian Muse 121

and familiar experience only to view it with suspicion and to endeavor to

leave it behind. In nearly every poem in his first book, Ommateum (1955), the
speaker seeks to dissolve the boundaries of the self and leave the ordinary and
fleshly world behind. In “Some Months Ago,” the speaker tells of how

Some months ago I went out early

to pay
  my last respects to earth
     farewell earth …
(Collected, 4)

After chanting “farewell” to earth and ocean, rain and mountains, plants and
birds and spiders, the poem ends with a leap out of corporeal, daily existence
into the unbounded expanse of infinity:

I closed up all the natural throats of the earth

and cut my ties with every natural heart
and saying farewell
  stepped out into the great open
(Collected, 5)

David Kalstone points out how frequently Ammons depicts a “welcome aban-
donment of the world” in these early poems, which find the poet doing things
like “peeling off my being” and saying “so long /​to the spoken /​and seen”
(Kalstone, “Ammons’s Radiant Toys,” 135; Ammons, Collected, 10).16 However,
as Kalstone notes, Ammons had difficulty sustaining the “lunge toward
vision” that drives such poems (“Ammons’s Radiant Toys,” 135). He gradually
comes to embrace his true métier: a poetry that stages a struggle between a
thirst for broader vision and a dedication to what both Stevens and Schuyler
refer to as “things as they are.”17
Ammons’s pilgrimage seems to have been helped along by his immer-
sion in philosophy, which confirmed and deepened his fascination with
the problem of unity and diversity, one and many. We can even ascertain,
from a journal Ammons kept in 1959, that he was specifically reading and
responding to William James’s writings on pragmatism at precisely this cru-
cial, formative moment in his career. In an unpublished notebook entry from
September 1959, Ammons muses on the central tension between “rational-
ism” and “empiricism,” and then jots down several telling quotations from
William James’s Pragmatism that broach this very subject. First, he gives a
kind of illustrative parable about the need for both ground-​level inquiry and
bird’s-​eye vision: “struggling along with the brambles, briers, thorns,” “beat-
ing our ways through the woods of life, we feel the need to climb a tall tree
122 Attention Equals Life

now and then so we can see how the general land lies—​we may even modify
our direction. Such is rationalism vs. empiricism. You cannot get where you’re
going except through the brambles (the realism, knocks and blows of every-
day life)—​but still it is useful to have a view, an over-​arching principle, per-
spective, ideal.”18
Here, Ammons lays out the two sides of the dilemma that always haunted
him: he acknowledges the allure and utility of “over-​arching principle” and
idealism, but also insists on the need to remain committed to “realism” and
the “knocks and blows of everyday life.” On the next line in his notebook, he
writes “Pragmatism, William James,” which seems to indicate that this whole
entry is prompted by his reading of that text. This is followed by two fragments
from the essay “What Pragmatism Means,” where James explores the differ-
ences between the rationalist and empiricist tempers and embraces a radical
version of the empirical outlook. The passages Ammons has selected closely
follow the sentences I quoted above (in which James says that the pragmatist
“turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts”), and they show
James dismissing ultra-​rationalism and the mystical, superstitious thinking
of metaphysics. Following the quotations, Ammons ends the entry by writing
“The philosophers became meaningful to me only after I had myself discov-
ered the problems.”19
A month later, Ammons seems to have discovered a deep connection
between poetry and realism that would stay with him for the rest of his career,
as he developed his own form of experimental realism—​on October 4, 1959,
he wrote in the same journal: “Oh, I see! A great poet is a great realist!”20
Around the same time as these notebook entries, Ammons began confront-
ing the same “problems” that James and other philosophers reckon with in
his poems—​writing his way through them, as it were. For example, in the
oft-​discussed poem “Hymn,” Ammons presents the issue as a knotty, unre-
solved paradox.21 On the one hand, he claims that “I know if I find you I
will have to leave the earth,” will need to zoom way out “into the unseasonal
undifferentiated empty stark” (Collected, 39). On the other hand, he says “I
know if I find you I will have to stay with the earth /​inspecting with thin
tools and ground eyes /​trusting the microvilli sporangia and simplest coel-
enterates” (Collected, 39). Leaving the earth and embracing the “One” would
mean losing all sense of the variety and specificity of concrete experience.
Staying with the earth and embracing “the Many” would call for an empiri-
cal inspection of the microscopic building blocks of life. As Gilbert observes,
the final lines of “Hymn” point to the “central dialectic of Ammons’s
poetry,” leaving the poem paradoxically committed to both alternatives
(“A. R. Ammons”). The statement “I must go out deep into your /​far resolu-
tions” is simply set next to the declaration that “I must stay here with the
separate leaves” (Collected, 39). However, although the dialectic may be unre-
solved, the last stanza is notably more “realist,” brimming with a profusion
A. R. Ammons’s Quotidian Muse 123

of everyday detail, a shift of balance that signals the direction his poetry will
move. The speaker says

I walk down the path down the hill where the sweetgum
has begun to ooze spring sap at the cut
and I see how the bark cracks and winds like no other bark
(Collected, 39)

In other words, we end with the speaker alive to what William James calls
“the rich thicket of reality”:  an ordinary world made up of vivid specifity
and differences, where the cracked bark, for instance, is “like no other bark”
(Writings, 385).
In Pragmatism, James recognizes the beckoning call of those same “far res-
olutions” Ammons seeks—​the desire to see ourselves “as One with the infinite
Being of the universe.” “We all have some ear for this monistic music,” James
concedes (Writings, 414–​15). But he takes a dim view of that siren call, reminding
us of all it necessarily leaves out of its account of the world. Similarly, Ammons
begins to acknowledge—​and to resist—​his own penchant for this monistic music,
this desire to leave behind the messy vagaries human existence for the One. In
“Guide,” another poem that feels like a self-​conscious turning point in Ammons’s
work, he acknowledges the costs of unity, abstraction, and absolutes:

     You cannot come to unity and remain material:

in that perception is no perceiver:
  when you arrive
you have gone too far:
     at the Source you are in the mouth of Death:
you cannot
  turn around in
the Absolute:
(Collected, 79)

To arrive at the kind of “unity” he longs for would mean becoming, as Keats
says, “a sod”: it would mean becoming nothing oneself, like Stevens’s Snow
Man, inhuman and dead. Following the pragmatist rejection of closed sys-
tems and fixity in favor of a view of the world as defined by motion and dyna-
mism (and “numberless fingers”), Ammons suggests in “Guide” that in order
“to be” one must “break /​off from is to flowing” (79).
As they turn away from monism and finality and accept a universe of flux,
Ammons’s poems begin to register a deep ambivalence about both the gains and
losses of such a view: “this is the sin you weep and praise,” he says—​it is an unset-
tling wisdom, one that makes him simultaneously “glad and sad.” But the weight
124 Attention Equals Life

seems to be on the “praise” and “glad” side of the scales, since giving up the false
illusion of the Absolute frees Ammons to zero in on difference, to relish the
world’s variety and the concrete facts of day-​to-​day experience (here emphasized
by the triple repetition of “particular”), something monism is incapable of doing:

wisdom wisdom: a peachblossom blooms on a particular

tree on a particular day:
    unity cannot do anything in particular
(Collected, 80)

In poems like “Hymn” and “Guide,” Ammons chronicles a profound shift in

his philosophical and poetic outlook toward a philosophy of pluralism and
radical empiricism, or what he calls in one poem “the sordid /​reacceptance of
my world” (Collected, 48). In this new mode, the settings of his poems become
much more tangible and “real” and the actions much more mundane than in
the mythic landscapes and parables of the Ommateum poems.
While he continues to acknowledge the appeal of homogenizing and uni-
fying a universe of diverse particulars, Ammons, like James, constantly ques-
tions and resists this very human desire, without entirely relinquishing it. As
he explains in Sphere, to view all things as equal and one can lead to an omi-
nous outcome: “when egalitarianism is legislated into ultimate /​ramification,
legislation and effect click /​heels into totalitarianism” (15). Ever aware of this
danger, Ammons explains that “I do not smooth into groups” (16).22
This theme is at the heart of one of Ammons’s most famous poems,
“Corsons Inlet,” perhaps his purest articulation of his pragmatist suspicion
of absolutes, closed systems, and totalizing narratives. This much-​discussed
poem chronicles a walk, as many of Ammons’s poems do, but instead of the
urban flâneur registering the sensory shocks and impressions of modern
daily life in the city, Ammons’s walker moves along the beach and observes
the mind-​bogglingly complex systems, patterns, and swarming particulars of
the nonhuman world.23 The speaker finds that a careful, radically empirical
attentiveness to the immediate, concrete world can be freeing:

the walk liberating, I was released from forms,

from the perpendiculars,
   straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds
of thought
into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends
    of sight
(Collected, 148)

This daily stroll on the beach frees the speaker from fixity, from the rigid cat-
egories of “thought” and reason. Instead, he is released into “sight,” a mode of
A. R. Ammons’s Quotidian Muse 125

awareness that—​like radical empiricism—​a llows him to perceive what James

calls the connections and relations between things (figured here as hues and
shadings, flowing bends and blends).
However, because Ammons has become as much an anti-​monist as William
James, he is quick to acknowledge his inability to arrive at any understanding of
the One, any unified principle or narrative summation of these ordinary events
of wave, wind, and seaside flora and fauna: “But Overall is beyond me: is the sum
of these events /​I cannot draw, the ledger I cannot keep, the accounting /​beyond
the account” (148). There are few places in postwar poetry where the rejection of
closure is expressed so directly, even didactically, as in “Corsons Inlet”: “I have
reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries … I have /​drawn no lines”
(148–​49). Ammons actively decides to accept the world as it is, not as we might
wish it to be—​a world of flux, “rich with entropy” (150), whose only constant is
constant change: “I am willing to go along, to accept /​the becoming / t​ hought,
to stake off no beginnings or ends, establish /​no walls” (149).
If there is no such thing as transcendence, no single explanations, no complete
perception or absolute truth, it is not cause for despair or nihilism but, rather, ela-
tion. Like Wallace Stevens’s “Latest Freed Man,” who, tired of old descriptions of
the world, escaped from the truth only to discover “everything bulging and blaz-
ing and big in itself” (Stevens, Collected, 187), Ammons finds himself liberated:

    I will try
   to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening
scope, but enjoying the freedom that
Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision,
that I have perceived nothing completely,
     that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.
(Collected, 151)

I take that final line, probably Ammons’s most famous statement, to be a

particularly pithy expression of a central theme at the heart of the poetics
of everyday life: the notion that each day, each ordinary event and moment,
is filled with value, is charged with so much meaning that our attempts to
represent and master it are doomed to fail. Widen the scope of your atten-
tion though, Ammons suggests, and you will find abundant evidence that no
person ever takes the same walk twice.

Ammons and Attention

At the core of the radical empiricism that Ammons shares with William
James is a belief that the phenomenon of attention is central to how humans
interact with and understand the world. As I discussed in c­ hapter 1, James
126 Attention Equals Life

was instrumental in developing modern ideas about the nature of attention—​

its importance, its selective nature, its role in cognition and perception, its
links to habit, and so on. In his landmark Principles of Psychology, James
argues that rather than being “out there” as a solid, unchanging given, the
world we experience is entirely filtered and shaped by the process of atten-
tion. As I have argued, Ammons and other poets of the everyday seek to use
poetry to expand what James calls the “narrowness of consciousness” and, as
Joan Retallack puts it, to “reconfigure the geometries of attention” (Poethical
Wager, 175)—​bringing the fringe and margin toward the center so that we
become newly conscious of that which routinely passes beneath notice.
In a sharp early essay on Ammons, Josephine Jacobsen argues that the “spe-
cial genius of Ammons” is “simply paying attention” (in Burak and Gilbert,
Considering the Radiance, 120), a compliment it would be hard to imagine a
different kind of poet receiving—​Ezra Pound, say, or T. S. Eliot, or Sylvia Plath.
Even more so than the other poets in this book, Ammons contemplates the
nature of attention directly in his poems, and portrays the dialectical relation-
ship between attention and inattention.24 Furthermore, Ammons frequently
discusses the nature of poetry by recourse to the language of attention, and
even defines poetry itself as an act of attentiveness to the world. For example,
in the long poem “Essay on Poetics,” he argues that poems are “arresting”
because they “attract attention with /​glistery astonishment and they hold it”
(Collected, 310), and defines art as “a fining up of the attention /​and filling
out of the means” (316). In a letter to Harold Bloom, Ammons explains why
he loves having written his poems: it is because he relishes “the fact of having
my attention freshened my seizure” (“Selected Letters,” 639). In an interview,
Ammons discusses writing in terms of an intense act of attention: he describes
the “focusing of the attention when the mind is fully awake, fully focused
and penetrating” and defines the poem as “an image of this complex activity”
(Grossvogel, “Interview,” 48). In this view, what poetry does is portray atten-
tion in action. He goes on to explain his sense of poetry’s purpose:
to rehearse, to alert, to freshen, to awaken the energies, not to lunacy and
meaningless motion but to concentration and focus. That is the desir-
able state to which art should bring you, and to the extent that the poem
becomes an image of this, and a generator of it, it is a desirable thing. (48)
For Ammons, the work of art generates (for the reader) a newly awakened,
freshened awareness of the world, at the same time it can “heighten one’s own
attention” (48).
In the long poem “Hibernaculum,” Ammons spells out the fundamental,
takeaway message he intends for his readers:

public, I have nothing to say to you, nothing: except,

look at the caterpillar under this clump of grass: it
is fuzzy: look at the sunset: it is colorful: listen
A. R. Ammons’s Quotidian Muse 127

it’s hard to compete here in winter: snow makes the

broadest impression, an ineradicable eradication: slows
and muffles: you can hear the snow fall, a fizz: if
I cannot look at you, I can look with you
(Collected, 363)

Look, listen, pay attention: Ammons claims he has nothing to say except this.
The creed resembles the outlook of many other writers in this book. As Frank
O’Hara’s friend, Bill Berkson, says of his work and life: “Attention was Frank’s
gift and his requirement. You might say it was his message” (Berkson and
LeSueur, Homage, 161). “Look with all your eyes, Look” reads the epigraph to
Georges Perec’s Life A User’s Manual; “Attune yourself to what is happening
/ Now” (Collected, 216), Schuyler demands, and so on. In all, we see a wish to
instruct and wake up others (one’s readers) as well as the self: less a preachy or
didactic message, and more of a plea.
For all the importance he places on fostering heightened attention, Ammons,
like James, understands that this is easier said than done, because attention is by
definition partial, selective, and forever at war with habit and distraction. Ammons
believes poetry can combat this tendency by shifting attention to the marginal,
to what James calls the “fringe” of our consciousness and perception, or to what
Ammons frequently calls the “peripheral.” In an interview, Ammons explains
that “the most interesting motion to me is the coincidental, peripheral event, the
simple, minute particular that leads to something inevitable; that is, you see some
peripheral connection leading to something more central, becoming more bind-
ing until the poem completes itself in an inevitable place” (Jackson, “Event,” 214).
Sounding much like James, Ammons says “I try to recognize certain events on the
surface mind, or the periphery so to speak, of our perception” (215).
However, Ammons recognizes the difficulties of maintaining constant,
vigilant attention, and decries a culture addled by inattention and distrac-
tion. For example, in a 1967 journal entry, he jotted down a series of fragments
that seem to register the costs—​the ethical and political, as well as aesthetic,
damages—​of inattention. These remarks are also surprisingly prescient in how
much they anticipate recent discussions of the “attention economy,” which
center on the idea that attention is a scarce resource in contemporary life:

there aren’t as many people paying attention as there are

needing it
not as many people pay, as need, attention
more people need than pay attention—​an economy
of scarcity
more people need attention than pay any
[…]
(“Selected Letters,” 616)
128 Attention Equals Life

But Ammons doesn’t just chide us for being inattentive, as if simply paying
attention to everything could solve the problem. He contemplates the different
costs incurred if one tries to be attentive to such a wide range of experience as
it unfolds. One interviewer recalls that “Ammons spoke about the exhaustion
caused by paying too much attention to things. He laughed and said that, late
in life, he was thankfully learning the happiness of ‘paying no attention at
all!’ ” (Fried, interview). Ammons realizes that the intense absorption poetry
calls for is a difficult, tiring undertaking, and that it also means inevitably
ignoring and blocking out other things: there is no total and continuous
attentiveness to experience possible. This insight explains why, in Sphere, he
asks “I wonder if one /​can pay too much attention, as one can pray too much
and /​forget to shop for dinner” (70).25
Ammons doesn’t just worry about the need to pay attention and its dif-
ficulties; he also frequently creates parables of attention to dramatize the pro-
cess of attention and give tangible form to the dialectic between distraction
and attention. For example, in “Eyesight,” Ammons laments his own inatten-
tiveness to the turning season:

It was May before my

attention came
to spring and
my word I said
to the southern slopes
I’ve
missed it, it
came and went before
I got right to see
(Collected, 388)

Ammons revisits this theme in a later poem, “Distraction,” which appeared in

A Coast of Trees in 1981. Looking back, he writes:

During my glorious,
crazy years, I
went about the business of
the universe relentlessly,
inquired of goat
and zygote,
frill and floss,
touched, tasted,
prodded, and tested and as
it were kept the
A. R. Ammons’s Quotidian Muse 129

whole thing going
by central attention’s
node:
(Coast, 24)

Once again, Ammons ties his work as a poet, and as a person, to the intense
activity of attention, especially attention to the world’s variety and specific-
ity. The notion that “central attention’s /​node” is what keeps the whole busi-
ness of the universe “going” is another version of O’Hara’s equation in which
“attention equals Life, or is its only evidence” (O’Hara, Standing Still, 184).
However, now that he is older, the speaker worries about the impingement
of distraction and the effects of what James calls “the dispersal of attention”:

now my anklebones hurt
when I stand up
or the mail truck
drops by to bury
me under two
small obligations: I
can’t quite remember
what call I went to find
or why so much
fell to me: in fact
sometimes
a whole green sunset
will wash dark
as if it could go
right by without me.
(Ammons, Coast, 25)

By saying that the sunset passes “as if” it could occur without the speaker to
notice it, Ammons (playfully) raises the question of what happens to things
if we don’t pay attention to them, or if the world even exists without us to
attend to it. In the process he echoes O’Hara’s sense that “it’s my duty to be
attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth” (O’Hara,
Collected, 197).
As with the onset of spring that he laments missing in “Eyesight,” here
Ammons worries that distraction, or what cognitive psychologists call “atten-
tion blindness,” increasingly robs him of the ability to register and appre-
ciate the pleasures and cycles of daily life. Although the poem poignantly
acknowledges the effects of aging (complete with its own “senior moment” of
forgetfulness), it also sounds like a poetic version of the various cries of alarm
about the contemporary crisis of attention (even if the distraction here comes
130 Attention Equals Life

via the antiquated mail truck of 1982 rather than today’s chime of a new email
in the inbox).
Dozens of Ammons’s poems explore the nature and effects of differ-
ent, contrasting modes of attention, often weighing the benefits of taking a
wide-​angle view of the world versus a zoomed-​in focus on specific details.
For example, “Kind” (which leads off Ammons’s 1966 collection Northfield
Poems) is an emblematic Ammons parable of attention—​an instructive poem
about the importance of taking into account that which is on the “margins”
or on the fringe of our perception. In “Kind,” the speaker converses with “a
giant redwood” who, like the mountains that frequently speak in Ammons
(in poems like “Mountain Talk”), stands for the massive, grand, unchanging
eternal aspects of the universe.

I can’t understand it
  said the giant redwood
   I have attained height and distant view,
   am easy with time,
  and yet you search the
 wood’s edge
for weeds
that find half-​dark room in margins
  of stone
  and are
as everybody knows
  here and gone in a season
(Collected, 188)

“Kind” is a poem about choosing, by an act of will, to shift the frame of one’s
attention to those excluded currents on the fringe of our perception. The red-
wood is incredulous because the speaker favors the marginal over the semi-
nal, the contingent over the absolute, the tiny, scruffy, temporary weed rather
than the magnificent towering, timeless tree. The speaker replies

  O redwood I said in this matter

I may not be able to argue from reason
but preference sends me stooping
seeking
  the least,
  as finished as you
   and with a flower
(Collected, 188)
A. R. Ammons’s Quotidian Muse 131

The speaker’s preference for the “least” spurs an active choice about what
to attend to and about how to approach the world—​and even prompts the
speaker to engage in a deliberate project of sorts. The last lines suggest that
this choice is justified because the tiny weed is just as “finished”—​just as intri-
cate, perfect, and significant perhaps—​as the giant tree. In fact, it is even bet-
ter, since the weed has the added flourish of a flower as a grace note.

“Honor the Maggot”: Ammons and the Reversal of Hierarchies

Ammons returns to this theme frequently, such as when he notes that “the
tiny invites attention” in Sphere (46). This phrase unites two impulses of his
work: an interest in the phenomenon of attention and a penchant for revers-
ing our expectations about value, about big versus small, grand versus insig-
nificant. Ammons’s poems continually express awe at the complexity and
vastness of the micro and miniscule, though often more from the perspective
of the scientist or materialist philosopher than the mystic. This note is first
sounded, perhaps, in the title poem of his second book, Expressions of Sea
Level, which riffs on William Blake’s conviction that one can see “a world in a
grain of sand” and “hold infinity in the palm of your hand.” Here, Ammons
claims that “the talk of giants, /​of ocean, moon, sun, of everything” is “spo-
ken in a dampened grain of sand” (Collected, 136).
Following his conversion to an aesthetics of everyday life, one of the key
gestures of Ammons’s work becomes this flipping of conventional notions
of significance and beauty on their head, in often deliberately provocative
ways. Throughout this book, I refer to this as the “reversal of hierarchies,” one
of the most important strategies in the poetics of everyday life. Ammons’s
poem “Still” offers perhaps the most memorable and well-​k nown example
of this trope in his poetry. Like many Ammons poems, “Still” goes beyond
simply displaying an attentiveness to the “least” as other poems might, but
also self-​consciously turns that act of attention into the thematic problem
at the center of the poem.26 It begins with lines that amount to something
of a manifesto:

I said I will find what is lowly

   and put the roots of my identity
  down there:
each day I’ll wake up
and find the lowly nearby,
   a handy focus and reminder
a ready measure of my significance
(Collected, 140–​41)
132 Attention Equals Life

It is worth noting that Ammons does not just state a preference for the over-
looked and humble, but actually announces a willful project of attention
(“each day I’ll wake up /​and find the lowly”) of the sort that I have argued is
central to everyday life poetics: a deliberate act of recovering the ordinary, to
use Cavell’s terms.
However, the project of identifying with and praising the “lowly” near at
hand is frustrated by the fact that Ammons’s comes to realize that to think in
terms of such engrained hierarchies of value makes no sense:

but though I have looked everywhere,

   I can find nothing
   to give myself to:
  everything is
magnificent with existence, is in
surfeit of glory:
nothing is diminished,
nothing has been diminished for me
(141)

Again, Ammons finds that careful scrutiny of the world around us reveals
infinity in the smallest spaces. He stoops to inspect the mundane grass (echo-
ing, of course, the leaning and loafing Whitman), but discovers when “I
looked at it closely” dazzling intricacy and vitality:

           but nestling in I
            found
   below the brown exterior
   green mechanisms beyond intellect
awaiting resurrection in rain: so I got up
and ran saying there is nothing lowly in the universe:
(141)

The next example of “the least” the speaker comes across is a beggar with
“stumps for legs: nobody was paying /​him any attention: everybody went on
by: /​I nestled in and found his life.” The encounter with the ignored beggar
is another parable about attention and the need for art to change “the distri-
bution of the sensible” (in Rancière’s terms). Seeking to enlarge “the scope of
our noticing” (Retallack, Poethical Wager, 184), Ammons makes apparent that
which was hitherto outside the domain of the perceptible (“nobody was pay-
ing him any attention”); at the same time, he registers the costs of remaining
inattentive to the marginalized. By shifting from unobserved natural facts
to the social realm, where the impoverished and disabled are shamefully
A. R. Ammons’s Quotidian Muse 133

neglected and rendered invisible, the poem takes on a political and ethical
charge (a theme familiar from Whitman, and perhaps Wordsworth, not to
mention Christian teaching, and one that will be picked up and made much
more literal by a poet like Brenda Coultas, whom I discuss in ­chapter 6). Like
Rancière, Ammons warns us that habits of inattention consign not only vast
regions of experience but also neglected, suffering people to oblivion and
silence. In this, he would also seem to concur with Lefebvre’s argument: “To
rehabilitate the masses—​the masses of instants that philosophers condemn
to ‘triviality’ as well as the peoples that poets relegate to the shadows—​are
related tasks” (Critique, 1:127). However, unlike, say, figures depicted in the
work of poets like Brenda Coultas and Ron Silliman, who take an ethno-
graphic interest in the concrete details of specific marginalized people’s lives,
the beggar in “Still” feels more like a metaphor or symbol, a way of making
an argument for the sanctity of every human life than a chance to evoke the
real, lived experience of this individual.27
As we might expect by this point in the poem, the anguished vagabond
turns out to be as filled with depth and magnificence as the grass (“love shook
his body like a devastation”). In the end, as the speaker “whirled through
transfigurations up and down” the ladder of existence, spinning through
“transfigurations of size and shape and place,” he is left wonderstruck by the
richness of the world’s tiny concrete particulars, emphasized by the enumera-
tion of six final nouns:

   at one sudden point came still,

   stood in wonder:
moss, beggar, weed, tick, pine, self, magnificent
  with being!
(142)

The poem provides an ecstatic epiphany that flirts with the sentimental,
indulging in a romantic, perhaps idealistic revelation about the wonders
of ordinary existence and downtrodden people—​much more so than most
works I discuss in this book. Unlike other Ammons poems that will make
“a home of motion,” this arguably more traditional or overly romantic poem
finds “one sudden point” where the speaker “came still”: a resting place from
which to admire the world’s bounty (Sphere, 76).
However, despite its distance from some of the more avant-​garde works
consciously examines and performs, in dramatic,
I  discuss, “Still” self-​
manifesto-​like fashion, the reversal of hierarchies that is central to a whole
range of everyday-​life aesthetics; it also demonstrates and thematizes the cen-
tral credo about the inexhaustibility of the small and concrete. In that sense,
the spirit it exudes resembles arguments about value and hierarchy that are
central to works by Schuyler, Silliman, and theorists of the everyday.
134 Attention Equals Life

Perhaps the most paradigmatic, and extreme, example of the reversal of hier-
archies for Ammons—​as it is for many figures discussed in this book—​is the sig-
nificance he grants to garbage, waste, debris, and excrement. As I have argued, the
elevation of garbage—​whether in Kurt Schwitters’s collages, Walter Benjamin’s
“trash aesthetic,” Wallace Stevens’s “Man on the Dump,” Francis Ponge’s “Dung,”
or James Schuyler’s “Trash Book”—​is a key instrument in the everyday-​life aes-
thetic toolkit. It is an intentionally provocative gesture, intended to shake up
readers’ assumptions and biases.28 But it is also a way of putting the philosophical,
ethical, and political belief in the value of the daily life and ordinary objects into
practice, taking it to a logical endpoint. Although Ammons’s recurring interest
in trash and debris reaches its apotheosis in his celebrated late poem, Garbage,
it can be seen throughout his work, in the “coils of shit” lit by radiance in “The
City Limits” (Collected, 320); in the scatology of The Snow Poems; or in a passage
in “The Ridge Farm” where he discusses “the odor of shit,” asserting that “every-
thing is more nearly incredible / t​ han you thought at first” (“Ridge,” 83).
Just as Schuyler insists that the “said to be boring things /​dreams, weather,
a bus trip /​are so fascinating” (60–​61), Ammons marvels once more that
everything, even excrement, upon close consideration, is more surprising and
amazing than one would have dreamt. Near the start of Garbage, he pledges
his allegiance to trash:

garbage has to be the poem of our time because

garbage is spiritual, believable enough
to get our attention, getting in the way, piling
up, stinking, turning brooks brownish and
creamy white.
(8)

This late tour de force has often been read in terms of the poet’s response
to environmental degradation and humanity’s destruction of natural ecosys-
tems, but it also echoes the keynote of Ammons’s attentiveness to the every-
day that I have been tracing.29
This interest goes all the way back to his early poem “Catalyst,” which
begins with a typical Ammons reversal of expectation and hierarchy:

    Honor the maggot,

    supreme catalyst
he spurs the rate of change:
(all scavengers are honorable: I love them
all,
will scribble hard as I can for them)
(Collected, 110)
A. R. Ammons’s Quotidian Muse 135

With its instructional tone, the poem again has a lesson to teach us:  our
praise should go not to the lordly, powerful, and beautiful but instead to
the lowest of the low. The poet  also acknowledges that he will, contrary
to literary decorum, devote himself as a writer to any laudable eaters of
carrion and garbage (“will scribble hard as I  can for them”). He admires
the maggot’s important work in transfiguring waste and rotting flesh, as it
recycles “the wet-​sweet of decay” into new life, including its own life (111).
By casting the maggot as an alchemist in whose hands “dead cell dross [is]
transfigured /​into gloss, /​iridescence of compound eyes, /​duck-​neck pur-
ple of hairy abdomen,” Ammons fuses this insect scavenger with the poet
of everyday life:

    O worm supreme,

transformer of bloated, breaking flesh
into colorless netted wings,
into the wills of sex and song …
(111)

Both maggot and poet turn detritus into song, dross into gloss. Roughly forty
years later, Ammons makes this connection crystal clear when he writes on
the dedication page of the book-​length poem Garbage:

to the bacteria, tumblebugs, scavengers,

  wordsmiths—​the transfigurers, restorers

For Ammons, those who are truly attentive to the everyday and immediate
experience are—​like Walter Benjamin’s ragpicker at daybreak—​foragers in
the world’s debris and refuse, recovering and recycling and restoring it to
our conscious awareness. As Benjamin says of Baudelaire and the modern
poet: “Ragpicker and poet: both are concerned with refuse” (Selected, 48).
Ammons’s most outlandish foray into a maggot aesthetic—​and perhaps
his most extreme experiment in reversing hierarchies—​is the poem “Shit List;
or, Omnium-​Gatherum of Diversity into Unity,” a forty-​five–​line poem that
consists entirely of different kinds of animal feces. It begins:

You’ll rejoice at how many kinds of shit there are:

gosling shit (which J. Williams said something
was as green as), fish shit (the generality), trout
shit, rainbow trout shit (for the nice), mullet shit,
sand dab shit, casual sloth shit, elephant shit
(awesome as process or payload), wildebeest shit,
136 Attention Equals Life

horse shit (a favorite), caterpillar shit (so many dark

kinds, neatly pelleted as mint seed), baby rhinoceros
shit, splashy jaybird shit, mockingbird shit
(dive-​bombed with the aim of song), robin shit that
oozes white down lawnchairs or down roots under roosts,
chicken shit and chicken mite shit, pelican shit. …
(Lehman, Selected Poems, 79)

Ammons’s irreverent reverence for the lowly and quotidian (what could be more
everyday than shit and shitting?), his Hopkinesque love for the “pied beauty” of
the world’s variety, his brazen and comic refusal of poetic decorum, his often
scatological appraisal of the human body and its daily processes, and his pen-
chant for Whitmanesque cataloging and enumeration—​all come together here.
But “Shit List” is also a conceptual work, fueled as it is by a triggering idea that
is at least as important as the poem’s content (i.e., list every kind of feces you can
imagine and call it a work of art). Like many conceptual everyday-​life projects,
it creates an archive of everyday life, an “omnium-​gatherum,” or hodge-​podge
collection, that displays the enormous variety of specimens making up a cat-
egory. It is a repository of information, a work that deliberately employs excess
as a formal device for thematic purposes, and an act of collecting and gather-
ing as a form of attention and “radical mimesis.” In this sense, the poem is
not terribly far from works like John Ashbery’s “Into the Dusk-​Charged Air”
(an exhausting catalog of rivers around the world) or the lists he collected in
The Vermont Notebook, or Georges Perec’s inventory of foods he has eaten, or
Brenda Coultas’s litany of pieces of trash found on the Bowery.
The title jokingly takes the slang phrase (“he’s on my shit list”) and literal-
izes it, forcing readers to think about what an actual “shit list” might entail.
The poem participates in a long line of list poems, but takes their Whitmanic
desire to exhaust the world’s variety to an extreme. From its first line for-
ward, the point of “Shit List,” of course, is affirmation, as it rejoices in the
variety and awe-​inspiring qualities of excrement. It also has an implicit moral
dimension—​the poem’s very existence, and the brio with which it flouts rules
of propriety, serve to combat puritanical repression and any ideological forces
that would relegate such basic, daily, and bodily facts of life to silence and
oblivion. At the same time, the piece revels in the pure joys of language and of
naming (after all, who could not love the phrase “casual sloth shit”?), buoyed
by funny little asides and precise images and vivid comparisons (“neatly pel-
leted as mint seed”). Much like the mockingbird’s shit, this work’s own spew
(its expulsion of excrement) seems “dive-​bombed with the aim of song.”
Apparent, too, is Ammons’s posthumanist perspective on “nature” and the
human, a stance that has proved attractive to recent ecopoetics. He deliber-
ately, provocatively dethrones the human, shoving it from the center to the
A. R. Ammons’s Quotidian Muse 137

periphery of existence: it is no accident that “man shit” finally appears some

thirty lines into this poem, buried in the midst of creatures great and mostly
small—​“razorbill shit, scorpion shit, man shit, laswing /​fly larva shit, chip-
munk shit” (80). (The implication, of course, is that human shit is no different,
no better and no worse, from fly larva shit).
The poem’s catalog goes on and on, and there seems to be no logic to its
ordering or classification system, just as there seems to be no reason for it
to ever end. As with many other conceptual experiments, the project flirts
with what I call “the dream of the everything work”: an effort to encompass
everything within the space of a poem and the recognition that its subject is
inexhaustible. The references to “unity” in the title, and “gathering all” in the
subtitle are tinged with irony because the poem raises the question of how
this list (or any list) can ever form a unity or final tabulation of diversity: one
is immediately aware of all that is left out.30

Ammons and the Long Poem: Tape for the Turn of the Year

Ammons’s attraction to the impossible fantasy of composing an “everything

work” leads directly to his important experiments with the long poem. If
Ammons’s shorter pieces insist on the importance of the “lowly,” the “least,” and
the ordinary, it is in his long poems that he really puts his money where his mouth
is, as it were, pushing his everyday-​life aesthetics to an extreme. Starting with
the composition of the book-​length poem Tape for the Turn of the Year in 1963,
Ammons began to intersperse the writing of short lyrics and medium-​length
pieces (like “Corsons Inlet”) with a series of ambitious longer poems. He pub-
lished five book-​length poems, Tape (1965), Sphere (1974), The Snow Poems (1977),
Garbage (1993), and Glare (1997), and a number of other somewhat shorter long
poems, like “Summer Session,” “Essay on Poetics,” “Extremes and Moderations,”
“Hibernaculum,” “Pray Without Ceasing,” and “The Ridge Farm.”31
Throughout this study, I argue that a close connection exists between the
long poem as a genre and the pursuit of the everyday as a preoccupation of
twentieth-​and twenty-​first–​century poetry. As we saw with Schuyler, the
long poem is one of the most important modes for the poetics of everyday
life because its expansive scope, its frequent reliance on collage and the col-
lecting of fragments, its ability to mirror daily time and cycles, and so on are
especially well suited for experiments in representing the quotidian.32 Like
other long poems discussed in this book, Ammons’s are driven by a logic of
accretion and accumulation rather than teleology or narrative, permit few
resting places, continually move on and on and circle around and branch off
and return, all the while deferring conclusion.33
As virtually every critic on Ammons has noted, one of his signature moves
is the extensive use of the colon, a device that appears across his whole body
138 Attention Equals Life

of work, but especially in the longer works.34 Ammons perfects the use of
the colon as a formal mechanism that allows the poem to resist closure, to
join together disparate materials in a nonhierarchical fashion. Although it
may seem like a mere poetic device, Ammons’s use of the colon is an impor-
tant formal means by which the poet communicates his basic philosophi-
cal and moral convictions—​including his belief that all experiences, events,
and objects great and small have import and meaning, and that social and
intellectual conventions create insidious hierarchies of values and habits that
blind us to a great deal of our quotidian experience.35 In Ammons’s work, the
colon has a democratizing effect, insisting on an equation where this equals
this equals this. Rather than stopping the motion of thought and separating
different sentences, ideas, and perceptions with periods and capital letters,
the colon allows for an ongoing, continuous flow. If, as James argues, “the
word ‘and’ trails along after every sentence” and “something always escapes,”
then the colon is the punctuation mark par excellence for responding to a
pluralistic universe (James, Writings, 806). Ammons has something similar
in mind: “the colon jump should do that, just connect and connect and con-
nect” (Fried, interview). It is one crucial way of demonstrating and working
through the pluralistic nature of experience.36
Although any of Ammons’s remarkable long poems would lend themselves
to this discussion, I want to focus especially on Tape for the Turn of the Year,
for several reasons. First, Tape is the work in which he most overtly addresses
the everyday as the subject and goal of his poetry, and where he does so in a
sustained and self-​aware fashion. Second, it is also where Ammons’s work
resembles most closely other experimental everyday-​life poems:  because it
relies on the poet’s decision to embark on a constraint-​based project; and
because of its subject matter and unusual form, and its self-​conscious medi-
tation on the everyday itself. The poem also serves as an important break-
through for Ammons’s development as a poet; it seems to have given him the
means to move beyond the early poems into the richest and most rewarding
writing of his career, which so often takes the everyday as a central problem
and inspiration.37
The poem begins by explaining its own origins: after coming across a roll
of adding-​machine tape at the local “House & /​Garden store,” Ammons was
struck by an idea for “some / fool use for it” (Tape, 2–3). For two weeks, he
pondered the possibility of using this found material to create a long poem,
“but not seriously.” However, “now, /​two weeks /​have gone by, /​and /​the
Muse hasn’t /​rejected it, /​seems caught up in the /​serious novelty” (3). The
novelty of this experiment would involve feeding the roll of paper into his
typewriter and writing continuously day by day, until the tape ran out; fur-
thermore, the poem’s form would be governed by the width and length of the
paper, constraints that would make for an extremely skinny and incredibly
long poem. For the next thirty-​five days, from December 6, 1963, to January
A. R. Ammons’s Quotidian Muse 139

10, 1964, Ammons typed daily entries onto the tape, as it unspooled from
where it sat on “the glazed bottom of an / ashtray,” into his typewriter, and
then down into its “nest” (29), a wastebasket on the floor. The finished poem
consists of thirty-​three dated sections that chronicle the “turn of the year,”
portraying the day-​to-​day present as an always transitional space, forever in
motion between past and future.
In its diary-​like pages, we watch the poet doing domestic chores, spending
time with his family, celebrating Christmas, taking walks, and struggling to
write the very poem we are reading. We also see him first waiting for and then
greeting the publication of his second book (Expressions of Sea Level, 1963),
hoping for good news about a teaching position at Cornell University (which
he would eventually get), musing about his favorite philosophical and aes-
thetic questions, and marveling at the intricacies and complexities of nature
and culture around him. On its first page, he writes:

today I
decided to write
a long
 thin
 poem
(Tape, 1)

As he makes clear by emphasizing in its opening words his decision to under-

take this project, Ammons came up with a concept prior to writing, an idea
that generated the poem: the book as a whole will reflect back on that idea
and turn it into one of its major themes. The concept is, in part, an intellec-
tual one:  Ammons knows that the idea of using these arbitrary conditions
and rules to generate a work of art raises questions about aesthetic form, the
relationship between poetry and the passage of daily time, conventional ideas
about poetic inspiration, and so on.
But what are the particular implications of Ammons’s project as a way of
coming to terms with the everyday? By deciding to engage in a daily practice
of writing, under these specific conditions, Ammons consciously attempts to
integrate the act of writing more fully into everyday life, in effect making a
point about art as everyday praxis. With Tape, Ammons also creates a type of
project that will force him to shift the horizon of his attention toward quotid-
ian incidents and the passage of daily time.
Because of the conditions of this experiment, Tape also seems to offer
various analogies for the experience of everyday life itself. The long blank
roll of paper, with its arbitrary beginning and ending, seems to be a physical
manifestation of the flow and cycle of days, the turn of the year. Composing
directly onto the roll allows the poet to replicate the movement of days and
the flow and accident of diurnal time—​registering both the continuity and the
140 Attention Equals Life

breaks, the repetition and the unpredictability, the longeurs and the flashes of
heightened experience that constitute everyday experience. The poem’s very
medium—​the roll of paper—​comes complete with a definite ending, but one
that is, especially to the poet writing, arbitrary and unpredictable—​at first,
far off, later all-​too-​impending. In this manner, the poem’s form and medium
also stand as an allegory for the passage and the finitude of an individual’s
life, a fact the poem thematizes as well.
With its conceptual frame and constraint-​based procedure, Tape for the
Turn of the Year actually puts Ammons surprisingly close to concurrent
developments across the avant-​garde in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in vari-
ous process-​oriented projects associated with John Cage, Fluxus, Pop Art,
and conceptual art—​as Patrick Deane rightly observes, the poem “sits very
comfortably among other avant-​garde works of the early sixties.”38 Although
Ammons’s work is rarely thought of in this context, his artistic act in Tape
previews the famous pronouncement Sol LeWitt would soon make about con-
ceptual art: “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art” (Stiles and Selz,
Theories and Documents, 822).
Critics seem to agree that Tape for the Turn of the Year exhibits Ammons
at his most experimental, even though many of them differ from my own
perspective in viewing this as a liability rather than a strength.39 Aesthetic
judgments aside, in Tape Ammons clearly comes closest to other currents
in the New American Poetry, sharing considerable ground with the work of
the Beats, the New York School poets, and the Black Mountain poets.40 By
composing a poem that takes the form of a diary, with each section given a
date, Ammons prefigures the widespread tendency in the 1960s and 1970s
toward poems that draw upon such forms—​including the flourishing of jour-
nal poems, dated poems, serial poems, and sequences during this period (in
the work, for example, of Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Paul Blackburn,
Philip Whalen, Joanne Kyger, Robert Creeley’s Pieces and Day Book, and
Robert Lowell’s Notebook).41 The poem’s playfulness, its irreverence toward
poetic decorum and rejection of the notion of poem as a “well-​wrought urn,”
its typographical experimentation, its constraint-​based form, its colloquial,
chatty language, and its insistent dailiness all bring it into the orbit of various
strains of the New American Poetry. Furthermore, Ammons’s use of the roll
of tape resembles Jack Kerouac’s famous use of a scroll for the composition of
On the Road in the early 1950s. A handful of critics have mentioned this con-
gruence and offered it as useful evidence that Ammons shares a fascination
with process and spontaneity with Beat, Black Mountain, New York School,
and other New American poets.42
As I have suggested, Tape for the Turn of the Year is a major turning point
for Ammons because he made a conscious decision to put his newfound
A. R. Ammons’s Quotidian Muse 141

commitment to dailiness into practice, in a new and much more extreme

way than he had previously. In an interview with Steven Schneider, Ammons
explained that “the reason that it starts with ‘today’ is that was what the
poem was going to be called at one time. I thought it was going to be called
Today because it was going to be the surface things as they occur—​from
day to day to day” (Schneider, “From the Wind,” 335). To explain why he is
drawn to recording what happens as it happens, day to day, without wor-
rying about “content” or “narrative” or “aboutness,” Ammons reveals his
debt to the quotidian side of Emerson. He quotes (as he does in multiple
interviews) a remark from Emerson’s “Self-​Reliance” that “has affected me
more deeply than anything he ever said”: “Let me record from day to day my
honest thought without prospect or retrospect… . I have no doubt it will be
found to have been symmetrical” (335–​36).43 Ammons repeatedly states how
deeply inspiring he finds this idea: that if one writes down one’s thoughts
and experiences day by day, as they happen rather than according to some
plan or goal, then eventually some kind of order and meaning will emerge.
As many readers of Tape have pointed out, Ammons self-​consciously places
his own very long poem in dialogue with the epic tradition, but he deliber-
ately reverses the hierarchies that underwrite the ancient epic tradition, from
Homer to Virgil, Dante to Milton, and beyond. The poem begins by half-​
seriously invoking the Muse and reflecting on the conventions of epic poetry,
but quickly admits the difference between epics of the past and this work:

I wish I had a great

story to tell: the
words then
could be quiet, as I’m
trying to make them now—​
immersed in the play
of events: but
I can’t tell a great
story
(Tape, 8)

The particular “great story” Ammons seems to have in mind is the tale of
Odysseus, which tells of the brave and wily hero’s arduous ten-​year journey
home from the Trojan War to the domestic sphere of Ithaca, where his wife
awaits.44 But Ammons casts his poem as a twentieth-​century rewriting of the
Odyssey, suggesting, much like Joyce’s Ulysses, a crucial difference: the ancient
hero’s adventures in war and on his dramatic quest home have been replaced
by a quest for the ordinary. In contrast to Odysseus, who encountered
142 Attention Equals Life

fantastic creatures, survived harrowing hardships, and endured the death of

his companions, Ammons explains that

my story is how
a man comes home
from haunted
lands and transformations
   it is
   in a way
   a great story:
but it doesn’t unwind
into sequence
(9)

The story this poem narrates is the poet’s journey away from the visionary and
idealized realms, the “haunted lands and transformations,” of Ommateum
and other early poems, and toward a language “immersed in the play of
events” and an acceptance of the everyday as it is.45 As the passage suggests,
this too is a “great story.” But Ammons indicates that such a poem, one that is
truly responsive to the fluctuations of everyday, will not fall into the orderly
“sequence,” linear patterns, and teleological narrative of traditional epic. As
he explains, Tape is about a man coming

home, to
acceptance of his place
       and time,
responsibilities and
limitations: I mean
  nothing mythical—​
Odysseus
wandering in a ghost-​deep
background
(10)

To arrive home, then, is to forget about ghosts and myths, and to learn how to
take the world as it comes: to understand the dimensions, the limitations, the
pleasures of the everyday. The poem asks

what’s the way home?

home?
what’s wrong with these
deserts, excitements, shows:
excursions:
A. R. Ammons’s Quotidian Muse 143

home is every minute,

occurring? just like this?
(28)

What Ammons has in mind is quite close to what Stanley Cavell means when
he talks about “everydayness as home”: a coming home to the ordinary which
is not a stable, permanent dwelling but, rather, an always-​moving present.
This calls for a rather daunting task, which he explores further in Sphere: an
effort to “make a home of motion,” within each passing moment (76).
Near the very end of the poem, Ammons again tries to define what he
means by home: the place you end up when you return from idealism’s false
promises and hopes and reaccept where you actually are:

coming home:
  how does one come
 home:
  self-​ acceptance:
  reconciliation
a way of
going along with this
world as it is:
nothing ideal: not as
you’d have it:
testing, feeling the way
  ready to
  readjust, to make
       amends
(293)

Thus, Tape’s hero, its Odysseus, is an ex-​idealist turned chastened realist. He

has learned that the everyday can be an antidote to absolutes, to grand nar-
ratives or metaphysics. He now knows he must, in pragmatist fashion, move
forward tentatively, viewing all ideas as provisional, all situations as con-
tingent, ready to adjust to new configurations of an ever-​changing reality.
What does “the everyday as home” consist of, what does it feel like, in this
poem? Ammons reminds himself (and, by extension, his audience), that to
really account for it, one must go wide, must try to include as much of the
daily as possible:

give room, latitude, widen

the band
  of acceptance: we live
in strictures of hate
144 Attention Equals Life

& suspicion, intolerance

 & doubt:
absorb the margins:
enlarge the range:
give life room
(91)

With these last three slogans, Ammons calls for a different, wider mode of
attention, one less constrained by the rigid categories and habits of perception
that determine what Rancière calls the “sensible” (“get out of boxes, hard /​
forms of mind”; Tape, 181). At one point, he explains

  I’ve been
looking for a level
  of language
   that could take in all
  kinds of matter
& move easily with
   light or heavy burden:
  a level
that could …
   not be completely
outfaced
by the prosaic
& not be inadequate
  to the surges
(143–​144)

In the midst of this massive and messy epic, his first, Ammons explains his
impatience with the well-​crafted lyric poem, his own included, and the limi-
tations he finds in it. The problem is that such a poem does not seem loose and
open enough to adequately attend to the everyday:

  I’ve hated at times the

self-​conscious POEM:
  I’ve wanted to bend
  more, burrowing
with flexible path
into the common life
& commonplace:
(144)
A. R. Ammons’s Quotidian Muse 145

Over and over, he describes the quest for this new, more flexible and inclu-
sive level of language, a new form of poem: “we’re going to make a /​dense,
tangled trellis so /​lovely & complicated that /​every kind of variety will /
find a place in it or on /​it” (44). To achieve this vision, he calls for a mode
of writing more in tune with the “common” and the “average”—​a form that
seeks to

merge with coming &

  going common life
 drink
  the average
  drink
(181)

Driven by this aesthetics of expanded scope, the poem that results features
a rather vast spectrum of materials, ranging from details of the poet’s daily
life, observations of the natural world, philosophical speculation, and meta-​
poetic considerations about the nature of poetry. We find casual, diary-​like
entries:

just went to Tony’s to

get a pack of cigs: it’s
colder than you
can imagine: must be
around 8: yipe!
(76)

Accounts of shopping expeditions, family outings, and humble meals:

6:35 pm: we went
Christmas shopping at
 Korvette’s and
 Cherry Hill:
had dinner just now
over to Somers Point at
Mac’s: fried shrimp—​
  & Phyllis had
crab:
they have good salad
dressing there
(56)
146 Attention Equals Life

* *
lunch: hot dogs and baked
  beans again: swell:
  2/​23: 11 ½ ¢ a can: cheap: …
 & all
 that energy
turned into verse
(39–​40)

* *
3:20 pm: today is near-​
ly shot aready:
   got up ear-​
ly & drove
mother-​ & father-​in-​law to
Philly for train to Fla:
Phyllis & Mary came, too:
stopped on way back at
Korvette’s & traded in two
records Phyllis gave me
for Christmas
(166)

Even more so than other poets in this study (save, perhaps, Bernadette Mayer),
Ammons lavishes attention on the domestic: daily routines and activities of
the home, family get-​togethers, the Christmas holiday—​a ll the minor hap-
penings of bourgeois, heterosexual family life. “I hear the /​porkchops fry-
ing!” he exults at one point, bringing Whitman’s grand claim of “I hear
America singing!” down to earthy particulars, and rewriting Eliot’s romantic
lament “I hear the mermaids singing, each to each” as a song of praise for the
sensual gratifications of middle-​class home life (Ammons 132; Eliot, Complete
Poems, 7).
It is rather striking, even now, to find a male poet writing about daily life
as husband, father, doer of dishes, and runner of errands, but it was even
more unusual within the context of constrained and rigid gender roles in
postwar American culture. Ammons finds pleasure and meaning in these
acts and insists that poetry can be capacious enough to include them. He
does not lament their tedium, or worry that the lack of adventure and the
repetition inherent in the daily domestic life of a husband and father are too
trivial for the domain of poetry, or even worse, somehow emasculating. In
fact, Ammons’s work is relatively free of the “crisis of masculinity” and anxi-
ety about gender roles one finds in other poetry by straight male poets of his
A. R. Ammons’s Quotidian Muse 147

generation.46 (That said, Ammons can seem rather oblivious to the division of
household labor and his wife’s domestic duties, and the gendering of house-
work, as we see in the next chapter).
Tape also features countless reports about each day’s ever-​ shifting
weather (“sunshine & shade /​alternate at 32”), and depictions of ordinary
moments passing (“cars hiss on the highway: /​typewriter clicks: /​the ther-
mostat snaps: /​(sounds like a motorcycle /​out there)” (24, 66). There are
encounters with locals, complete with evocations of daily speech, which
indicate the delight Ammons takes in found language (“conversation: /​
hearing people /​talk, how marvelous”; 201)—​a predilection he shares with
so many other everyday-​life poets, like Schuyler, Silliman, and Armantrout.
For example, at one point the speaker talks to “the man at the /​Esso station”
about a violent storm the previous night and incorporates the man’s colorful
speech: “ ‘must have been a / sucker,’ he said, ‘lifted /​oil cans right off the /​
shelves’  ” (17–​18).47
Ammons also interweaves events from the news, as part of his desire to
be faithful to the full spectrum of daily experience, including the way cur-
rent events and politics can quickly enter and exit the flow of our lives.48 In
particular, he draws attention to two disasters—​an airplane that was struck
by lightning and crashed on December 8 and a cruise ship that sank on
December 2249—​which add to the sense that an everyday-​life poem can also
serve as a kind of archive or time capsule, an impulse that I discuss in other
chapters as well.50
There are also recurring references to the poem-​as-​process, to the real-​
time act of creating the poem we are reading, which reinforce the notion that
writing is a daily and physical practice, a form of work, even a chore, rather
than an exalted visitation from on high. Ammons repeatedly suggests that
this project calls for an arduous physical act:

  I feel weak so
much tape remains:
my back’s getting sore:
I don’t sleep good
with this going on
(38)

In addition, funny and surprising interruptions intrude into the poem and
deliberately break the fourth wall. For example, after an extended and rather
solemn passage that uses the phrase “who cannot love,” Ammons suddenly
undercuts the foregoing by writing “I had /​lunch after ‘who cannot love’—​/​
soup, sandwich, milk, /​chocolate fudge cookie, & /​coffee” (60–​61). By doing
so, he unsettlingly blurs the boundary between art and life, and emphasizes
the poem as a process rather than a finished, polished artifact.51
148 Attention Equals Life

Even as he devotes himself to attending to the immediate and ordinary,

Ammons also recognizes the difficulty of the task he has set himself:

today is full of things,

so many,
how can they be managed,
received and loved
in their passing?
(11)

In such passages, he ponders questions about how to represent the daily,

and the relationship between aesthetic form and the everyday. Throughout
Tape, Ammons struggles to create a novel poetic form that grows out of, and
responds to, the contingent and quotidian: “let a new /​order occur /​from the
random & /​nondescript” (17), he avows. Ammons hopes this will be achieved
through the poem’s formal features—​especially its headlong rush, lack of peri-
ods (there is only one period in the 200-​page poem), and its fragments and
observations strung together by the ubiquitous colon that equates but never
arrests or separates. Through these means, his long poem aspires to be com-
mensurate to the dynamic flow, the democracy of particulars that make up
everyday experience. It hopes to “merge with coming & /​going common life”
(181), without trying to freeze it by locking it into place in a formal art work.
But he also understands the impossibility of escaping the everyday’s
double-​bind. In fact, he seems acutely aware of the paradox so many everyday-​
life theorists foreground: the inescapable need to bestow some form or shape
on daily life for it to be apprehensible inevitably distorts and alters the “real”
and renders it non-​everyday. On the one hand, he concedes the need to give
the chaos of experience a form:

         if
structure without life is
meaningless, so is
  life without structure
(44)

On the other, he admits the costs of imposing such form on the flux of daily
life:

why do I need to throw

this structure
against the flow
  which I cannot stop?
(87)
A. R. Ammons’s Quotidian Muse 149

This frustration is a key component of Ammons’s own strain of skeptical real-

ism. Even as he embarks on a quest for a new, enhanced kind of realism,
Ammons—​like Schuyler and other figures in this book—​constantly under-
mines any claims for poetry’s mimetic fidelity to “reality.” For example, just
after describing a storm, he writes

 the record
can’t reproduce the event:
even if I could know &
describe every event, my
account would
  consume the tape & run
on for miles into air:
(18)

Ammons addresses the dream of writing the poem that includes everything,
that impossible wish that haunts everyday poetics. He knows it is a fan-
tasy, because attention is by definition partial and because representation is
always a distortion and mediation of the “real.” Like Schuyler, he knows that

an object,
exactly perceived
& described is
when entered in the
    tapestry
somewhat compromised:
(67)

Just as Silliman will point out that “the map is not the territory” (Age of Huts,
12), Ammons admits poetry is at best an asymptotic approach to the “real”:

the only representation

of the sea’s floor
is the sea’s floor itself
  we take soundings & we
get schemas, approximations,
but we can’t come
to the whole truth
(Tape, 184)

Near the conclusion of Tape, as the poet senses the end of the roll of tape
approaching, he reflects back on what this strange project has accomplished
150 Attention Equals Life

and what it has given to his readers. In his view, the project forced him to be
more attuned than ever to the contingency and variety of daily life, to be open
to chance and accident, a process that in turn is reflected in the disorder and
messiness of the poem we have just read:

I wrote about these
days
the way life gave them:
  I didn’t know
 beforehand what I
 wd write,
whether I’d meet
anything new: I
showed that I’m sometimes
blank & abstract,
sometimes blessed with
song: sometimes
silly, vapid, serious,
angry, despairing
(203–4)

Ammons’s experiment in opening the tightly closed valves of poetry has

revealed the multidimensionality of the poet’s self, but also how multifaceted
daily life can be. He suggests that short lyric poems do not always provide a
form commensurate to the dynamic, various, and changing nature of what
happens “all day” every day:

 ideally, I’d
  be like a short poem:
  that’s a fine way
  to be: a poem at a
time: but all day
life itself is bending,
weaving, changing,
adapting, failing,
 succeeding
(204)

As he often does, here Ammons suggests that one of the most satisfying ways
to pursue the everyday is through a long, exploratory, loose baggy monster of
a poem like this one.
Appropriately enough, Tape concludes with a peroration about dailiness.
Ammons addresses his readers directly, explaining why he felt compelled
A. R. Ammons’s Quotidian Muse 151

to include in his epic poem the empty, the dull, the in-​between spaces of
everyday life.

 I’ve given
you my
emptiness …
I’ve given you the
interstices: the
  space between
 electrons:
  I’ve given you
  the dull days
when turning & turning
revealed nothing …
   I’ve given
you long
uninteresting walks
so you could experience
vacancy
(204–​205)

By stressing that this project has driven the poet, and the reader, to confront
and find meaning in emptiness, nothingness, vacancy, the space between
the big events, this brings to mind the aesthetic philosophy of John Cage, as
well as William James’s belief that “life is in the transitions” (Writings, 212).
Toward the end of his later long poem Sphere, Ammons returns to the con-
cept of the everyday as a crucial, in-​between space, a place where we spend a
great deal of our lives:

       between blastoff and landing, home and

office, between an event of some significance and another
event of some significance, how are we to entertain the time
and space: can we make a home of motion: there is a field
of sheep, vanishing: something terminal may be arriving to
that house, but we are leaving: mortgage payments, water rent,
phone bills, medical insurance, steep steps imprisoning an old
man: but we are fueled and provisioned: motion is our place
(Sphere, 75–​76)

In this case, he asks a plaintive, almost Beckett-​like question: how are we to fill
the interminable, repetitive time of everyday life? Can we make a home there,
152 Attention Equals Life

as Tape has sought to do? Can we live and find meaning in that always-​moving
space of daily life, in those “interstices” between the so-​called major events of
our lives? We have no choice, Ammons suggests, because “motion is our place.”
Thus, he intertwines images of daily routines (rent, bills) with the “terminal,”
inevitable facts of mortality, aging, and the ravages of time, but he insists that
“we are fueled and provisioned” by the stuff of everyday life just the same.

The Snow Poems

As my brief reference to Sphere suggests, many of the themes, issues, and

strategies of attending to the everyday I have located in Tape for the Turn of
the Year are at work in Ammons’s other long poems, stretching from the 1960s
through his 1993 book-​length poem Garbage, often hailed as a late master-
piece, to his final long poem, Glare (1997).52 Although space precludes discuss-
ing these works in depth, I want to look briefly at The Snow Poems, his 1977
long poem, because I view it as one of Ammons’s most compelling everyday-​
life projects—​one that returns to the mode and themes of Tape, but with an
even greater willingness to experiment with form.
Often referred to as “his most experimental and most controversial”
book, The Snow Poems stands as a radical departure from the more high-​
flown mode Ammons perfected in his previous long poem, Sphere (Kirschten,
Critical Essays, 14). In Sphere, Ammons had consciously aimed for a kind of
grandeur and sweep, and the volume had consequently met with great criti-
cal success. Roger Gilbert makes a compelling case that Ammons wrote The
Snow Poems as a defiant response to Harold Bloom’s insistence that he “return
to the questing, mythopoetic mode” of his early work. “In its unabashed
earthiness,” Gilbert argues, “it’s hard not to see the book as a deliberate repu-
diation of the abstract sublimity of Sphere, and more specifically as a pointed
refusal of Bloom’s exhortation” about what kind of poet Ammons should be
(“ ‘I Went to the Summit,’ ” 190).
Once again composing on continuous rolls of paper, Ammons wrote daily
poems, each one simply and arbitrarily titled after its first line, but intended
to be read as parts of one long poem. Like Tape, Snow Poems is an ambitious
and self-​conscious everyday-l​ife project. In an interview, Ammons explains
that he wrote this work after the temporary resolution and unity he felt he
had achieved in Sphere collapsed back into a sense of the world’s chaos and
disorder:

With Sphere, I had particularized and unified what I knew about things
as well as I could. It didn’t take long for me to fall apart or for that to fall
apart, too. Thinking of the anger and disappointment that comes from
such things … I wrote The Snow Poems, where I had meant to write a
A. R. Ammons’s Quotidian Muse 153

book of a thousand pages. I don’t know why I didn’t go ahead and do it,
because I wanted to say here is a thousand pages of trash that nevertheless
indicates that every image and every event on the planet and everywhere
else is significant and could be great poetry, sometimes is in passages and
lines. But I stopped at three hundred pages. I had worn myself and every-
body else out. But I went on long enough to give the idea that we really are
in a poetically inexhaustible world, inside and out. (Set in Motion, 65–​66;
ellipsis in original)

As these remarks suggest, The Snow Poems is driven by the frustration that
comes from witnessing the failure of a monist view of the world. Thus, it is
another example of how Ammons’s work can be understood as the expression
of an ex-​idealist turned skeptical realist—​now devoted to the Many, to a mul-
tiverse of plural facts (and swirling snowflakes), as opposed to the perfectly
unified universe of One (figured as an orb in Sphere). As an experiment with
form, and as a project of attention, The Snow Poems resembles other works
discussed here, like Ron Silliman’s Ketjak, that use extreme, even excessive
length and scope (“a book of a thousand pages”) for two reasons: as a way of
pursuing the impossible dream of including and dignifying every aspect and
instance of existence, and as a conceptual premise, a formal allegory for the
multiplicity and inexhaustibility of daily experience.
The resulting poem presents a ragged day-​by-​day chronicle of a brutally
cold, snowy upstate New York winter. As Kirschten notes, The Snow Poems
“abandons almost all considerations of sequential narrative and argument
in favor of a variety of typographic arrangements, lists, lyric moments,
asides, voice changes, dirty jokes, word games, and other fragmentary tac-
tics, which often infuriated reviewers” (Critical Essays, 14). Derided for its
self-​indulgence, its bawdy humor, and its steady focus on the minutiae of
the weather and other quotidian matters, The Snow Poems was greeted with
disbelief and hostility by many of Ammons’s most supportive readers, and
threatened to derail his career just as it reached its apex with the great suc-
cess of Sphere. One exception was Helen Vendler, who wrote approvingly of
the much-​maligned volume. Vendler’s support for the book is quite signifi-
cant for, as Gilbert argues, The Snow Poems “marks the point when she took
over the role of Ammons’s primary booster” from Bloom. Indeed, Vendler’s
“praise of Ammons’s fidelity to the quotidian may have given him permission
to keep writing in that mode despite Bloom’s clear disapproval” (Ammons,
“ ‘I Went to the Summit,’ ” 190).
Not surprisingly, in The Snow Poems Ammons seems to find the whole
romantic poet-​as-​seer bit, which had so often appealed to him with its siren
song, increasingly absurd and impossible to sustain. It seems harder and
harder for him to reconcile the Bloomian quest for the “high” sublime with
the rhythm and grind of actual everyday life.
154 Attention Equals Life

I can speak big and high

(but to which end?)
I can hone the severe metric,
incision’s incendiary …
anyway, who would have one around
speaking big and high:
over dishes, filling the vaporizer:
emptying the trash:
prefer chitchat to
swales of the austere unknown
(Snow, 25)

It is not accidental that Ammons’s most insistently and restlessly everyday

poem is also by far his most formally experimental. Dropping entirely the
stately, regularly lined stanzas of Sphere and a number of his other long
poems, The Snow Poems is a fragmentary, disjunctive, sprawling, and wild
book; it is playful, filled with “chitchat,” puns, wordplay, rampant goofing
around, and typographical experimentation. Ammons observes the shift-
ing weather and fluctuations of temperature and precipitation, compiles lists
of words and things, tells off-​color jokes, notes football scores on TV (“it’s
4:20 dusk coming /​the Redskins have a touchdown /​to go with their field-
goal” [56]), and riffs on excrement (“Things Change, the Shit Shifts” [4]‌),
and the importance of garbage (“realize trash /​the just groundwork /​of
marvelous devising … beauty’s unbelievable contrary” [6]). There are also
passages where Ammons (like Schuyler and many other everyday-​life poets)
appropriates found language, creating a collage-​like feel (“save a life /​return
my dog /​my brown and white /​female dog was taken … (from a bulletin
board)” (45), and conveying the fragmented and scattered nature of attention
in the age of media.
Most notoriously, Ammons experiments in The Snow Poems with present-
ing two columns of poetry at the same time. As he mentioned in an interview,
“the double columns in Snow Poems have unnerved some people, I suppose.
They are intended to be playful; they can be read one at a time, but with an
awareness of the other column, the other perspective” (Jackson, “Event,” 219).
This unusual device not only conveys the simultaneity of daily life but is also
an exploration of the nature of attention. Much like John Ashbery’s notorious
double-​columned poem “Litany,” Ammons tests our ability, or inability, to
pay attention to multiple things at the same time:

Go lemon juice
crabmeat claws
Old age     swiss slices
gets salad shrimp
A. R. Ammons’s Quotidian Muse 155

set lean roast
to sit baking mix
down apple sauce
pie filling
ground chuck
minced clams
corned beef

the elm
also (like the  in
willow) late this
to lose our
its leaves own
has (like day
the willow) and
lost them time

arrange these words so that they make

sense
(Snow, 45–​46)

As Michael McFee notes in his welcome defense of the book, The Snow Poems
resists closure at every turn, including its ending: Ammons “does not stage a
soaring consummation of the poem, as with Sphere,” nor does it resemble the
conclusion of Tape, where the poet “explains in the last few pages what he has
been doing the whole poem and builds up to his benediction.” Instead, at the
close of The Snow Poems “he suspends and scatters us in several directions”
(“A. R. Ammons,” 64).
I would argue that Ammons’s decision to surrender, at least for the moment,
the temptation of talking “big and high” about the “austere unknown” in
favor of diving head-​first into the “explosive, incredible mix” of everyday life
actually sparks the radical open-​endedness, multiplicity, and playfulness of
The Snow Poems (Snow, 264). In that sense, the case of Ammons—​especially
in works like Tape and The Snow Poems—​exemplifies a point I make through-
out this book: that the pursuit of the everyday in contemporary poetry often
prompts an impatience with conventional modes of representation and gen-
erates restless innovations with poetic form.
 { 4 }

Writing the Maternal Everyday

Bernadette Mayer and Her “Daughters”

I think my obsession with the daily is quite political.

—​Bernadette Mayer

It’s political to be a mother.

—​L aynie Browne

At one point in Tape for the Turn of the Year (1965), A. R. Ammons writes at
length and with evident pleasure about the sounds and smells coming from
the kitchen of his home as he types:

  I hear the
  porkchops frying!
  ah,
there’s the sweet, burnt
smell!
   sounds in the kitchen,
  pots lifted
  with empty
hushing ring,
the plunger of the icebox
  door
  snapping loose: the
  sizzling roil of
  porkchops turned:
  protest, response:
   flashes of aluminum
light
   as the pots work, the
  glint of tines
   as the table
   dresses: the
Bernadette Mayer and Her “Daughters” 157

   holy
   slow
   lifting & turning
in the spinach pot …
what’s that sound?
mashed potatoes being
  whipped?
   there, a chop turned:
  cups winding up
still in saucers:
the grasping snip of
celery stalks …
   “You
   can
   come
   sit
   down
   now
   if
   you
   want
   to.”
6:08 pm
(Tape, 132–​33)

On the one hand, this passage is a good example of what we saw in the
previous chapter: Ammons, a poet deeply committed to the everyday, hap-
pily replaces the Whitmanic yawp of “I Hear America Singing” with the
more humble “I hear the /​porkchops frying,” offering a deliberate challenge
(especially as a male poet) to mid-​century American poetic decorum by rel-
ishing the mundane activities and routines of domestic life: shopping, fam-
ily meals, taking out the trash, playing with one’s child. On the other hand,
it is not hard to detect a gendered subtext here: a set of unspoken assump-
tions about whose job these household chores are and should be. Although
the poet lovingly details the preparation of an ordinary home-​cooked meal,
it is clear that he is not doing the cooking. Instead, he envisions the process
from afar while he sits in his study writing the poem we read, savoring the
sounds and smells of dinner being prepared for him—​but by whom?
The language of the passage is quite revealing: Ammons’s ample use of
the passive voice renders the person actually doing the domestic labor utterly
invisible. In effect, he erases the agency of his wife, the writer’s faithful
158 Attention Equals Life

helpmeet, who presumably cooks while he writes. Those pork chops seem to
fry on their own, it is the “pots” and not people who “work,” the mashed
potatoes are magically “being whipped,” cups “wind up” in saucers, and the
table seems to set itself: “the /​glints of tines /​as the table /​dresses.” Once the
meal is ready, a disembodied voice summons the speaker, almost as if he were
a little boy, to dinner, explaining it is time to eat as long as it is convenient for
him (“if you want to”). After quickly mentioning what was served for dinner
and his satiation (“so wonderful to be just /​the outside edge of / painfully full:
/​then coffee!”), the poet seems to be back at his desk soon afterwards, once
more typing away like mad (Tape, 134). The engine that drives the domestic
routine—​the unseen wife and mother who turns the gears of the quotidian
machinery—​is almost comically obscured.1
How jarring, then, it is to turn to Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, writ-
ten in 1978, fifteen years after Tape for the Turn of the Year (and published in
1982), where we find the preparation of an ordinary meal described from quite
a different point of view:
Now’s the best time to be a mother, everybody’s hungry when we first get
home, Marie wants another orange, she asked for it three times before she
got her coat off, Sophia needs lunch before her nap, Lewis coffee bread and
butter. … Lewis goes into his room to work. … Now there’s so much to
do for a while, alot of little things, getting the dumb objects out of the bag,
peeling oranges, making some space to slice bread, washing the tray and to
find a clean cup and to have to deal with the awful sink. I don’t even look
up, there is a window in the kitchen. … (Midwinter Day, 61–​62)
Unlike Ammons, who appreciates the daily rituals of the kitchen from a
distance, Mayer reports from the thick of the moment, conveying her own
actions amid the clamor and demands of her hungry young daughters. Far
from being erased, the active agency of the woman doing the work is high-
lighted, even celebrated in this passage: “now’s the best time to be a mother.”
And she leaves no doubt about the rigors and requirements of her role: she
peels the oranges, slices the bread, cleans the dishes, makes lunch for chil-
dren and husband, without even having a chance to look out the window.
Meanwhile, the husband, like Ammons, seems to have the freedom and privi-
lege to leave the scene, withdrawing to “his” room, to “work.”
It is fair to say that both Ammons and Mayer are poets of the everyday,
committed to rendering the sights, sounds, pleasures, and downsides of
ordinary, quotidian existence. However, the results are strikingly different,
as are the political and cultural assumptions underlying their works. The
contrast raises important questions about the role of gender in everyday-​life
poetics, and illustrates a fact I discussed earlier, one that is fairly self-​evident
and yet not always at the forefront of everyday-​life theory nor discussions
of the quotidian in poetry:  our sense of what constitutes the everyday is
Bernadette Mayer and Her “Daughters” 159

radically dependent upon perspective and subject position. One’s experience

of everyday life is inextricable from one’s identity and social location, in part
because such factors inevitably produce the “sensible,” in Jacques Rancière’s
terms: they determine and shape what we are able to attend to, notice, and
experience. Clearly, Ammons’s everyday is fundamentally different from, say,
his wife’s, or that of a poet who is also a mother, or a queer poet whose days
are filled with strolling the avenues of Manhattan, or an African-​American
woman taking a walk in the hills overlooking Los Angeles.2
As I suggested in the introduction, recent developments in “everyday life
studies” have reminded us of this fact: far from being a monolithic or uni-
versal category, the everyday is instead better seen as a site of contestation,
discontinuity, and contradiction, profoundly shaped by political and cultural
forces.3 For all the talk of the “common” or shared nature of everyday life,
it is also irreducibly contingent, particular, and inevitably marked by, even
defined by, difference. However, both everyday-​life theory and the everyday-​
life aesthetic tradition have tended to sweep this sense of difference and con-
tingency under the rug, often positing white, male, bourgeois, heterosexual
experience as the norm and standard for a speciously “universal” everyday.
Both theorists (such as Henri Lefebvre, Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord,​
and practitioners of cultural studies) and writers (modernist authors from
Apollinaire to Joyce, the Surrealists, the New York School) have often associ-
ated the everyday, especially its more positive connotations, with male, urban
experience (and the figure of the flâneur) while devaluing the domestic and
the maternal. In other words, our understanding of “daily life” has often been
constructed and represented in gendered terms, as I discussed in c­ hapter 1.
In this chapter, I argue that Bernadette Mayer’s body of work functions as a
feminist critique of the everyday-​life tradition, exposing some of these impor-
tant blindspots and gaps at its heart. To do so, Mayer develops a groundbreak-
ing mode that I call “the poetics of the maternal everyday.” I use this phrase to
refer to a feminist aesthetic that explores how daily experience is inescapably
shaped by gender, that strives to represent the lived realities of being a woman
and a mother, and insists on the fact that motherhood is always, at some level,
political.4 In short, the poetics of the maternal everyday offers a stiff challenge
to the supposed universality that has long cloaked the implicit male-​ness at
the heart of many models of dailiness.
The particular mode Mayer helped inaugurate—​the poetics of the mater-
nal everyday—​has blossomed in the past several decades, as can be seen in
the writing of a whole range of younger contemporary women poets, includ-
ing Rachel Zucker, Claudia Rankine, Laynie Browne, Hoa Nguyen, Eleni
Sikelianos, and Catherine Wagner, many of whom cite their debt to Mayer.
And yet Mayer’s profound and widespread influence on contemporary poetry
has remained mostly under the radar and is only just beginning to be recog-
nized. To demonstrate and explore the aesthetic and political impact of her
160 Attention Equals Life

career, this chapter pairs Mayer’s poetry with the work of some of her most
interesting descendants. By focusing on Mayer and her poetic “daughters,”
this chapter aims to revise discussions of poetry and the everyday, and to
question some of the gendered assumptions that still sometimes structure
those discussions.

Part I: Bernadette Mayer
Bernadette Mayer, the Everyday,
and the Poetry of Motherhood
On December 22, 1978, Mayer undertook an unusual experiment that she
had been planning for weeks: she wrote an entire book-​length poem during
and about the events and thoughts she experienced on that particular day.
She later described the resulting poem, which she titled Midwinter Day, as
“a 120-​page work in prose and poetry written on December 22, 1978, from
notes, tapes, photographs, and memory” (Bernadette Mayer Reader, vii). The
poem recounts an ordinary day in the life of a young woman, her husband,
and two young children in the small town of Lenox, Massachusetts, where
Mayer and the poet Lewis Warsh had recently moved from New York City.
As the poet Alice Notley has noted, Midwinter Day is an “epic poem about a
daily routine.”5
Although it was not well known at the time, Midwinter Day has increas-
ingly come to be seen as a major long poem of the past several decades.
While still hardly a household name, Mayer has lately become a beacon for
younger American women writers who are trying to negotiate what is often
referred to as “the juggle”—​t he irresolvable balancing act of work and family
that contemporary women endlessly struggle with. Her books of the 1970s
exuberantly demonstrate that one can be a poet and a mother at the same
time and still survive, and even thrive. Many young poets today feel that
Mayer managed to find a way to reconcile these competing roles successfully,
long before the “mommy wars” of our day. For example, Juliana Spahr has
hailed Mayer’s ability to perfect the “juggle”: “I’ve long thought of [Mayer’s
book] The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters as a sort of handbook
to having it all.”6
In recent years, Mayer’s work has received a smattering of good critical
attention, but her poetry’s outsized influence on more recent writing has still
not received the attention it deserves. Critics have often focused on Mayer’s
complicated connections, especially as a woman poet, to the two different,
often competing movements with which she is associated, the New  York
School and Language poetry.7 They have also discussed her relationship to
conceptual art, her feminist revision of poetic forms (such as the long poem
and the sonnet), and her complex handling of gender and sexuality.8
Bernadette Mayer and Her “Daughters” 161

Despite this recent surge of interest in Mayer’s work and her example, there
has been little attention paid to her role as an important poet of the everyday,
or to the significance of her quotidian aesthetic for contemporary poets who
follow in her wake. In this chapter, I argue that Mayer should be viewed as
an important and underrecognized contributor to this tradition. But I make
the case that Mayer not only draws upon the resources of this lineage but also
offers a powerful retort, a bracing corrective to its failures and limitations.9
First, the avant-​garde lineage that is founded upon a fascination with daili-
ness is largely male; although the domestic and family life have at times been
a concern within this aesthetic line, mothering and the female body have not.
Second, most of the women writers who have contributed to this tradition—​
a group that includes Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein,
Marianne Moore, Lorine Niedecker, and Elizabeth Bishop—​did not have
children and rarely, if ever, explore mothering as a primary aspect of daily
life. In effect, Mayer says to the practitioners of this broad tradition:  “OK,
you’ve made a strong, persuasive case that poetry and art can and should
be about the everyday. Well, I’ve got some dailiness for you—​a whole range
of experience you’ve always ignored: the changes of the pregnant body, the
apartment full of diapers and toys, the screaming kids who won’t put their
boots on, the bookshelf full of Curious George and Dr. Seuss alongside Rilke
or Apollinaire.”
Mayer’s work not only exposes the neglect of such experiences within the
lineage of everyday-​life poetics and New York School poetry but also responds
to a broader absence—​the lack of a viable tradition of women’s writing, in
general, about pregnancy, childbirth, and being a mother.10 For Mayer and
her contemporaries who began writing in the mid-​1960s and 1970s, treating
such experiences as subject matter was practically off-​limits. There were few,
if any, models to turn to for inspiration. As I mentioned, many of the major
modernist women writers were childless.11 As Stephen Burt has observed, in
1975 “if you wanted to write about giving birth to children; reorganizing your
life around them; nursing, feeding, or coming to understand them as they
turn from infants into toddlers, preschoolers, and second graders, you had
a disturbingly clear field: not that there were no poems about such experi-
ences, but there were not enough, and of the wrong kind” (“Smothered to
Smithereens”).
Thus, for a poet to write about mothering and pregnancy in the early 1970s
seemed an inherently rebellious, defiant act. As Alicia Ostriker notes in her
introduction to the recent anthology Not for Mothers Only,

Poetry, according to my professors, was supposed to be “universal.” I had

read thousands of love poems and thousands of death poems. These were
“universal” themes. Yet I had never read a poem about pregnancy and birth.
Was birth not universal? It took me a while to realize that the topic was
162 Attention Equals Life

taboo. One did not mention female physical experiences in mixed company,
much less try to make literature out of them. (Wagner and Wolff, Not for
Mothers Only, ix)

As Mayer’s friend and fellow New  York School poet Alice Notley
recalls: “it seemed one had to disobey the past and the practices of liter-
ary males in order to talk about what was going on most literally around
one, the pregnant body, and babies for example. There were no babies in
poetry then. How could that have been?” (Dienstfrey and Hillman, Grand
Permission, ix).
In the postwar period, a handful of women had begun bravely writ-
ing about such topics, particularly Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Anne
Sexton. However, the example these groundbreaking poets offered proved to
be unsatisfying and even demoralizing for Mayer, Notley, and other young
women who were brought up on the experimental strategies and bohemian
stance of the modernist and post-​World War II avant-​garde. In terms of
form and style, the confessional poets were committed to a more traditional
lyric mode that seemed alien to young avant-​garde women writers. Thus, the
tools poets like Plath used to grapple with the daily life of women felt inad-
equate. But more important, Plath, Rich, and Sexton often depict marriage
and children as a prison or death sentence, as in “Tulips,” where Plath writes
“My husband and child smiling out of the family photo; /​Their smiles catch
onto my skin, little smiling hooks” (Ariel, 10), or in “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,”
where Rich laments that “The massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band /​Sits
heavily upon Aunt Jennifer’s hand” (Fact, 4). This paradigm, underwritten
by the deep suspicion of the cultural meanings and effects of motherhood
at the heart of second-​wave feminist thought and activism, left little room
for more positive or nuanced explorations of mothering and the domestic.
Perhaps even more debilitating was the fact that, in the case of Plath and
Sexton, the profound despair the poets felt as they tried to be both poet and
mother seemed to lead inevitably toward the women’s tragic self-​destruction
through suicide. As Dienstfrey and Hillman observe, “a shadow was cast over
the lives of women poets by their suicides, and these two became haunting
muses” (Grand Permission, xiv). Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller note that
Plath and Sexton provided an “example of the costs of female creative ambi-
tion, an example that was disheartening, if not terrifying, to young women
who aspired to be poets” (“Feminism,” 86). Recalling a period when she lived
in England as a young pregnant mother caring for an infant, Alice Notley
remembers “thinking about Sylvia Plath going mad in a similar English
scene. I wrote in a now-​discarded poem the line: ‘But Poetess X was a shit; she
killed herself’ ” (Dienstfrey and Hillman, Grand Permission, 138).
In recent years, however, this situation has changed dramatically. The vir-
tual absence of poetry focused on the specifically “female” experiences of
Bernadette Mayer and Her “Daughters” 163

pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering has given way to a rich and varied body
of writing that does just that. A new subgenre of contemporary poetry has
sprung up, which Stephen Burt refers to as “motherhood poetics” and others,
like Ange Mlinko, have derisively called “mommy poems.”12 Indeed, poetry
that chronicles the ups and downs of motherhood has been widely hailed and
much discussed, and its practitioners have been granted prizes, plum aca-
demic positions, and high visibility.13 Several important and sophisticated
anthologies have appeared that theorize and collect such work, including The
Grand Permission (Dienstfrey and Hillman), which is a book of essays about
poetry and mothering, and a collection of poems entitled Not for Mothers
Only (Wagner and Wolff).14
If poets like Mayer and her peers had no models to turn to, the same is not
the case for women writers today: as many frequently point out, they have
Mayer herself, and a handful of her peers, as inspiration. “There was a lot
of resistance to the subject of motherhood and parenting during graduate
school,” Jean Donnelly recalls. “I cried when I finally found the work of poets
like Alice Notley and Bernadette Mayer, who neither ignored nor romanti-
cized it” (Wagner and Wolff, Not for Mothers Only, 216). Following the lead
of Mayer and Notley, contemporary poets of the maternal everyday insist on
a poetry capacious enough to include breastfeeding and tricycles, tantrums
and playgrounds—​a ll the small details and rhythms of daily life with chil-
dren. At the same time, these poets vigorously resist romanticizing either
maternity or the everyday, as they attempt the nearly impossible: stripping
mothering, pregnancy, and child-​rearing of sentimentality and cliché, while
at the same time not condemning these activities as “square,” oppressive, or
politically conservative.
In this manner, the poetics of the maternal everyday constitutes an alter-
native to the familiar lineage of women’s lyric poetry that runs from Sylvia
Plath to Sharon Olds and beyond. It is more formally experimental, more
attuned to the politics of daily life and to gender and power, more trained on
the everydayness of the everyday, and crucially, often more affirmative and
less despairing about motherhood and its costs.
Mayer’s experimentalism has taken many forms, but probably the most
important part of her legacy has been her tireless creation of those rule-​
determined, procedural works I refer to as “everyday-​life projects” through-
out this book. For example, Mayer’s breakthrough work was a mixed-​media,
conceptual work entitled Memory. An explicitly time-​based and procedural
work that she called an “emotional science project,” Memory was composed
according to self-​assigned parameters and rules:  to create it, Mayer took a
roll of film every day for the entire month of July 1971, and recorded seven
hours of narration (Studying Hunger, 9). The work was exhibited in a gallery,
and was also later published in book form, and was thus simultaneously a
long poem, a performance piece, an art exhibit, and an archive of daily life.
164 Attention Equals Life

Following on the heels of Memory, Mayer would go on to devise many

such everyday-​life projects, including her book The Desires of Mothers to
Please Others in Letters (in which she used the nine months of pregnancy as
the formal constraint for a book of unsent letters arranged in nine sections
that track the pregnancy’s progress) or her recent book The Helens of Troy, NY
(in which she tracked down every woman named Helen in the city of Troy,
New York, and took photographs and wrote poems about each one). Mayer’s
belief in the generative qualities of constraints and conceptual projects can
also be seen in her well-​k nown “Experiments” list:  an evolving, collabora-
tive set of writing prompts that grew out of Mayer’s workshops at the Poetry
Project in the early 1970s and that have circulated widely ever since. Many
of the prompts are designed to channel attention toward the domestic or the
urban quotidian, often through the use of time-​or space-​based constraints.
For example, “Write household poems—​about cooking, shopping, eating and
sleeping”; “Structure a poem or prose writing according to city streets, miles,
walks, drives. For example: Take a fourteen-​block walk, writing one line per
block to create a sonnet”; “Write once a day in minute detail about one thing”;
“Write minimally: one line or sentence per day.”
These groundbreaking and influential projects suggest that Mayer should
be considered a major progenitor of the recent movement known as “concep-
tual writing,” especially as it is practiced by women. Over the past decade,
critics have debated conceptual writing’s political and aesthetic claims and
goals and argued about its antecedents (especially its roots in seminal fig-
ures like Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, or Andy Warhol) and its evolution.
Mayer, however, is not often mentioned in such accounts. This is unfortu-
nate, as Mayer stands out among the various literary forerunners to today’s
conceptualism because of her close, first-​hand connection to conceptual
art itself. Her literary career took off in the late 1960s in collaboration with
her then brother-​in-​law, Vito Acconci, who started out as a poet but soon
became a leading and controversial figure in conceptual and performance
art. With Acconci, Mayer founded and co-​edited the influential journal 0 to 9,
a groundbreaking venture that brought together underground New  York
poetry with many of the emerging practitioners of conceptual art. Although
the intimate contact Mayer had with conceptual art during the late 1960s did
not last, her whole body of work grows out of her generative relation with the
movement and its practices.15
Recognizing Mayer as a major influence for contemporary conceptual writ-
ing is important because it enables us to assess the pivotal role of women and
women-​centered art in its evolution, which is all too easily elided from narra-
tives about literary movements as they harden and become codified.16 As can
be seen in the recently published anthology I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual
Writing by Women (Bergvall et al.), contemporary women poets have shown
a special affinity for conceptual projects, constraints, and appropriation, in
Bernadette Mayer and Her “Daughters” 165

part because they have found that such strategies offer possibilities for a sub-
versive poetic practice and for feminist critique. Mayer’s importance to this
resurgence of conceptualism can be seen in the anthology itself, which both
showcases Mayer’s work and explicitly acknowledges her influence on this
trend, including in the collection’s title, which is borrowed from a poem by
Mayer (fittingly borrowed in turn, of course, from Shakespeare).17
The case of Bernadette Mayer can also help us see that two important phe-
nomena that have emerged in the past two decades, which are often considered
separately—​the new “poetry of motherhood” and conceptual writing—​are
actually intertwined. Recognizing Mayer’s work as a crucial source for both
these developments allows us to understand their origins, their political
investments, and how they relate to one another. Burgeoning discussions of
poetry and mothering have neglected the importance of the everyday to that
body of work, while debates about conceptualism and everyday-​life poetics
have rarely mentioned motherhood as a key topic and problem for avant-​garde
writers. In other words, scholars have overlooked the important intersection
where conceptualism, avant-​garde everyday-​life aesthetics, and “motherhood
poetics” meet—​a nexus first explored in Mayer’s pioneering work.18

From 0 to 9 to Memory: Mayer, Conceptual

Art, and Everyday-​L ife Poetics
From the beginning of her career in the late 1960s, Bernadette Mayer has been
fascinated by the quotidian in all its complexity and contradiction. “I love you
and daily life, what life isn’t daily? … [W]‌hat poetry isn’t everyday,” Mayer
proclaimed in “The Poetry of Everyday Life,” a lecture she gave at the Poetry
Project at St. Marks in 1998 (quoted in Nelson, Women, 119). In an early poem
titled “The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica,” Mayer tells herself “Look at
very small things with your eyes /​& stay warm” (Bernadette Mayer Reader, 20).
The poem suggests that careful attention to the tiny and immediate can be a
survival strategy—​“the way to keep going” when faced with crisis, depriva-
tion, and extremity, in the “Antarctica” of our lives. Throughout her work,
she espouses an experimental realism designed to attend to the full range
of immediate, quotidian experience: as she puts it at one point in Midwinter
Day, “I want to get /​A tight pair of paints and dance /​With you with things
as they are” (17).
Mayer’s desire to dance with things as they are, her attempt to honor the
vast scope and richness of the everyday and its “very small things,” drives
her restless experimentation with form—​such as her delight in blurring
genres, exploring mixing media, and devising conceptual and constraint-​
based projects. With one foot in the world of conceptual art and the other in
the New York School’s second generation, Mayer turns to avant-​garde forms
in part because she feels conventional forms and self-​contained lyric poems
166 Attention Equals Life

do not offer an adequate mode of attending to and recording everyday life—​

especially contemporary daily life as experienced by women and mothers.
From the first, Mayer was drawn to project-​based and conceptual meth-
ods for apprehending the quotidian, as can be seen in her involvement with
the journal 0 to 9, which she founded in 1967 with Vito Acconci. The journal
0 to 9 was a low-​budget, homemade mimeographed magazine, but despite its
modesty, it became an important showcase for conceptual art. Indeed, one
of the defining statements of the new movement, Sol LeWitt’s “Sentences on
Conceptual Art,” first appeared in the fifth issue of 0 to 9, in January 1969.
Although other small literary journals at the time showed the impress of
developments in conceptual art, no other journal was as devoted to pub-
lishing work in both areas, nor did any other journal so thoroughly refuse
to respect any boundaries between the two. The six issues of 0 to 9 featured
works by figures who would become some of the major artists within con-
ceptualism and post-​minimalism—​Sol LeWitt, Robert Smithson, Yvonne
Rainer, Dan Graham, Lawrence Weiner, Adrian Piper, Douglas Huebler—​
right alongside New York poets like Berrigan, Padgett, and Koch. Acconci
himself embodied the bringing together, and eventual sundering, of these
two worlds:  increasingly fascinated by the possibilities of conceptualism,
and skeptical about poetry, Acconci soon left literature behind as the maga-
zine reached the end of its run and devoted himself to art.
Conceptual artists were almost as fascinated with the everyday as poets of
the New York School, although they developed quite different methods and
approaches for grappling with the quotidian. In contrast to the chatty, col-
loquial voice and often exuberant embrace of pop culture, “low” subject mat-
ter, and quotidian acts and thoughts associated with O’Hara, Schuyler, and
Berrigan, conceptual art took a rigorous, often “neutral” or quasi-​scientific
approach to ordinary objects and experiences.
0 to 9 amply displays Mayer’s early interest in the use of conceptual and
performative projects for purposes of attending to the everyday. Many of the
works in 0 to 9 track, in methodical and quasi-​scientific fashion, the movement
of daily time and create situations or frames within which ordinary events
and activities become art. For example, in issue 5, the first of John Perreault’s
“Three Poetry Events,” consists of the following instructions: “Darken the
performance area. /​Light a match and then blow it out. /​Continue doing this
until all twenty matches /​from a book of safety matches /​have been lit and
then extinguished” (Acconci and Mayer, 0 to 9, 11). In an untitled piece in
issue 6, Mayer’s sister, the artist Rosemary Mayer, experiments with making a
“real-​time” artwork: it consists simply of three-​fourths of a page covered with
tiny typed x’s; after the last line of x’s stops partway, it says “equals smoking
time one Chesterfield King Size” (110). The conceptual artist Hans Haacke
seems to speak to experiments of this kind when he proclaimed in 1965:
“make something which lives in time and makes the ‘spectator’ experience
Bernadette Mayer and Her “Daughters” 167

time” (Lippard, Six Years, 38). This smoking piece, like many conceptual
works—​including Warhol’s films Empire and Sleep; landmark French avant-​
garde movies like Agnes Vardas’s Cleo de 5 a 7 and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne
Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles; Mayer’s later book Midwinter
Day; even Ammons’s Tape for the Turn of the Year—​play with this idea of
duration, creating a “real-​time” work that forces the spectator to experience
the actual passage of time as it occurs.
The quotidian orientation of the work collected in 0 to 9 becomes even more
pronounced in its later issues: especially in the last (“supplemental”) issue enti-
tled “Street Works,” which documented “a series of three collective and cha-
otic events held during the spring of 1969” (Russo, “Poetics of Adjacency,” 130).
Clearly displaying affinities with Situationism, Happenings, and Fluxus, “Street
Works” was “a set of occasions where art could be encountered in ‘non-​art’
spaces people traversed daily” (130). Mayer’s own contributions to “Street Works”
evince her growing fascination with conceptual approaches to the everyday.
One piece, “Polaroid Street Works,” “involved taking a Polaroid photo of the
street, walking until it developed, then attaching it to the nearest surface” (131).
Another involved “handing out index cards communicating one of ‘101 con-
structions’; this is documented in 0 to 9 with one painstakingly filled neatly
handwritten page bearing instructions” (131). Here is the opening passage:
make noise. throw garbage cans away. run on one street for a short time.
steal cars and replace with photographs. two people run on two streets for
a long time. take down signs on twenty streets for one minute … take over
construction sites for 24 hours. record signs in the middle of the block at
dawn. measure wastebaskets in front of a store in the afternoon. set up
mailboxes in an alley. refer to telephone booths. synchronize parking
meters. cover fire pumps. count children in the gutter for as many min-
utes as there are children. point out adults in the middle of an intersection.
drive dogs into the street. signal policemen crossing the street. label build-
ings “please do not touch.” fill mailboxes with ideas … stand up against
the wall for 24 hours. refer to noises for as many hours as there are noises.
(Acconci and Mayer, 0 to 9, n.p.)
With its creation of “situations,” of ruptures within the flow of everyday rou-
tine and spectacle, Mayer’s piece resembles the kind of projects initiated by
the Situationists, as well as similar activities issuing from Fluxus and others
involved in Happenings. The use of the imperative voice and the off-​k ilter
assignments to undertake quotidian actions or to disrupt habitual behav-
iors indicate Mayer’s tendency to create the kind of instructional, practice-​
oriented, or “toolkit” pieces that I  have discussed as being common to
everyday-​life aesthetics.
As with many other toolkit pieces, Mayer’s contribution to “Street Works”
suggests that any reader or recipient could take this artwork and turn it into
168 Attention Equals Life

daily practice. Mayer’s experiment strikingly prefigures a whole slew of later

projects—​from Georges Perec’s listing of similar odd activities in Species of
Spaces, to Silliman’s BART, to the recent explosion of books that offer instruc-
tions and tips for disrupting habit and routine and returning a sense of joy
and unpredictability to everyday life, such as Roger Pol-​Droit’s Astonish
Yourself:  101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life (which includes
experiments like “Smile at a stranger,” “Tell a stranger she is beautiful,” “Take
the subway without going anywhere,” and “Telephone at random”); and David
Horvitz’s blog-​turned-​book Everything That Can Happen in a Day (“For an
entire day, give a flower to every cashier you purchase something from” (43),
“In a public place, line up ten oranges and leave them” (48), “Leave a bouquet
of flowers in a taxi for the next person” (61).
As the work in 0 to 9 suggests, from the beginning of her writing career,
Mayer attempted to wed the New York School’s poetry of dailiness (as prac-
ticed especially by its second generation) to conceptual art’s more anthropo-
logical attentiveness to the ordinary. Lytle Shaw explains that Mayer soon
began to undertake “self-​imposed research projects,” in which the subject of
inquiry was herself, her own consciousness and daily experience (“Faulting
Description,” 156). It was quite common for conceptual artists to use them-
selves as specimens for such inquiry: Acconci, for instance, became notorious
for creating a new model of the “artist as scientist,” turning himself into “the
subject of his own faithfully, even bureaucratically recorded experiments on
his body in itself and in relation to public space” (155).19
Mayer’s own breakthrough as a poet came in 1971, when she extended the
spirit of the works found in 0 to 9 and of her “Experiments” list to the creation
of a large-​scale hybrid conceptual work of her own, which she called Memory.
The first of her many exhaustive projects of documentation, Memory is an
explicitly time-​based and procedural work that she called an “emotional sci-
ence project,” composed according to self-​assigned parameters and rules. As
she described the work:

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. (Studying Hunger, 9)

In some ways, Memory is a quintessential everyday-​life project. “It’s a diary of

one month,” Mayer later explained:
I wrote incessant notes and made drawings about everything that hap-
pened every day. I wrote down as much as I could without interrupting my
Bernadette Mayer and Her “Daughters” 169

life. It was the month of July, 1971. I had chosen the month at random with-
out knowing what I would be doing during that month, because I didn’t
want to choose a time to do this experiment that would be particularly
loaded, or particularly interesting or dull. (“From: A Lecture,” 98)
It was exhibited as a multimedia work in a gallery that was interested in “try-
ing to do kind of new things at that point in time. Conceptual art I suppose,
is what it’s called.” As she envisioned it, the audience “could follow the whole
month by walking along with the pictures, and spend eight hours in the gal-
lery” (98).20
As much a work of conceptual art and an installation as a work of poetry,
Memory exhibits Mayer’s “unapologetic” dedication to “the art of intermi-
nable catalogue” (Nelson, Women, 104). This is one of the key features that
Mayer’s everyday-​life poetics shares with both conceptual art and other every-
day life poetic projects: an obsession with the idea of creating an artwork that
might include, absorb, hold, and document everything. For instance, to create
the text of Memory, Mayer set about transcribing “every event, every motion,
every transition of … her own mind” (quoted in Vickery, Leaving Lines, 152). 21
In her discussion of Mayer, Nelson focuses on the poet’s “Whitmanesque ‘aes-
thetics of monstrous absorbency, total inclusion’ ” (Women, 100). As Mayer’s
close friend and collaborator Clark Coolidge has recalled about the interests
and goals they shared: “We wanted endless works, that would zoom on &
on and include everything ultimately, we’d talk about the ‘Everything work,’
which would use every possible bit flashing through our minds” (quoted in
Baker, “Bernadette Mayer”). As I argued in earlier chapters, the impossible
desire to create the “everything work,” the work of “total inclusion” that
achieves maximum attentiveness to all of experience, is a motif that haunts
everyday-​life aesthetics, from Perec’s “attempts to exhaust” a location to
Ammons’s fantasy of composing an “omnium-​gatherum.”22
Like other everyday-​life poets, Mayer always recognizes both the impos-
sibility and the allure of including “all.” At one point in Midwinter Day, she
writes:

              How preoccupying
Is the wish to include all or to leave all out
Some say either wish is against a poem or art
                 I’m asking
Is it an insane wish?
(102)23

Like Schuyler and Ammons, she remains skeptical of the capacity of language
or art to encompass or master the everyday. Elsewhere in Midwinter Day
she writes “if you could tell the story of exactly what is happening it would
be amazing, but I  can’t do it” (89).24 However, Mayer, the skeptical realist,
170 Attention Equals Life

persists in entertaining this “insane wish” to include, track, and document

the inexhaustible “everything” of daily life.

Midwinter Day: “The Day, Like the Dream,

Has Everything in It”
Given Mayer’s fascination with creating “self-​imposed research projects,” it
is not surprising that once she had children in the mid-​1970s, she quickly
took the tools and tactics she had been using in 0 to 9, Memory, and her
“Experiments” list and adapted them for the purposes of rendering daily life
as a mother as exhaustively and fully as possible. This goal came to fruition
in Midwinter Day, generally considered to be one of her most significant and
influential works.
Like so many of Mayer’s other works, Midwinter Day is the result of a
deliberate, constraint-​and time-​based project—​a kind of “real-​time” experi-
ment written about, and during the course of, a single day. In deciding to
create a book-​length poem, Mayer quite self-​consciously contributes her own
effort to the storied genre of the long poem. But she provocatively shifts the
typical concerns and scope of the form from that displayed in long poems like
Pound’s Cantos, Hart Crane’s The Bridge, William Carlos Williams’s Paterson,
Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems, or even Ammons’s Tape for the Turn of the
Year, to the domestic sphere conventionally associated with women and
mothers, offering a provocative rejoinder to the epic tradition itself.25 Mayer’s
book demonstrates that a poem about a single day in the life of a mother—​
even a day like December 22, which she seems to purposely choose because it
is what she calls the “year’s least day” (55), the “shortest day of the year” (33)—​
is so rich, complex, varied, and inexhaustible that it could include everything
one finds in traditional epics: love, death, fear, war, violence, pleasure, loss,
memory, sex, and dream. At one self-​reflexive point in the poem she writes “I
had an idea to write a book that would … prove the day like the dream has
everything in it” (89).
Furthermore, by deciding to give a single day book-​length treatment, Mayer
both invokes and comments on the familiar modernist tactic of using a single
day as the focus and frame for a novel—​a tactic most famously seen in Joyce’s
Ulysses and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. From the book’s first page, Mayer signals
her intention to converse with these predecessors: Midwinter Day’s first word
(complete with an oversized capital S) directly alludes to the famous begin-
ning of Ulysses (where Joyce wrote “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan,” Mayer
writes “Stately you came to town in my opening dream”). Mayer thus alerts
us right away that she will be putting her own subversive stamp on this mini-​
genre. If those landmark modernist works were radical attempts to shift the
scale of the novel to the daily life of “ordinary” people, Midwinter Day not only
extends that project but also takes it in a notably different direction. First, the
Bernadette Mayer and Her “Daughters” 171

events of those novels seem momentous in contrast to the much more mun-
dane ordinariness of Mayer’s day, in which nothing conventionally “dramatic”
happens at all (by far the biggest moment of conflict is a toddler’s tantrum in
the town’s public library—​a far cry from, say, the suicide of Septimus Warren
Smith in Mrs. Dalloway). Second, Mayer pointedly replaces the concerns of the
Joycean everyday (largely male and urban) with the thoughts and actions of a
woman caring for little children in a small town.26
In addition, unlike those examples, Mayer’s poem is not a fictional represen-
tation of a single “day in the life.” It was—​or purports to have been—​written
on a single day, by a woman who was also a primary caregiver to two young
children.27 In that sense, Midwinter Day ups the ante on its predecessors and
their claims about the everyday:  it becomes a performance piece and feat of
endurance. It is also a feminist refusal to abide by strict divisions of labor and
the engrained belief that the domestic and the intellectual are incompatible. As
Maggie Nelson suggests (Women, 110), Midwinter Day is designed to confront,
perhaps definitively, the problem of “the juggle”: it responds to the questions fac-
ing all women writers who are mothers: how can you be both woman and artist?
When do you find time to write? “All day long” is the book’s defiant answer.
For Mayer, every element of a day can become fodder for a self-​assigned
research project: at one point she writes, “I would study the twelve hours of the
day /​Spending an hour in each” (Midwinter Day, 94). In this case, studying the
hours of the day entails carefully noting and documenting the busy activity of
a home filled with young children who are doing nothing much in particular
except playing, talking, fighting, reading, and eating. One passage reads:
Sophia sits on my lap playing with markers. She pulls them from a jar,
opens them and puts them back. She does it repeatedly. Marie falls down.
Marie builds a farm from blocks, she puts two cows in a stall. Sophia
takes them. Marie says don’t destroy my farm. Sophia walks. They shout.

Marie wants Lewis to read Curious George, he doesn’t want to. She
says try it.
(84–​85)

By creating a work that devotes attention to such activities, Mayer makes a

potent, even defiant point about content—​about what material can be appro-
priate for, even thrive as, poetry. For the same reason, Mayer frequently weaves
the language of her children directly into the fabric of the text, delighting in
the strange poetry that crackles in the ordinary speech of kids—​a tactic that
will be picked up by later poets of motherhood:  “Marie says children have
candy my name is Betsy you’ll get sticky. She calls Sophia baby brother, it’s
from a book. She says here’s a mountain I made I cut it sharp and thick” (84).28
172 Attention Equals Life

As such passages suggest, Mayer casts off the strictures of poetic convention
as too limiting to capture the variety and complexity of daily life. Smashing
the confines of the short lyric poem, Midwinter Day features a dizzying variety
of forms, moving from disjunctive free verse, to strangely antiquated rhymed
quatrains, to long-​lined stanzas, to rambling prose paragraphs, and back again
to poetry—​with different sections of the poem (and of the day) corresponding
to different poetic modes. The formal variety, fragmentation, and overall sense
of flux and flow aim to convey the rhythm, the feel, the distinctive temporality
of daily life with small children. For example, after one passage of scrambled
syntax, kid language, and rapid jumps—​“Where’s the chair it’s in the pail put
the person in it, is it the teacher’s chair, I used to go to New York yesterday
and have my hair shampooed, maybe it’s a sparrow maybe not maybe it’s just
a bird”—​she exclaims “What an associative way to live this is,” which refers
equally to her lived experience and to the text we are reading (35).
As part of her goal of achieving radical inclusivity, one tactic (or “trap for
the attention”) Mayer deploys is the use of extravagant documentary lists and
Whitman-​like catalogs, like the exhaustive tally of the “titles of all the current
books” spotted at the local bookstore (53–​54). In the second section, Mayer
launches without warning into a Georges Perec–​like inventory of every item
visible in her home, naming objects and moving associatively, like a video
camera, roaming through the space of the cramped, bohemian, art-​and
kid-​filled home:
From the bedroom, curtains blue as ink I stare at, red Godard floor white
walls all crayoned, from the bed raised on cinder blocks at Dr. Incao’s mid-
wife’s request so Sophia could be born, fake Indian cover Ray gave us for
Marie American Indian and Ray’s old real wool blanket and all our sheets
her gifts, Lewis’s Aunt Fanny’s crocheted Afghan and Tom’s old sleeping
bag, the mimeographic machine and its cover, diaper rash ointment, from
the walls a butterfly kite, a leaf on a ribbon from nursery school, mush-
rooms by Joe, an iris and a gladiola by Rosemary, the gladiola painted here,
the stuck clock, the window faces south, laundry on it, closet doors hung
with jackets, shawls, scarves and Marie’s dress. … (32–​33)
And on it goes for another page and a half of unbroken prose, this careful
and loving scrutiny of the messy but vibrant domestic space. As it archives
and documents the mundane things that constitute her daily existence, the
passage exhibits the leveling of hierarchies typical to everyday-​life poetics,
thanks to its penchant for the catalog, which presents all objects as more or
less equivalent, none prioritized over any other.
Mayer takes this gesture of cataloging and documenting the mundane—​
familiar from other everyday-​life artworks, from the lists of Whitman or
Joyce to Perec’s inventory of every item he ate and drank for an entire year—​
but gives it a feminist twist. It is no accident that she doesn’t distinguish at all
Bernadette Mayer and Her “Daughters” 173

between the highest of high art (a poster on their wall featuring “A woman
by Matisse in yellow and blue”) and her daughter’s art works (“a leaf on a rib-
bon from nursery school”) or the “potty chair, diaper pail for cloth diapers,
plastic bag of used plastic diapers, toilet sink tub” cluttering their home (33).
It is quite deliberate that the list of books she mentions borrowing from the
library moves without pause from There’s a Wocket in My Pocket by Dr. Seuss
to Samuel Pepys’s Diaries (43–​44). Throughout Midwinter Day, Mayer refuses
to see any division between the domestic sphere (typically linked to women
and childcare) and the world of intellect and imagination: it is all one, big,
jumbled, happy whole.
Another trope familiar from earlier everyday-​life aesthetics that Mayer
puts a feminist spin on is the flâneur—​the walker in the modern city who
serves as the very embodiment of the modern artist, both a part of and able
to stand apart and critique the urban crowd and the emanations of capital-
ism. The flâneur is a motif central to Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, Apollinaire’s
“Zone,” and the city poems of Frank O’Hara and Ted Berrigan. But, as Maggie
Nelson has argued, “the literary tradition of the writer as flâneur—​a tradition
of great importance to O’Hara, for example—​simply cannot remain intact
when the flâneur becomes a flâneuse” (Women, xxiv). In the third section of
Midwinter Day, Mayer offers just this sort of subversive riff on the figure of
the flâneur: Mayer transforms the observant male walker in the city into a
“flâneuse”: a bohemian and politically resistant poet-​mom strolling with kids
around a quaint New England town.
In this part of the book, Mayer deliberately moves outward from the pri-
vate, interior spaces of the book’s first two parts to the wider public world, as
the poet and her husband and children take a walk around the town of Lenox,
Massachusetts. By chronicling a noontime walk on the wintry streets, com-
plete with errands, shopping, and pointed social observation, Mayer overtly
invokes the premise and content of everyday-​life “walk poems”—​especially
Frank O’Hara’s diaristic, “I do this I do that,” “lunch poems.” At one point,
she more or less directly echoes O’Hara’s famous mode when she writes “It’s
12:15 p.m. /​Everything circumscribed” (Midwinter Day, 48). But once again,
she does so with a difference. The “hum-​colored cabs,” the Manhattan bus-
tle, the boozy lunches of literary gossip with writer friends that one finds in
O’Hara, are out. Here, the poet walks with kids in tow, stops by the small-​
town post office and the library, and hauls her daughters along to bookstore
and market, as in this passage:

       Now Marie says her boots are getting too hot

We run the few yards to the market in the deep and cheerful snow
… To market to market to buy a fat pig
Home again home again jiggety jig
There’s the State Line Potato Chip truck
174 Attention Equals Life

                We all go
In the door of the mausoleum store lit like a jailcell
To get spaghetti, oranges, juice, yellow peas and some cheese
… I can’t get Marie in the cart too well with her Korean boots on
(54)

In this manner, Mayer writes her own “I do this I do that” poem, but trans-
forms the familiar New York School model of dailiness so that it now con-
sists of household errands, nursery rhymes, and wrestling babies into
shopping carts.
The third section also illustrates another aspect of Mayer’s poetry that has
been very influential for later poets of motherhood: she erases the expected
boundary between the private and domestic world of mother and family and
the public world of politics, economics, and cultural critique. Throughout the
poem, she reflects on the details and absurdities of local politics (“There’s a
sign on the door that from the first of the year /​Library hours will be cur-
tailed due to fuel prices”), frequently contemplates the inequities and ironies
of capitalism, and is especially sensitive to how class and money influence and
structure so many facets of daily life (43). She returns especially to the diffi-
culties of living as a poet and trying to raise a family, without a fixed income,
on the edge of poverty: “But the neat dry bank is always the same big loss,
even today /​Though the pigeons from our roof feed in the yard next door /​
We are still as poor” (43). Mayer asserts that a life fueled by poetry and by
children can be a liberating alternative to the mainstream’s consumerism and
the acquisition of wealth: “intensest of storms to come, /​Sickening holidays,
cold rooms and running out of money again, /​Nothing to do but poetry, love
letters and babies, hope for spring /​Coming to please us because now we are
parents” (54–​55).
By insisting on the interconnection between the mother-​figure and wider
public spheres of politics and capitalism, Midwinter Day refuses to abide by
expectations about “women’s poetry” or the poetry of motherhood. Mayer
consciously attempts to welcome everything into her long poem, to broaden
the scope of the poem far beyond the confines of family, marriage, and “love”
(conventionally understood), beyond the nursery or kitchen, to include the
whole world. This feature of the poem becomes inescapable when, in the
midst of the prose paragraphs of the book’s fifth section, she inserts a three-​
page list of news events arranged into lines of poetry:

So when I write of love I write of

Binding referendums, bankruptcy intent,
Industrials, utilities and sales
The petitions of a citizens’ group …
An exploding oil depot in Rhodesia,
Bernadette Mayer and Her “Daughters” 175

A controversial nuclear physicist,

South Africa’s resources of chrome
And Russia’s stores of platinum and tin,
Intercontinental ballistic missiles,
Mexican oil, student assemblies,
Mobile homes uprooted by strong winds,
Book sales, Chris Evert’s engagement,
The uses of trees on the banks of reservoirs,
The victory of the Cleveland Cavaliers
And how the Sabres beat the Flames.
(90)

On it goes—​a dizzying list of the day’s events, stitched together as an enor-

mous catalog that evokes the simultaneity and breadth of the everyday, of
each and every day:

I write of bribery and surgery …

The Pope’s speech about his first trip,
Jet hijackings, price rises, a recession,
            … the findings
Of the House Assassinations Committee
… New Federal oil-​industry regulations,
Freed North Korean political prisoners,
The Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty …
The financial default of the city of Cleveland,
Inflation …
The defeat of the Knicks by the Hawks,
Army allegedly breaking recruiting rules,
The Nets’ loss to the Rockets …
(91)

This section of Midwinter Day demonstrates the kind of “time capsule” effect
found in many everyday-​life works, where the work functions as an archive
that aspires to document and store for posterity the events of a given day.
Mayer attempts to “prove the day like the dream has everything in it” by
listing dozens of stories and items from the day’s news, from sports scores,
to cold war politics, to celebrity news (89). With the benefit of today’s search
engines, we can quickly discover that nearly every item mentioned in these
three pages can be found in the New York Times on December 22, 1978. Thus,
we are given a remarkable snapshot of the culture and politics of the 1970s
as glimpsed on a random day in late 1978: economic crisis and inflation
(“foreclosures,” Cleveland’s default), geopolitics (Taiwan, South African
apartheid, the crisis in Iran), nuclear arms and containment (ICBMs,
176 Attention Equals Life

SALT), scientific developments (“information from the surface of Venus”),

environmental crisis (“air pollution”), pop culture (“Clint Eastwood with a
monkey”), art (“Andy Warhol and Red Grooms”), and so on.
The sheer variety and excessive volume of the material Mayer catalogs
conveys the overwhelming abundance of information, drama, and activ-
ity contained in a single day and its news—​a virtually limitless expanse of
human experience. In doing so, this passage clearly anticipates Kenneth
Goldsmith’s much-​debated book-​length poem Day, a transcription of a single
day’s New York Times, that I discuss in ­chapter 6. In Mayer’s hands, though,
the point is again a feminist one, as it is inextricable from her ideas about the
maternal everyday: in effect, she argues that the poet, the mother, compos-
ing this book is just a single point within a whole series of networks, ranging
from the most personal to the most public and global. We have seen the poem
move from the speaker’s solitary dreams in bed, to her nuclear family, to the
wider communities of town and coterie, and finally to nation and world. The
implication? No mother is an island, and no poet-​mother must write as if
her experience raising children removes her from politics, history, and cul-
ture. Mayer drives this point home when she concludes the long list of news
stories by adding her own name to the vast panoply of the day’s events, large
and small:

A lost anarchist novelist, contract bridge,

Biographies, the Bible, documentaries,
Cosmology and the Balinese dance,
              Bernadette.
(92)

By inscribing herself in this catalog, Mayer suggests that “Bernadette,” her life
and her family, are no less important than “cosmology,” “air-​pollution emis-
sion,” “a Basque militant leader,” Clint Eastwood, or the Pope. This passage
seems to echo, or put into practice, Mayer’s concerns, expressed much earlier
in the poem, about how her little family relates to the larger world, about
“where we fit in the system of the news of the day” (32).
For all its loving attention to daily life with family and children,
Midwinter Day is no simple hymn to the joys of domesticity and maternity.
Rather than romanticizing or simply celebrating her own domestic bliss,
Mayer explores the mixed feelings everyday-​life engenders. She presents
the everyday as the paradox it so often is, warts and all—​t he mix of rep-
etition and change, the clutter, the chaos, the interruptions and burdens,
as well as the delights and pleasures. Just as Schuyler shows us again and
again that “each day” is “so alike and yet so different,” Mayer at one point
posits that “every morning’s the same” and then almost immediately writes
“then I’ll tell you how each day is different” (24). Midwinter Day frequently
Bernadette Mayer and Her “Daughters” 177

reflects on the comforts of domestic routine, but also the dangers of rep-
etition and boredom it involves (“Pleasure without any change becomes a
chore,” she admits at one point [103]).
Mayer also frequently probes the tension between her radical, pre-​children
days and her current, more “square” lifestyle. At one point, she waxes nostal-
gic about her lost freedom, all she’s had to sacrifice:

            Before we had children

We used to work all night, eyes open, then sleep
For the day, eyes closed to people’s mornings
(7)

And compares her old life to “the new ordinary way of being” that children
and domesticity has brought:

                   Now that our days

Are full of normal parts
It seems we have all lived forever so far
Eyes open, eyes closed, half-​open, one eye open
  One closed to the coming day
(7)

In another passage, she wonders “have I lost my tough or punk part among
these kids who write on lines between the windows where I  imitate them
after they cover the walls with notes on making a face generous or a house
a cave” (37). In such moments, Mayer directly confronts the mixed feelings
that are perhaps endemic to the role of the bohemian, avant-​garde poet-​
mother. However, Mayer consistently turns this conflict—​her anxiety about
being a poet of motherhood and family—​into one of Midwinter Day’s central
themes.29

Part II: Bernadette’s “Daughters”: Contemporary Women

Poets and the Maternal Everyday

With works like Midwinter Day, Mayer established a powerful poetic model
that combines avant-​garde aesthetics, an abiding concern for dailiness, and a
feminist, politicized consciousness about mothering, its pleasures and strug-
gles. As I have suggested, this stance has taken root in many corners of con-
temporary poetry. Many women poets today refuse to segregate mothering
from all other aspects of experience, or to treat it in a clichéd or sentimental
manner, and exploit a host of avant-​garde poetic strategies for the purposes of
exploring motherhood.30
178 Attention Equals Life

This dimension of “the new poetry of motherhood” has not been apparent
to all readers, though. In her attack on the recent surge of “mommy poems”
in contemporary poetry, Ange Mlinko writes:
Even as the subjective experience of motherhood is endlessly parsed, there
is almost no reference to the societal and technological changes being
wrought upon our (women’s) biologies and how that might impinge upon
this “identity.” But in this day and age, how can you claim motherhood’s
centrality to female experience and ignore the larger forces at work to
sever the female and the reproductive? If that sounds too recondite, what
about the reality of war and violence? While poems celebrate the sheer
exquisiteness of infants and so forth, where is the political consciousness
of other mothers and children trapped in far different circumstances? So
far as I know, there are no books, or even chapters in ordinary parenting
books, that advise new mothers on how to deal with the problem of not
being able to get through a newspaper without sobbing. (“Why I Am Not
a Poet-Mom”)
However, if one turns to some of the more interesting examples of the
maternal everyday in recent poetry, it is immediately clear that Mlinko seems
to have missed the really exciting and new ways that younger women poets
are adapting the work of Mayer and other pioneers for our own particular
cultural moment.31 For example, the poems in Hoa Nguyen’s Hecate Lochia
almost directly counter Mlinko’s complaint (even including a mom unable to
confront the news without “sobbing”):

Cry at the joke about K-​mart

Cry at the photo of the woman crying
(baby born dead    held in her arms)
Life penetrates life  I am free-​form today
    fermenting a loaf of bread
The oven is warm
    I need to bake a chicken
      Raining again
(31)

In a quite different vein, Rachel Zucker’s work registers the collision between
the daily experience of the “war on terror” and being a parent of young
children:

why, asks my son on the subway, should you

   say something if you see something?
Bernadette Mayer and Her “Daughters” 179

pointing at the poster of an abandoned black

    duffel on a subway platform. I am trying
to breathe but he’s asking and pointing …
I’m trying so hard not to show him
    my worldview I can barely breathe. gave him
a brother want to give him another and never
    tell him there are things
and things that explode and no easy way to know
   the difference.
(Museum of Accidents, 15)

In another poem, Zucker focuses on the aftermath of witnessing a teenage

boy being brutally beaten on a Manhattan street:

                      When I get home
and try to describe the boy in the street Josh says, More people died
in Iraq this month than any other and I remind him that tomorrow morning,
before the new table is due to be delivered, we’re going to Saint Vincent’s
Hospital where Dr. Margano will put the KY-​covered wand inside me
and tell us if these past nine weeks have yielded a fetal heartbeat
which will change everything, nothing.
(55)

As these examples suggest, while there are many ways to discuss and even
criticize recent poetry of motherhood, to complain that this body of work
is content to just “celebrate the sheer exquisiteness of infants and so forth,”
rather than grappling with “the reality of war and violence” or “the political
consciousness of other mothers and children trapped in far different cir-
cumstances,” seems odd and misleading. Contra Mlinko, a diverse array of
recent women poets have been extremely alert to the intertwining of moth-
erhood and politics, and write in myriad ways about the impossibility of
separating the domestic from broader geopolitical and ecological crisis and
tragedy.

Every Day Is Ordinary with Fish-​S ticks: Hoa

Nguyen’s Hecate Lochia
Like many other poet-​mothers today, Hoa Nguyen has been explicit about
her debt to Bernadette Mayer, which makes her an important figure in the
lineage I am tracing. For instance, in Hecate Lochia Nguyen titles one poem
“Thinking of Bernadette” and notes that another is “after B. Mayer.”32 Critics
180 Attention Equals Life

have followed suit in connecting their work. For example, Timothy Yu

observes that Nguyen’s work “adapts the everydayness of New  York school
poet Bernadette Mayer to the scene of contemporary politics and Asian cul-
tural influences” (“Asian American,” 844). Just as Mayer re-​imagined the dai-
liness of O’Hara and Schuyler to better reflect her gender and class experience
as a bohemian woman and mother in the 1970s, Nguyen refashions Mayer’s
quotidian aesthetic to respond to her own life as an Asian-​American woman
raising mixed-​race children in our contemporary cultural moment. Like
Mayer, Silliman (as we see in the following chapter), and other more recent
poets, Nguyen takes the aesthetics of dailiness initiated by the New  York
School and other sources and overtly politicizes it—​in her case, she updates it
to respond to the dark days of post-​9/​11, Bush-​era American life. In Nguyen’s
hands, the poetics of everyday life becomes a potent method of compelling
our attention to how gender and race shape even the smallest facets of daily
experience.
Nguyen’s work resembles Mayer’s in its spirit, politics, and underlying avant-​
garde sensibility perhaps more than in specific features of its style and form.
Nguyen’s compressed and sonically rich poems are closer to the work of poets
who exploit spareness, silence, gaps, and leaps, especially Lorine Niedecker
and Rae Armantrout, and she seems less drawn to constraints and conceptual
projects than Mayer and many of her other descendants. Despite her eschewal
of the everyday-​life project as a form, she deploys a number of other tech-
niques I have associated with the practice of skeptical realism and everyday-​
life poetics, which link her to other figures in this lineage. Like Niedecker
and Armantrout, Nguyen collages bits and pieces of found language, quotid-
ian detail, pop culture reference, and image, and assembles them in delicate,
charged mobile-​like constructions that are highly attentive to sound.
The collection’s clever, provocative title, Hecate Lochia, yokes together the
three-​faced Greek goddess Hecate, associated with pregnancy and nurturing
the young, but also witches, magic, the moon, the underworld, and the ward-
ing off of evil spirits, with lochia, a vaginal discharge that can appear for sev-
eral weeks after childbirth. By using this title, Nguyen finds a striking figure
that fuses the usually unspoken realities of women’s bodies with culture and
history. She also suggests that the book itself is akin to lochia, an organic emis-
sion of a postpartum body, but one deeply connected to myths of the feminine
and its power, fertility, and biological processes. In an interview with Nguyen,
Reb Livingston notes that by pairing “a powerful goddess who was sometimes
feared and misrepresented with postpartum bleeding, a topic that would make
some squeamish,” Nguyen seems to be “paying respects and honoring pow-
erful (and oftentimes misunderstood) femininity and childbirth.” Nguyen
responds:
I also include pussy, breast milk, nursing and menstrual blood in the poems.
So what you said is right. It’s about honoring these powerful themes and
Bernadette Mayer and Her “Daughters” 181

positing the female body as normal, incredible. One birth advocate made a
comment about the image of a baby’s head crowning from the vagina—​t hat
if men gave birth, this image would be revered, celebrated, and plastered
everywhere. Instead it is hidden and found disgusting. I  mean, network
TV rejected tampon commercials that included the word “vagina” and
Facebook blocks pictures of women nursing their babies. Part of my project
is to piece the lost female body back together and put it in its rightful place
of power—​wanting to steal the “magical instruments” back from patriar-
chy. (Livingston, “Interview”)

Thus, allusions to Hecate (“my 3-​faced goddess nests in the roots”), to the
moon, to bodily fluids, and to myths of “The Great Mother” and other female
figures run throughout the collection (Hecate, 27).
Like other groundbreaking women poets before her, Nguyen bravely pushes
against strictures about content, and takes an open, honest, and largely posi-
tive stance toward the mundane, daily processes of women’s bodies. In this
book, women figures are strong, powerful, and rebellious—​“Hecate doesn’t
fucking /​need you or your loving” (91)—​and mothering is associated with
strength (“Big biceps from lifting children” [24]). The poems are defiant and
celebratory about maternity and women’s bodies:

I like seeing useful breasts    Babies

eating    even older babies and toddlers
Mothers talking and showing breast skin
It’s food   I’m making milk right now.
(39)

Nguyen follows Mayer in insisting that motherhood is an inherently political

act, deeply entangled with wider social, economic, and political forces that
often bear down on women’s bodies, their reproductive freedom, and their
ability to work and raise children simultaneously. In one poem, she writes:

Now it’s August
AC: in
Hot: out
   Also headlines
of brain dead woman dying
after giving birth
(75)

Here, Nguyen moves swiftly from noting the stifling weather in the home to a
bit of news that seems to suggest how often woman’s bodies become political
footballs.
182 Attention Equals Life

Like Mayer, Nguyen also strips the maternal everyday of sentiment.

Instead of gauzy uplift, she offers a clear-​eyed experimental realism, a quotid-
ian mode that doesn’t shy away from the poop and vomit, the cleaning and
bill paying, but declines to either romanticize those activities or decry them
as solely imprisoning. “We might be folding laundry I am fucked,” one poem
begins, “having never learned to start a fire without matches /​Now I’m boy
scouted I’m cooking eggs” (99). Rather than reaching for summarizing ges-
tures, rather than sacralizing mundane acts of mothering, Nguyen’s poems
notate the ordinary, daily chores and routines of a mother with a bluntness
that captures both the ordinariness and the sweetness of the domestic quotid-
ian. For example:

10 AM whacked the wool bed pad

on the line with a long rod and smote
dust mites
   Also carried wash and 2 kids
in a plastic basket
the phone rings
“It’s me” “I love you”
(41)

Or:

        The thatch of
the days Every day is
ordinary with fish-​sticks Picking
skull-​crap from our 4 year old’s
head
  Nicely we crud      overlay
Our bed is encumbered
     We
strip at night and the light
is on …
(30)

In Nguyen’s poem, details like “picking /​skull-​crap” from her son’s scalp are
not used as metaphors, or laden with symbolism but are, rather, presented as
a fact—​as an ordinary yet interesting thing that happened set alongside other
things that happened in the course of a day.
Furthermore, for Nguyen, the domestic idyll is never a world apart: it is
always already hopelessly enmeshed in local and global political and economic
Bernadette Mayer and Her “Daughters” 183

realities. The opening poem in Hecate Lochia, “Up Nursing,” juxtaposes daily
life as a mother with the war raging in Iraq:

Up nursing   then make tea

The word war is far
“Furry” says my boy
about the cat
I think anthrax
and small pox vax
(13)

As if anticipating Mlinko’s charge that contemporary poets of motherhood

ignore the intertwining of the private and the political, Nguyen opens her
book by acknowledging the guilty feeling that “war” seems far away to the
nursing mother—​it is nothing more than a word, and a distant one at that, an
abstraction, something flickering on CNN rather than present. But the poem
actually suggests how not far away the war really is: just at the moment her
toddler is learning to apply adjectives to things, the speaker’s mind turns to
anthrax and vaccinations—​in other words, to fear, paranoia, and the news.
More generally, the piece registers the terrifying worry that one may not be
able to protect the vulnerable young humans one has made, a guiding con-
cern of the book as a whole.
The poem turns back to daily routine, the act of making tea, to conclude:

Pour hot water on dried nettles

Filter more water for the kettle
Why try
to revive the lyric
(13)

With this ending, Nguyen’s poem also becomes a pointed meditation on

poetry itself—​a concern that also may be encoded in the opening, which hints
that for the nursing mother, the “word war” (that is, the bitter struggle to get
words down on paper) feels far away, too. The plaintive final question compels
us to think about the purpose of poetry in a world where war and anthrax
compete with nursing, making tea, and a child’s early words. Although
Nguyen doesn’t provide a direct answer, the implicit response can be found
in the poem itself: this is why one must revive the lyric—​to write and record
and illuminate this constellation of detail and experience, to give life to the
everyday experience of women and mothers in the contemporary world.
184 Attention Equals Life

“Up Nursing” sets up the radical blurring of the domestic and the political
that carries through the book. The intensely personal details of the speaker’s
domestic life keep bouncing off the public and political in strange and sur-
prising ways (“The news pictures the beheaded defense contractor /​wearing
a cowboy hat 6 eggs fell today /​(toddler accident)” (32). Nguyen’s poems pose
the question: How can one write lyric poems about the calamitous state of the
union in the first decade of the twenty-​first century?

I had this idea stubbornly

      Dog still barking
Write something ‘new’ about the national tragedy
(15)

As she struggles to accomplish this task, Nguyen juxtaposes moments of the

maternal everyday with glimpses of tragic, graphic, and media-​hyped news,
challenging the sense that the two realms are somehow separate. For exam-
ple, here is the poem “Tuesday,” in its entirety:

“Here comes the rain”

and I should make pizza
Vivid heirloom tomatoes
Still lunging around with poems
More soldiers dead
in Iraq
and Bush
is the fittest president in history
going for a jog on vacation again
(with cute dogs as pets)
“Better times approach”
(79)

The poem begins with a snatch of overheard ordinary speech whose

meaning quickly turns ominous. Domestic duties (the speaker should be
cooking) seem to be in competition with writing (“still lunging around
with poems”), but both activities are suddenly interrupted by reminders
of the war and the disengaged leader who takes a run with his dogs, far
away from the bloodshed he initiated. The poem’s ending perhaps offers
a glimmer of hope, but the middle part of the poem and the use of quo-
tation marks around this phrase seem to undercut it, so that the idea of
better times to come sounds more like pabulum or cliché than genuine
optimism.
Bernadette Mayer and Her “Daughters” 185

In an interview with Reb Livingston, Nguyen discusses how political cri-

tique, identity, and gender intersect in her writing by touching on this poem
in particular:
I was once asked to submit political poems to a magazine seeking same and
was told by the (male white) editors that they did not want to publish the
poems I sent (including this one) as they sought works that were “more anon-
ymous in their critique” of power structures. To which I thought: exactly!
To attempt a critique of power structures, how could I—​as a woman—​and
person of color—​be “anonymous?” It seemed to me that they meant they
wanted poems without any signatures of identity. How could I write poems
like that? I’d have to erase my being. Be more pervasive—​male and white.
(Livingston, “Interview”)
Nguyen refuses to write as if “unmarked” (as those in a position of privi-
lege can do much more easily), to strip away the specific features of her lived,
bodily experience.
Nguyen’s response to this kind of silencing is to adjust the volume so that
the dynamics of class, racial identity, and gender in daily life become more
audible, if not deafening. For Nguyen, this means an attention to the inter-
section of race, identity, and mothering, especially as experienced by a half-​
Vietnamese, half–​Euro-​American woman with mixed-​race children.33 The
poem “Eurasiacan” grapples with what it means to embody this blend of iden-
tities, as can be seen in its title and opening lines:

No mother in body   no
body when on the phone
Meatballs simmer in sauce
Maybe my baby whitens me
   Turtles and blue eyes
(18)

The poem raises questions about the experience of having a body in the
first place, and of inhabiting an identity based on its outward features (“no/​
body when on the phone”). The speaker ponders whether raising a blue-​
eyed, mixed-​race child somehow “whitens” her, presumably in the eyes
of the dominant American culture and its denizens. In another poem,
Nguyen acknowledges the privileges and advantages that come along with
having certain kinds of bodies, especially those that are white, male, and
American: about her son, she writes “[I]‌think /​he will go far being male &
white-​looking & attractive” (71). In “Water that Falls from the Sky,” Nguyen
describes her family’s activities during “Tet 2006, the Year of the Dog,” refer-
ring to the traditional Vietnamese New Year celebration. The poem depicts
186 Attention Equals Life

the kind of syncretism and cultural mixing so common to many present-​day

American households:

Today we ‘Invent our own

Celebration
      And squish
a giant cockroach in front of guests”
(25)

Again, such moments underscore that there is no monolithic, “universal,”

“everyday American life,” but only contingent, culturally specific instantia-
tions of the daily.
Another, related running theme in Hecate Lochia is class: specifically how
the particular economic conditions of contemporary capitalism impinge
on one’s everyday life. A line in the poem “Get Debt Relief” echoes Henri
Lefebvre’s belief that capitalism invades and colonizes the smallest details of
the quotidian, a conviction that hovers over Nguyen’s poems: “ ‘Money affects
virtually every interaction / w​ e have with other people’ ” (76).34 The second
poem in the book, “Thinking of Bernadette,” begins with a tribute to Mayer’s
own focus on money and poverty, dailiness, and the role of the poet in a capi-
talist culture that I discussed earlier:

Thinking of Bernadette    trying to live without

money Having written three checks today
(food) I’d rather trade but make no
“valuable” goods
(14)

Although a society based on barter would be nice, poems aren’t really mar-
ketable commodities, alas, and we’re stuck within the system we have: “Ate /​
ginger miso with buckwheat noodles bought /​with inconvertible money” (14).
Many of Nguyen’s poems portray daily life lived paycheck to paycheck,
where having enough money to eat and support a family is a constant concern.
Paying rent, buying food on credit, juggling the care of young children with
doing one’s writing: such is the quotidian Nguyen delineates. It is not lost on
her that this version of daily life is sharply different from the one staked out
so memorably, and perhaps romantically, by Frank O’Hara and other earlier
models of an everyday-​life aesthetic. In a revealing and unsettling moment,
Nguyen takes one of O’Hara’s most famous and inspiring lines about the lim-
itless possibilities of the protean self—​“Grace /​to be born and live as variously
as possible” (Collected, 256)—​and gives it a rather hard-​edged, politicized spin
appropriate for our age of recession and limited possibilities:
Bernadette Mayer and Her “Daughters” 187

It’s my birthday          and throw myself

a party          Hard to be born     live variously
and have a job       Be grateful
for the job  heat in winter           9 AM
and 3 I love you’s   Wipe poop
(19)

While the passage shows Nguyen’s class-​conscious riff bringing O’Hara’s

exuberance down to earth and the workaday world, it still exudes an O’Hara-​
like affirmation of the daily and gratitude for small pleasures. For Nguyen,
however, those quite deliberately include poop wiping and other maternal
acts that were simply alien to the experience of a poet like O’Hara.35

Conceptual Poetry and “Women’s Time”: Rankine,

Sikelianos, Holbrook
As I mentioned before, many of Mayer’s “daughters” have found time-​based,
conceptual everyday-​life projects particularly useful for their attempts to take
stock of the maternal everyday. Many of these younger women poets under-
take similar time-​based conceptual projects that turn rhythms, cycles, and
routines associated with female bodies and maternal experience into poetic
forms or material for art.
For example, Claudia Rankine’s Plot (2001) is a book-​length poem that
directly mirrors the structure and conceit behind Mayer’s Desires of Mothers,
though it is quite different in terms of its content and style. Like Mayer,
Rankine chronicles the gestation and birth of a child and uses the pregnancy’s
duration as a structuring device (the work is in nine sections, one per month,
plus an afterword where the infant is welcomed).36 Rankine has described
the project’s experimental form as an attempt to solve the problem of how to
write about childbirth without getting bogged down in cliché and gauzy emo-
tion. In an interview with Jennifer Flescher and Robert Caspar, she explained
that “Plot started with the idea that there are certain subjects that you can’t
write about without being sentimental” (“Interview”).
Similarly, Eleni Sikelianos’s Body Clock (2008) experiments with creating
forms that grow directly out of the distinctive sense of temporality experi-
enced by a pregnant woman and mother. A  hybrid text that mixes poems,
prose, and unpolished drawings taken from the poet’s notebook, Body Clock
is, like Rankine’s Plot, structured in nine sections. The book explores how the
changing body, especially during the transformations of pregnancy, relates to
the moment-​by-​moment passing of time. As Sikelianos explained in an inter-
view, the idea came to her while pregnant that her body was akin to a “a dou-
ble clock—​my body timing an event and a body inside my body expanding
188 Attention Equals Life

itself within time (how many minutes to grow a finger?).” In one section, she
writes

the baby in the body clock

then then then  and
next this comes
next and       then
put pieces of time next
to pieces of time

in the many directions in which a body grows, it grows

or shrinks in time
(32)

Like Rankine and Mayer, Sikelianos suggests multiple parallels between the
simultaneous creation of baby and poem (“put commas around the baby, put /​
quote marks around her”) (32).
Sikelianos has explained that she struggled to find a way of articulating the
intense feelings of “anticipation and unknowing” characteristic of pregnancy,
a period in which “time takes on very corporeal attributes.” This prompted
her to pay attention to the most minute fluctuations of daily time: “I began to
sketch minutes, trying to get at their fatness (which is how I was feeling them)
as opposed to their flatness. I wanted to feel a minute—​each piece of it.” Thus, in
a section of Body Clock entitled “Experiments with Minutes,” Sikelianos repro-
duces a series crude drawings of circles with dots in them, each intended as
a representation of a minute (with sixty dots, one for each second), and each
connected to a brief note on the sketch: “In this conception a minute is round
though not perfectly—​its lines disconnect in the drawing of it to meet up with
the next/​past minute. You might see the small freckles of scattered seconds at
the interior (heart-​meat) of the minute. This is a big-​meat minute, true to its
actual size, but only took 34 seconds to draw” (36). (As a “real-​time” experiment,
this piece recalls Rosemary Mayer’s contribution to 0 to 9 in the late 1960s, in
which a page full of x’s “equals smoking time one Chesterfield King Size”).
Sikelianos also found the differences of daily temporality between preg-
nancy and being a new mother to be instructive—​ in an interview, she
explained:

When my daughter Eva was born, time took on yet another set of textures—​
a kind of rolling flood, or waves, with all notion of regular punctuation
to the day overturned. Sleeping, waking, meal-​making, bathing—​a ll took
on new posts (or no posts). Not too much later, I was suffocating within
the closeness of minutes, and an hour was a precious eternity. That’s when
I began sketching hours, trying to inhabit every petal that peeled off the
hour. (Saterstrom, “Interview”)
Bernadette Mayer and Her “Daughters” 189

In “The Abstracted Heat of Hours & Days,” Sikelianos offers much more
elaborate hour-​long sketches (for example, a detailed drawing of a flower,
which she captions “first experiment with an hour”) accompanied by poetic
notes that indicate, in Mayer-​like fashion, that writing and mothering occur
simultaneously, moment by moment: “1:24:50 pm now I have filled the hour’s
outer petals with arrows the baby /​cries she is hun /​gry … I see this cor-
ner (petal) of the hour peaking like an ancient /​wave, a shark’s fin” (Body
Clock, 100).
Works like these, ranging from Mayer’s Midwinter Day to Rankine’s Plot
and Sikelianos’s Body Clock, seem to answer Rita Felski’s feminist call for
everyday life theorists to be more attentive to repetition, home, and habit as
constitutive elements of the everyday. They all deploy new aesthetic forms in
order to explore what Julia Kristeva calls “women’s time.”37 Kristeva argues
that female subjectivity is associated with “cycles, gestation, the eternal recur-
rence of a biological rhythm which conforms to that of nature,” as opposed to
the “linear” or teleological time of history, conventionally associated with the
masculine (Kristeva Reader, 187).38
Echoing Kristeva’s insights, contemporary women poets speak again
and again of the particular, special temporal experience of pregnancy and
maternity—​the way time feels disrupted, fragmented, interrupted, marked
by cycles and repetition, elastic, blurred, and so on. They also reflect on the
effects “women’s time” has on their ability to pay attention in conventional
ways.39 Kathleen Fraser, a contemporary of Mayer’s, explains that having
children

completely changed my perception of time, from continuous to discontin-

uous. I was forced from the naïve expectations of a learned formal art to
a far more improvised necessity involving interruption, error and negoti-
ated compromise with private workspace. Once another struggling human
arrived under my care, my capacity for attention, compassion, invention
and thought changed radically. For this—​and for my son—​I am grateful.
(Wagner and Wolff, Not for Mothers Only, 68)

Like Fraser, contemporary women poets frequently assess the challenges

and opportunities this altered sense of time and attention presents to them as
writers. A recurring theme in Dienstfrey and Hillman’s The Grand Permission
and Wagner and Wolff’s Not for Mothers Only is the urgent need for poet-​
mothers to find and create time to think and write within the crowded, con-
stantly interrupted, and fragmented, never-​a lone flow of their daily lives—​a
key issue that we have seen Mayer tackles directly in her work. Kimiko Hahn
describes this as “stealing time”:
Mothers need to compartmentalize their lives into little chambers of activ-
ity: oatmeal, children off, keys, salad bar, etc. Somewhere in the day’s chro-
nology, there might be a moment for a different ritual: writing. Maybe on
190 Attention Equals Life

the subway or coffee break. Maybe whole hours in a library carrel. Art hap-
pens and happens because women are not only creative, but creative with
how to be creative” (in Wagner and Wolff, Not for Mothers Only, 189)
From Mayer and Fraser forward, women poets have attempted to be cre-
ative in this manner, to use the constraints and obligations that structure
maternal daily time and processes of attention, rather than viewing them as
merely oppressive or debilitating—​and when they do so it is often under the
sign of Mayer herself.40 Susan Holbrook’s recent prose poem “Nursery” is a
particularly potent example of this trend. In fact, I cannot think of another
single work that so well illustrates and ties together a number of strands I have
been discussing: the poem is a playful formal experiment informed by ordi-
nary “female” bodily experience, it is a constraint-​based work, a conceptual
poem, and a politicized, feminist reimagining of the “everyday-​life poem.”
Holbrook, a Canadian poet, situates herself within the same basic lin-
eage of experimental poetics as Nguyen, Sikelianos, and Browne, with ties to
Gertrude Stein, Language poetry, conceptualism, and innovative poetries in
Canada and the United States. Like the others, she has also repeatedly cited
Bernadette Mayer as an inspiration and model for her own work.41 As a les-
bian poet, though, Holbrook displays a different investment in the politics of
mothering in her work than the other poets I have been discussing. As she
explains in an interview,

a lesbian “frame of mind,” yes, motivates all of my writing, as it necessarily

shapes my everyday life, as I deal with neighbours who are titillated by us,
teachers who don’t understand why I’m concerned about gay-​inclusivity
because they “just teach about families.” Poetry offers me a way to enter
into cultural codes and upend, question and hopefully nudge them toward
something more welcoming. (J. Fitzgerald, interview)

Holbrook’s poem “Nursery” does just this: it takes “cultural codes” regarding
the utterly familiar yet still politically tendentious act of breastfeeding and
playfully upends and nudges them. After the birth of her child, Holbrook
says she “decided to make her mothering life work for, rather than against,
her writing, and started composing a line every time she nursed the baby”
(Wagner and Wolff, Not for Mothers Only, 411). The specific procedure
Holbrook uses is determined by the activity itself—​as she alternates from one
breast to the other each time the baby nurses, she notes the shift at the start
of each sentence. Thus, as Alicia Ostriker observes in the introduction, “each
line [is] methodically and hilariously marked ‘Right’ or ‘Left’ ” (xi).
The idea of creating a poem consisting of one sentence per nursing session
over a period of time recalls various earlier everyday-​life projects, such as
Ron Silliman’s poems “Skies” (in which the poet wrote one sentence about
the sky each day for a year) and “Jones” (one sentence about the ground per
Bernadette Mayer and Her “Daughters” 191

day for a year), or projects by Oulipo writers, like Jacques Jouet’s Poèmes du
Métro and Jacques Roubaud’s Tokyo infra-​ordinaire (in which “the constraint
is to write a poem with as many lines as the stops on one’s journey in the
metro”) (Silliman, Alphabet, 1060; Sheringham, Everyday Life, 350). Holbrook,
however, adds a brilliant and subversive twist to this kind of project, much
as Mayer so often does: she turns a device often used by male writers for the
purposes of urban flânerie into a tool for the exploration of a particularly
“feminine” experience of the daily.
The result is a delightful and very funny ode to breastfeeding that contains
a subtle but strong dose of political critique and commentary. When asked
by an interviewer whether the humor in her work is intended “to leaven the
rigorous structural constraints you put on your work,” Holbrook responds
“Rigorous structural constraints are funny!” adding that “the ‘leavening’ I do
is actually often through the humour of constraint, the startling surprises
hopefully functioning as comic jolt and cultural (usually raging feminist) cri-
tique” (“Susan Holbrook and Her Six Cats”).
A five-​page piece of unbroken prose, the form of “Nursery” seems designed
to convey the somatic and psychological experience of nursing a baby. With
its constant, trudging back and forth between “left” and “right,” its mostly
short discontinuous sentences, and its length and expansiveness, the poem
communicates the ongoing rhythm and the constant disruption, the dura-
tion and the repetition, the tedium and sheer excessiveness (“Right: too tired
to look at the clock, come under here, little bug. Left: Not again”), but above
all the deep pleasures to be found in the act of breastfeeding. The poem is a
vivid, charming, playful, and frequently hilarious hymn to this most natural
and ordinary of daily activities:
Left: Try to sit you up for a burp, you’re still latched on. Right: Milk drops
leave shiny slug trails across your cheek. Left: Reading at the same time, my
book on your hip, worried the officious prose style will come through in
the milk, give you gas. Right: Doping for sleep. Left: Feeling like a mother
didn’t happen when you were born, or when I first fed you, or first used the
word “daughter.” It’s happening six months later, in the dark, as a mosquito
kazoos and without a second’s contemplation I pull up your covers, lay my
bare arms on top of the blanket, whisper “bite me.” Right: I wasn’t talking
to you. Left: You spit up to make room for more, like the Romans. (Wagner
and Wolff, Not for Mothers Only, 411)
With bracing honesty, the poem both normalizes the act—​indeed, makes
it appear as natural as breathing—​and shows its strangeness, its mixture of
discomfort and wonder. As the poem unfolds, Holbrook tracks the growing
sense of connection and love between a mother and her daughter as the infant
rapidly changes and grows. Thus, the poem is dotted with sharply observed,
awed evocations of the baby’s tiny features and endearing actions:  “Your
192 Attention Equals Life

‘wrist’ is a crease circling your fat arm like a too-​tight string” (412), “your nos-
trils are wheels on a tiny pink VW Beetle,” “Hand straight up in the air, fla-
menco dancer’s articulate fingers” (411), “You thump your palm on my chest,
then your own, you and me, I agree, difficult to distinguish” (414).
But there are also moments when the speaker notes the attendant dis-
comforts—​from sore nipples (“Left: Ugh, plugged ducts. Right: How did the
childless author of Tender Buttons know” [412]) to sleep deprivation (“Left: I
close my eyes, these days getting only the kind of sleep you have on planes”
[412]). At times, she lightheartedly mentions that she feels a bit more like
a conduit or means to an end in this relationship than a person: she notes
“Left: I drink milk at the same time, am I an elaborate step that could be
skipped” (411) and at another asks: “If the goods flow one way, why are we
both ‘nursing’” (416).
Holbrook is also sharply aware that the very existence of a poem on this
topic is in itself a political and feminist act. She makes the stakes of writing
“Nursery” painfully clear when she writes “Right: three years ago in Texas,
Peruvian immigrants had their children taken away when the photo shop
clerk developed their breastfeeding pictures and called the cops; a nipple in a
baby’s mouth was a second-​degree felony: ‘sexual performance of a minor’ ”
(412). A few lines later she adds “Left: Dark green eye keeps darting up at me,
as if finally putting the face and the food together. Right:  I  wouldn’t write
this poem in Texas” (412). Suddenly, “Right” is no longer an innocuous label
denoting which breast is being suckled, but a loaded political signifier (a con-
nection made explicit in a later moment of wordplay:  “Right:  wing, whale,
to-​lifer, to-​k now, to-​die”) (413).
Holbrook makes clear that even in the twenty-​first century, discussing or
representing the act of breastfeeding remains controversial and dangerous.
By making the act of nursing visible and “normal,” “Nursery” creates “new
partitions of the sensible,” in Jacques Rancière’s sense, a move which speaks
to the poem’s political force. As Ben Highmore observes, for Rancière the
“distribution of the sensible” “is a dynamic arena constantly managed by the
policing activities of forces bent on maintaining what and who will be visible
and invisible and constantly disrupted by aesthetic and political acts that will
redistribute the field of social perception” (Ordinary Lives, 45). “Nursery” is
disruptive in precisely that sense: “Nursery” proclaims that a work of art that
lavishes attention on the simple, daily, natural act of breastfeeding is an act
of defiance against repression and sexist or misogynist attempts to control
women’s bodies and reproductive freedom.
Holbrook is also highly self-​conscious about the status of “Nursery” as a
“mommy poem,” and acutely aware of what it means to be a poet who writes
about this subject: “Left: Eyeing my inflating belly, friends would ask, You’re
not going to start writing sentimental mothering poems are you” (415). She
even ironically addresses whether this poem fulfills the expectations of the
Bernadette Mayer and Her “Daughters” 193

subgenre I have been discussing—​the anti-​sentimental, experimental poetry

of motherhood initiated by poets like Mayer and Notley. After mentioning
the possibility of getting thrush from her daughter and the painful “red, itchy,
cracked and burning nipples” associated with it, Holbrook writes “finally, the
kind of mammaire verité and deromanticization of motherhood the reader
expected” (413). A moment later, she playfully adds: “Left: just when I was
being a smart aleck about deromanticization, a sharp tooth” (413). Despite her
self-​deprecating disclaimers, the poem’s use of constraint and repetition, its
humor and irony, its careful attention to the immediate and concrete details
of the daily—​a ll help it avoid the pitfalls of the familiar “sentimental mother-
ing poems” it wishes to steer clear of.
Holbrook also seems fully sensitized to the gender politics at play in writing
a poem like “Nursery.” At one point, she skewers the idea that poetry should
speak to “universal” (in other words, male) themes: “Right: Insert scenes of bat-
tle for more universal appeal” (413). The poem pointedly alludes several times to
Gertrude Stein’s poem “Patriarchal Poetry,” as when she writes “Left: Patriarchal
poetry left left left right left” (414). Holbrook appropriates Stein’s caustic mockery
of the militaristic nature of the patriarchal poetic tradition and inserts it into
the structure of her own nursing poem, where the sound of marching army
boots is recast as the movement from breast to breast. A few sentences later,
she again quotes Stein “Left: Patriarchal poetry might be what is left,” punningly
suggesting just how much might be left to say now that “patriarchal poetry” is a
thing of the past and poems like this one can be written and read.

“It’s Political to Be a Mother”: Laynie

Browne’s Daily Sonnets
Laynie Browne is another poet who follows Mayer in explicitly, and rather
joyfully, confronting the problem of balancing the dual roles of writer and
mother. Deeply inspired by Mayer, Browne explores a range of methods,
projects, and self-​assigned prompts that try to turn the tension between
poet, mother, and the various other roles she inhabits into new, vital poetic
forms.42 At one point in her book The Desires of Letters, she writes of this
struggle: “How to do this parental stuff in tune with being a writer, daughter,
sibling, granddaughter, citizen, wife (though not to a house), devotee, bhakti,
tzadik in training, community weaver, domestic everything, yogi, herbalist,
confidante, friend, reverse insular portrait of rain” (175).
To find solutions to this conundrum, Browne, like Mayer, turns to project-​
based works. Her book Daily Sonnets is yet another powerful recent example
of a conceptual, time-​based experiment prompted by the particular rhythms
of the maternal everyday.43 As the title suggests, it is also extremely conscious
of its place in a tradition of everyday-​life poetics, especially that associated
with the New  York School.44 The book is a sequence of 151 playful sonnets
194 Attention Equals Life

(loosely defined), many composed using particular time-​based constraints—​

like the “one-​minute sonnet” and the “after-​shower sonnet” (write a poem
while wrapped in a towel after a shower)—​and other procedures, such as the
ransacking of the dictionary or the incorporation of other found materials.45
As a project, Daily Sonnets provides a solution to the problem of needing
to write quickly and within the constraints of daily life as a mother, squeez-
ing the composition of “real time sonnets” into the interstices of her passing
days.46 In a prose piece at the end of Daily Sonnets entitled “The Permeable ‘I,’
A Practice,” Browne explains “this is a collaborative experiment in time,” an
attempt at trying to “write yourself out of whatever existing parameters you
fall into”:
As a parent of two small children I invent time in order to work. Thus
the one-​minute sonnet. Thus the collaboration with the kids. And finally
after many years of controlled circumstances, the allowing in of all voices,
all time. Deep and scattered fragments of time. Loud and physical time.
Someone else literally pulling you out of your chair. (157)
The constraints, rules, and collaborative exercises Browne employs are all
methods of harnessing and channeling the attention so that material ignored
and overlooked by most literary and aesthetic forms can swim into the poet’s
ken. For Browne, this includes above all the silliness, the difficulties, the mad-
cap surrealism, and the cacophony of living with two small boys.

Whose pen is this I’m writing with?

Jacob just had a wolly mammoth infant
Which he indicates by cradling his arms
Now he’s dancing with girls at preschool
Romping with the crowd
Benjamin can’t be bothered to notice
An impromptu drum session
He’s too obsessively busy watching
An earwig under the hot dog shaped table
(85)

Another poem ends:

My rice bowl is not full

Jacob kicked me in the top of my nose
We pushed each other off of the couch
(126)

As this passage suggests, Browne echoes Mayer in relishing the speech of her
children and seeing it as a form of raw poetry (“Do sheep have laps?” one
Bernadette Mayer and Her “Daughters” 195

poem asks. “Do hippos swing on ropes?” [110]). Like Mayer, Browne injects
the kids’ language straight into her poems (“You don’t have any bunny in
your body /​You ate a bunny but you’re not a bunny-​k ing” [126]), to the point
that the poems are, in her eyes, better thought of as collaborations.
Rather than viewing children as “little smiling hooks,” à la Plath, adver-
saries who drag the female poet away from the ability and time to write,
Browne, like Mayer, sees her children not just as inspiring subject matter
but also as a condition that makes poetry possible. On the book’s dedica-
tion page, she includes a photograph of her sons and dedicates the book
to them thus: “my daily sonneteers /​inventors of the ‘real time sonnet’ and
‘dailiness.’ ” For Browne, the young boys are fellow poets and co-​creators;
she even implies that children create a special brand of everydayness, one
her book hopes to capture.
Browne’s sonnets fully embrace the interruption and distraction endemic
to life with young children, and deploy many methods, like the “real-​time
sonnet,” to evoke (and use) the distinctive temporality of parenting: the rep-
etition and cycles (“this music repeats itself night after noon” [3]‌), or the way
time can feel compressed into bursts at one moment and stretch out intermi-
nably at another, with long hours to traverse before the next nap or bedtime.
“Daytime never ends” Browne confides in one poem that is brimming with
children’s play and voices (“I’m a bunny /​in a human suit /​so people /​don’t
try to eat me” [131]). As this remark about the day’s interminability suggests,
Browne doesn’t merely sing the praises of the quotidian or the delights of
motherhood. Instead, she evinces palpable ambivalence about everyday rou-
tine, like so many other poets in this study. One poem rails “Against monot-
ony of daily endeavor /​Against monotony in verse” (33). In another, the poet
speaks of the small-​scale sacrifices inherent in being a parent, capturing one
of those moments when a mother realizes she can no longer go at her own
pace or do only what she wants: “To walk at dusk /​I miss my pedestrian life /​
I must gain foot with the children” (69).
Browne also writes unflinchingly of the politics and economics of mother-
ing, including the unpaid and often unrecognized labor of raising children.
“I’m learning my job description,” she writes tartly in one poem. “Now you
learn your job description /​In the meantime I’m supervising myself /​Please
forgive me, / i​maginary salary” (10). The poems also convey how frequently
(even in the most progressive of families) household duties tend to fall upon
mother rather than father, encroaching inequitably on the mother’s time to
write and create:

I’m a poet with no preparation

Only invented moments
My husband is in France
Baby-​sitter is ill
196 Attention Equals Life

Husband returns to work

Children are ill
I’ve prepared this
without time
(70)

With no one else to care for the kids, with her husband traveling and then
at work, the speaker informs us that the poem we are reading has been “pre-
pared” despite the lack of time we might expect to be necessary for the cre-
ation of literature.
Browne also never lets us forget one of the main themes of this chapter: “It’s
political to be a mother” (Desires of Letters, 68). She, too, refuses to cordon off
the domestic from the political. In “Post-​9/​11 Sonnet (2003),” Browne writes
about the blurring of September 11th’s aftermath and her own caring for a new-
born: “The number [eleven] became an event I could not at first recognize /​As
I nursed my two-​week old infant… . He slept easily /​Unlike my first /​Notion
of terrorism” (28). For Browne, as for Mayer and her other descendants, the act
of mothering is continuous with, and even exacerbated by, a whole range of
political concerns and problems.47
As we have seen, Laynie Browne and many other contemporary women
poets follow Mayer’s example in insisting that a woman can be a mother and
a writer simultaneously. In their work, they often make a conscious choice
to welcome rather than decry the quotidian routines and time constraints
of mothering, and to use them as the basis for poetry. In the 1970s, Adrienne
Rich rightly lamented that “we know more about the air we breathe, the seas
we travel, than about the nature and meaning of motherhood” (Of Woman
Born, 11). Thanks to poets like Mayer, and Rich herself, this is no longer the
case. With her pioneering work of the 1970s, Mayer helped inaugurate a
poetics of the maternal everyday that is flourishing today, striving to make
the long invisible labor and joy, boredom and delight, politics and poetry of
mothers’ daily lives perceptible and vivid, legible at last.
 { 5 }

“There Is No Content Here, Only Dailiness”

Poetry as Critique of Everyday Life
in Ron Silliman’s Ketjak

Realism, if it addresses the real, is inexhaustible.

—​Lyn Hejinian, My Life, 144

In the midst of his 1978 prose poem Sitting Up, Standing, Taking Steps, Ron
Silliman offers the following passage:
Tuesday, a.m. What, alarm, ceiling, clock, dull light, urine, toothpaste, blue
shirt, jeans, water for coffee, bacon, eggs, soy toast, phony earth shoes, bus,
another bus, typewriter, telephone, co-​workers, salad, ice tea, more co-​
workers, bus, ambulance on freeway, another bus, a beer, chicken, rice and
squash, today’s mail, feces, TV, glass of Chablis, darkness. (Age of Huts, 298)
This appears to be a record of a relatively uneventful day:  it moves, from
the moment when the buzz of an alarm clock first stirs the consciousness,
through a litany of daily activities, such as brushing one’s teeth, commuting
on the bus to and from work, eating meals, using the bathroom, and going
to sleep. Because the piece also happens to be an experiment in writing a
poem completely devoid of verbs, it narrates the day’s story solely through
nouns, which results in a kind of list of things, objects, and small-​scale events.
The passage contains little one might think of as “poetic” or “beautiful”; the
details of daily life remain rather defiantly untransformed, neither aestheti-
cized nor turned into metaphor or symbol. The passage does not seem to be
“about” anything, either, other than the day itself in all its dailiness.
Although it feels like a straightforward catalog of what happens in the
course of a day, the sentence also hints at some knotty aesthetic and philo-
sophical issues that arise when a poet pays this sort of attention to the daily.
Reading this sentence, one might wonder if this is even “art.” Is it heightened,
transformed, or crafted enough to be considered as such? Can an experience
so undramatic and banal be appropriate subject matter for art or poetry in the
first place? If so, how should it be represented? Do the features of this particu-
lar experiment—​reducing a day to a string of key nouns—​actually provide us
198 Attention Equals Life

with a full record or representation of the day itself? What does this account
necessarily leave out? Would a different form of representation offer a dif-
ferent or better version of it? Furthermore, the passage raises the question
of what the most significant components of a so-​called ordinary day actu-
ally are. Does this slice of everyday life have any meaning, and if so, of what
sort? Could a close examination of these details tell us anything about what
it is like to be alive in late twentieth-​century American culture, or about the
economic, social, and political structures that underlie it? Is there something
“universal” about the kind of experience the passage describes? Or do differ-
ent people in various times and places experience the everyday so differently
that it is misleading to imagine it as a universally shared experience?
Since the 1970s, Ron Silliman, one of the founders and leading members
of the influential, controversial avant-​garde movement known as Language
poetry, has been consistently and memorably asking these kinds of ques-
tions at the heart of a body of poetry that has rightly been called an “epic
of everyday life.”1 Overflowing with images like “the squeal in the tone of a
clothesline pulley” (Age of Huts, 29), “Ritz crackers topped with cream cheese
and, beside them, Crayolas” (293), “green tint to the shit” (11), and “abandoned
industrial trackside cafeteria amid dill-​weed stalks” (294), Silliman’s writing
returns again and again to “what is to be taken as no information, decisions
we make each time we cross the street” (12). Convinced that we too often dis-
miss such aspects of the world as insignificant, as “no information,” Silliman
would seem to concur with the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, who
argues that “everyday life” is “in a sense residual, defined by ‘what is left over’
after all distinct, superior, specialized, structured activities have been singled
out by analysis” (Critique, 1:97).
Lavishing fresh attention on that which is “left over” is one of the primary
motives of Silliman’s writing. “I want to tell you the tales of lint,” Silliman
writes at one point in his long poem Ketjak, warning us about the micro-
scopic focus of his opus (Age of Huts, 9). The vaguely archaic syntax and iam-
bic lilt ironically hint that this is an epic poem we are reading, but it will not
be about “arms and the man,” or “man’s first disobedience and the fruit of
that forbidden tree,” or “the growth of a poet’s mind.” To truly tell the tale of
the tribe, poets must talk of things like “lint.” “The lower the existence, the
higher the experience” (169), Silliman declares in the poem 2197, reversing
the usual hierarchy that determines what we deem valuable and meaningful.
Like William Carlos Williams, a defining influence on his poetics, and James
Schuyler, Silliman provocatively overturns entrenched ideas about what is
significant and beautiful by insisting that so much depends upon the ugly,
the humble, and the usually overlooked.
The quotidian credo at the center of Silliman’s work is neatly summed up in
a single three-​word sentence that repeats over a dozen times throughout the
course of his one-​hundred-​page prose poem Ketjak: “Attention is all.” Because
Poetry as Critique of Everyday Life in Ron Silliman’s Ketjak 199

Ketjak is a poem characterized by constant, systematic repetition, there are

hundreds of sentences that recur again and again, but this phrase carries a
special resonance, ultimately becoming a sort of mantra for the entire work.
It is not hard to detect in it a Shakespearean echo—​both Hamlet’s recogni-
tion that “the readiness is all” and Edgar’s declaring “ripeness is all” in King
Lear—​but Silliman riffs on these allusions, substituting attention as the all-​
important prime mover.
As I have discussed in this book, the idea that poetry might be thought of
as a form of attention takes hold in the mid-​twentieth century amid increas-
ing anxieties about the effects of our sped-​up, scattered culture of media and
distraction. Silliman articulates a version of this notion, as he claims that
what is paramount for his poetry, for life itself, is not imagination, not inspi-
ration, not ripeness, nor readiness to act in a contingent world but, rather,
attentiveness to experience and to language. Throughout Silliman’s body of
work, the idea that “attention is all” rings out as a statement of purpose and a
dogma put into practice in the writing itself.
It is in Ketjak, the remarkable long poem that he has often characterized as
a major breakthrough in his life and writing career, that Silliman first trans-
forms this ethic of attention into a highly influential poetics of everyday life.
Written over the space of five months during the summer and fall of 1974, and
first published as a book in 1978, Ketjak is a hugely ambitious work by a rest-
less, young avant-​garde poet seeking to develop a new mode of writing, one
better equipped to present everyday life in late twentieth-​century American
culture with all its variety and contradiction intact.
In what follows, I argue that Ketjak represents an important chapter in
the development of everyday-​life poetics because Silliman offers a deliber-
ate rejoinder to the poetics of dailiness that preceded him, extending its
reach and addressing what he views as its shortcomings and blind spots,
thus building on and altering the tradition this book traces. First, Silliman’s
work is not only brimming with sharply etched images of the daily, but also
mounts a compelling, self-​reflexive inquiry into the importance of form,
and formal innovation, in any attempt to render everyday life legible. By
combining poetic practice with theoretical reflection on the everyday itself,
Silliman makes the dilemma of how to pay attention to and represent the
quotidian one of Ketjak’s central subjects. I argue that in both its form and
its content, Ketjak becomes an ambitious allegory of everyday life as such.
As Silliman puts it in a pivotal sentence in Ketjak, “There is no content here,
only dailiness” (Age of Huts, 51). Ultimately, what the poem is “about” is
everydayness itself.
Second, Silliman, along with other Language poets (such as Lyn Hejinian
in her book My Life), breaks new ground by turning the resources of the
everyday-​life aesthetic tradition—​especially that strain associated with the
Objectivists, the New  York School, the Black Mountain poets, and other
200 Attention Equals Life

facets of the New American Poetry—​toward more overtly political and criti-
cal ends. The everyday, Silliman insists, is never neutral or free from deter-
mining social forces. Unlike those poets whose work seeks to uncover the
beauty lurking in mundane moments, Silliman engages in a politicized cul-
tural critique of late twentieth-​century consumer capitalism that reveals how
its institutions and ideologies invade and determine the smallest details of
everyday life. Silliman’s belief that poetry can be a potent instrument for
engaging in what Lefebvre calls “the critique of everyday life” has proved to
be influential. Such a mode has become widespread in the past two decades,
as we saw with the work of Hoa Nguyen, Laynie Browne, and other recent
poets of the maternal everyday in the previous chapter, and will explore in
more detail in c­ hapter 6 when discussing “everyday-​life projects” in the new
millennium.
Third, Silliman makes an important contribution to the everyday-​life
poetic tradition by developing unusual large-​scale, conceptual projects, based
on constraints and generative procedures, that are designed to hone atten-
tiveness to the everyday, works that anticipate a wide range of more recent
“everyday-​life projects.” Fourth, because in texts like Ketjak, Silliman dramat-
ically alters ideas about “content” and subject matter, wresting the everyday
away from the version promulgated by “mainstream” poetries of the 1970s,
known for their reliance on epiphany, voice, moralizing anecdote, and the
move that I have referred to in this book as the “transformation trope,” which
prizes the poet’s “discovery of the extraordinary within the ordinary.” In
contrast, Silliman’s work resists the temptation to romanticize or aestheticize
daily experience, as it attempts what it knows is virtually impossible: to pay
attention to the ordinary without transforming it or reducing its complexity.
Because Ketjak has long been out of print, until quite recently it has been
difficult for readers to grasp wholly the architecture, scale, and intent of this
major work and to gauge its subsequent impact. However, thanks to the publi-
cation of Ketjak as part of the cycle of poems called The Age of Huts (Compleat)
in an attractive, widely distributed new edition from the University of
California Press in 2007, the full scope of Silliman’s achievement has recently
become clearer, allowing for a reassessment of his pioneering contribution to
contemporary practices of writing the everyday.2
Although readers of his work have long recognized the everyday as one
of its central preoccupations, the idea that Ron Silliman, of all poets, should
be dubbed an indispensable poet of everyday life may come as a surprise to
some, especially those who continue to view Language poetry with suspi-
cion and paint the writing done under its banner with too broad a brush.3
Detractors of Silliman’s brand of writing, as well as of Language poetry and
experimental postmodernist writing more broadly, have long characterized
the work, for the most part wrongly, as a kind of anti-​literary word salad—​
nonreferential, self-​enclosed, overly theoretical and formalist, deliberately
Poetry as Critique of Everyday Life in Ron Silliman’s Ketjak 201

obscure and elitist, cut off from or disdainful of the “real,” and so on.4 In
an essay on Silliman’s poetry, Hank Lazer observes that “a persistent cari-
cature of innovative poetry would claim that it is divorced from daily life,
from so-​called ‘common experience,’ and from overt political engagement”
(“Education, Equality,” 82). However, as Lazer argues, such a reading over-
looks a key aspect of his work: “Silliman’s writing is often overtly political,
even didactic in its attention to the political meaning of daily experience” (82).
Far from being divorced from daily life and the “real,” Language poetry
from the start was deeply concerned with the theory, politics, and practices
of everyday life.5 This concern is at the heart not only of Silliman’s work, but
also of other landmark works of the Language movement, from Hejinian’s
My Life to Charles Bernstein’s Content’s Dream, just as it courses through the
poets’ engagement with a wide range of theorists and philosophers, including
Karl Marx, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, Roland
Barthes, and Stanley Cavell.6 But despite the pervasiveness of everyday life
as a guiding theoretical and aesthetic problem for its poetics, this aspect of
Language poetry has not received the scrutiny it deserves. In fact, the poets’
radical investigation of the everyday has gotten lost in all the pitched discus-
sions and fierce debates about so many aspects of Language poetry over the
past three decades, debates that have most often focused on its theoretical
concerns about language, reference, and ideology; its claims about experi-
mental writing as a form of radical politics; its status as a poetic community
and avant-​garde movement; and its relationship to dominant institutions.7
The upshot is that the unique contribution Language writers like Silliman
have made to contemporary debates about the everyday has not yet been fully
assessed. Those debates have emerged from the diverse body of everyday-​life
theory associated with such figures as Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes,
Guy Debord and the Situationists, Michel de Certeau, Raymond Williams,
and perhaps most centrally—​and most usefully for Silliman’s poetry—​Henri
Lefebvre, whose multi-​volume Critique of Everyday Life is a touchstone for
contemporary theoretical discourses about the quotidian.
To understand the particular contribution Silliman makes to this terrain,
it is useful to view his work as the offspring of a fruitful marriage between a
few distinct sets of sources and commitments. First, Silliman inherited, and
set out to reformulate, the aesthetic of dailiness pioneered by earlier avant-​
garde poets, especially an American tradition stretching from Walt Whitman,
William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, and the Objectivists to the postwar
New American Poetry associated with the Beats, Black Mountain poets, and
the New York School. Second, during the early 1970s, he began to immerse him-
self in literary and cultural theory; his work was quickly energized by a diverse
array of theoretical arguments about culture, language, ideology, and the
everyday. And lastly, the flowering of conceptual art in the late 1960s and
early 1970s—​and especially its preoccupation with the use of procedures and
202 Attention Equals Life

constraints to compel attention to the daily and ordinary—​had a profound

impact on Silliman and his circle, just as it left its mark on Bernadette Mayer,
as we saw in the previous chapter.8
Forged by the collision of these discourses, Silliman’s work (along with
some strains of Language writing more broadly) represents the emergence
of a philosophically informed and politicized poetics of everyday life that
both extends and challenges the work of previous writers who seek to limn
the daily. Furthermore, the fusion of these strands of fascination with every-
day life—​the poetic-​aesthetic, the conceptual, and the theoretical-​political-​
cultural—​that one finds in Silliman’s work can be seen reverberating in many
adventurous contemporary works that experiment with form in order to probe
the quotidian.9
As we have seen with other figures in this book, Silliman’s experimentation
with form—​including his use of procedural, constraint-​based methods of com-
position, repetition, collage and disjunction, found and appropriated language,
and extreme length and scale—​grows out of a conviction that “the everyday
is inherently resistant to being captured in the nets of realism” (Sheringham,
Everyday Life, 42–​43). Indeed, a motif running throughout Silliman’s work is
an impatience with conventional “realism,” especially the claims made on its
behalf about its ability to render accurately and exhaustively the everyday and
ordinary. In an early essay, “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the
World,” Silliman goes so far as to denounce “realism” as nothing more than
“the illusion of reality in capitalist thought” (New Sentence, 10).10
But Silliman—​unlike some avant-​garde writers and artists—​never entirely
abandons the realist project. Instead, he develops a distinctive brand of skep-
tical, experimental realism that strives to reconceive, expand, and improve
realism itself, while simultaneously surrendering its dream of accurately or
definitively capturing the “real” in its nets. In fact, although it has not been
granted a great deal of attention in the extensive critical conversation about
Language poetry, the movement as a whole was fairly consumed with attack-
ing an outdated conventional “realism” and creating a new, avant-​garde real-
ism to take its place.11
Language writers were keen on drawing attention to the highly problem-
atic nature of the term itself, as traditionally conceived. “Realism is a strategy,
not a condition,” Silliman writes in the poem 2197 (Age of Huts, 194). The con-
ventions of realism are no more than a tool, a literary tactic, he suggests; real-
ism does not amount to a natural, innocent, transparent mode or “condition.”
Language poets are therefore deeply suspicious of claims to objectivity and
mimetic fidelity that are implied whenever traditional realism is discussed.
In 1989, Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein answered a question about
Language poetry and its “calls for a new realism” (Andrews, Paradise, 108) by
challenging the assumptions inherent in the label itself:
Poetry as Critique of Everyday Life in Ron Silliman’s Ketjak 203

Whose realism? Whose reality? How can realities be pictured, sounded, cri-
tiqued, undermined? The issue isn’t therefore just the stylish representation
of some given reality, but questioning who controls that reality and who
controls its exclusions and inclusions as well as its accepted representa-
tions. … What passes for Realism too often makes overblown and imperial
claims, puffing itself up with the pretentions of positivism. Yet so-​called
“realistic” projects are never neutral and objective; they depend on systems
or methods of composition that are partial and biased. In this sense, the
“real” is at odds with Realism. (Andrews, Paradise, 110)

Rae Armantrout offers another version of this suspicion in the midst of a 1986
review of “mainstream” contemporary poetry: “it is worthwhile to examine
claims to naturalness and objectivity carefully to find out what or who is
being suppressed” (Hejinian and Watten, Guide to Poetics, 67).
If we understand “realism” to be just another set of conventions and devices,
a contingent strategy existing in a particular historical moment and doing
particular kinds of ideological work, than it also follows that it can change.
Hejinian captures this idea in a resonant sentence in book My Life: “So from
age to age a new realism repeats its reaction against the reality that the previ-
ous age admired” (104). Hejinian suggests that her own writing and Language
poetry more broadly, in reacting against previous versions of reality, are advo-
cating for a new realism, one that might be less at odds with the “real” than tra-
ditional realism. The pay-​off for achieving this would be enormous: as Hejinian
writes in My Life, “Realism, if it addresses the real, is inexhaustible” (144).
Though it may seem surprising, given the familiar connotations of the
word realism, the term was always central to how Language poetry conceived
of itself. When Silliman edited the landmark anthology of Language writ-
ing called In the American Tree in 1986, he gave it a deliberately provoca-
tive subtitle—​Language, Realism, Poetry—​which also served as the title of
his introductory essay about the movement. It surely would have surprised
William Dean Howells or George Eliot to see the label “realism” applied to
the kinds of poems included in this anthology, which often features passages
like this one by Bruce Andrews:

Cherry red kind of washed-​out caged · & staged quack quack spoke job,
pees & balls juice up, nobody’s heroes censor doesn t censor enough; anti-
dote a panic, white eyes—​They much jeopardy—​They much probability
solid pleasure—​Moto kitsch, or racial mercantilism?, what about the feds
damaging the emissions?—​Stereo bust means ‘think quicker’; I  must eat
worms—​Flesh with insistence; I insist so it s calculated passion sell-​outs?—​
Andersonville prison. (Silliman et al., American Tree, 71)
204 Attention Equals Life

At the close of his introductory essay, Silliman claimed that in such writ-
ing, “the content is literally the world. Thus, like all art when understood
within the context of its audience, this writing is realism” (69; italics added).
As Andrews and Bernstein put it, with a nod to Marx’s famous comment
about philosophy, in their remarks on Language poetry and realism: “the
point is not to present reality but to change it—​by a reordering of the senses,
of thought, of language… . [T]‌his involves challenging any normative, con-
trolling conception of reality: at the very least by withholding the usual alle-
giances of syntax, style, decorum or subject … and by mobilizing forces
that can probe how reality is constructed—​by being contested” (Andrews,
Paradise, 110–​11).
In the 1970s, Silliman discovered that using disruptive, procedural, avant-​
garde forms in the service of a “new realism” could allow his work to provide
a much more expansive and nuanced picture of everyday life in moder-
nity.12 Laden with paradox, Silliman’s quotidian is a complicated, unstable
mixture—​of private and public, universal and particular, tedium and pos-
sibility, repetition and newness, deprivation and plenitude. In its embrace of
these contraries, Silliman’s work parallels Lefebvre’s belief that the everyday
is “at once empty and miraculously full” (Sheringham, Everyday Life, 143).
Like Lefebvre, Silliman aims to uncover the everyday’s ambiguities and con-
tradictions in order to “release the creative energies that are an integral part
of it” (Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, 13).
Silliman’s profound belief in the significance of the everyday and the “cre-
ative energies” lurking within it gives his writing a potent ethical dimension.
In Ketjak this ethical charge is most powerfully conveyed through the poem’s
frequent recourse to images of morning and waking, a trope we have seen at
the heart of the everyday-​life aesthetic tradition. For Silliman, this theme cul-
minates in the moving admonition of the poem’s closing sentence: “Awake,
for nothing comes to the sleeper but a dream” (Age of Huts, 101). In effect,
Silliman declares that awakening to the material realities of everyday life is a
cardinal virtue, a poetic and even moral goal. As we will see, he connects this
critical and creative awakening to the promise of active, left-​wing political
and social change.
Like Walter Benjamin, Silliman conceives of capitalism, and the false con-
sciousness that sustains it, as an insidious “dream-​filled sleep”; both authors
use the metaphor of awakening to make tangible that a central mission of
their work is to wake us up from that numbing slumber (Benjamin, Arcades
Project, 391). In The Arcades Project, Benjamin criticizes the Surrealists for
being too easily seduced by the lure of the unconscious and dream and, in
contrast, portrays his own project as an adventure in philosophical and politi-
cal waking: “whereas [Louis] Aragon persists within the realm of dream, here
the concern is to find the constellation of awakening” (458). He refers to The
Arcades Project itself—​an innovative “constellation” of fragments intended as
Poetry as Critique of Everyday Life in Ron Silliman’s Ketjak 205

an inventory and analysis of the urban everyday—​as “an experiment in the

technique of awakening” (388).13
Ultimately, Silliman’s Ketjak casts itself as exactly this kind of experiment
in wakefulness. Although the poem clearly echoes and anticipates many of the
philosophical and political ideas about the quotidian that theories of every-
day life articulate, it does something else as well:  by exploring new formal
means, Silliman puts those ideas into practice and extends them. If much of
this body of theory declares that habit and other forces have led us to neglect
the everyday and ordinary, leaving us anesthetized and blinded to the reality
of an everyday that has been “colonized” by capitalism and power, Silliman’s
writing takes this insight as the motive for a practical act, of criticism and of
attention—​the creation of his own “constellation of awakening.” His work,
like that of many innovative writers and artists who devote themselves to the
everyday, does what theory and critique point toward but cannot always truly
achieve. At its best, Silliman’s writing suggests that certain kinds of art can
model new modes of attention that change the way we experience our every-
day lives and even, perhaps, wake us to action.

Inventing a New Everyday-​Life Poetics: The Ketjak Breakthrough

In his own frequent retellings of the narrative arc of his career, Silliman has
repeatedly cited the writing of Ketjak in 1974 as a kind of “Eureka!” moment.
Indeed, it is one that has taken on almost mythic proportions in the story
of Silliman’s work, as well as of Language poetry as a whole. Silliman has
described Ketjak as “my first really serious work” (Tursi, interview), and
noted that it “in many respects marks my adulthood as a writer” (McCaffery
and Gregory, Alive and Writing).14 The centrality of this poem to Silliman’s
subsequent work is even more apparent when we consider that he has given
the title Ketjak to his entire body of poetry.15 Although the dramatic turning
point this particular long poem represents can be (and has been) assessed
within a number of critical contexts, I wish to focus on a key aspect of the
Ketjak breakthrough: how it facilitated Silliman’s creation of a potent new
mode of addressing the everyday, one that managed to fuse form and content
in complex, innovative ways.
The question of whether certain aesthetic forms can help render the every-
day visible, without unnecessarily falsifying or distorting it, seems to have
been central to Silliman’s struggles with his work in the early 1970s. At first
deeply influenced and inspired by the avant-​garde poets of the previous gen-
eration who were lumped together under the rubric of the “New American
Poetry” (Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg,
Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Jack Spicer, Philip Whalen,
and others), Silliman felt that their work “for a time offered a more fully
206 Attention Equals Life

generative response to daily life” (McCaffery and Gregory, Alive and Writing).
But he quickly began to view what the New American poetry had to offer as
a “false model,” because it was based on a “speech-​imitating poetics” that
left Silliman and his peers with a sense of “limiting claustrophobia” (Beckett,
“Interview”). In other words, although he found the New American Poetry’s
emphasis on dailiness initially liberating, Silliman felt that even the “open”
forms pioneered by Ginsberg, O’Hara, Creeley, or Olson “concealed their
‘madeness,’ ” as they fetishized the supposedly “speech-​based,” “natural,” and
“organic” nature of their poetics.
In a 1976 response to a questionnaire about his writing, Silliman recalls that
he “started out as a conventional writer of lyrical poems” in the mid-​1960s but
“quickly became bored and frustrated” with the “forms I’d inherited”:
the pseudo-​formalist approach of the post-​Projective writers, with which
I experimented for a time, offered no real solution. At best, the equation of
the page to “scored speech” was a rough metaphor, & it excluded more than
it could bring in. Asserting that such writing exposed completely their
inner selves, most of these writers had in fact created elaborate & idealized
personae. Their mysticism, like the incessant gossip orientation of the so-​
called younger NY gang, was simply one way to avoid confronting the fact
that, by 1970, there was no content left in anybody’s work. (quoted in Lally,
None of the Above, 62)
Silliman’s critique of his New American Poetry predecessors rests on two
issues that would become quite important to the direction of his work in the
1970s: inclusiveness and content. He felt that the New American Poets failed
to provide an aesthetic that could accommodate a full enough range of every-
day experience: their work “excluded more than it could bring in,” and as a
result was severely limited in terms of “content”—​a lack barely covered over
by the metaphysical pretensions of Duncan or Olson or the coterie chatter of
the New York School. Even though these writers developed new poetic forms
highly attuned to the daily, the local, and the mundane, for Silliman, they
remained chained to habits of perception, continuity, narrative, and order.
Even worse, he saw them as beholden to an outdated, untheorized model of
the self and subjectivity, in which poets seek to expose “their inner selves”
and cultivate “elaborate & idealized personae.”
After a period of experimenting with fractured syntax and isolated words
in the minimalist vein of Robert Creeley, Robert Grenier, Clark Coolidge, and
others, Silliman found himself at something of a dead-​end.16 The leap for-
ward came when he decided to try two new devices in his work that enabled
him to take up the mantle of dailiness from the New American Poets but
to refashion and extend it. First, he began to experiment with prose poetry,
developing the use of what he would later famously call “the New Sentence”—​
complete, usually grammatically correct sentences, juxtaposed paratactically
Poetry as Critique of Everyday Life in Ron Silliman’s Ketjak 207

in collagelike, discontinuous structures.17 And second, at almost the same

moment, he invented a procedural constraint—​based on repetition, expan-
sion, and modification—​that would guide and generate the writing of a poem.
As he has explained, the idea for the form of Ketjak came to him after he
heard a performance of a piece of repetitive minimalist music (Drumming)
by the avant-​garde composer Steve Reich.18 Silliman was likewise inspired by
the Balinese oral performance “ketjak,” a ritual also known as the “Balinese
monkey chant,” in which hundreds of performers chant and dance a dynamic,
rhythmic reenactment of a battle from the Hindu Ramayana epic.19
Silliman composed Ketjak according to the following constraints: (1) each
paragraph has twice as many sentences as the previous paragraph; (2)  the
new paragraph repeats each sentence from the previous paragraph in the
exact same order, although sometimes those earlier sentences are altered
or expanded; and (3)  the new sentences in each new paragraph are placed
between the existing sentences.20 The predetermined formal mechanism
results in a poem made of expanding blocks of prose that grow exponentially
in size:  the first paragraph has only one sentence, the second features that
sentence plus one more, the third consists of four sentences, and the fourth
paragraph has eight sentences. The last paragraph of the one-​hundred—​page
work, the twelfth, features 2,048 sentences and over ten thousand words and
runs for nearly fifty pages of unbroken prose. The most stimulating, reward-
ing aspect of Ketjak is that each new paragraph features all the previously
used sentences appearing in order except that they are now interspersed
with new sentences. Each time a sentence recurs, the reader recognizes the
familiar phrase but now finds it in a completely different context, sandwiched
between two new sentences, raising many interesting questions about repeti-
tion, variation, and meaning’s relationship to context.
Like other writers attracted to formal constraints, from John Ashbery to
Georges Perec and the Oulipo, Silliman became convinced that using this
sort of device to generate a text had the potential to free a writer from unex-
amined habits and received conventions that delimit what is possible in both
writing and consciousness.21 “Ketjak,” he explained in an interview, “was pre-
cisely an attempt to identify a form that would enable me to break away from
habits of continuity” (Tursi, interview). In Under Albany, he recalls that in
Ketjak and the other procedural texts that followed it, he was experimenting
with “structures that carried forward a formal concept as a mechanism for
breaking up the habits of perception” (22).
When explaining his turn to constructivist, procedural mechanisms for
generating poetry, Silliman argues that his conscious, systematic use of a for-
mal constraint in Ketjak is no different from the use of rhyme or line breaks
or any other kind of form in poetry: “All poetry is formalist,” he insisted in a
1985 interview (Beckett, “Interview”), “the intervention of forms into the real,
the transformation of the real into forms. But the real is social, discontinuous,
208 Attention Equals Life

unstable and opaque. Against that, any fixed poetics (any valorized, codi-
fied set of procedures) is necessarily a falsification.” Silliman suggests that
existing forms of poetry, conventions of “realism,” and habits of narrative
and perception seldom provide a picture of the “real” that matches our expe-
rience of it—​as a phenomenon that is “social, discontinuous, unstable and
opaque”—​and instead only falsify and distort it. In other words, form mat-
ters, immensely: it can even dictate the kind of “real” a poem describes and
presents. Or, as Silliman’s friend and fellow Language writer Barrett Watten
puts it, “New form means new content” (Silliman et al., “For Change,” 468).

The Content of a Poem That “Renounces ‘Aboutness’ ”:

“A Real Taste for the Humble”

To be sure, when it comes to considering content, it can be hard to locate

what a work as disjunctive and decentered as Ketjak is “about.” Clearly,
Silliman does not set out, like so many contemporary lyric poets, to provide
a self-​contained anecdote, essay, or meditation about a particular subject.
Nevertheless, he insists that the decisions governing a procedural, formal-
ist work like Ketjak are very much “content dependent”: in other words, the
choice to use a particular device is determined by a desire to present particu-
lar kinds of content and subject matter (Beckett, “Interview”).
So what kind of content did Silliman have in mind as he developed the form
for his long poem? When asked in a 1982 interview about the content of Ketjak,
Silliman explained: “Ketjak is very content centered. It has been pointed out to
me by various other people that there is a great deal of ‘dailiness,’ a real taste for
the humble, in Ketjak. That sense was very important to me, and still is; it was
something I had not been able to approach using a speech-​based metaphor for
the text” (McCaffery and Gregory, Alive and Writing). In other words, despite
the imposing structural exoskeleton (or, from Silliman’s perspective, because of
it), Ketjak is not just a formalist exercise; it is actually very focused on its con-
tent. Further, what constitutes Ketjak’s content is nothing more nor less than
daily life itself. As Silliman explains, his conscious goal in the poem is to get
at aspects “of American life not much acknowledged by the language of public
institutions, which includes creative writing. Presenting these ‘ignored’ areas
of experience was and is of definite concern to me, and, in that sense Ketjak is
extremely content oriented” (McCaffery and Gregory, Alive and Writing).
When an interviewer asked, “Why is it that certain ‘contents’ become
ignored? Is it mainly a matter of convention, or do certain objects have a rea-
son for being talked about over and over again?” Silliman replied, “The ques-
tion of what is appropriate content is mainly conventional. People tend to have
things in the world that they are taught to view as meaningful” (McCaffery
and Gregory, Alive and Writing). Sounding a bit like William James and other
Poetry as Critique of Everyday Life in Ron Silliman’s Ketjak 209

theorists of attention, Silliman argued that social conventions, aesthetic cus-

toms, habits of mind, and ingrained hierarchies of significance all guide and
shape what kinds of content we notice, what we accept into our poems or
artworks, and by extension, into our worldview. In the poem Sunset Debris,
Silliman asks, “Don’t you see how so-​called good writing is a sort of distor-
tion, positing dishonest limits on the real?”—​further underscoring his con-
viction that the tidy shape, obvious subject matter, and logical organization of
“so-​called good writing” (Age of Huts, 112) can insidiously distort and restrict
our knowledge of lived reality. In contrast, the kind of writing he has in mind
“allows for the relationships within the poem to be as complex, as mediated,
as contradictory, as disjointed, as indirect and as over-​determined as they are
in life. Perversely, this enables the work to much more accurately document
the realities of the universe than any so-​called unified text, any writing orga-
nized under the hierarchical principles of narrative or exposition” (Beckett,
“Interview”).
Silliman’s approach is designed to remedy the failings of the epiphanic
mode that was so prevalent in “mainstream” poetry of the 1970s. As he recently
observed in a post on his widely read blog, he finds the frequent recourse to
humble moments and settings in that kind of poetry to be predicated on a
“fundamental dishonesty”:

So for me, the quotidian, to call it that (I never think of it as such), is not
about adding a layer of texture for the sake of enhancing a reality effect.
The invisible or marginal is not adjunct to the work:  it is the work itself.
I want you to understand that dust bunny in the corner under your desk.
The whole of human history can be found there. But how that history is to
be discovered matters terribly. One of the primary objections I have to the
school of quietude is its grotesque sense of heroism, even when it’s a hero-
ism of everyday objects. A trowel is not a trope. This always seems to me a
fundamental dishonesty, a true violation of any pact with the reader, even
with the self. It’s a betrayal of the world of objects & of the objective. Such
poetry is founded on precisely the dynamics that render the most critical
elements of the world invisible. (October 27, 2002)

Silliman argues that by turning trowel into trope, such poetry creates “a false
world, a poetry of lies” that leaves “the most critical elements of the world”
unnoticed and occluded. In contrast to “the writing of a Robert Lowell or a
Phil Levine or a Linda Gregg or an Alfred Corn,” he holds up a poetry that
insists upon the everydayness of the quotidian, pointing to Francis Ponge’s
“insistence on the thingness of things” as exemplary.
For Silliman, a nonhierarchical work that ignores the demand for “about-
ness” can get considerably closer to the realist project’s dream of being able to
“accurately document the realities of the universe” by challenging the existing
210 Attention Equals Life

distribution of the sensibile, in Jacques Rancière’s terms, and offering a much

more rich, uncensored picture of everyday life and the social real:
That which restricts itself to what reason can comprehend of the real is nec-
essarily going to be exclusionary and narrow, linear instead of polymorphic.
A writing which is never “about” anything is never limited as to what can
enter in. … Which is why a writing which renounces “aboutness” can be so
rich at precisely the level of content. … When writing is organized hierar-
chically, content is not only restricted, but much more easily subjected to a
wide range of possible social conventions, internal as well as external cen-
sorship. (Beckett, “Interview”)
Silliman’s way of thinking about content and the everyday here helps explain
the crucial sentence I mentioned earlier, which appears twice in Ketjak, once
just before the ending, where it takes on even greater resonance: “There is no
content here, only dailiness, the driver education car poised in the intersec-
tion by the playground, around which a jogger orbits, all in the hill’s shadow
at sunset” (Age of Huts, 51, 100). Why would Silliman suggest that the poem
we are reading has “no content”? And why is “dailiness” cast in opposition to
subject matter or content? Because Ketjak “is never ‘about’ anything,” because
it is relieved of the burden of representing “content” in the conventional
sense, it “is never limited as to what can enter in.” If we give up looking for
what we think of as “content,” Silliman suggests, we may wake up to the “dai-
liness” right in front of us, all around us: the driver’s ed car, the playground,
the orbiting jogger, the hill, an ordinary evening in San Francisco. In saying
“there’s no content here, only dailiness,” Silliman proclaims that by relin-
quishing “aboutness” he has found a way to tune into a kind of “raw feed” of
the “polymorphic” everyday itself as it constantly unfolds.
Silliman has always shared with other poets of the everyday the alluring yet
unachievable dream of writing what I referred to in previous chapters as “the
everything work”—​one that might be wide enough to exhaust and contain
the whole world.22 When Ketjak talks about itself, the text highlights its own
expansiveness and commitment to radical inclusiveness, its logic of accumu-
lation, as when Silliman writes, “One could propose, for example, the inclu-
sion of anything” (Age of Huts, 12); “This new arc is wider, more gradual” (38);
and “If you go wider, deeper” (74). At one point, ironically reappropriating
advertising language to “sell” the merits of his long poem, he writes, “Bigger,
to serve you better” (57).
After completing Ketjak and the larger cycle of which it was a part, The
Age of Huts, Silliman launched into creating an even more expansive “every-
thing work,” The Alphabet. This sequence appeared in twenty-​six volumes,
one devoted to each letter, over the course of the next three decades, and
was finally published as a single text in 2008. More recently, Silliman has
taken this commitment to radical inclusivity to an even greater extreme: he
Poetry as Critique of Everyday Life in Ron Silliman’s Ketjak 211

is currently at work on a massive work he calls Universe, which he projects

will fill 360 volumes. On the back cover of the sequence’s opening poem,
Revelator, the blurb describes the book as “the jumping off point for a work
that, if Ron Silliman were to live long enough, would take him three centuries
to complete.”23 Silliman’s comically ambitious, unfinishable project embod-
ies the impossible aspiration of creating an “everything work” that lies at the
center of the experimental realism and everyday-​life aesthetics.24
In Ketjak, Silliman hints at his poem’s expansive scope, its status as a kind
of encyclopedia of everyday life, when he writes: “You could start almost any-
where and find almost anything” (Age of Huts, 45). In reading Ketjak, one
feels this to be just about true. To get a sense of the range of images, informa-
tion, and materials on offer within the “wider, more gradual arc” of Ketjak, we
might consider a typical passage plucked from the flow of the poem:
Frying yellow squash in the wok, with string beans, bell pepper, tofu,
sprouts. Intermittent as it is, the process of refrigeration sets up a hum in
the wall, non-​specific, not to be avoided, not precisely heard, felt rather by
the wake in the belly’s fluids. Bone bruise. Rose of china embedded in the
lamp. An old spool for cable made into a table, made home for a garden in
an old wine jug. The alimentary life. Each morning geese circle the lake
until they refind day’s forms. Feta cheese. Normal discourse. You are not
the most complicated of men eating an English muffin. What in the wall
whistles. Exploration in closure. Prefers instruments of percussion, for dis-
creteness. Fat dimpled thighs. Raw mushrooms. The waitress looms over
the table, pot of coffee in hand. Write this down in a green notebook. The
rectangular geometry of the tiles, the plane of the floor held stories above
the ground, which flows under the metal door into this cubicle of the john.
Celery, salary. Auto-​dactyl dream. Piano man. He gave the impression that
very many cities rubbed him smooth. Almonds. The warm blood of rain,
say, such image as proposes an aesthetic. Power curtain. So it seemed I woke
in a castle, or, rather, its inner court, whose walls of yellow and brown brick
supported vines of ivy, until, standing, shaking off dead leaves, I could see
into the windows of the rooms, the classes going on there. Each day new vis-
tas become possible, yesterday’s earlobe, today’s toenail, a radio on a mantel
one had forgotten to think of, a flashlight. Would pour pigment directly
on the canvas, then manipulate that. Interest is something you impose.
Endless possibility, drifting from campus to campus, hanging out. Cohn’s
loans … An harbor, Ann Arbor. Evolution of the mailbox, professionalism
of cops. The poem as long as California, or summer. Until I myself became
trapped in the Bermuda Triangle of the heart. Technographic typography.
A calculated refusal to perform the normal chores of verse. (39)
It is quite difficult to appreciate the full effect of a poem like Ketjak from
excerpts, but its main features should be apparent in a passage of this length
212 Attention Equals Life

(except for its use of repetition, which can be better experienced over lon-
ger stretches of the poem). Obviously, the nonlinear, disjunctive form of the
passage displays Silliman’s use of the “new sentence,” with its reliance on
non sequitur, parataxis, and juxtaposition for its effects. The intense self-​
consciousness about language and representation so common to Silliman
and to Language poetry more broadly can be seen in the many references
to the poet’s act of writing the text we are reading (“write this down in a
green notebook”) and to the nature of the poem in front of us (“a calcu-
lated refusal to perform the normal chores of verse,” “the poem as long as
California, or summer”). In this way, the poem continually flaunts its own
“madeness,” its status as text, as writing. Silliman also interweaves moments
of meta-​commentary about specific aspects of writing and art that resonate
with the text at hand (“interest is something you impose,” “exploration in
closure,” “normal discourse,” “would pour pigment directly on the canvas,
then manipulate that”). His penchant for puns and wordplay (“celery, sal-
ary,” “Cohn’s loans,” “An harbor, Ann Arbor,” “technographic typography”)
draws attention to the materiality of the signifier. He also reflects, ironically,
on other, contrasting poetic modes, as in the remark about “The warm blood
of rain, say, such image as proposes an aesthetic,” which sounds like a dig
at the 1970s vogue of “Deep Image” poetry, the often watered-​down version
of surrealism I discussed in my introduction, which was fond of images like
“the warm blood of rain,” and which is an aesthetic Silliman here implicitly
rejects.
At the same time, the passage amply displays Silliman’s goal of eschewing
“content,” conventionally understood, in favor of “only dailiness” itself. With
hyper-​precise language and careful observation of the minute and humble,
Silliman trains his attention on a wide range of extremely specific, concrete,
ordinary details: food (“frying yellow squash in the wok, with string beans”;
“raw mushrooms,” “eating an English muffin”); intimate and unpoetic aspects
of the body (“fat dimpled thighs,” feeling “the wake in the belly’s fluids”);
unglamorous everyday spaces, like a public bathroom (“the john”); and the
background white noise of daily life (“the process of refrigeration sets up a
hum in the wall … not precisely heard”). There are also slivers of narrative
about daily encounters (“the waitress looms over the table”), alongside com-
ments that illuminate the cultural landscape and its public institutions (“evo-
lution of the mailbox, professionalism of cops”). Mixed in with all this are
bits of possible autobiography, like the description of a revealing dream where
the speaker seems to be looking in the windows of an ivy-​covered academic
institution while classes are being taught, or the reference to being “trapped
in the Bermuda Triangle of the heart.” There are also evocations of recurrence
in everyday life (“each morning geese circle the lake until they refind day’s
forms,” “each day new vistas become possible, yesterday’s earlobe”) and of the
bodily, routine aspects of daily life (as can be seen, for example, in the many
Poetry as Critique of Everyday Life in Ron Silliman’s Ketjak 213

images of eating and “the alimentary life” which run through this particular
passage).
If Silliman’s unusual experiment is designed to grant us a new and
improved picture of everyday life in modernity (“bigger, to serve you bet-
ter”), what kind of portrayal does a passage like this convey? For one thing, it
quickly becomes apparent that Silliman conceives of the everyday as more an
ongoing, fluid, dynamic process than a tangible thing or set of experiences.
Rather than a sphere where privileged moments of heightened experience or
revelation occur, which can be singled out by the artist for the reader’s edi-
fication, we are presented with a dizzying, swirling world of concrete details
piled up one after the other. These details are presented as a democracy of
particulars, stripped of any false or imposed hierarchy of significance. (Or,
as he puts it at one point in Ketjak, “No individual sentence given particu-
lar attention” [78]). As Hank Lazer notes, “Silliman resists an emotionally
heightened fetishizing of [the] objects” (“Education, Equality,” 74) he is con-
stantly documenting; he “does not isolate such details as part of a narrowed
version of ‘realism’ ” (93). They are offered as parts of a world only, facets of a
vast mosaic of information, constantly juxtaposed with other fragments. In
this manner, Silliman wards off the temptation—​regularly succumbed to in
much twentieth-​century poetry—​to treat everyday experience sentimentally,
or as a stepping-​stone to transcendent moments of vision.
While Silliman’s writing does not seek to transform the mundane or cel-
ebrate its hidden riches, neither does it denigrate the everyday as a site of
unrelenting boredom and alienation. Filled with variety, ugliness, and beauty
at every turn, Silliman’s everyday is immensely varied. It is densely textured
and multifaceted, both positive and negative, exhilarating and repetitive.
Recoiling from synthetic, narrow versions of what “ordinary” American
“daily life” is and means, Silliman refuses to define the everyday in absolute
terms. Instead, his goal is to challenge those reductive, constructed versions of
the everyday that circulate in our culture through movies, television, adver-
tising, popular music, novels, and poetry. In his verse essay “The Artifice of
Absorption,” Silliman’s friend and fellow Language poet Charles Bernstein
decries “the simplistic reduction / ​of everyday life” fostered by the absorbing
distractions of television and “entertainments” (“the fastread magazines &
fictions and verse”) (A Poetics, 84). For Bernstein, such cultural products end
up “fueling the banality of everyday life, /​not reflecting its elusive actualities.”
Bernstein, like Silliman, calls for a kind of writing that might be able to put
an “end to this /​monotonizing of experience: not to be further /​submerged
in it” (84). In fact, one goal of Silliman’s poetry is to lay bare the protocols and
subtle forms of “internal as well as external censorship,” those partitions of
the sensible Rancière refers to, that limit what “content” is permissible—​the
ideological machinery that creates this highly mediated, simplified sense of
the everyday in the first place.
214 Attention Equals Life

The Revolving Door of Ketjak’s Form: “Extension,

Addition, Modification”

As I have suggested, the particular picture of contemporary everyday life that

Silliman presents emerges from far more than just the poem’s content, the
scenes, moments, people, and actions he chooses to weave into the poem’s
tapestry. It arises out of the complicated interplay between this content and
the poem’s unusual, disruptive form. Indeed, the form of this poem—​even
more so than in later Silliman works which do not rely on procedures of rep-
etition and expansion—​actually causes the poem to function allegorically,
to the point that the form comes to embody or approximate everydayness
as such.
In other words, Silliman’s Ketjak can be read as a postmodernist alle-
gory, in that its formal features—​for instance, its reliance on accumulation,
its use of a mathematical procedure of expansion, its paratactic piling up of
fragments—​begin to glow with figurative as well as merely formal signifi-
cance.25 But as an allegory for what? Dailiness itself, I would argue, because
the formal and structural features of the poem feel so emblematic of many
of the everyday’s constitutive features: endless progression without teleology,
discontinuity, repetition, variation, accumulation, contingency, polyphony,
and simultaneity.
In a recent interview, Silliman reiterates his belief that our experience of the
“real” is, in actuality, “discontinuous,” a quality clearly embodied in the jagged
jump cuts that make up the poem’s form. “[W]‌e experience the world not as a
stream of consciousness,” he observes, “but rather as a series of far more finite
events… . [I]f you pay close attention to the phenomenological experience of
daily life, it is filled with such junctures and they’re always abrupt” (Tursi,
interview). In order to approximate this dimension of the “real” more accu-
rately, Silliman creates the disjunctive structure of Ketjak, which acts as an
analogy for the discontinuity at the heart of the phenomenological experience
of the everyday. The form of the poem also exhibits a world where an almost
impossibly large number of things are happening at once. As the text says
of itself at one point, “this sequence presents simultaneity” (Age of Huts, 82).
And as a collage of multiple voices and sources, the poem’s form evokes the
fundamentally social nature of the everyday, which compels us to be aware of
the pluralism and polyphony of everyday culture, events, and language.26
In the essay “I Wanted to Write Sentences,” Silliman explains that he “set
up a form in the poem Ketjak that revolved around the sentence as a visible,
foregrounded element of the reading experience and that utilized repetition
to undercut hypotaxis. Borrowing an idea from the music of Steve Reich,
I  realized that accumulation itself could be used to suggest direction” (13).
Repetition and accumulation, then, become governing formal devices because
they enable the writer to counteract our unthinking, habitual reliance on
Poetry as Critique of Everyday Life in Ron Silliman’s Ketjak 215

order, linearity, continuity, teleology, vertical hierarchy (“hypotaxis” refers to

the subordination of clauses in a sentence), and closure—​a ll of which tend to
mask or distort what Bernstein has called the “elusive actualities” of everyday
experience (A Poetics, 84).
Silliman learned from both Steve Reich’s music and Balinese ketjak a cru-
cial lesson: that a form based on repetition and “accumulation” can provide
a work with a sense of direction. Building a text upon this insight permits
Silliman to evade the pull of teleology and linear progress that drives most
forms of writing; at the same time, he avoids having to surrender a feeling
of forward movement. Even more to the point, writers and artists have often
found that forms based on accumulation can be a powerful tool in the quest
to rescue the everyday from neglect, as we have seen in the previous chapters
on Schuyler and Ammons. The effort to accumulate data—​to gather, collect,
archive and document—​is a key feature of twentieth-​century everyday-​life
projects. Silliman’s attraction to “ketjak”—​even to the point of gathering his
entire oeuvre under this title—​stems from his fascination with this notion of
form-​through-​accumulation: “the term Ketjak stands in my own imagination
as a figure for accumulation, an allusion to the remarkable layering of voices
at the heart of the chant” (“I Wanted to Write,” 13–​14).
In the poem Ketjak, the deliberate structure of accumulation and repetition
is directly tied to its desire to approximate the experience of everyday life. For
one thing, the poem’s formal repetition manages to convey a powerful sense
of the repetitive, cyclical rhythm that so many theorists of the everyday have
seen as its most important feature. As Rita Felski has noted in an important
discussion of repetition and the quotidian, “everyday life is above all a tem-
poral term. As such, it conveys the fact of repetition; it refers not to the sin-
gular or unique but to that which happens ‘day after day’ ” (“Invention,” 81).
Indeed, for Lefebvre, the word quotidienne “really refers to repetition in daily
life, to that which repeats itself consistently” (“Toward a Leftist Cultural
Politics,” 78). As Felski observes, both modernist aesthetics and everyday-​life
theory have recoiled from “the horrors of repetition,” seeing it as a sign of
our alienation and imprisonment within daily routine (83). But this “disdain
for repetition” is misguided, as it is much more complex than it might at first
appear: “the temporality of everyday life is internally complex; it combines
repetition and linearity, recurrence with forward movement” (84–​85).27
Ketjak’s form—​its unusual yoking together of repetition and expansion—​
seems tailor-​made to explore the paradoxes of everyday temporality that
Felski refers to. For one thing, the poem’s use of repetition becomes a way for
Silliman to find a tangible formal analog that could convey, or literalize, the
idea that repetition is a, perhaps the, constituent feature of everyday experi-
ence. But at the same time, he does not portray the repetitive nature of daily
life as something to be decried or celebrated but, rather, as Felski suggests, a
paradoxical and complex phenomenon worthy of exploration.
216 Attention Equals Life

From the very first sentence of the poem, repetition takes center stage,
both formally and thematically: “Revolving door.” Because of the rules that
generate the text, this carefully chosen line serves as the first sentence usher-
ing us into each of the poem’s twelve, ever-​expanding paragraphs. As such,
the phrase “revolving door” seems designed to serve as an emblem for the
text itself. It can even be read as a figure for the fusion of form and content
that I have been highlighting: while Silliman himself has said that “ ‘revolv-
ing door’ is a metaphor for the reading function of re-​entering the content in
each line,” he also has noted that the sentence was inspired by seeing the door
of the Bank of America skyscraper in downtown San Francisco, so it serves
as a sign of the particular material and economic culture of the late twenti-
eth century (“Reading Ketjak,” 50; Under Albany, 61–​62). By using “revolving
door” as linchpin and symbol, Silliman underscores the circular quality of
both the text and everyday life itself. Each leaves us forever revolving (with no
stops for epiphanies) but also constantly moving into new experiences, new
days, new sentences.
Alongside the use of repetition, the extravagant length and enormous scale
of the poem play an allegorical role in this project. The one-​hundred–​page
poem’s intentional excess, vast size, lack of closure, and “revolving door” rep-
etition become emblematic of the sheer endlessness of everyday experience.
At its darkest, Ketjak hints at the incessant circularity and tedium of day-​to-​
day life that one finds in other works about the everyday—​such as those of
Samuel Beckett (Happy Days, Endgame, or Waiting for Godot). When we read
a sentence like “Constantly waking, new day” (Age of Huts, 35), or “Walking
each day through the business district, select a facet on which to fix attention,
displays of white loafers, calendars at half price” (87) and then encounter the
exact same words again two, four, or forty-​five pages later, we cannot help
but recognize, even feel, the endless, dizzying round of waking up, going to
work, walking down the street, going to the bathroom, going to sleep. By
using a repetitive structure to create a very long poem, Silliman crystallizes—​
not only on the level of content but in the experience of reading the poem
itself—​the circularity and repetition that give the everyday its flavor of ennui,
sameness, and perpetual recurrence. As Silliman puts it, “Each dawn [is] a
return to an eternal conclusion” (29). One might think of it as the Groundhog
Day effect. Silliman even includes a two-​word sentence, “Xerox days” (34),
that captures, in a particularly succinct manner, the grim sensation that our
days are little more than infinite copies of one another—​everyday life in the
age of mechanical reproduction, perhaps.
And yet to repeat is not to Xerox. In The Chinese Notebook, Silliman won-
ders: “Is the same sentence in two contexts one or two sentences? If it is one,
how can we assign it differing meanings? If it is two, there could never liter-
ally be repetition” (Age of Huts, 173). The Chinese Notebook is a series of num-
bered statements modeled on Philosophical Investigations, and in this passage
Poetry as Critique of Everyday Life in Ron Silliman’s Ketjak 217

Silliman engages in a Wittgensteinian meditation on how repetition affects

meaning. He seems to be thinking through the implications of his own use
of repetition in Ketjak (a text he had only recently completed when he wrote
the philosophical meditations of The Chinese Notebook): each time a sentence
reappears in his poem, it exists in a different context, and is therefore not
the same, has a different meaning. One could take this a step further and
argue that by analogy, or even in terms of allegory, each time a fragment
of the quotidian in Ketjak appears in an altered context, it is quite literally
not the same. By extension, then, Silliman’s repetitive structure actually chal-
lenges the belief that the everyday is a realm of experience defined by little
more than numbing repetition, one in which the predominant ontological
feature is sameness and repetitive experience. Instead, it casts the quotid-
ian as a space of difference, change, and variety, albeit within a framework of
continual recurrence. As Felski points out, “repetition is not simply a sign of
human subordination to external forces but also one of the ways individuals
engage with and respond to their environment. Repetition can signal resis-
tance as well as enslavement” (85). In Silliman’s presentation of everyday life,
each day is not a Xerox of every other day, although it may feel that way at
times: to echo Ammons’s “Corsons Inlet,” each walk to work is a new walk,
each tedious bus ride a new bus ride.
Perhaps counterintuitively, Ketjak’s use of repetition actually highlights
the richness, variety, and ongoing mutability within endless reiteration. This
is because the poem’s structure evokes the way human life is driven, para-
doxically, not merely by repetition but also by the accretion or accumulation
of experience—​which becomes apparent when one glances at the shape and
trajectory of the poem’s first few, increasingly long paragraphs and then looks
ahead to the gargantuan final paragraph. With its formal structure founded
on a logic of what Silliman refers to as “extension, addition, modification”
(Age of Huts, 34), Ketjak embodies the paradoxical mixture of sameness and
newness, boredom and possibility, stagnation and change, that characterizes
modern everyday experience.
The poem’s form has other functions and effects. It also reinforces its the-
matic insistence that, as Lefebvre puts it, “man [sic] must be everyday, or he
will not be at all” (Critique, 1:127). Silliman’s brand of experimental realism
is driven by an ongoing tension between the “real,” on the one hand, and the
activity of the imagination, on the other—​a binary which most often appears
in terms of the “everyday” versus “dream.” In one interview, Silliman flatly
states that “I’m not interested in making things up” (McCaffery and Gregory,
Alive and Writing) and in another more recent interview, he remarks that “the
word poet comes of course from the Greek word for ‘to make,’ but there is a
radical difference between making and ‘making things up.’ What I’m NOT
interested in is a fictive realm” (Tursi, interview). Thus Silliman seems to
throw his lot in, decidedly, with a poetry of what Wallace Stevens would call
218 Attention Equals Life

“bare earth,” the unadorned, not transformed real rather than a poetry of
imaginative or “fictive music” (Collected, 112, 70).
To see how Silliman graphically, literally addresses the tense interplay
of the real and the imagined, the everyday and dream, it is worthwhile to
consider the relationship between the very first and second sentences of
Ketjak: “Revolving door. A sequence of objects which to him appears to be
a caravan of fellaheen, a circus, begins a slow migration to the right van-
ishing point on the horizon line” (Age of Huts, 3). As we have seen, the first
line, “revolving door,” becomes the leitmotif of the entire work: a totem of the
everyday and its persistent recurrence, a figure for the poem’s formal repeti-
tion, and a signifier of the material realities of modern life under capitalism.
What are we to make of its juxtaposition with this strange second sentence?
Quickly bumping up against realistic images like the “fountains of the finan-
cial district,” “a cardboard box of wool sweaters” (3), “the garbage barge at the
bridge” (6), and so on, the image of a “caravan of fellaheen, a circus” migrat-
ing slowly to the horizon feels much more exotic, fanciful, even dreamlike or
imagined—​especially since Silliman stresses its subjective quality (it is, after
all, a series of objects “which appears to him to be” a circus). The reference
to the unusual word fellaheen—​a word which Jack Kerouac borrowed from
Oswald Spengler to describe, and to romanticize, the impoverished masses
of nonwhite, non-​Western people living all over the globe—​conjures another,
distant world and its downtrodden, far from the contemporary United States.
At the same time, the depiction of a traveling circus evokes the realm of the
carnivalesque, the imagination, play, and magic, as in the movies of Fellini or
Kenneth Koch’s poem “The Circus.”
Further, when the sentence reappears as the poem goes on, Silliman
alters and gradually expands it, so that in a few pages the circus parade now
includes “dromedaries pulling wagons bearing tiger cages, fringed surreys,
tamed ostriches in toy hats” (6). With these additions, the sentence becomes
much longer and more involved than the typical short sentences that make
up so much of Ketjak; furthermore, the image grows increasingly rich with
a profusion of unusual, exotic details—​a Fellini-​esque tableau of circus per-
formers, unusual animals (camels, tigers, ostriches in toy hats), and archaic
means of transportation (“fringed surreys”). In short, the image is about as
far from the ordinary and everyday as Ketjak ever gets. And in its exfoliating
evolution, it also begins to seem like a metaphor for the imagination’s ability
to “make things up.”
It is worth considering why Silliman chooses to place this sentence next
to “revolving door” and give it pride of place at the start of his long poem.
If at first the “caravan of fellaheen” image feels like an instance of dream,
or the unreal, pushed up against the more realistic, gritty everyday detail of
the poem, the form of the poem seems to drive the two realms further and
further apart. In other words, because of the poem’s governing procedure,
Poetry as Critique of Everyday Life in Ron Silliman’s Ketjak 219

the space between the “revolving door” of the daily and the exotic “caravan
of fellaheen” literally grows, as more and more sentences fill up the space in
between these two statements that were initially adjacent. (In fact, by the time
we get to the last paragraph, these two sentences, once side by side, are now
separated by forty-​five pages of dense, continuous prose).28 Silliman further
solidifies the connection between the image of the “caravan of fellaheen” and
the realm of the fictive and imaginary when he expands the sentence’s ending
to include an allusion to Wallace Stevens and his famous trope of the “palm
at the end of the mind /​Beyond the last thought” (Collected, 476): the caravan
now begins “a slow migration to the right vanishing point on the horizon line
signified by a palm tree” (9). By introducing the “palm,” Silliman links his
“caravan” to Stevens’s penchant for using tropical, exotic imagery to evoke
the furthest limits of the poet’s fecund imagination. In this sense, he subtly
criticizes the tendency of modern poetry after romanticism to fetishize the
imagination, the unconscious, and the “marvelous.” Silliman thus echoes the
critique of Surrealism, its overemphasis on dream and its neglect of the daily,
that we saw in Benjamin’s assessment of Aragon and that also fuels the work
of everyday-​life theorists like Lefebvre and Debord.29 Pushing away from the
carnivalesque circus of the imaginary, he, like they, declares his allegiance
to the experimental realism I have been tracing in this book—​an aesthetic
fueled by careful attention to “things as they are,” to the everyday and ordi-
nary, rather an art that prioritizes “making things up.”

“Ketjak Is a Political Act”: Poetry as Cultural Critique

For all his obsessive attention to concrete, daily experience, Silliman, like
other practitioners of skeptical realism, is acutely aware that we have no access
to an unmediated reality, that there is no way of disentangling the “real” from
how it is constructed and imagined via our languages and forms of repre-
sentation. Despite his profound investment in the poem as an everyday-​life
project, a deep skepticism of the ability of poetry, or any other form, to repre-
sent the everyday in any kind of objective or exhaustive way runs throughout
Silliman’s work. Ketjak incessantly questions its own ability to represent the
“real,” showcases its status as text, acknowledges that “art is a mirage” (97),
and generally reflects on the difficulty of creating a “poem as real as life”
(92). Of course, Language poetics as a whole depends on exactly this kind
of self-​reflexive meta-​commentary, this raising of questions about the nature
of representation and language. But it is important to note that, for Silliman
at least, the crisis of representation so central to Language poetry is insepa-
rable from the problem of the everyday. Furthermore, one benefit of actively
building such skepticism into the poem is that Silliman manages to thema-
tize the conceptual dilemma of the everyday itself and modes of access to
220 Attention Equals Life

dailiness, keeping this issue at the forefront as both a theoretical and an aes-
thetic concern.
However, despite this awareness that “all depiction’s false,” as he puts it in
a later poem, Silliman remains convinced that the attempt to comprehend
everyday life is a crucial element of the political critique of capitalist, consum-
erist American culture that has engaged his energies for decades (What, 27).
As numerous critics have shown, one of the most distinctive features of
Silliman’s work is its politicized depiction of the complex, textured landscape
of late capitalism through sharp-​eyed observation and the juxtaposition
of telling fragments. Bob Perelman argues that an “oppositional stance” is
“implicit” in Silliman’s sentences, “as they simultaneously depict and critique
their world” (Marginalization, 69): “Far from being fragments, his sentences
derive from a coherent, wide-​ranging political analysis,” in which his “sense
of the broken integers produced by capitalism is inseparable from his com-
mitment to the emergence of a transformed, materialist society” (66).30
Silliman’s work is not merely politically engaged, though. More specifi-
cally, it seeks to document the micropolitics of daily life, exposing just how
infiltrated by power, class, gender, and race the everyday can be. The con-
viction that capitalism and mass media have invaded, or even “colonized,”
twentieth-​century everyday life joins the work of Silliman to the projects
of Lefebvre and Debord. In Lefebvre’s words, “the commodity, the market,
money, with their implacable logic, seize everyday life. The extension of capi-
talism goes all the way to the slightest details of ordinary life… . A revolu-
tion cannot just change the political personnel or institutions; it must change
la vie quotidienne, which has already been literally colonized by capitalism”
(“Toward a Leftist Cultural Politics,” 79–​80).
To make visible the mechanisms that enable this colonization and to trace
its effects on our lives, Silliman offers vignettes drawn from a wide spectrum
of American culture, often merely by presenting concrete details without
authorial comment or editorializing. As a result, the range of subject posi-
tions adumbrated in a piece like Ketjak is deliberately enormous. Thus, we
encounter a social world that teems with diversity and variety: a “City of ste-
nographers … City of busboys, of administrative assistants” (53), of fisher-
men and businessmen, factory workers, suburbanites, bohemian poets, and
“Tourists from Taiwan” (20), where “Women, smelling of ammonia, board
the bus” (20), a “Man on the bus, scavenger, sips cough medicine” (21), and
“men eating burgers in silence, at a drugstore counter, wearing t-​shirts and
short hair, staring at their food” (21). This embrace of difference, along with
its implicit commentary on the hierarchies in American culture, is a major
aspect of Silliman’s work, one that admirers have often hailed as one of its
most salient and political features. “Only someone who had thought intensely
about the fate of other peoples’ lives could have written Ketjak,” Watten
observed in an important early critical response to the poem. “To imagine
Poetry as Critique of Everyday Life in Ron Silliman’s Ketjak 221

another life without power gives value to the fact. Identity is all that literary
politics can produce. Ketjak is a political act. Identity in Silliman’s work is
open-​ended” (Andrews and Bernstein, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, 271).
This intense concern for “the fate of other people’s lives” leads Silliman
to conceive of poetry as what Lazer has called “an extended act of indig-
enous ethnography” (“Education, Equality,” 68)—​a n auto-​a nthropological
scrutiny of contemporary American culture that takes nothing for granted
about the familiar activities and practices of its people. This effort calls to
mind Jacques Rancière’s belief that art is inseparable from politics, because
both aim “to render visible what had not been, and to make heard as
speakers those who had been perceived as mere noisy animals” (Rancière,
Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 25). With its abiding fascination with the lives
of others—​a nd the “other”—​across a broad range of subject positions and
identities, Silliman’s work echoes Lefebvre’s belief that a critique of every-
day life must join together in a single project the simultaneous rescue from
neglect of everyday particulars and of marginalized people, those hith-
erto viewed as “mere noisy animals,” outside the realm of the sensible. In
Lefebvre’s words, “To rehabilitate the masses—​t he masses of instants that
philosophers condemn to ‘triviality’ as well as the peoples that poets rel-
egate to the shadows—​a re related tasks” (Critique, 1:127). This project leads
Silliman to present an extremely varied, uneven social field, and to consider
details of daily life within that field semiotically, as markers in a complex
system of forces that operate within even the most trivial and tiny aspects of
our experience. The notion that one can “read” the supposedly unimportant
details of everyday life as an index of the large-​scale political and cultural
dynamics of contemporary culture becomes a central feature of Silliman’s
work going forward. For example, in his 1988 poem What, Silliman writes
“Out of the behavior /​of drivers at /​an intersection you can read /​the state
of the nation” (111).
This conviction is strikingly similar to one at the heart of Lefebvre’s work.
In a well-​k nown passage in the 1958 edition of The Critique of Everyday Life,
Lefebvre calls for a new, critical attentiveness to everyday life under commod-
ity capitalism that would strip away the “veil” of familiarity masking daily life
and expose the ideological roots of the oppressiveness, alienation, routine,
and boredom of contemporary everyday life and its most mundane, ordinary
actions, and practices:

thus, the simplest event—​a woman buying a pound of sugar, for example—​
must be analyzed. Knowledge will grasp whatever is hidden within it. To
understand this simple event, it is not enough merely to describe it; research
will disclose a tangle of reasons and causes, of essences and ‘spheres’: the
woman’s life, her biography, her job, her family, her class, her budget, her
eating habits, how she uses money, her opinions and her ideas, the state of
222 Attention Equals Life

the market, etc. Finally I will have grasped the sum total of capitalist soci-
ety, the nation and its history. (Critique, 1:57)

Lefebvre uses this example of a woman shopping as the route to an under-

standing of the “sum total of capitalist society”; similarly, Silliman implies
that every scene, moment, or fragment of everyday life in Ketjak could provide
us with a picture of the state of the nation, if only we would pay attention. To
that end, Silliman offers countless glimpses of daily life lived within an often
invisible system of neoliberal capitalism, corporate and media manipulation,
class difference and rampant inequality, racial hierarchy, and so on. The world
he depicts is marked by both the excessive abundance and the deprivations of
late twentieth-​century culture, and Silliman zeroes in on the way that their
uneasy coexistence is often ignored or repressed in our daily lives.
One of his favorite tactics is to use juxtaposition to sharpen the critique
and heighten the contradictions. For example, on the first page of Ketjak,
Silliman places “fountains of the financial district”—​a signifier of American
corporate culture and economic might—​right next to a tableau in which a
group of “idle” men on the roof of a houseboat floating in the bay, play the
dobro, a jaw’s harp, and a twelve-​string guitar (Age of Huts, 3). Part of the
critique’s power lies in the jolt that comes from yoking together these two
starkly different cultural instances, one familiar, the other much less so.31
Similarly, in a later paragraph, when an ironic reference to a “Portrait of
the best worker in Auto Plant 7” is immediately followed by the reappear-
ance of the sentence “Fountains of the financial district spout soft water in
a hard wind,” Silliman detonates another little collision of contrasting class
registers, of different, dehumanizing spaces within the economic system (10).
Across the variegated landscape of the poem, Silliman allows the strange
habits of consumer-​ mad American culture—​ “Shopper’s world, a whole
store for quilts” (24)–​to bump up against the experience of the impover-
ished: “Stood there broke and rapidly becoming hungry, staring at nickels
and pennies at the bottom of the fountain” (10). We are frequently reminded
that in the midst of all this plenty, in a society where some of us can shop in
a store selling nothing but quilts, enjoy “a tall glass of tawny port” (6), or gar-
nish our pizzas with anchovies, there is also profound privation and poverty
which many of us rarely acknowledge: “A metal table, round, whose center
is a large beach umbrella placed instead upon concrete, at the pool’s edge,
for us to set our drinks upon while we gaze at the divers. Layers of bandage
about the ankle. People are starving. Anchovy” (32).
One effect of Silliman’s ethnographic investigation of such a multifaceted
social landscape—​of devoting so much attention to class in particular—​is
that it allows him to avoid simplistic clichés that equate “everyday life” with a
dubious, universalized notion of commonness or “the common man,” which
so often serves as a quiet stand-​in for white, bourgeois, heterosexual, and male
Poetry as Critique of Everyday Life in Ron Silliman’s Ketjak 223

experience. With its seemingly endless multiplicity of quotidian instances,

the poem’s capacious pluralism demonstrates the concept that everyone lives
within the everyday, whether they are politicians or homeless people, stock
analysts or gang members. But extending the notion of dailiness to a broad
range of cultural experiences and lived spaces does not mean that Silliman
simply conceives of the everyday as “universal.” He never suggests that every-
day life is the same for everyone; instead, he merely demonstrates tangibly
that, for all the differences shaped by culture and identity, everyday life is a
level of existence experienced by everyone, regardless of class or region, race
or gender.
Silliman also casts an unsparing light on submerged assumptions about
identity, including his own, as he frequently stresses just how much our lives
are shaped by gender roles, social class, or ethnicity. For example, at one point
the text explains “It was my racism that caused me to hear these blacks in
the café discussing Heisenberg” (Age of Huts, 54). With such uncomfortable
admissions, Silliman insinuates that the most basic experiences in daily life—​
here, the way one might perceive even the most off-​hand, overheard remarks
over coffee—​ are actually determined by deep-​ seated racial assumptions
and more broadly by ideology. In Silliman’s world, the specter of the politi-
cal haunts all our day-​to-​day activities and behaviors. It lurks nearly out of
sight in our workplaces, our dining rooms, and our most intimate relation-
ships: “Couple at the next table, over coffee, discuss power relations of their
home” (52). In order to make such dynamics of power more visible, Silliman
often denaturalizes the dominant class and race, treating what he observes
anthropologically rather than as a natural default setting, as in as in the par-
ticularly memorable, defamiliarizing image, “White tribe, the golfers migrate
up the slope” (82).
By suggesting that Silliman’s radically inclusive vision of the social pro-
duces a potentially liberating ideological critique of everyday life, I  do not
mean to imply that Silliman himself manages to transcend the limitations of
his own subject position. In an incisive recent discussion of Ketjak, Timothy
Yu argues that while Silliman may aim to “create a broad-​based account of
contemporary experience that achieves a modicum of objectivity,” the text
is still “marked as emanating from the perspective of a white male avant-​
gardist” (Race and the Avant-​Garde, 39). After highlighting numerous ways
in which the poem reinscribes whiteness and sexism (especially by point-
ing out how often it traffics in disturbing displays of the male gaze and the
objectification of women), Yu writes, “It is Silliman’s hope that the method
of the new sentence deployed in Ketjak will provide a realistic and documen-
tary language that manages to escape the boundaries of his own (straight
white male) perspective, with all its limits” (70). In other words, what saves
this ostensibly politically progressive text from falling prey to the “perspec-
tives and prejudices” of the author’s “identity as a straight white man from
224 Attention Equals Life

a working-​class background” is its discontinuous, fragmented form (71). Yu

argues that Silliman’s use of parataxis “refuses to allow that perspective to
cohere—​serving, in essence, as the author’s bulwark against himself” (71).
The notion that Silliman deploys the paratactic form of Ketjak in a bid to
free himself from himself seems consistent with his stated desire to break
with his own habits of perception through formal experiment. It underlies
Silliman’s effort to evade the perilously narrow view of the social real pro-
vided by most linear and hierarchical forms of writing, including that of
his New American Poetry predecessors. At the same time, there is no ques-
tion that the text remains tied to the white male heterosexual subjectivity
of its author in ways that Yu sensitively addresses. However, this line of
inquiry makes one wonder: Does Silliman make a strong claim that his work
is able to transcend the borders of his own class or racial position? Does
he in fact believe that the map of the everyday social world he draws could
ever be “objective” or “universal,” especially given his profound skepticism
about the ability of representation to capture the “real”? One could argue
that Silliman deliberately refuses to treat either his own subject position, or
his ethnographic attention to the “other,” as neutral or unproblematic. Self-​
aware, self-​critical comments occur throughout his work, such as the remark
about how “racism” forced him to be conscious that some strangers discuss-
ing Heisenberg were African-​Americans (Age of Huts, 54). For example: “You
use, she said, rising up from the bed angry, sex as a weapon” (91); “Do you
at times presume that merely by observing the person, a glancing diagno-
sis, you can, by extension of the imagination, understand their fuller lives?”
(116); “the crowd at the hockey game /​is entirely white” (What, 70); or “How
concerned was I over her failure to have orgasms?” (Alphabet, 1). Instead of
claiming that his poetry permits him to transcend a white male perspective
to arrive at an objective vantage point outside of ideology, Silliman often
uses his writing to uncomfortably display his own assumptions and preju-
dices, including his own sexism. In this manner, Silliman’s poetry puts flesh
on the bones of the theoretical insight that our everyday language and daily
lives—​even those of the poet himself—​are thoroughly imbricated with our
class, race, and gender identities.

“The Dawn Light Is Before Us”: Ketjak

as a Constellation of Awakening

As we have seen, Ketjak is highly sensitive to the often grim reality that poli-
tics, power, and inequity permeate our daily lives. Nevertheless, a quiet opti-
mism about the everyday and its possibilities suffuses the poem’s sentences.
Consider the tonality and outlook of these instances that run through Ketjak’s
fabric like brightly colored thread: “Each morning I rise to praise these faces”
Poetry as Critique of Everyday Life in Ron Silliman’s Ketjak 225

(Age of Huts, 31), “Each dawn a return to an eternal conclusion, the lemon tree
in flower” (29), “Each day there’s the bridge” (48). It is striking to see how fre-
quently Silliman repeats the word each in these sentences and in many, many
others throughout the poem (“Each day now the late sun later” (85), “Each
day as I lie here, I hear her rise and wash” (35), and so on). “Each” serves as
a kind of anaphora at the opening of these sentences and as such becomes a
key component in Silliman’s presentation of everyday experience as a kind of
“revolving door,” a paradoxical mixture of continuous newness and intermi-
nable sameness.
The hopeful tone and gentle lyricism that pulse steadily in Ketjak are
connected to what I mentioned earlier to be a guiding trope and central, if
unstated, thematic core of the poem—​the act of waking. Throughout the
piece, Silliman deploys dozens of images related to waking and morning. By
doing so, he often suggests that each day is less an oppressive “Xerox” of all
other days than an opportunity for renewal and revitalized attentiveness: for
example, he writes that “you wake in waves, each new day’s small tides of
attention” (8), refers to “sweet wake-​up” (83), and the “clarity of winter morn-
ing” (96), and celebrates that “Each day new vistas become possible, yester-
day’s earlobe, today’s toenail, a radio on the mantel one had forgotten to think
of, a flashlight” (20).
Ketjak is, fundamentally, a poem of “morning,” an embrace of dawn—​not
just the particulars of any given sunrise, but morning as an existential state
of mind, as a mode of awareness and attentiveness to the world around us.
In this, Ketjak echoes the famous passage in Thoreau’s Walden, in which he
praises morning as a way of being rather than a time of day. For those who
are truly awake, Thoreau says, “the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not
what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am
awake and there is a dawn in me… . To be awake is to be alive” (73–​74). What
Silliman’s poem models is a similar ethos, a way of being in the world that
puts into practice Nietzsche’s similar injunction: “Try to live as though it were
morning” (quoted in Bloom, Anxiety, 79).
As we have seen throughout this book, writers and artists who cham-
pion daily life and alert us to its vitality often articulate this vision by pit-
ting images of slumber or dream against wakefulness, as when John Cage
describes his experimental music as a way “simply to wake up to the very
life we’re living” (Silence, 95), or when the painter Fairfield Porter remarks
that “the whole question of art is to be wide awake, to be as attentive as pos-
sible” (quoted in Spring, Fairfield Porter, 38). Using a similar trope, the French
writer Georges Perec urges us

To question the habitual. But that’s just it, we’re habituated to it. We don’t
question it, it doesn’t question us, it doesn’t seem to pose a problem, we live
it without thinking, as if it carried within it neither questions nor answers,
226 Attention Equals Life

as if it weren’t the bearer of any information. This is no longer even con-

ditioning, it’s anesthesia. We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep.
(Species of Spaces, 210)

In the last pages of Ketjak, Silliman arrives at a profound recognition about

his own creative project and how it might address the problem Perec poses.
The final, climactic sentence of the long poem, which appears only once, takes
the form of a rather startling commandment: “It was the voice of Big Black,
‘Awake, for nothing comes to the sleeper but a dream’ ” (Age of Huts, 101). The
message uttered by this mysterious, authoritative voice in the final sentence of
this massive work resonates with the themes of the entire poem, as it seems to
say something quite similar to Perec’s warning: the habitual is a form of anes-
thesia. Wake up. Sleepwalking through our lives condemns what are actually
the most important aspects of our existence to oblivion and gives us nothing
in return but silent shadows and dreams.
But Silliman does not use these images of dawn, morning, and waking
merely to declare the importance of an alert responsiveness to daily life, or to
reject the siren call of dream and imagination. Just as Benjamin draws a link
between the “constellation” that he creates in his own work and an “awak-
ening” from the specific “dream sleep” that is capitalist society, Silliman’s
images of waking are also, subtly yet directly, connected to political aware-
ness, ideological unmasking, resistance, and action (Benjamin, Arcades, 458).
When Silliman writes, in one of the poem’s host of references to morning,
“The dawn light is before us, let us rise up and act” (Age of Huts, 48), he under-
scores the connection between tropes of dawn and leftist political opposition
to the status quo. Silliman has appropriated this particular image of dawn
from a 1948 speech given by Mao Zedong, calling the Chinese Communist
Party to revolution (although the remark is unattributed and appears without
quotation marks). The phrase is also quoted (in French) in “The Kingfishers,”
by Charles Olson (Selected, 168), who served as a formative influence on
Silliman.32 Thus Silliman is not merely alluding to any old dawn but hints at
the possibility that political awareness and acts of resistance might help us
awaken to a dramatically new world, through what the French Situationists
called “the revolution of everyday life.”
To see how Silliman brings this theme to fruition, consider again the
poem’s final line: “It was the voice of Big Black, ‘Awake, for nothing comes
to the sleeper but a dream’ ” (Age of Huts, 101). Who is “Big Black” and why
does it, or he, say this? Is it the dark night, telling us to wake up? A number
of figurative resonances are possible. But once the real identity of “Big Black,”
the person who actually said this phrase, becomes clear, the poem’s politi-
cal charge—​its ethical commandment—​only deepens. The sentence refers
to the bloody prison uprising at the Attica Correctional Institute in upstate
New York in 1971, and to Frank Smith, one of the inmates involved, a “huge
Poetry as Critique of Everyday Life in Ron Silliman’s Ketjak 227

man with a booming voice” who was known by the nickname “Big Black”
(D. Martin, “Frank Smith”). The Attica uprising occurred when 1,500 inmates
revolted and took over the prison to protest inhumane conditions. After a
four-​day standoff, the state police stormed the prison in a military-​style
assault, killing dozens of inmates and hostages in a horrific, violent, racially
charged crackdown. “Big Black” Smith had in fact tried to keep the situation
from getting out of hand, and he represented the prisoners as a negotiator
with the authorities during the standoff, but once the rebellion was crushed,
he, like others, was brutally beaten and tortured by police officers.33
So what does the Attica uprising and Big Black’s voice have to do with
Silliman’s Ketjak? First, Silliman spent most of the 1970s, including the period
when this poem was written, working as an activist and lobbyist in the prison
reform movement. So one could surmise that everything “Attica” symbolized—​
about American racism, the oppressiveness and violence of state institutions,
the American public’s lack of awareness about the inhumane brutality of the
prison system, and so on—​held deep personal and political meaning for him.
Second, the movie Attica, a well-​received documentary chronicling the injus-
tice of the prison and the violence of the brutal crackdown, was released in
1974, when Silliman was at work on this poem. Most important, the final line
of the film—​just like the last line of this long poem—​is spoken by Big Black,
who says, “Wake up, because nothing comes to a sleeper but a dream.”34 In a
1974 review of the movie in the New York Times, Vincent Canby specifically
pointed to the power of this closing moment: “there is nothing so eloquent as
the last line of the film, spoken on the soundtrack by an ex-​inmate who would
shake the public out of its historic disinterest in penal reform” (“Attica”).
By incorporating Big Black’s stirring demand for social justice, racial
equality, and political awareness into Ketjak, Silliman ends his poem with a
sentence that fuses the image of waking up with the need to shed the blind-
ers of ideology, the need to become more aware of the way power and poli-
tics infiltrate our daily lives. In this way, Silliman’s insistence that “Attention
is all” broadens outward, becomes an active response to destructive social,
ideological, and political systems.
In the act of writing Ketjak, Silliman seems to have discovered a way to
short-​circuit the anesthesia that both Georges Perec and Big Black warn
us about. He did so by creating his own “constellation of awakening”—​
devising a strange, challenging new form, an everyday-​life project, that
allowed him, and perhaps us, to break with entrenched habits of perception
and to escape prejudices about “content” that tend to keep the everyday,
its pleasures, pains, and politics, hidden (Benjamin, Arcades Project, 458).
Although Silliman sets out to undertake a pointed critique of everyday life
that is informed by Marxism and leftist cultural theory, the poetry itself
rarely feels doctrinaire, since the primary message it articulates (open your
eyes and stop dreaming; attention is everything) is more open ended and
228 Attention Equals Life

exploratory than topical or programmatic. Now that the dust kicked up by

the furious struggles over the meaning of Language poetry as a movement
has begun to settle, the radical and influential nature of Ron Silliman’s
groundbreaking work of the 1970s can come into sharper focus. Through
the force of its own moving, even inspiring example, Ketjak confronts the
enduring problem of how to present those aspects of human experience
that seem almost by definition beyond representation, and thus has much
to teach us about our never-​ending attempt to catch up with the always
elusive everyday.
 { 6 }

Everyday-​Life Projects in Contemporary

Poetry and Culture
Kenneth Goldsmith, Claudia Rankine,
Brenda Coultas, Harryette Mullen,
and More

On Monday, September 6, 1976, on the Labor Day holiday, Ron Silliman

engaged in an unusual experiment. Armed with a pen and a brand-​new
notebook purchased for the occasion, he spent five and a half hours traveling
around San Francisco and its environs on the Bay Area Rapid Transit train
system, known as BART. His goal was to record in writing the experience of
traveling from one end to the other of the entire subway system, riding on all
its lines and stopping at each of its stations at least once, and in some cases,
many more times, as he zigzagged back and forth across the city and the bay.
The poem that resulted—​and Silliman is quite deliberate about labeling this
genre-​defying work a poem—​is a ten-​page piece of prose, written as a single,
run-​on sentence, which chronicles everything the poet saw and experienced
as it occurred—​a ll in “real time” (Age of Huts, 300–​10). Titled BART, it focuses
intensely on observing, documenting, and critiquing urban social space in
micro-​detail, as Silliman narrates his experiences on the various trains and
platforms; records his impressions of people and places; comments on the
political, social, and cultural aspects of what he sees; and as is typical in his
poetry, offers self-​conscious commentary that reflects on the project itself as
it unfolds. Having set up the artificial, constraint-​based conditions for this
experiment with the goal of prompting himself to “pay more attention,” as he
puts it in the poem, Silliman creates a conceptual project—​one that posits the
poem as a form of documentation, an archive of everyday life, and a record of
both its own process of becoming and of “real time” as it passes.1
As such, BART is a quintessential example of a “project of attention” or
everyday-​life project, the mini-​genre I  have focused on in this book. As
I discussed in the introduction, an everyday-​life project is a predetermined,
230 Attention Equals Life

rule-​bound procedure that seeks to compel a new kind of attentiveness to

ordinary experience. If BART was something of an anomaly in the world of
American poetry in 1976, it is much less of one today. Everyday-​life projects
seem to be everywhere at the moment, both within poetry and in every nook
and cranny of our culture. Silliman’s poem now looks like a bellwether text,
prophetic of this recent surge.
The popularity of constraint-​based everyday-​life projects can be seen in
the rise of conceptual poetry, especially in the work of Kenneth Goldsmith,
whose projects—​which call for things like recording and transcribing every
movement his body made for an entire day to create a long poem—​echo
many of those by Silliman and other forerunners. But the “project” mental-
ity extends well beyond that movement, as we will see in this chapter. Recent
project-​based poetry includes everything from a book of poems based on “the
results of an experiment in which the four authors rose at 3:15 A.M. every day
in the month of August from the years 1993–​2000 and wrote” (Mayer et al.,
The 3:15 Experiment) to Matias Viegener’s 2500 Random Things About Me Too,
a book made up of Facebook posts that each list “25 Random Things About
Me,” one post per day for a 100 days.
In recent years, such projects have become so popular that the trend has
sparked a backlash of sorts. In a widely discussed diatribe published in 2010
entitled Poetry Is Not a Project, the poet Dorothea Lasky lashed out at the cur-
rent vogue of poets and scholars using the word project in reference to works
of poetry: “Nowadays, poetry critics and scholars often refer to an entire body
of work by one poet as a ‘project’; but I  don’t think poems work that way.
I  think poems come from the earth and work through the mind from the
ground up. I  think poems are living things that grow from the earth into
the brain. I think a poet intuits a poem and a scientist conducts a ‘project’ ”
(n.p). Complaining that poets today rely too much on procedures, methods,
and constraints to generate poems, Lasky gives as her primary example an
unnamed acquaintance who visits an art museum every day for a month and
writes a poem about a different piece of art each day.2
Setting aside Lasky’s rather romantic ideas about intuition and inspira-
tion for the moment, she is certainly right that “projects” seem to be ubiq-
uitous in contemporary writing. But a host of questions remain that this
chapter explores:  Why have such projects proliferated over the past two
decades, and why have they become so attractive, in particular, for those
fascinated by the quotidian? Why have the tactics and concerns under-
lying them—​such as the use of constraints and procedures, performa-
tive and embodied practices, appropriation, the poem as documentary or
ethnographic form—​become central to the poetry of our moment? And
what are we to make of the fact that quite similar projects have flourished
“in the wild,” far from the precincts of avant-​garde poetry and art? (Bök,
“Conceptualism in the Wild”).
Everyday-Life Projects in Contemporary Poetry 231

Earlier portions of this book have demonstrated that everyday-​life projects

took root in the 1960s and 1970s, when conceptually driven works like A. R.
Ammons’s Tape for the Turn of the Year, Ron Silliman’s Ketjak, and Bernadette
Mayer’s Midwinter Day began to prove that such projects could be a key com-
ponent in the aesthetic of dailiness at the heart of postwar American poetry.
In this chapter, my focus moves much closer to the present. In ­chapter 4, we
saw one important way in which the everyday-​life project has flourished in
recent years: as a tool for contemporary women poets who follow Bernadette
Mayer in exploring the maternal everyday, such as Laynie Browne, Eleni
Sikelianos, and Susan Holbrook. But here I  take stock of the broader turn
to everyday-​life projects in poetry from the 1990s to the present, and explore
further the connections between that trend and the spread of quite similar,
yet extra-​literary developments in our culture.
Though they vary widely, contemporary everyday-​life projects have a num-
ber of elements in common: first, they rely on some set of constraints, rules, or
procedures, often involving specific time and/​or space requirements, usually
based on the rhythms of daily time—​for example, the participant will do X
at Y time of day for a year or for Z number of days (for example, write sixty
sentences per sixty-​minute walk every day for five days). They typically seek to
combat distraction and to sharpen our attentiveness to daily experience; in fact,
they often deploy the vocabulary of attention to explain and justify their goals.
Project-​based poetry reconfigures the role of poet, too: from bardic expresser of
deep feelings, or crafter of exquisite language and metaphor, to ethnographer,
investigator, collector, collator, and archivist. By the same token, the poem itself
is often reimagined as a research experiment, a recording device, or an archive.
Everyday-​life projects often, but do not always, focus on the city and daily
urban experience; they typically involve observations and data gleaned while
the participant is walking, using public transit, or driving. Conversely, they
might call for an individual to sit still in a particular place for a prescribed
length of time as he or she observes everything that happens, either out-
side a window or in the midst of a public space, as in Georges Perec’s An
Attempt to Exhaust a Place in Paris, which entailed the writer’s trying to
record everything he witnessed from a café table on the Place Saint-​Sulpice
for three consecutive days. They often share a goal of making us newly aware
of the political and ideological forces that shape urban space and how it is
used. They also frequently use the device I have referred to as the “reversal
of hierarchies”: the elevation and recuperation of the trivial, ordinary and
lowly, especially garbage, waste, and detritus. And they often share an urgent
need to preserve and memorialize elements of daily experience before they
succumb to oblivion and inattention, or become obsolete, casualties of the
relentless march of progress.
Furthermore, as they explore how best to present the “findings” and results
of the projects undertaken, many project-​driven works experiment with
232 Attention Equals Life

form. Seeking to achieve new ways of accessing and recording the “real,” often
through a kind of radical mimesis, many reject the expected forms of lyric
poetry and conventional realism. Instead, they blur or erase lines of genre by
turning to prose, rely on appropriation of found text, incorporate a variety of
media, utilize digital technology, or move off the page into performance and
“real life” experimentation and experience.
This chapter considers several representative figures and examples to illustrate
some of the range and diversity of this body of work, and to analyze its central
motifs and concerns. After considering why the project has proved to be so con-
genial to everyday-​life aesthetics, I discuss the controversial poetry of Kenneth
Goldsmith, who perhaps more than any other figure has been responsible for
sparking a renewed interest in conceptualism, project-​based poetics, and an
obsessive concern with the mundane. However, as we will see, the phenomenon
is much more diverse (racially, aesthetically, and politically) than some commen-
tary has suggested, and extends far beyond Goldsmith and conceptual writing.
Goldsmith’s brand of conceptualism—​with its studied neutrality and
Warholian blankness—​has also recently been accused of, at best, indifference
to the political, or, at worst, obliviousness about white privilege and even out-
right racism. This line of attack on Goldsmith exploded in 2015 after a perfor-
mance at Brown University, in which Goldsmith appropriated the transcript
of the autopsy report for Michael Brown, the African-​American teenager who
was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, and presented it
as a work of art. Goldsmith recited the report as a conceptual “found poem,”
altering it to end with a reference to the “unremarkable” nature of Brown’s
genitalia. The performance sparked fierce protest, voluminous online com-
mentary, and, eventually, a feature article in The New Yorker about the con-
troversy (Wilkinson, “Something Borrowed”).
In this chapter, I argue that in contrast to Goldsmith, and even in some cases
in response to his example, many recent project-​based poems consciously
intensify the political stakes already inherent in this tradition, exploiting the
possibilities of the everyday-​life project as an instrument of social and politi-
cal criticism and anti-​racist expression. The remainder of the chapter focuses
on a number of more recent projects by Claudia Rankine, Brenda Coultas,
Harryette Mullen, and other poets whose works enact a critique of everyday
life in the Lefebvrean sense, as they seek to make us more conscious of how
capitalism, consumerism, sexism, and racism insinuate themselves into the
interstices of the most minute daily experiences.

Why Projects? Why Now?

To return to the question I brought up a moment ago, why have those inter-
ested in achieving a radical or invigorated attentiveness to the quotidian been
Everyday-Life Projects in Contemporary Poetry 233

drawn so frequently to project-​based works? In part, it is because the “project”

seems to offer possible solutions to the intractable problem I have discussed in
this book: how to investigate and represent a level of human experience that
can feel maddeningly elusive and paradoxical. In his valuable discussion of
projects of attention, Michael Sheringham makes a compelling case for why
projects can provide a fruitful, oblique avenue of approach to the everyday,
even though it can seem, almost by definition, resistant to objectification, sci-
entific analysis, and aesthetic representation.
Sheringham views these experiments, which “generally consist in putting
oneself (or someone else) into a particular concrete situation” where one must
follow a set of specific procedures, as an attempt to create a new mode of atten-
tion: by forcing the individual to actively participate in everyday actions and
practices without an established goal, free from the detached, analytical per-
spective of the social scientist or philosopher, a project has the potential to
create “a breathing space, a gap or hiatus that enables the quotidien to be appre-
hended as a medium in which we are immersed rather than as a category to
be analysed” (Everyday Life, 390). Projects usually feature “an insistence on the
hands-​on, grass-​roots level, on practical steps geared to the accumulation of
data,” and use repetition to focus “attention on minute variations.” Thus, a proj-
ect might call for someone to take a photograph of the sky each day for a year
and then create a time-​lapse video from the results (Phil Plait, “A Year’s Worth
of Days”), or to look at the ground each day for a year and write one sentence
per day based on what one sees (Ron Silliman, “Jones”), or to write for five min-
utes every hour on the hour for two straight days (Steve Benson, “The Ball”).
By generating “attention to the present, to the unresolved matter of what is
still in process,” projects tend to be better than more conventional approaches
at “making visible what is already there, not hidden but lying on the surface,”
and thus are able to provide “a new mode of attention that is responsive to
the uneventful, to what is initially hidden in habit” (Sheringham, Everyday
Life, 391). In other words, projects seem especially well suited to serve as a
tool that might “reconfigure the geometries of attention,” to return to Joan
Retallack’s vocabulary I discussed in an earlier chapter. Retallack argues that
“consciously redirecting our noticing” can have political and ethical implica-
tions: “we need to devise projects that in their sustained attention and col-
laborative scope adjust the distribution of silences, that is, the distribution of
value and power” (Poethical Wager, 180).
Some might object that these activities are “self-​conscious, artificial, and
experimental,” and therefore wonder “how may they relate to what we actu-
ally do in our everyday lives?” (Sheringham, Everyday Life, 386). The idea of
relying on such projects to advance the goal of capturing the everyday does
present a vexing paradox: a deliberate, contrived scenario that demands the
participant to do this or that activity, for this length of time, or at this hour
every day, is by its very nature, the opposite of everyday experience itself.
234 Attention Equals Life

However, though it may seem counter-​intuitive, projects seem to be capable

of providing a more effective mode of attention to the everyday because they
are artificial, because they create what the Situationists would call a “con-
structed situation” (Knabb, Situationist International, 51).
For one thing, as I discussed in the introduction, projects provide us with
practical steps we can take to actively alter habits of perception and attention
that otherwise remain deeply engrained and difficult to change. Another rea-
son is that constraints and rules force the individual to dismantle or short-​
circuit prefabricated prejudices against what is and is not worthy of attention.
In this way, the deliberateness and artifice of the project achieves a shake-​up
of ingrained vectors of attention and what Jacques Rancière calls the “distri-
bution of the sensible”: they are able to make one conscious of what are oth-
erwise unconscious everyday activities and events, and even micropolitical
structures—​things normally consigned to the oblivion of habit, routine, and
automatic behavior. Projects offer us the possibility of being newly aware of, for
example, the micropolitics, small wonders, and absurdities of a city we travel
through every day and think we know like the back of our hand. Because they
aim to disrupt the habitual and to revitalize and channel the attention in new
ways, everyday-​life projects have been promoted as a way for us to become
more attuned to the materiality of daily life, the actuality and meaning of
everyday practices, the small-​scale joys and fascinations of the quotidian.
Pursuers of the everyday have long been drawn to the project for these
reasons, from Thoreau’s Walden to Cage’s “4′33′′” and from the activities of
Fluxus to the experiments of conceptual art, as we have seen in earlier por-
tions of this book. But the rapid technological and cultural changes of the
past several decades have only made such projects both more pertinent and
more attractive. One of the ironies of this story is that new technologies and
digital media have not only spurred a deeper craving for contact with the
everyday, thanks to their attention-​scattering effects, but have also simultane-
ously given us an array of novel ways to combat the very problem they seem
to be exacerbating.
Today virtually everyone has access to myriad tools for the recording,
documenting, storing, and circulating of images and information drawn
from everyday life, thanks to the advent of things like digital photography
and video, as well as tools like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Flickr,
Foursquare, and other methods of micro-​blogging and self-​documentation.
We can now use such technologies to devise our own everyday-​life projects,
whether it is taking a photo of ourself each day for a year, tracking the num-
ber of steps we take in a day, or documenting a visit to every Sizzler restaurant
in America (“Every Sizzler”).
Such projects seem to provide an antidote to a culture of distraction and
mediation, of ubiquitous screens and nonstop information flow, a way to
satisfy a gnawing “everyday hunger,” a desire for greater contact with the
Everyday-Life Projects in Contemporary Poetry 235

immediate, material conditions and experiences of everyday life, for more

engagement with our “real”—​as opposed to digital or virtual—​daily lives. By
helping us gather, store, and transmit data and images from our daily lives,
contemporary projects are viewed as an aid to memory, a permanent archive
housing the often-​overlooked but meaningful minutiae of our lives, and a
therapeutic or life-​enhancing instrument that can make us more aware of the
richness and significance of daily life. A cure for today’s fragmented attention
spans, projects promise to help “wake us up” to the life we’re living and to
make us newly appreciative of the day-​to-​day details, pleasures, and routines
and of our lives.
The relationship between aesthetic projects and these technological devel-
opments and cultural trends is a complicated and multidimensional one. On
one level, the spread of everyday-​life poetic projects seems to be congruent
with—​or even symptomatic of—​the contemporary rage to self-​document,
and the new technologies that have aided and abetted it. Indeed, many
projects—​both within poetry and especially without—​rely on and exploit
such technologies, and the literary trend is undoubtedly part of this larger
cultural and epistemic turn.
On that score, the phenomenon of the everyday-​life project could be
accused of being little more than an ominous symptom of some of our cul-
tural moment’s more troubling features. One could argue that it is the perfect
aesthetic for our moment of rampant self-​documentation in which the best
we can do with all these snazzy new technologies like Facebook and Twitter—​
at least according to the ubiquitous truism—​is to tell the world “Here’s what
I ate for breakfast.” The everyday-​life project could be seen as little more than
a capitulation to digital media and its abuses and excesses, an acquiescence
to information overload or to the narcissism of Facebook culture, and so
on. It could also be accused of complicity with the new paradigm by which
corporations—​like Facebook and many others—​encourage us to provide
them with endless amounts of personal and private information that they
then can monetize, turning into profit for themselves.
However, I fear that to dismiss the recent rise of contemporary projects of
attention as a sign of poetry’s collusion with some of the more insidious fea-
tures of our age does not do justice to the complexity of the phenomenon, nor
the quality of the works it has produced. It would also mean ignoring its roots
in a long tradition of avant-​garde realism and everyday-​life aesthetics. I argue
that the contemporary vogue for the everyday-​life project can more profitably
be read as a response to conditions of the present, a challenge, or even an act
of resistance to such trends.
Although the nature and efficacy of the political in some recent conceptual
writing is debatable, many such projects do draw welcome attention to the
workings of power, ideology, and micropolitics in everyday life; dramatize the
invasion of the political and the forces of capitalism into the experience of daily
236 Attention Equals Life

life in a post-​9/​11 world; and in some cases, highlight and contest the effects of
everyday sexism, racism, and economic inequality. Many also raise intriguing
philosophical and aesthetic questions, give us unique insight into our culture
and times, and in general, function as powerful and unusual works of art.

Kenneth Goldsmith

Kenneth Goldsmith is undoubtedly one of the most important figures behind

this recent surge of interest in conceptual projects and the use of constraint-​
based and procedural methods for composing poetry. And his work is virtu-
ally inescapable if one wishes to consider the role of the everyday in recent
poetry. Goldsmith self-​consciously draws upon the aesthetic of everyday life
that begins with modernism and the historical avant-​garde and continues
through the New American Poetry, the postwar avant-​garde, conceptual
art, and Language poetry. Unlike many of the poets discussed previously,
he actually flaunts his familiarity with the theorists and philosophers of the
everyday, as well as its practitioners, citing names like Walter Benjamin,
Michel de Certeau, and Guy Debord alongside James Joyce, William Carlos
Williams, Gertrude Stein, Frank O’Hara, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Andy
Warhol, and conceptual artists. However, Goldsmith also sets out to adapt
and update this tradition for the digital age.3 In what follows, I  argue that
Goldsmith’s projects take up the long tradition of avant-​garde everyday aes-
thetics in intriguing and sometimes critical ways, while also anticipating a
whole range of projects that have emerged in literature, art, and across the
cultural spectrum of our time.
By positioning itself as both a culmination and a corrective to this lin-
eage, Goldsmith’s work represents a certain advanced stage in the story
of avant-​garde everyday-​life aesthetics this book has been telling. By the
time we reach Goldsmith, this tradition has become highly self-​aware of its
own protocols, tropes, and devices. It has begun to increasingly turn in on
itself, at times questioning and mocking its own goals and premises. This
sort of internal critique, this grappling with the paradoxes of an everyday-​
life aesthetic, has been present from the start—​evident in the work of
Wallace Stevens and Virginia Woolf, James Schuyler and A. R. Ammons,
Ron Silliman and others. But it seems exacerbated in this latest episode, as
the tradition contends with its own weighty history and extends itself into
the digital age.
After beginning his career as a visual artist steeped in the lineage of Pop
Art, minimalism, and conceptual art, Goldsmith left the art world in the
1990s and turned his attention to poetry after being exposed to the experi-
ments of Language writing.4 Part-​prankster, part-​visionary, Goldsmith has
declared poetry’s need both to catch up with the other arts and to confront
Everyday-Life Projects in Contemporary Poetry 237

the realities of the digital mediasphere in which we all float today. With his
playful, evasive persona and sometimes faux-​naïve pronouncements, he has
self-​consciously positioned himself in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp, John
Cage, and especially Andy Warhol. He has aggressively promoted conceptual
writing—​a movement that also includes writers like Christian Bök, Vanessa
Place, Craig Dworkin, Robert Fitterman, and Caroline Bergvall—​as “a poetics
of the moment, fusing the avant-​garde impulses of the last century with the
technologies of the present, one that proposes an expanded field for 21st cen-
tury poetry” (Goldsmith, “Conceptual Poetics”). In Goldsmith’s definition,
conceptual writing “employs intentionally self and ego effacing tactics using
uncreativity, unoriginality, illegibility, appropriation, plagiarism, fraud, theft,
and falsification as its precepts; information management, word processing,
databasing, and extreme process as its methodologies; and boredom, value-
lessness, and nutritionlessness as its ethos” (“Conceptual Poetics”).
In the mid-​1990s, Goldsmith embarked on a series of conceptual, con-
straint-​based everyday-​life projects that have become touchstones and flash-
points for contemporary poetry. As Goldsmith likes to point out, each of his
books rests on an easily explained concept, idea or, some might say, gimmick.5
These works have generally fallen into two related but distinct categories—​the
first are, like Silliman’s BART, experiential projects that involve the writer’s
following certain rules and time constraints and documenting and transcrib-
ing an aspect of everyday life. These are my main focus in what follows. The
second, bigger, and more widely discussed category of Goldsmith’s works
involves large-​scale acts of appropriation, copying, and transcribing of found
text, usually the mundane, ordinary language in sources like the newspaper,
on the Internet, in traffic and weather reports, and in sports broadcasts, as
in No. 111: 2.7.93–​10.20.96, Day, his “American trilogy” (The Weather, Traffic,
Sports), and the recently published Seven American Deaths and Disasters.
From the vantage point of 2015, Goldsmith and conceptualism seem to be
everywhere. His unusual, playful projects have garnered Goldsmith a great
deal of attention from literary scholars and poets, in established literary ven-
ues like Poetry magazine, not to mention prestigious university presses (some
of his recent books have been published by Columbia University Press and
Northwestern University Press, rather than the small publishers with whom he
has published in the past). He was a guest on the Colbert Report and a talking
head on CNN. He continues to teach courses on “uncreative writing,” methods
of plunder and recycling, and “Wasting Time on the Internet” from his lofty
perch at an Ivy League school (the University of Pennsylvania)—​classes that
regularly cause controversy and elicit derision and shock. Perhaps the pin-
nacle of Goldsmith’s fame and visibility came when he received a rather sur-
prising invitation to perform at the White House for “An Evening of Poetry,”
hosted by President Obama in May 2011, at which he read excerpts from Walt
Whitman and Hart Crane alongside transcriptions of traffic reports.
238 Attention Equals Life

Not surprisingly, all of this exposure and celebrity has prompted a good deal
of backlash and criticism. In the past several years, there has been abundant,
fierce discussion in the world of poets and poetry critics about Goldsmith
and conceptual writing—​arguably too much, as it has sometimes seemed
to generate more heat than light. Critics and poets have endlessly debated
whether the rise of Goldsmith, conceptual poetry, and uncreative writing are
healthy developments for contemporary poetry. Goldsmith’s gleeful embrace
of appropriation, recycling, plagiarism, and his challenge to originality and
authorship have been exhaustively discussed and hashed out, as have his pub-
lic persona and canny navigation of the institutions of poetry and the media.
As I mentioned earlier, in 2015, the political meanings and racial politics of
his work became highly controversial flashpoints in the poetry community
and attracted international media attention.6
But these issues have to some extent obscured the fact that so much of
Goldsmith’s work is preoccupied with the everyday, an issue that has been
discussed less often and less fully. In fact, virtually all his works can be viewed
as contemporary everyday-​life projects that echo and extend earlier works by
figures like Warhol, Mayer, and Silliman. Commentators frequently note that
Goldsmith “mines the mundane” (Garner, “Words We Heard”) as he goes
about “collecting the quotidian” (Cain, “Kenneth Goldsmith”), or mention
that each of his works “draws from the quotidian in its most minute details”
(Aji, “The Weather”), or discuss how his works “defamiliarize the quotidian
world, rendering its everyday language extraordinary and strange” (Dworkin,
“Zero,” 17). How could they not, given that Goldsmith deliberately chooses
materials and experiences for his works that seem, at first blush, extremely
boring, trivial, meaningless, disposable—​or to use his vocabulary, “value-
less,” “nutritionless,” “junk,” “detritus,” “dumb,” and “waste”?7 He recently
summed up his work thus:  “for the past twenty years, I’ve been fascinated
with rendering the mundane in language. In hindsight, my archival impulse
arose concurrent with the internet, which also seemed intent on creating a
vast warehouse of our most commonplace experiences—​at least in the early
days—​in words” (Seven American Deaths, 169).
Despite the centrality of this theme to his work, Goldsmith’s investment in
a poetics of everyday life has been much less discussed than issues related to
originality, uncreativity, conceptualism, or the fate of writing and reading in
the digital age. How does Goldsmith conceive of the everyday and its value,
and why does it hold such a prominent place in his writing and in conceptual
poetics more broadly? Does his obsession with dailiness help explain why his
unconventional work, and conceptual writing in general, have found wide
acceptance and sparked such debate over the past decade?
Like Schuyler, Ammons, Silliman, and Mayer, Goldsmith insists on the value
and inexhaustibility of the most mundane, ordinary, even degraded experience
and language, the commonplace, the obvious, the what’s-​already-​there. He has
Everyday-Life Projects in Contemporary Poetry 239

described his work as a “concretization of the ephemeral” (Bessa, “Exchanging

Emails”), and has written widely quoted essays celebrating boredom (“Being
Boring”) and dumbness (“Being Dumb”).
Goldsmith has even become something of a visible spokesman for the
everyday, a digital-​age guru preaching the gospel of attention as a cure for
our everyday blindness. For example, in 2014, in an interview that aired on
CNN, Goldsmith responded to the host’s assertion that “most of what I think
I read in a day is, quite frankly, rubbish,” by informing the audience: “this is
important stuff. It’s not all garbage. And a lot of the garbage that we think is
garbage, the detritus, the flotsam and jetsam of our daily lives are the things
that actually make our daily lives as rich as they are” (“Poet: Internet Has
Revolutionized”). Here, Goldsmith touches on—​and one could say popular-
izes, via the wide reach of cable news—​a recurring theme of everyday-​life
poetics and philosophy: the notion that what we usually consider to be waste
and garbage, the detritus of everyday life, can be recuperated through acts of
attention and aesthetic reframing, leading to a reversal of hierarchies of value.
Even as Goldsmith perpetuates many of the tactics and concerns seen in
this book, he also sets his work against previous works of avant-​garde realism
and everyday-​life aesthetics. For example, Goldsmith follows earlier figures
in this lineage by viewing his work as a radical extension of a much older
form—​realism. Echoing the rhetoric of Language poets like Ron Silliman and
Lyn Hejinian and others we have discussed, he defines his own mode as a new
and more vital, radical “poetics of realism.” He writes:
Inspired by Zola, Conceptual Writing is a realism beyond realism:  it’s
hyperrealist, a literary photorealism, an embodied and enacted simula-
crum. Charles Reznikoff and Frank O’Hara strive for realism, but they
were too constructed, too precious and still too invested in authorial sub-
jectivity; we prefer the repulsive Documentary Poetics of Vanessa Place
and the ugliness of real speech in Andy Warhol’s a, A novel. (“If I Were”)
However, by suggesting that the “realism” of poets like Reznikoff and O’Hara
was “too constructed, too precious and still too invested in authorial subjectiv-
ity,” Goldsmith posits his own work as a corrective that might right the wrongs
and address some of the failings of those predecessors. For Goldsmith, such
works fell short because they were not everyday enough. They were too aes-
theticized, too literary, too concerned with transforming the materials of the
mundane into the stuff of art. Goldsmith says as much about one of his heroes,
John Cage. According to Goldsmith, Cage, “whose mission it was to accept all
sound as music, failed; his filter was on too high. He permitted only the sounds
that fell into his worldview. Commercial sounds, pop music, lowbrow culture,
sounds of violence and aggression, etc. held no place in the Cagean pantheon”
(“Uncreativity as Creative Practice”). As Ray McDaniel notes of this passage,
“Goldsmith tacitly presents himself as the cure to the affliction even Cage
240 Attention Equals Life

was unwilling to completely cure” (“Affect and Autism”). The same goes for
Goldsmith’s criticism of the use of ordinary or “real” speech in the poetry
of Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, Gertrude Stein, Frank O’Hara, or David
Antin: “the speech so often passed off as ‘real’ seems artificial, composed and
stilted,” he argues; in contrast, he avers, his own work is less “cleaned up and
sanitized,” as it is “speech at its most raw, most brutal” (Perloff, “Conversation
with Kenneth Goldsmith”).
In this manner, Goldsmith’s work constitutes a challenge to the everyday-​
life aesthetic tradition itself, even as he often affirms some of its goals.
Furthermore, that sense of critique or correction sometimes shades into a lam-
pooning or a burlesque of the whole idea of an everyday-​life aesthetic, as he
parodies or tweaks it with forms of radical mimesis that take earlier practices
and goals to an extreme. Following the lead of Andy Warhol in films like Sleep
or Empire, or his novel a, Goldsmith calls the bluff of any aesthetic of the every-
day: in effect, his works say, “so, you guys loudly proclaiming that art should
be about paying attention to the everyday? Well, this is what attention to the
‘real’ everyday would actually look like.” As we will see, in some of Goldsmith’s
recent work, this kind of questioning and meta-​commentary has given way to
an outright departure from the everyday, an aversion to it that runs parallel
to Goldsmith’s continued engagement with it. Weary of embracing dailiness,
bored with boredom, Goldsmith has recently turned to the exceptional, the
cataclysmic event, the non-​everyday.

Soliloquy and Fidget
Goldsmith’s Soliloquy is a good example of a work that both draws upon
the everyday-​life aesthetic tradition and comments on it at the same time.
Goldsmith has explained that the book originated in an unusual project of
attention:
Soliloquy is an unedited document of every word I spoke during the week
of April 15–​21, 1996, from the moment I woke up Monday morning to the
moment I went to sleep on Sunday night. To accomplish this, I wore a hid-
den voice-​activated tape recorder. I transcribed Soliloquy during the sum-
mer of 1996 at the Chateau Bionnay in Lacenas, France, during a residency
there. It took 8 weeks, working 8 hours a day.8
Thus, Soliloquy is another example of an artwork as research project or quasi-​
scientific experiment, an echo of the self-​assigned research projects under-
taken by Bernadette Mayer and conceptual artists like Vito Acconci. The
resulting book—​which Goldsmith deliberately refers to as a long poem—​is
divided into seven sections (which Goldsmith refers to as Act 1 through Act
7), each devoted to a day of the week. Goldsmith presents the unedited tran-
script of his own speech as a single block of text in each section (without
Everyday-Life Projects in Contemporary Poetry 241

paragraph breaks), which means that, visually, the text resembles the dense
sea of language found in a work like Silliman’s Ketjak. If this work of extreme
transcription and documentation of spoken language is a poetry of the every-
day, which I think it most certainly is, we have come a long way from a short
lyric poem of daily life—​from Billy Collins or Mary Oliver, or even from
Frank O’Hara or William Carlos Williams, for that matter.9 In fact, one could
read the poem as a shot across the bow, a challenge to the “I do this I do that”
mode of everyday-​life poetry pioneered by Frank O’Hara. Goldsmith’s retort
is a 500-​page “I say this, I say that” poem, which deliberately takes the O’Hara
premise to extreme, even absurd lengths. Also, by declaring this work to be
a long poem, Goldsmith automatically inscribes it within a particular line
of descent, from classical epics through Wordsworth’s Prelude or Whitman’s
Song of Myself, to Pound’s Cantos and the whole array of modernist and post-
modernist long poems, and thereby comments on that tradition as well.
At nearly 500 pages, Soliloquy is a hefty volume, but its massive, one could
say excessive, length and size are a major part of the concept behind the work
and the effect the project is designed to produce. Goldsmith drives the point
home with a postscript:

If every word spoken in New York City daily

were somehow to materialize as a snowflake
each day there would be a blizzard
(postscript page)

As this suggests, Soliloquy, like nearly all of Goldsmith’s works, aims to take
the volume of ordinary language we use and experience and make it tangible
and material, through the means of literary form. The back cover of the book
make this goal clear: “Soliloquy quantifies and concretizes the sheer amount
of language that surrounds us in our daily lives.”
At one point early on in the book Goldsmith talks with someone about
the very project that led to the book we are reading: “I’m taking a leap of lan-
guage,” “I’m always taking [sic] about the volume of language that’s around I
mean what would your language look like it if was if you collected every piece
of shit word you that you said for an entire week… . I could take the language
that I record myself speaking all week no one else speaking, just the shit that
I spew myself and think now how could I represent this visually differently?”
(Soliloquy, 15). As in Silliman’s Ketjak, form here functions allegorically—​the
form of the work is intended to symbolize and embody ideas about the vast-
ness, inexhaustibility, and accumulative nature of daily experience and ordi-
nary language.
With its use of new technologies (a voice-​activated recording device) to
record and store a large amount of data about daily experience, Goldsmith’s
Soliloquy anticipates trends that have flowered in the new millennium like
242 Attention Equals Life

the life-​logging craze, wearable computing, and the “quantified self” move-
ment.10 Goldsmith even seems to have foreseen this trend. In 1999, he dis-
cussed his plans for an expanded, year-​long version of Soliloquy with A. S.
Bessa. Although this project does not seem to have come to fruition, it is
rather uncannily prophetic of developments in poetry and culture more
broadly in the years since:

It will be a documentation of every word that I speak for an entire year—​

unedited. But it will differ from the first version of Soliloquy in that it will
take place live over the Internet. I’ll be hooked up to a wireless headset,
which will cellularly beam my words to a voice recognition system on a
computer that will, in turn, automatically churn my words into web pages.
In short, anyone anywhere will be able to see what I’m saying at any given
moment during the course of a year. Think of it as a text-​based Truman
Show. (Bessa, “Exchanging Emails”)

Even as he echoes Bernadette Mayer’s dream of continuous transcript of

daily thought, in 1999 Goldsmith was—​much like the 1998 film The Truman
Show—​a lready foreseeing the explosion of the genre of reality TV and pro-
grams like Big Brother and, perhaps as a result, imagining a new kind of “real-
ity poetry.” He went on:

But what I really care about is the language itself and, in the end, I will have
archived all the text files and turned them into a 52 volume work—​one
book for each week—​w ith each book about 350 pages long (the length of
the printed edition of Soliloquy) giving me a total of approximately 18,000
pages. It’ll literally be an encyclopedia, a reference book of what one aver-
age person said for an entire year in the early part of the 21st century. It’ll
not only make a great artwork, but every library in the country will have to
have a copy, due to its sociological relevance. And best of all, it’s a book that
will “write” itself. (Bessa, “Exchanging Emails”)

At the time, Goldsmith probably intended for his proposal to sound wild and
extreme, much like many of his other provocative statements and concepts
(as when he gained notoriety for his seemingly ludicrous and impossible plan
to print out the entire Internet). But in the decade and a half since, this idea
has gone from outlandish speculation to actuality.
As we have seen, by 2014, the practice of tracking, recording, storing,
quantifying, and circulating data about one’s daily existence has become
pervasive, even leading to new gadgets like Narrative Clip—​a tiny camera
that takes and stores pictures every 30 seconds of your life—​which would
seem to take Soliloquy to an endpoint. How different is Goldsmith’s year-​long
Soliloquy from the NYU professor and photographer who plans to have sur-
gery to install a camera in the back of his head, which “will take still pictures
Everyday-Life Projects in Contemporary Poetry 243

at one-​minute intervals, then feed the photos to monitors at [a]‌museum”

in Qatar? (Orden, “Sir, There’s a Camera”). Soliloquy seems just a half-​step
ahead of (and ironically reflective of) all the data-​driven self-​documentation
projects going on today.
With its encyclopedic, totalizing, and archival ambitions (an “unedited
document of every word I  spoke”), the book also deliberately invokes and
plays with the idea of creating an “everything work.” Like Mayer, Goldsmith
entertains the wish of capturing everything that happens within a particular,
predetermined time period. But the totalizing dream of capturing everything
is ironically undercut by our inevitable recognition of how selective, partial,
and incomplete this (or any) “record” is. Soliloquy highlights this fact by the
very constraints and parameters of the project: first, we are only privy to the
speaker’s words, not those of his interlocutors. Second, we are only given his
words, and never anything else—​no internal thoughts, no visual depictions of
actions, and so on. For all its pretense of exhaustiveness, Soliloquy also con-
stantly reminds us of all that it excludes, as Goldsmith obviously only pres-
ents one facet of daily experience—​and even that part is necessarily shaped
and distorted by the contrived nature of the project itself, and by the act of
selection and representation.
Furthermore, despite his professed goal of creating a more “real” version of
everyday speech, Goldsmith never actually pretends that this work presents an
unvarnished or unmediated picture of “the real.” As he says to Marjorie Perloff,
“Soliloquy is not actual mimesis because it has been framed and presented as
art as opposed to a scientific documentation of language or mere sociological
research” (Perloff, “Conversation with Kenneth Goldsmith”). It, too, is a kind
of dramatic performance, a fact implied by the clever title—​if this is a solilo-
quy, then we the readers are the audience, and it is a staged drama. This may be
a kind of “reality poetry,” but the “real” it presents is hardly any more real than
that presented by reality television. As Goldsmith acknowledges, the realism
of conceptual writing is “an embodied and enacted simulacrum” (“If I Were to
Raise”). Indeed, in his interview with Leevi Lehto, Goldsmith says:
But surely, this, is not “natural” or “real” speech either—​dozens of “aes-
thetic” decisions needed to be made in order to create this piece of writ-
ing, among them:  where do line breaks occur? do I  include “um’s” and
“uh’s”? where do question marks or exclamation points go? what happens
when I can’t understand certain garbled words? and so on. No matter how
much Soliloquy might look like “real” speech, it’s every bit constructed a
text as Language Poetry, Beat Poetry or the New York School. Having said
that, Soliloquy is as close to a transcription of “real” speech as one can get.
(Lehto, “Interview with Kenneth Goldsmith”)
The work’s presentation of “real” language is further compromised by the
artificial nature of the project itself, which fosters a self-​consciousness in its
244 Attention Equals Life

creator that undermines its own claims to objectivity and realism. (This is
the same dynamic that has become very familiar to us thanks to reality TV.)
Goldsmith is always aware that he is wearing a mic and recording his words
(and at times talks about that fact in the text), as is his wife and some of those
he speaks to.11 In this manner, Soliloquy highlights one of the key paradoxes
of any everyday-​life project of attention: even as it draws attention to the usu-
ally unobserved details of the daily, it admits that such scrutiny is not natural,
can never be neutral. This is a constructed and artificial experiment, and as
such, it necessarily fails in its effort to create a mode of art that might bring us
closer to the everyday because the project itself is so unordinary.
This feature of Goldsmith’s work connects it to the broader practice of
skeptical realism that I have focused on in this book. Like Schuyler, Silliman,
and others discussed earlier, Goldsmith’s work as a whole never lets us for-
get that his supposedly more “real” and objective, inclusive renderings of the
everyday are artificial, partial, and constructed. In addition, he is sharply
aware that by drawing attention to the “valueless,” “boring,” and “trivial”
detritus of daily life, he is investing it with value and interest; as he notes, “the
object of the work was to create a valueless practice, which I found to be an
impossibility since the act of reproducing the texts in and of itself has some
sort of intrinsic value” (quoted in Wershler-​Henry, “Uncreativity,” 158).
In the case of Soliloquy, even while Goldsmith portrays this work as more
“real,” more raw and unmediated than other attempts at rendering daily life
and ordinary language, he very self-​consciously takes this mass of informa-
tion or raw data, and presents it and packages it, as literature. By provoca-
tively, knowingly titling the work Soliloquy, Goldsmith positions the text as a
dramatic utterance by a character in a literary work. Furthermore, he under-
scores the link to drama by calling each day an “act,” and presents the work
as a long poem and its author as a poet. By doing so, Goldsmith differenti-
ates this project from more pure “life-​logging” activities and other “quan-
tified self” projects that have become increasingly prevalent in its wake, as
part of his point is to force us to consider what happens when one reframes
and recontextualizes everyday-​life data as art. To echo another theme of this
study, Goldsmith reminds us that everything depends on what you do with
the fruits of heightened attention.
What Goldsmith does with all this data is to present a massive archive of
the everyday, a time capsule of what ordinary language looked and sounded
like in the United States in the 1990s, and an exhaustive catalog of his every
utterance, every mundane interaction. We hear his chats with cab drivers and
waiters and his conversations with friends and his wife; and we follow along
as he wakes up, has breakfast, makes phone calls, navigates the art scene,
meets the literary critic Marjorie Perloff for the first time over a consequen-
tial lunch at the Museum of Modern Art, bumps into friends on the subway,
works as a DJ, and experiences myriad aspects of daily life in the modern city.
Everyday-Life Projects in Contemporary Poetry 245

As Craig Dworkin, Marjorie Perloff, and others have noted, the most imme-
diately notable feature of Soliloquy is that it is filled with

unflattering autobiographical revelations. The book paints a portrait of the

artist as a young racketeer, as well as a tireless raconteur: on the move, on
the phone, at all the right events; obsequious and sycophantic to some-
one and then contemptuously ridiculing them behind their back; cajoling
one moment and provoking the next; endlessly angling and self-​promoting
through 487 breathless pages and seven days in the life of a loquacious art-​
world hustler. In the end, however, the cynicism of that hustle is offset by
a surprisingly candid and unguarded willingness to put the machinations
on display, and by a pervasive and winningly optimistic enthusiasm not so
much for artists as for the art itself. (Dworkin, “Imaginary Solution,” 35)

In effect, Goldsmith presents an uncensored, warts and all, self-​portrait of

a young man on the cusp of leaving art behind and embracing a new identity
as a poet. As some readers have pointed out, the work even contains quite a
bit of suspense and drama, as one cannot help but try to figure out what is
going on—​where the speaker is at any given moment, who he’s talking to,
and who he is gossiping about. For all the distracting talk about the (self-​
proclaimed) “unreadability” of Goldsmith’s work and its lack of affect and
feeling, Soliloquy is compulsively readable and absorbing, queasily voyeuristic
and fun to decode.12 I see the brutal honesty and self-​exposure of the book
as part of Goldsmith’s desire to perform a kind of “realism beyond realism,”
a hyper-​realism. In that sense, the book again reads more like a corrective
to—​or even parody of—​the realist project. In effect, it says this is what “real”
life and “real” speech are like when they are not idealized, and it isn’t all that
pretty. In his interview with Perloff, Goldsmith explains that he remains
unapologetic about the book’s radical candor, even though it proved embar-
rassing to and angered many friends and acquaintances: “I have lost many
friends over this work. I  do feel bad that their feelings have been hurt but
I  still cannot apologize for having done the piece.” (Perloff, “Conversation
with Kenneth Goldsmith”)
The project hinged on not editing or cleaning up his speech:
It was to be an examination of language as it was spoken, plain and simple.
If I had begun to edit, where would I start? And where would it end? If, in
fact, I had edited at all, it would have been a completely different piece. So
exactly what was said and how it was said was left untouched. And that
included a lot of gossip and slander. The entire activity was humiliating and
humbling, seeing how little of “value” I actually speak over the course of a
typical week. How unprofound my life and my mind is; how petty, greedy
and nasty I am in my normal speech. It’s absolutely horrifying. But I dare
any reader to try the same exercise and see how much more value they
246 Attention Equals Life

come up with in their life. I fear that they might discover, too, that their
lives are filled with trivial linguistic exchanges with waiters and taxi driv-
ers. (Perloff, “Conversation with Kenneth Goldsmith”)
The aspect of the quotidian that Soliloquy redirects our attention to is, obviously,
ordinary speech. Whereas other project-​based works like BART, Midwinter Day,
or Tape for the Turn of the Year establish particular conditions, such as time and
space constraints, and then record the poet’s written thoughts and observations,
this one experiments with transcribing and recording (in “pure” or “uncreative”
fashion) a more external feature of the daily: the act of speaking. In this sense,
Goldsmith pushes further than Schuyler, Ammons, Silliman, Mayer, and others
in the direction of “things as they are” and letting things be, where the artist is
conceived as a neutral, passive recorder. In that sense, Goldsmith’s non-inter-
ventionist approach to art making is distinctly Cagean and Warholian.
From the title forward, the book is very much about language as speech,
and only secondarily as writing; it implicitly makes a case that humans are
creatures who speak—​a lot—​and whose days, like those of characters in
Samuel Beckett’s plays, are filled with endless chatter. By presenting itself as
a long poem that renders colloquial speech, Soliloquy asks us to read it as
an ironic, even polemical response to the age-​old quest within the history of
poetry in English to write poetry based on more natural, colloquial, vernacu-
lar language—​most famously articulated in Wordsworth and Coleridge’s goal
of reproducing the “real language spoken by men.”
In Soliloquy, Goldsmith goes to great lengths to produce speech exactly
as it is, not as we are used to seeing it represented: with all the “uhs,” “ums,”
repetitions, stupidities, and infelicities included:

Did he go to art school? He’s not like like sort of part of like the art world
like when we’re talking about people he didn’t know anybody that we were
talking about. Hmmm. What scene has he been like hanging on? Right.
Right. Uh huh. Uh huh. Ha! Hmmm. Hmmm. Yeah, yeah definitely. Oh
I now, I mean, you know gosh. We’ve we’ve we’ve sort of been around the
block a few times. You know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh huh? (130–​31)

By doing so, Goldsmith ironically comments on how literary works usually

represent supposedly “natural,” “common,” and “daily” language—​in realist
fiction, in much contemporary poetry, and even in exemplars of the avant-​
garde New American Poetry who focus on everyday language, like O’Hara
and Ginsberg.13 As the book’s back cover says, Goldsmith “ups the ante on
real speech as poetry.” In an interview with Leevi Lehto, he explains: “when
we examine, say, Ginsberg or O’Hara or Antin’s ‘natural’ speech, we find that
it isn’t natural at all. It’s completely artificial language written on the page: it
couldn’t be farther from ‘real’ speech” (Lehto, “Interview”). In his interview
with Perloff, Goldsmith elaborates:
Everyday-Life Projects in Contemporary Poetry 247

[Soliloquy] extends the thrust to incorporate “real” speech into poetry that
has run from Whitman to Stein, through Ginsberg and Antin. In com-
parison to Soliloquy, the speech so often passed off as “real” seems artificial,
composed and stilted. As much as I’m a fan of David Antin’s work, we can
never believe that his “talk poems” are really his talk. It’s edited, composed
on the page, cleaned up and sanitized. Soliloquy presents speech at its most
raw, its most brutal and in its most gorgeously disjunctive form. (Perloff,
“Conversation with Kenneth Goldsmith”)

Goldsmith’s challenge to the tradition of representing “real” speech in poetry

also rests on its refusal to treat what Wordsworth calls “the language really
spoken by men” reverentially; he debunks the tendency one finds in everyone
from Wordsworth to Frost, Williams, Stein, Ginsberg, or O’Hara to idealize the
“poetry” inherent in ordinary speech. Instead, he refers to his words repeatedly
as “shit” that he “spews.” By referring to language as junk and garbage here and
throughout his work—​“Language as junk, language as detritus. Nutritionless
language, meaningless language, unloved language”—​Goldsmith again par-
takes in the effort to recuperate detritus, trash, and shit throughout the tradi-
tion I have been discussing (Goldsmith, “Conceptual Poetics”).14
Even though part of Goldsmith’s goal is clearly to demonstrate just how
clumsy, awkward, stilted, and dumb our speech really is, to show how “how
little of ‘value’ ” one actually speaks “over the course of a typical week,” it
is also evident that he thinks of it as meaningful, replete with its own kind
of poetry and strange beauty. After all, he also claims the experiment of
Soliloquy presents “speech at its most raw, its most brutal and in its most gor-
geously disjunctive form” (Perloff, “Conversation”). He has even stressed that
its branching, fragmented disjunctiveness unwittingly echoes the features of
avant-​garde writing:
When we look at “real” speech in Soliloquy, we find that our normative
speech patterns are avant-​garde! It strikes me odd that what modernism
worked so hard to get at for the past 100 years has always been right under
our noses! (Perloff, “Conversation”)

He elaborates further in his interview with Lehto:

surprisingly, linguistically, it’s an extremely disjunctive book—​every bit

as disjunctive as, say, Bruce Andrews’ work. It’s eye-​opening how garbled,
forked and mangled our every day language is if we examine and frame it
in a way that the familiar becomes unfamiliar. (Lehto, “Interview”)

This underscores Goldsmith’s nuanced attitude toward the quotidian: while

he insists on its tremendous value and interest, he also refuses to romanticize
it in any way. His everyday is hardly the realm of the marvelous, where the
epiphanies that one finds in so much contemporary poetry forever lurk in
248 Attention Equals Life

waiting. Instead, Goldsmith presents it as stupid, repetitive, petty, and trivial.

But he also clearly feels it is remarkably inexhaustible at the same time: so vast,
so filled with every facet of human experience, that any given day’s newspaper
constitutes the world’s greatest novel, that daily traffic and weather reports
are fascinating once framed as art, and so on. Even as Goldsmith boasts, with
Warholian irony, that Soliloquy presents nothing but shit, that it is utterly
devoid of value, the experience of reading this rich and strange book belies
that view.
Goldsmith’s Fidget is another conceptual project that invokes and cri-
tiques the everyday-​life tradition while raising similar questions about the
problem of attention and the limits of experimental realism. To compose this
work, which was commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art,
Goldsmith recorded every moment his body made on June 16, 1997—​a care-
fully chosen date because it is also “Bloomsday,” the day on which Joyce set
his own epic of everyday life, Ulysses. As Goldsmith describes it: “I attached
a microphone to my body and spoke every movement from 10:00 AM, when
I woke up, to 11:00 PM, when I went to sleep. I was alone all day in my apart-
ment and didn’t answer the phone, go on errands, etc. I just observed my
body and spoke” (Perloff, “ ‘VOCABEL’ ”). Goldsmith transcribed and pre-
sented the resulting recording in various forms—​a multimedia art instal-
lation, a performance at the Whitney, a computer program/​website, and a
book-​length poem.
By using Bloomsday as the date for this project, Goldsmith is of course
deliberate about placing his poem in dialogue with Joyce’s Ulysses. This
move echoes Bernadette Mayer’s decision, discussed in ­chapter  4, to begin
Midwinter Day by loudly invoking the opening sentence of Joyce’s radical
experiment in dailiness. As some critics have noted, there are explicit par-
allels between Fidget and Ulysses:  “Goldsmith does follow some Bloomsian
paths, masturbating, having breakfast, and walking along the beach” (Cain,
“Kenneth Goldsmith”). Goldsmith’s nod to Joyce is a provocative and aggres-
sive one, like Mayer’s, as he raises the stakes on the everydayness of the very
novel that supposedly rewrote the rulebook on how to capture the daily. Like
Beckett, he responds to Joyce’s maximalist approach to the everyday with
bare minimalism. If Ulysses is supposedly the great modernist evocation of
the quotidian, Goldsmith’s postmodernist rejoinder seems based on a quite
different conception of the everyday and what it consists of.
The text begins with simple bare-​bones denotation of actions (“Eyelids
open. Tongue runs across upper lip moving from left side of mouth to right
following arc of lip. Swallow. Jaws clench. Grind. Stretch. Swallow. Head lifts.
Bent right arm brushes pillow into back of head. Arm straightens,” [8]‌). The
project forces us to attend to all the bodily actions that are normally beneath
consciousness. But it also highlights the incredible complexity of the simplest
ordinary actions and motions by actually detailing the number of actions that
Everyday-Life Projects in Contemporary Poetry 249

go into scratching one’s leg or yawning. In an early review, Marjorie Perloff

referred to the opening section as a kind of “poésie verité, a documentary
record of how it actually is when a person wakes up on a given morning”
that aims to refresh our sense of daily, bodily experience:  “breaking down
bodily functions into their smallest components, Goldsmith defamiliar-
izes the everyday” (“VOCABEL”). With its emphasis on everyday repetition,
drudgery, and the mechanics of the body, and with its pared-​down austerity,
no other Goldsmith works seems quite as close to the spirit of Beckett.15
One can also read Fidget, like Soliloquy, as another rather pointed response
to the influential “I do this I do that” mode associated with Frank O’Hara.
Goldsmith again takes O’Hara’s conceit to an absurd extreme, so that the
poem literally records “I do this, then I do this, then I do that”:
Both hands thrust out from body. Fingers separate and pull. Body bends
down. Slumps. Right foot raises. Bends at knee. Right foot hits ground. Left
foot raises. Bends at knee. Left foot hits ground. Thumbs pull away from
each other. Thumbs slip. Caress groin back and forth. Body leans forward.
Bends at waist. Right hand reaches out. … Weight on left foot. Right foot
lifts. Body leans. … Deep breath in. Left hand pulls. Right thumb nudges
penis. Urine flows. Anus pushes. Bladder pushes. Anus contracts. Left hand
shakes penis, flicking drops of urine. Lean forward. Left hand outstretched.
Presses down. Body turns. (Fidget, 38)
Here one finds a total absence of interiority, speech, and interpersonal
contact. As Goldsmith later explained: “There was to be no editorializing,
no psychology, no emotion—​just a body detached from a mind” (Perloff,
“VOCABEL”).
As Goldsmith tells it, as the day wore on he began to crack under the tedium
and pressure of the experiment. Later sections feature increasingly strange,
abstract language—​“Horror body weight on foot. What put blade outward.
Holting ground. Toe hitting leftly. First hat off ground, dancing about hand
and knee. Lift head reference. Thandclaspsle. Extend out in sled. Brokenicular
clap in scent of body. In the chive leash forward” (72). Goldsmith claims that
he coped with the situation by drinking a bottle of whiskey, which seems to
have hastened the unravelling of the text. (To create the final chapter, he says,
“I ran the first chapter backwards, mirrored it, then reversed every letter,” so
the first sentence reads “.etarapes regniferof dna bmuht thgiR”) (83).
Fidget resembles Soliloquy in its aspiration to be an “everything work,”
an exhaustive record of daily life. But it is, of course, yet another work of
skeptical realism that inevitably fails in that goal—​both because it drove
the author crazy and because it is so selective, constructed, and partial.
Indeed, Fidget is in no way a mimetic work that transparently records
the “real.” For one thing, it is highly contrived. Many other everyday life
works force us to confront this fact too, but Fidget drives home the notion
250 Attention Equals Life

that one cannot create artificial parameters and constraints (like “speak
every action you make into a microphone for an entire day”) and expect
the resulting record to be anything resembling an actual day and its
actions. The very existence of the project used to generate it, the self-​con-
sciousness it instills, and the particular actions it compels, all undermine
any possibility of this being a truthful, exhaustive, or objective record of
the “real” or the everyday.
Ultimately, Goldsmith’s Fidget rests on this nagging question: if you zoom
in on one set of everyday actions, what are you not focusing on? The con-
cept, the idea, that generates the work compels us to ponder the problem of
attention, and its necessary partiality, that lies at the center of any pursuit of
the everyday: How can one possibly pay attention to all features of daily life?
Furthermore, why does poetry and art so often pretend that it can? When one
set of features is foregrounded—​every word spoken in a week, every object
touched in a day, and so on—​countless others are not attended to. Goldsmith
acknowledges this problem: “From the outset the piece was a total work of
fiction. As I sit here writing this letter, my body is making thousands of move-
ments; I am only able to observe one at a time. It’s impossible to describe
every move my body made on a given day” (Perloff, “VOCABEL”). Like
William James, Goldsmith forces us to confront the selectivity of attention.
Fidget reminds us of everything that is left out when we train our attention on
one aspect of experience at the expense of all the rest.16

From Day to The Day

Many of Goldsmith’s other books differ from works like Fidget and Soliloquy
by focusing on appropriation and transcription rather than process-​based,
embodied acts. However, a fascination with the everyday has remained the
constant, resting at the heart of everything from his first major book, a 600-​
page tome entitled No. 111:  2.7.93–​10.20.96, through his “American trilogy”
(The Weather, Traffic, and Sports), which consists of transcriptions of weather
reports, traffic updates, and the broadcast of a baseball game, to his most
recent book, Capital:  New  York, Capital of the 20th Century, a rewriting of
Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project that substitutes New York and its history
for Benjamin’s Paris.
The everyday is obviously also at the center of one of Goldsmith’s most
extravagant and widely discussed works, the long poem Day. The book is
a verbatim, cover-​to-​cover reproduction of an entire New  York Times for a
single day and it runs to over 800 pages. To create the book, Goldsmith has
claimed that he spent months “uncreatively” retyping every word, number,
and letter for a randomly selected day, September 1, 2000. (At the same time,
Goldsmith also mentions that he digitally scanned and pasted much of the
text rather than painstakingly retyping it, an unresolved contradiction.) The
Everyday-Life Projects in Contemporary Poetry 251

project’s conceptual charge rests both in the premise behind it and in the
artifactuality of the final product: once again, the size and scope of the work
is part of the message conveyed. Day is another experiment in concretizing
the sheer quantity of language that surrounds us each day, so much of which
we disregard, forget, and ignore; Goldsmith again wants to make it tangible,
material, and legible.
Goldsmith’s point is also to demonstrate, concretely, the abundance and
richness of any given day:
the day I chose to retype, the Friday before Labor Day weekend of 2000,
was a slow news day. Just the regular stuff happened, nothing special.
But in spite of that, after it was finished, it became clear that the daily
newspaper—​or in this case Day—​is really a great novel, filled with stories
of love, jealousy, murder, competition, sex, passion, and so forth. It’s a fan-
tastic thing: the daily newspaper, when translated, amounts to a 900 page
book. Every day. And it’s a book that’s written in every city and in every
country, only to be instantly discarded in order to write a brand new one,
full of fresh stories the next day. After reading the newspaper over break-
fast for 20 minutes in the morning, we say we’ve read the paper. Believe me,
you’ve never really read the paper. (Goldsmith, “Being Boring”)
Day has frequently been discussed in terms of the issues it raises regarding
uncreativity and unoriginality, plagiarism, and transcription. But less has
been said about what the project suggests about “dailiness” or a “day.” From
the title forward, Goldsmith evokes the lineage of everyday-​life literary aes-
thetics, calling to mind modernist novels that encompass a single day (Ulysses
and Mrs. Dalloway) and the frequent recourse to the “day” as a unit of time
and concept for poets of dailiness, from Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died,”
to A. R. Ammons’s initial idea of titling Tape for the Turn of the Year “Today,”
to the countless uses of “day” throughout James Schuyler’s poetry.
By giving the title Day to an epic tome, a long poem, appropriated from
a single daily newspaper, Goldsmith compels us to wonder: What makes
up a given day in the first place? What is important and what is trivial?
How much, or how little, of any day’s news, large scale and small, do we
really absorb, understand, or retain? What is the relationship between a
poem, or work of art, and a day that is its subject? By reframing this par-
ticular day’s news as a book-​length poem, Goldsmith achieves a host of
aims, including defamiliarizing the daily paper and creating an archive of
a particular moment in time, achieving the time-​capsule effect I discussed
earlier. As I mentioned in ­chapter 4, Goldsmith’s decision to use the news-
paper as a crucial indicator of dailiness, and as a method of archiving the
daily, recalls the section in Mayer’s Midwinter Day in which Mayer lists
and juxtaposes a long list of items lifted from the newspaper that appeared
on the day her poem memorializes. As usual, Goldsmith takes this tactic
252 Attention Equals Life

to its logical conclusion by having his work be nothing but a transcription

of the daily newspaper.
As we have seen, Goldsmith is hardly a thoroughgoing cheerleader for
a poetics of everyday life, as his work frequently seems to be pushing back
against it, exposing its assumptions, denaturalizing it, and questioning its
blindspots. In recent years, he even seems to have turned against the everyday
as a concept and a goal. Not long after completing Day, he explained that he
was undertaking a quite different project that he called “The Day”:
I’m getting out of the boredom business, friends. I recently embarked upon
my latest project, a piece that would completely turn my entire practice on
its ear. I wanted to work with extraordinary language, dramatic language;
language drenched with emotion. Excitement is what I’m after now. After
thinking about what I could do for some months, I hit upon the perfect
project. I would redo my New York Times piece, only instead of retyping a
“normal” news day, I would retype the issue of the New York Times pub-
lished on the morning of September 11th, using the exact same method
I did for Day. (“Being Boring”)
The original version of Day, like so many other works I have discussed in
this book, goes to extreme lengths to demonstrate the inexhaustible rich-
ness of each and any day. But Goldsmith’s proposed 9/​11 newspaper proj-
ect is markedly different, even antithetical to the everyday-​life aesthetic
that has been our focus. (Although excerpts have appeared, Goldsmith
has apparently never completed or published the finished project, but as so
often with his work, one could say that the idea matters more than any fin-
ished artifact.) As he moves from “day” to “the day” Goldsmith eschews the
flow of diurnal, ordinary time, and turns away from the mundane and the
irredeemably quotidian, to the extraordinary, the special case, a moment
in which the dominant social order breaks down—​to what the philosopher
Alain Badiou calls “the event” (Being and Event, passim). As he transcribed
the news for September 11, 2001, Goldsmith realized that he was creating an
“epic unboring boring work,” “full of events that never happened: sales that
were cancelled, listings for events that were indefinitely postponed” (“Being
Boring”).
Thus, The Day provides a very different kind of frame—​one that is much
more conventionally literary or artistic, in that it is designed to lend signifi-
cance and drama to the everyday. In his most recent book, Seven American
Deaths and Disasters, Goldsmith continues to mine moments in which the
quotidian is ruptured and the ordinary upended. The book “transcribes his-
toric radio and television reports of national tragedies as they unfurl,” from
the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and John Lennon to the Columbine
shootings and the attacks of September 11th; by doing so, the book jacket
claims, Goldsmith “recasts the mundane as the iconic.”
Everyday-Life Projects in Contemporary Poetry 253

In the afterword to the book, Goldsmith explains his change of heart

and focus:
For the past twenty years, I’ve been fascinated with rendering the mundane
in language. … But after ten books of quotidian compilations, an unex-
pected thing happened: I began to tire of the everyday. After all, the job of
retyping the entire Internet could go on forever, driving me to seek a new
line of investigation. Still deeply entrenched in a digital ethos, I remained
tied to a mimetic and uncreative way of writing, yet found myself strug-
gling with how to expand my focus without radically altering my long-​
standing practice. (Seven American Deaths, 169)
In an interview, he described this new direction further:
So now I’ve turned to transcribing events and texts that are drenched in
drama and emotion, as opposed to transcribing the ordinary and dull.
It’s the identical writing act—​still wildly uncreative—​only I’ve moved the
frame from one subject to another, naturally giving the texts new results.
(M. Allen, “Proudly Fraudulent”)
Although Goldsmith retains a concern with the textures of everyday life—​
and especially ordinary language—​his focus has shifted to disruptions in
daily time, to the exceptional and dramatic, to heightened and unique events.
And this, perhaps, had made all the difference. As we have seen, audi-
ences often recoil when presented with artworks that seem too devoted to
the everyday, too keen on presenting the unmediated and untransformed
stuff of everyday life. This might explain why Goldsmith’s turn to tragic,
exceptional events has been met with a much greater degree of mainstream
exposure and approval—​i ncluding appearances on the Colbert Report and
CNN—​t han his more insistently daily works. Seven American Deaths and
Disasters seemed to break entirely out of the marginalized world of poetry
(and the doubly-​marginalized world of experimental writing) after it was
given a near rave review in the New York Times. In it, Dwight Garner dis-
tinguished this book from Goldsmith’s other work for precisely this rea-
son:  “His potent new book, Seven American Deaths and Disasters, takes
its title from a series of Warhol paintings. It’s made up entirely of other
people’s words, and in many senses it’s like everything he’s done. Yet it’s
like nothing he’s done. It knocks the air from your lungs” (“The Words We
Heard”).
One could argue that this move marks an abandonment or betrayal of
Goldsmith’s commitment to a poetics of the everyday, or perhaps the exhaus-
tion of the everyday-​life tradition I have been discussing. (I hesitate to go that
far because it is always particularly hard with Goldsmith to tell how seri-
ous he is: nearly everything he does seems to be done with tongue partly in
cheek.) If nothing else, it demonstrates the persistence of Goldsmith’s desire
254 Attention Equals Life

to self-​consciously question and wrestle with the aesthetics of everyday life

we have seen in his work.

Everyday-​Life Projects in the New Millennium

In the years since Goldsmith’s first works began appearing in the mid-​1990s,
contemporary poetry has witnessed a flood of similar conceptual everyday-​
life projects, some produced by Goldsmith’s friends and acolytes within the
conceptual writing movement, but many by poets who have emerged from
other traditions and groupings. As we have seen with Goldsmith and Mayer,
many of these works self-​consciously perpetuate the everyday-​life poetic
tradition that stretches from Williams and Stein to O’Hara, Schuyler, and
Language poetry, but deliberately take it to a radical extreme or comment on
its lapses and shortcomings.
At the same time, some recent project-​based works depart from Goldsmith’s
own writing and comment on its limitations, as I mentioned earlier. A range
of contemporary everyday-​life projects critique, or even break with, some of
the goals and practices of Goldsmith and conceptual writing—​particularly
regarding the potential of using projects to explore politics, gender, race, and
the insidious effects of capital. Alexandra Nemerov’s “First My Motorola”
exemplifies this aspect of the contemporary everyday-​life project. The poem,
which appeared in Against Expression, an anthology of conceptual writing
edited by Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith, is generated by several con-
straints, including once more a reliance on the temporal boundaries of a single
day as a frame: it is “a list of every brand she touched over the course of a day in
chronological order, from the moment she woke up until the moment she went
to sleep” (Against Expression, 457). Nemerov’s piece is another minimalist vari-
ation on the “I do this I do that” mode (now turned into an “I-​touched-​this-​
product, I-​touched-​that-​product poem”), as well as an interesting response to
Goldsmith’s Fidget. Again, we see a poem tracking the tiniest movements of a
day, but here every single move the speaker makes across the course of a day is
tied to a consumer product and the name of the corporation that produced it.
Here is how it begins:

First, my Motorola
Then my Frette
Then my Sonia Rykiel
Then my Bulgari
Then my Asprey
Then my Cartier
Then my Kohler
Then my Brightsmile
Everyday-Life Projects in Contemporary Poetry 255

Then my Cetaphil
Then my Braun
Then my Brightsmile
Then my Cetaphil
Then my Kohler
Then my Bliss
Then my Apple
Then my Kashi
Then my Maytag
Then my Silk
(Against Expression, 457)

and so on, for another five pages. With its incantatory repetitions and the defamil-
iarizing strangeness of poetic phrases like “then my Bliss,” “then my Silk,” “then
my Trident,” and “then my Fiji,” the poem has an oddly beautiful and hypnotic
effect. And yet the conceptual premise creates a creepy, disturbing undertow that
is at odds with its language. As the editors note, “Nemerov creates a new type of
self-​portraiture, one that is defined by what she buys, a marketer’s dream. By turns
embarrassing, intimate, and always very revealing, Nemerov’s brands define who
she is” (457). Indeed, Nemerov’s ingenious concept takes aim at a culture of “bling,”
conspicuous consumption, and designer items as markers of status.17
“First My Motorola” almost reads like an application of this passage from
Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life:

The critique of everyday life will propose the undertaking of a vast survey,
to be called:  How we live. … [It] should examine the details of everyday
life as minutely as possible—​for example, a day in the life of an individual,
any day, no matter how trivial. … One question we can ask ourselves, for
example, is how the average man in his ordinary, day-​to-​day life, relates to
the large corporations. Where does he encounter them? How does he per-
ceive them or imagine them? Theory reveals a complex structure here—​in
what ways does he move within it? And how does this structure appear to
him morning till night? (Critique, 1:196–​97)

As if answering Lefebvre’s call, Nemerov’s poem does just what Lebfebvre

requests, examining one way we interact with large corporations from morn-
ing till night. By isolating this aspect of the daily, the poem dramatizes the inva-
sion of daily life by consumerism and its manufactured commodities, its clever
and seductive names, its markers of status and distinction.18 As Paul Stephens
argues, Nemerov’s poem demonstrates “the increasingly commodified nature
of everyday life” (“Vanguard Total Index,” 763).19 But the poem is not just a
blank recitation of commodities—​in its creative, ironic deployment of brand
names, the poem exemplifies the idea of consumption as production, the
256 Attention Equals Life

notion Lefebvre shares with Michel de Certeau: both theorists read “consump-

tion not as sheer passivity within mechanisms of domination, but as a form
of production, production of a different kind that comes to disrupt the estab-
lished order” (Michel Trebitsch, preface to Lefebvre, Critique 2:xxiv).
Although Nemerov’s poem does not, a majority of recent project-​based
poems use the city as the main terrain for this kind of critique of everyday
life, much like Silliman’s BART and the “Street Works” issue of 0 to 9 men-
tioned in c­ hapter 4. To expose “urban social space as an ideological topogra-
phy,” these works often draw upon the lexicon and goals of Situationism, as
they bring familiar tactics like “psychogeography” and the dérive into poetic
practice (Davidson, “Poetics of Everyday Life,” 172–​73). In this manner, they
seek to disrupt our habitual perceptions of urban daily life and to reveal the
workings of power and politics within supposedly “natural” everyday actions
and places.
Most city-​based projects of attention have at their center the act of walk-
ing (or related forms of movement through the city, like travel on buses and
subways).20 For example, Ten Walks/​Two Talks, a collaborative book by Jon
Cotner and Andy Fitch published in 2010, grew out of two related everyday-​
life projects:  for the first, Fitch took a series of sixty-​minute walks around
Manhattan, composing a set of sixty sentences for each walk; for the second,
the two poets engaged in “a pair of roving dialogues” while walking around
New York. Also in 2010, CA Conrad and Frank Sherlock collaborated on the
book The City Real & Imagined, described by the publisher as a “psychogeo-
graphical poem” that offers readers the opportunity to “participate in the
future mappings of your city yet to be realized—​the city real and imagined.”21
Contemporary writers and artists have engaged in all manner of walking
related projects of attention, from Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital, which chron-
icles the experience of walking the entire length of the highway that circles
London, to the walk projects of Will Self, which are inspired by Sinclair and
share his fascination with the psychogeography of Situationism. In 2006, Self
undertook an unusual experiment that entailed “walking” all the way from
London to New York: to manage this feat, he traveled on foot from his home
in London to Heathrow Airport, flew across the Atlantic, and then proceeded
to walk from New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport to a hotel in Manhattan
(McGrath, “A Literary Visitor”).22
This current fascination with walking projects coincides with a recent
spate of books about walking itself, which often explore it as an antidote or
act of resistance to our distracted and mediated culture. Just the past sev-
eral years have seen the publication of Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust (2000),
Joseph Amato’s On Foot: A History of Walking (2004), Geoff Nicholson’s The
Lost Art of Walking (2008), Frédéric Gros’s Philosophy of Walking (a best-​seller
in France that was published in England in 2014), and Merlin Coverley’s Art
of Wandering: The Writer as Walker (2012).
Everyday-Life Projects in Contemporary Poetry 257

Within poetry, everyday-​life walking projects consciously build upon the

long tradition of the flâneur—​the walker who strolls or drifts around the city,
so important to Baudelaire, Benjamin, de Certeau, and cultural theory—​and
nod specifically to Frank O’Hara’s walking-​around-​New York poems.23 They
also frequently extend beyond the page—​many are performative, embod-
ied, or site-​specific experiences either for the writer, the audience, or both.
Such works imagine a poem to be, as Roger Gilbert puts it, a “walk in the
world,” not just metaphorically but literally as well. For example, to create his
poem “Follow,” David Buuck hired a private detective “to surveille him, con-
structing a kind of conceptual self-​portrait by proxy” raising questions about
privacy and the culture of surveillance, among other things (Dworkin and
Goldsmith, Against Expression, 125–​28). At the start of her 2012 book Public
Figures, Jena Osman explains the self-​assigned, urban research project that
gave rise to this hybrid, mixed-​media work: “The idea occurred: Photograph
the figurative statues that populate your city. Then bring the camera to their
eyes (find a way) and shoot their points of view. What does such a figure
see? To see the sigh of sighted stone you activate the idea” (2). The book—​a
meditation on public space, the city (in this case, Philadelphia), history, cul-
tural memory and violence—​mixes photographs Osman took of the statues,
photographs of whatever the statues themselves “see,” various pieces of prose
and poetry, and fragments of text transcribed from YouTube videos of drone
warfare (“missions where there is video of night combat being narrated by
remote pilots conducting the action,” [Gaughan]).
Although it relies on driving through the city rather than walking, the poet
Claudia Rankine recently staged her own version of an urban everyday-​life
project, a performance piece entitled The Provenance of Beauty, that resembles
walk poems in its effort to creatively explore and critique the nature of urban
social space. Another hybrid work, part poem, part guided tour, part the-
atrical experience, part experiment in psychogeography, The Provenance of
Beauty called for viewers to board a bus in Harlem for a ninety-​minute ride
through the South Bronx, during which they listened on headphones to vari-
ous spoken texts composed by Rankine and looked out the windows at neigh-
borhoods they would presumably otherwise never visit.24 Highly attuned to
issues of race, ethnicity, class and economics, urban planning, development,
and gentrification, Rankine’s work perhaps implicitly counters the omission,
or more recently, the clumsy or even offensive handling, of such issues in
Goldsmith and in conceptual poetry more broadly.
Rankine’s project recalls the whole lineage of project-​based explorations
of the urban, from the Dadaists, who “embarked on bizarre excursions to
unpromising locations” (Hopkins, Dada and Surrealism, 57), to the Surrealists
who “sought out particularly quirky or atmospheric sites” because “such
locations seemed to be part of an alternative city; one hidden to tourists and
miraculously spared by city planners, ruled by the logic of unconscious desire
258 Attention Equals Life

rather than day-​to-​day utility” (59), to the Situationists, conceptual artists,

and works like Ron Silliman’s BART. By having Rankine herself play the role
of poet-​as-​tour-​guide, The Provenance of Beauty recalls things like “the Dada
excursion to the little-​k nown, deserted church of St. Julien-​le-​Pauvre in 1921,”
a tour for the public guided by a group of writers and artists, including Louis
Aragon, Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, and Tristan Tzara: “Posters advertised the
event throughout the city. They promised that the Dadaists would remedy the
‘incompetence of suspect guides and cicerones’ ” (Goldberg, Performance, 85).
The Provenance of Beauty also resembles the urban explorations of Walter
Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre, and the Situationists, who each, as Ben Highmore
notes, expose “capitalist ‘progress’ as uneven and radically discontinuous,
while at the same time presenting itself as homogeneous” and who offer “an
analysis of the urban scene, a psychogeography that would reveal the uneven-
ness of capitalist development … such an investigation meant veering off the
beaten track, avoiding the official city of the tourist guide” (Everyday Life and
Cultural Theory, 140–1).
The creators’ description of The Provenance of Beauty echoes the rationale
for these earlier avant-​garde experiments in exploring the urban: they refer to
the work as “an invitation to see a place differently, and to engage the poetics
of its shifting definition with new inquiry and reverence.” They state:

The Provenance of Beauty is a poetic travelogue performed on a bus touring

the South Bronx. As we travel the streets of the neighborhood, Rankine’s
evocative text points out and reflects upon the sites that pass by outside
the windows. Views that to an outsider might go by unnoticed—​a factory
dressed up as townhouses, the theatre where La Lupe held court that is now
a church—​complicated places that ask what creates a neighborhood in a
city in a country in the world.
The audience boards the bus in Spanish Harlem, puts on headphones
and for 90 minutes eavesdrops on the voice—​both live and recorded—​of
this historic place. Provenance is an experience that both responds to and
redoubles the landscape—​its sites, history, present and future—​mapping
out a poetic cartography of a neighborhood—​of any neighborhood—​in its
eternal state of evolution. (Rankine, Provenance of Beauty)

Rankine’s work—​described here as more of an “experience” than a static work

of art—​offers a poetic mapping of a changing and overlooked, even abject
urban locale, echoing the goals of Surrealism, Situationism, and Silliman’s
BART. As Charles Isherwood observes in his review in the New York Times,
Rankine’s work alters the geometry of attention so that hitherto unnoticed
riches can become visible: “Look closely and with care, and you’ll find images
of unexpected beauty even in a landscape that at first glance looks barren
and blighted… . Snared in the cruel teeth of the coils were weather-​beaten
Everyday-Life Projects in Contemporary Poetry 259

plastic bags that had been shaped by the wind into tattered little sculptures of
strange, transfixing delicacy” (Isherwood, “Have You Ever”).
As Isherwood notes, “The South Bronx, it seems, has long been a favorite
dumping ground for the temporarily or permanently unwanted.” However,
as Rankine’s work makes clear, even in this seemingly blighted landscape,
“teeming life asserts its own unruly prerogatives.” With its “lyric musings on
the way that the landscape shapes people, and that people shape the landscape,
and the interaction between human beings and the places in which they live
and work and fight to establish a sense of belonging—​even places that it seems
nobody wants to belong to,” The Provenance of Beauty is an experiment in
putting psychogeography into poetic practice (Isherwood, “Have You Ever”).
By extending the “walk poem” in this way, Rankine’s project in effect creates
a three-​dimensional poem, an everyday-​life work that compels the audience
to experience the urban quotidian itself in a new way, in real time.

Brenda Coultas’s “Bowery Project”

Another exemplary everyday-​life project, Brenda Coultas’s 2003 poem “The
Bowery Project,” brings together a number of themes of this study. Like many
of the poets discussed in c­ hapter  4, Coultas has been deeply influenced by
Bernadette Mayer, along with other strains of the New York School poetry,
including the “investigative poetics” associated with Ed Sanders. The center-
piece of Coultas’s book A Handmade Museum, this sequence exemplifies the
recent flowering of “documentary poetry” and its belief that a poem can be a
kind of archive, or as Coultas puts it, a “museum.”25
A Handmade Museum is also a potent demonstration of the idea of the poet
as a scavenger, or in Walter Benjamin’s terms, a “ragpicker,” who records and
documents the detritus of the modern, urban daily life. However, Coultas’s
poem goes further than other instances discussed so far, in that it takes the
fascination with trash and waste that is so central to everyday-​life aesthetics
to an extreme. Indeed, she literalizes the sometimes metaphorical or rhetori-
cal interest in garbage in this tradition—​evident in, say, the bird who builds a
nest out of torn-​up letters in James Schuyler’s “An East Window on Elizabeth
Street,” or the maggot praised so highly in A. R. Ammons’s “Catalyst”—​by
creating a poem that is an extended catalog of actual trash. Other poets might
admire a scavenging bird or insect, or talk about a plan to collect one of every
kind of flower in a field (as in Schuyler’s “Salute”), or create an ode to the
varieties of excrement (Ammons’s “Shit List”), or sing the praises of garbage
as “the poem of our time” (Ammons’s Garbage), or transcribe vast quanti-
ties of “junk language” as Kenneth Goldsmith does. But Coultas takes this
another step. She doesn’t just “honor” the maggot—​she presents herself as
one: an actual dumpster-​diver, a person who relishes scouring trash cans,
gutters, and garbage piles for treasures. She is like a turn-​of-​the-​millennium
260 Attention Equals Life

Kurt Schwitters or Joseph Cornell, but one who rescues some really awful-​
sounding, forgotten stuff—​clothing, half-​eaten food, ragged furniture—​and
hauls it back to her Manhattan apartment.
When an interviewer asked Coultas why she and other artists and writers
are so drawn to garbage, she responded “Well, it’s because they’re so poor… .
It’s cheap material. We need it” (Manson et al., “Dumpster Surveillance”). The
interviewer asked whether garbage is a more interesting topic now than ever
before, and she responded:
I think it’s maybe more spoken about. It’s perhaps not as taboo to talk
about dumpster diving, and waste. Because poets and artists, and par-
ticularly visual artists, are always doing found object collages and assem-
blages. You go to the salvage yard to get your materials. It’s the same thing,
you’re looking to the garbage for what it says about society, and it’s also
a little bit of Sophie Calle, where she looks at the contents of the luggage,
the things that people bring to the hotel room. And you’re also looking at
what people are throwing out, and what it says about them. (“Dumpster
Surveillance”)
Here, Coultas makes it clear that she participates in a particular lineage—​
collage, assemblage, found materials, and conceptual art projects such as
those by Sophie Calle—​and suggests that our trash holds vital information
about ourselves and our culture. However, by taking quite literally this tradi-
tion’s fascination with garbage, its belief in the value of the forgotten, mar-
ginal, unnoticed things, events, and people, Coultas pushes the “reversal of
hierarchies” trope beyond the realm of trope and even to a logical endpoint.
A long poem composed of individually titled prose passages of vary-
ing length, “The Bowery Project” is, as Coultas puts it in a prefatory note,
“centered on the observations of activities that occurred and of objects
that appeared on a brief section of the Bowery between Second Street and
Houston” (Handmade Museum, 11) in New York, between 2000 and 2002. By
titling her work “The Bowery Project,” Coultas perhaps intentionally calls to
mind another work that gathers together the scraps and fragments of every-
day urban modernity: The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin, which was
first published in English in 1999 to substantial fanfare, just before this poem
was written. Echoing Benjamin, “The Bowery Project” positions the poet as
a kind of latter-​day flâneur, exploring the streets of the city and uncovering
traces of earlier moments lurking in everyday objects and spaces (as she notes,
this area “contains the remnants of SRO (single room occupancy) hotels and
the remains of the 1890s Bowery that are slated to be demolished” and “sev-
eral endangered historic spaces” [11]). Like Benjamin, she feels our culture’s
detritus holds a key, the secret to life as we live it today: “My mission is to
gather intelligence, so I went to the dumpster. There! Exactly what I was look-
ing for” (92).
Everyday-Life Projects in Contemporary Poetry 261

Coultas’s project is also self-​consciously archival and hyper-​inclusive, a

materialist, Benjaminian catalog and inventory of a contemporary place and
the ghosts of its past:
This will be my museum. I’ll put it all down here on the page, a portable
museum of the 1890s and 1990s on the Bowery, better’n film, no pocket
projectors invented yet, but real words to be copied and read and I write
slow cause I expect to live a long time. (18)
Coultas’s poem-​as-​museum sharply breaks with conventional expectations
that posit the poem as a self-​contained, self-​expressive lyric. Not only is the
poem written in chunks of prose, in the flat, declarative, almost neutral or
naïve voice of reportage, but she also casts the work as a “project” that is the
“result” of an experiment (“the results of two of my experiments in public
character are included in ‘The Bowery Project’ ” [11]).26
     Near the start, Coultas lays out her plan for the poem:
In order to transform into a public character I  need to claim a public
space. I will sit in a chair in the Bowery at the same place and time for
a season and participate and expedite street life. I’m going to dump it
all in, everything that occurs to me or everything I see. That will be my
data, my eyes upon the street; the firsthand observation of this last bum-​
claimed space, a small record before the wrecking ball arrives. I’m tak-
ing only pen and notepad. Everything I truly need will appear—​I’m not
an archaeologist, but am a studier of persons and documenter of trails
(BOWERY & 1st ST.). (15)
Like Silliman’s BART, Mayer’s Memory, and other everyday-​life projects, “The
Bowery Project” is a premeditated research project, shaped by certain param-
eters. In this case, it calls for the poet to sit in a chair on the Bowery, in the
same place and at the same time “for a season,” observing and cataloging—​
like Silliman on the subway, but less on the move—​“everything that occurs to
me or everything I see.”27 Coultas emphasizes the accumulation of “data,” the
act of observation, and the poet as documentarian and ethnographer (“stud-
ier of persons”).28
Choosing the Bowery as the site for her documentary project is not
incidental—​it is driven by an urgent ethical, political wish to create “a record”
of a particular place that is threatened by the “wrecking ball” of “progress,”
primarily in the form of the Cooper Square Development Plan that would
soon result in the demolition of many of the area’s historic buildings, as well
as its way of life. Just as Benjamin’s and Surrealism’s fascination with the “out-
moded” and the soon-​to-​be-​demolished “could be seen as criticizing capital-
ism, in so far as the ruins from its past are brought back to haunt it” (Hopkins,
Dada and Surrealism, 61), Coultas’s fascination with the Bowery’s past and its
swiftly vanishing present has a political, critical charge.29 Coultas literalizes
262 Attention Equals Life

the figure of the ragpicker, familiar from Benjamin. As Ben Highmore men-
tions in his discussion of Benjamin’s “trash aesthetics,” ragpickers are those
“remaindered by capitalist modernization”—​left behind by modernization,
they struggle to survive “by finding value in what has been devalued, out-
moded”—​“the detritus of modernity is scoured for its use-​value” ( Everyday
Life and Cultural Theory, 63–​65).
The poem is energized by Coultas’s ethnographic interest in the homeless
and impoverished people who have long made the Bowery their home, and
who for Coultas embody the human toll of the inequality and pain capitalism
leaves in its wake.30 In a way, she puts into practice the idea behind a poem
like Ammons’s “Still,” in which he celebrates a beggar whom he encounters on
his search for “the lowly.” Where Ammons’s beggar feels more symbolic than
real, Coultas’s “Bowery bums” are very much flesh and blood, actual people;
in fact, she is explicit about resisting the tendency to romanticize their pov-
erty (one Ammons arguably succumbs to). She writes: “I lived a block from
this section and traveled through it daily. My intent was not to romanticize
the suffering or demonize the Bowery or its residents, but rather to observe
the change the Bowery was currently undergoing and to write about my own
dilemma and identification as a citizen one paycheck away from the street”
(Handmade Museum, 11).
Much of the resulting poem consists of short fragments, observations,
and tallies of detritus, often labeled at the end with either the date (“MAY 15,
2001”) or the location (“BOWERY & 1st ST.”), or both (“APRIL 27, 2001, 75 E.
2nd ST”). Many of the sections depict the speaker rummaging through and
assessing objects found on the street or in dumpsters: “Peacock fan chair on
sidewalk. Another peacock chair lying in vacant lot next to wet, matted rat”
(16) and “Orange chair, 70s, metal legs; dirt ring on plastic seat; Apple color
printer; metal cig machine on top of dumpster, front opened; air conditioner
without a shell” (17). Brimming over with an abundance of things qua things,
the poem relies on the familiar strategy of listing and cataloging; it features
little or no attempt to beautify such objects or to treat them symbolically or
as metaphors—​“Shopping cart painted red, metal 70s office chair. Man put
small table in trash can and walked away” (30)—​and no skirting of the abject
quality of what she observes and records: “Puddle of puke” (MARCH 1, 2000,
BOWERY & 1st ST.)” (17).
At its heart, “The Bowery Project” chronicles the speaker’s shifting and
ambivalent attitudes toward the trash she observes and seeks to gather
and collect. The title of another poem in A Handmade Museum puts it
succinctly:  “A Pile of Conflicting Emotions About Garbage,” an assort-
ment of feelings that includes “disgust, amusement, joy, curiosity, desire
to uncover, pleasure, looking to garbage for clothing and entertainment
not food, not yet” (Handmade Museum, 62). “The Bowery Project” begins
with the speaker conveying some apprehension and unease about all
Everyday-Life Projects in Contemporary Poetry 263

the degradation and filth, not quite able to bring herself to fully accept
other people’s cast-​offs:  “I squatted down to touch gray Gap T-​shirt out-
side Bowery Bar,” she writes. “I’d just seen an ad of 6 real people wearing
same gray T-​shirt, thought I  could wear this one. Was damp with a liq-
uid, got repulsed, dropped it” (14). On the same page, she writes: “Trash
can by Film Anthology; a bright patterned dress pulled out with fingers,
label looked expensive, got creeped out, dropped on rim of can, walked on.
(2ND ST. & 2nd AVE.)” (14).
However, the poem soon charts the speaker’s awakening to the value of
trash: “Woke up seeing garbage with new eyes and new fresh attitude. Felt
transcendental all day” (15). The reference to transcendentalism brings to
mind the poem’s roots in the American philosophical tradition that I have
argued serves as an ongoing source for everyday-​life aesthetics. In a 2000
interview (conducted while “The Bowery Project” was under way), Coultas
mentioned that “the poem I’m working on now talks a lot about transcenden-
talism, and Thoreau, and thinking about the Bowery as Walden” (Manson
et al., “Dumpster Surveillance”). When asked “Do you see it as a wilderness?
As a place away from other parts of American culture, society, concern?”
she responded “Yeah, I mean, I see that the wilderness exists within the city.
And so, the Bowery, with those vacant lots, the street life and subculture, is
where the wilderness exists… . I was also thinking about the experiment
in Walden of going out into nature and finding sustenance from the land,
and doing that in the city, from garbage” (“Dumpster Surveillance”). In
other words, just as Thoreau says “I went to the woods,” Coultas suggests
(using a distinctly Thoreauvian cadence) “so I went to the dumpster” because
she too “wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life”
(Handmade Museum, 92). It seems fitting that she models her own project-​
poem on the work I have referred to as a kind of ur-​everyday-​life project.
Coultas emulates Thoreau’s concerns and ethical spirit in Walden, its time
constraints and its status as a deliberate “project” of attention.
Despite its aspirations, the poem is also driven by a self-​conscious, even
embarrassed recognition that her love for scavenging is tainted with idealism
and romanticism:
I’ve cultivated a joy of dumpsters out of necessity, romanticized dumpster
diving in order to make hunting and gathering interesting. I had a good
attitude until recently. I’ve become ashamed, developed a fear of being
yelled at for disturbing the recycling. That’s where I  get my magazines.
Some people say, “You love garbage, I’ve seen you get so excited about it.”
But really it’s just a glamorous pose. (Handmade Museum, 15)
In another, highly “meta” section, entitled “Some Might Say That All I’ve
Done is Stack Up a Heap of Objects,” Coultas addresses her doubts about the
whole idea of creating a poem that is just a collage, a stacking up, an archive
264 Attention Equals Life

of daily stuff. She questions its originality (aware, as she surely is, of the long
tradition that stretches from Duchamp, Cornell, and Rauschenberg to poets
like Mayer and Silliman): “Some will say it’s all been done before, and that
others have done better but still I stack things up” (28). She explains that she
persists, despite her misgivings:
I put blinders on but hope that through accumulation they’ll form a pat-
tern out of chaos. I’ve stacked up twigs one by one, building a structure,
weaving and shaping, forming a skeleton out of raw garbage transformed
into beauty, maybe with something to say to any Bowery resident or reader
of poetry. Please, I am intentionally writing this for you. (28)
Here, Coultas suggests that she has woven twigs and scraps together into a
work of art in order to reverse our normal valuation of “raw garbage,” turning
it into “beauty” and meaning (“with something to say to you”).
Like Silliman’s BART or Rankine’s The Provenance of Beauty, “The
Bowery Project” is interested in more than just discovering the beautiful
in unlikely places—​or, to put it another way, Coultas refuses to separate the
aesthetic from the ethical dimensions of her project. Like Mayer, Silliman,
and Rankine, and many others discussed here, Coultas is highly attuned to
the micropolitics of urban space, to capitalism’s uneven development, and to
the way class infiltrates every aspect of daily life. Her stark observations of
inhabitants of the street expose the deprivation and poverty lurking in the
midst of American plenty, and point to the tactics people use to navigate and
survive such a world. For example, she notes “A church lady rakes through
trash for goods, man asleep on sidewalk (NOONISH, JUNE 10, 2001, 1ST
ST. & 2ND AVE.)” (20), and “Man with huge, flopping boil on neck. His
hands were empty (EARLY MORNING, APRIL 29, 2001, BLEECKER &
BOWERY”) (27).
A radically egalitarian stance, a sympathy for those left behind by capi-
talism’s churning progress, suffuses the poem and its critique of everyday
life. When Coultas draws attention to the small, inventive ways people of
the city survive, her observations sometimes echo the outlook of Michel de
Certeau’s Practice of Everyday Life: “What I saw on the Bowery: A bum sit-
ting in an early 20th-​century vault, a small vault, front door missing, on its
back filled with water and trash and now, a bum drinking out of bag, his ass
firmly planted, his arms and legs sticking out. That’s what I saw, a resourceful
response to chairlessness” (Handmade Museum, 18). Here Coultas offers a tan-
gible example of what de Certeau refers to as everyday tactics (“the ingenious
ways in which the weak make use of the strong” [Practice, xvii] or “ways of
operating”: the “innumerable practices by means of which users reappropri-
ate the space organized by techniques of sociocultural production” [xiv]). The
“bums” Coultas depicts display the “make-​shift creativity of groups or indi-
viduals already caught in the nets of ‘discipline’ ” (Practice, xiv–​x v). In the final
Everyday-Life Projects in Contemporary Poetry 265

and longest section (titled “A Summary of a Public Experiment”), Coultas

offers a series of paragraphs, each devoted to a different person (mostly street
people and “Bowery bums”) encountered on the street. “One day I gathered
up a table and a chair and put up a sign that read, ‘Tell me a Bowery story’ ”
(Handmade Museum, 47), she explains, before presenting many of these sto-
ries by incorporating the actual speech of the people she met, transcribing
their litanies of chronic poverty, violence, and homelessness and the mixture
of attitudes they hold towards the Bowery itself.
Throughout “The Bowery Project,” Coultas likens her poetry to an act of
accumulation, much like Silliman, who, we may recall, explains that the word
ketjak, which applies to his work as a whole, stands in his mind as a figure
for accumulation. However, Coultas’s work renders the idea of poetry-​as-​
accumulation less metaphorical or textual and more concrete and embodied.
The line between an artform that gathers and collects the stuff of everyday
life and an actual obsessive-​compulsive practice of hoarding grows blurry
here, as it does, say, in the work and life of Joseph Cornell. The full extent of
the poet’s dilemma, her urgent need to collect and store, becomes clear in a
rather poignant moment when the speaker notes, “I realized that the garbage
had lost its appeal because I  no longer had room. Our bedroom was filled
with mismatched crippled furniture, some missing just a leg and propped up
with a book or newspaper” (44). She acknowledges that she is “filled up and
overflowing with things,” but hopes to “get my enthusiasm back because there
is, after all, a shitload in this world” (44).
Coultas seems to take quite seriously the idea that we have an ethical and
aesthetic obligation to find a form within which, as James Schuyler puts it,
“great hunks of the world will fit” (Collected, 28), while registering the dif-
ficulties such a stance involves—​both practically (who has the room? what
apartment could ever be big enough?) and aesthetically (what poem could
ever be expansive enough)? Thus, Coultas compels us to consider the point at
which a materialist poetry of the everyday, an aesthetics of everyday life, tilts
over into an everyday practice, a task, a way of being in the world.

Harryette Mullen’s Urban Tumbleweed

Harryette Mullen’s latest book, Urban Tumbleweed:  Notes from a Tanka
Diary (2013), in many ways embodies the broad and diverse turn to
everyday-​life projects in contemporary poetry. It also subtly reminds us
that the everyday-​life poetic tradition, which she deliberately invokes,
has often depended on the elision or omission of race and racial identity.
A  sequence of haiku-​like poems, written one per day for a year and one
day in conjunction with a daily walk, Urban Tumbleweed is something of
a departure from Mullen’s celebrated earlier work, especially the three
volumes collected in Recyclopedia, and her 2002 volume Sleeping with the
266 Attention Equals Life

Dictionary. Those books, deeply influenced by both Language poetry and

the forms and rhythms of African-​A merican expressive culture (slang,
hip-​hop, and so on), feature Steinian wordplay, punning, linguistic riffing,
and sociopolitical, feminist critique. Although the quotidian is an abiding
and ongoing concern throughout these works—​for example, in Mullen’s
attention to everyday consumption and material objects in S*PeRM**K*T
(shopping and food) and Trimmings (clothing)—​Urban Tumbleweed dis-
plays an even more explicit engagement with the everyday, both as primary
content and as problem or theme.
Unlike Mullen’s earlier works, Urban Tumbleweed is a project-​based “walk
poem,” generated by a particular procedure undertaken for a specific dura-
tion. As she describes it in a preface to the book:
My tanka diary began with a desire to strengthen a sensible habit by linking
it to a pleasurable activity. I wanted to incorporate into my life a daily prac-
tice of walking and writing poetry. … With a pen and notebook tucked
into my pocket, I could escape from the writer’s self-​imposed confinement,
if only to walk from home to the local post office. With the tanka diary to
focus my attention, a pedestrian stroll might result in a poem. Merging my
wish to write poetry every day with a willingness to step outdoors, my hope
was that each exercise would support the other. (vii)
Like many other project-​based works, Mullen’s book is the result of a delib-
erate, self-​conceived plan (as she puts it, she felt she “needed a break in my
routine, so [she] determined to alter” her habitual practice). In this case, the
project entailed taking a walk each day to generate a daily poem. She also
came up with a preconceived structure:  each day’s poem would have to be
written in a specific and highly constrained, compressed form—​an “adapta-
tion of a traditional form of Japanese syllabic verse” known as a “tanka” (“a
brief poem of thirty-​one syllables”) (ix). Lastly, the project called for the poet
to keep up this routine for an entire year: “the 366 tanka verses collected here
represent a year and a day of walking and writing” (viii). Thus, Mullen’s book
is another instance of the proliferation of “annualist” books (where the author
sets out to do X or Y for a year and records the results), and is yet another
project based on accumulation, daily practice, and repetition.
At the same time, Mullen takes some devices associated with Kenneth
Goldsmith’s conceptual poetry and avant-​garde everyday-​life aesthetics more
broadly, and refashions them as tools that raise questions about race, iden-
tity, and the quotidian. This aspect of the book can be seen in the twin epi-
graphs Mullen placed at the start of Urban Tumbleweed. At first glance, the
quotations highlight the book’s goal of becoming more attentive to daily life
through a combination of walking and writing. The first is a haiku that offers
instructions to a walker—​“Keep straight down this block, /​then turn right
where you will find /​a peach tree blooming.” The second offers advice about
Everyday-Life Projects in Contemporary Poetry 267

how, and why, to pay attention: “Look about you. Take hold of the things that
are here. Let them talk to you.” Both epigraphs alert us to Urban Tumbleweed’s
central concerns: walking, looking, grasping objects that are present, paying
attention to city (“this block”) and nature (a flowering peach tree), listening to
the immediate and concrete for what they can tell us (“let them talk to you”),
and using a Japanese poetic form to do so.
However, the sources of Mullen’s quotations complicate and deepen the
stakes of her project in quite fascinating ways. The first quotation, the haiku,
is by the African-​American writer Richard Wright, who turned to the haiku
at the very end of his life and wrote voluminously in the form.31 The second
is by George Washington Carver, the pioneering African-​American scientist
and inventor. By choosing these particular epigraphs, Mullen alerts us that
her own allegiance to an everyday-​life aesthetic tradition differs from that of
many other writers of the everyday, inevitably inflected as it is by racial iden-
tity. It may not be an accident that the Carver quotation about intense looking
so closely echoes the epigraph Georges Perec placed at the start of his mag-
num opus, Life A User’s Manual—​the injunction to “Look with all your eyes,
look!”—​a remark Perec took from Jules Verne.32 Mullen deliberately gives
that tradition a racially conscious twist here. While the choice of epigraphs
certainly connects her work to an explicitly African-​American tradition, it
also shows her uncovering within it something that might not be so appar-
ent: a deep concern with the everyday and a premium placed on attention.
The book quietly, but proudly, asserts itself as an effort to attend to the daily,
and to the natural world, from what Mullen suggests is the unlikely vantage
point of an African-​American writer.
In this sense, Mullen’s book stages an intervention within the story of
everyday-​life poetics. Mullen offers a subtle but pointed response to the prob-
lematic relationship between conceptualism and race in recent American
poetry. Urban Tumbleweed highlights the unacknowledged assumptions
about gender and race within the long tradition that celebrates the flâneur,
the dérive, psychogeography, and other methods of exploring the urban quo-
tidian. We have already seen Bernadette Mayer and other women poets stage
this kind of intervention in terms of gender and the everyday, echoing those
feminist cultural historians who, as Ben Highmore notes, have criticized the
centrality of the urban flâneur in accounts of modernity because the tradi-
tional image of the flâneur “fails to reveal its own situated-​ness in terms of
gender and class” (Everyday Life, 141). This bias persists in the Situationists’
social critique of urban space: “What the Situationists fail to reflect on is
their own position as white male Parisians who are able ‘to go botanizing
on the asphalt,’ or in this case, to enact what seems to be a kind of tour-
ist relationship with the colonized spaces of Paris and the lived experiences
within them” (Everyday Life, 141–​42). Like Claudia Rankine’s Provenance of
Beauty, Mullen’s book adds concerns about racial identity to this mix and
268 Attention Equals Life

prompts us to consider: what happens to questions of privilege, and to the

idea of the flâneur as a tourist inspecting colonized spaces, when the walker,
the flâneur, is both a woman and a person of color?
By raising such issues, Urban Tumbleweed exemplifies the recent flower-
ing of projects of attention that challenge and extend the same everyday-​life
poetic tradition they perpetuate. Like so many other everyday-​life projects,
the outcome, or record, of the project takes the form of a long poem, an
expansive work that grows by accretion and eschews the familiar model of
a volume of poetry as a set of self-​contained lyric poems. Urban Tumbleweed
is a serial work made up of untitled three-​line units, three to a page, appar-
ently one written per day; while they do not move sequentially or create a
coherent, linear narrative, each offers a glimpse, an observation, an aperçu
or brief thought. On the one hand, the project explores the use of brevity and
compression (which Mullen feels is “suitable” for rendering “the ephemera of
everyday life”) (ix). On the other, by stitching over three hundred such short
poems together into one work, Mullen also experiments with the long poem
as a method for capturing the rhythm, flow, and variety of daily life. As a
whole, Urban Tumbleweed resembles other long poems we have discussed by
creating a tension between continuity and disruption, sameness and change,
repetition and difference, part and whole.
A second way in which this book embodies the turn to everyday-​life proj-
ects is that Mullen explicitly explains that the raison d’être for her experiment
is a quest for the everyday. The goal of doing this project in the first place—​
taking the walk, writing the tanka—​is to better attend to and apprehend the
quotidian: “the brevity and clarity of tanka make it suitable for capturing in
concise form the ephemera of everyday life (ix).” This element of the work is
apparent in not only its insistently quotidian content but also in its presenta-
tion of itself as a “diary,” a diurnal recording or daily journal. Mullen’s tanka
diary overflows with notations and snapshots of the mundane, the ordinary,
the tiny, and overlooked, from “a bruised banana peel” (9) on the sidewalk to
a “plastic flamingo with spinning whirligig / ​wings” (36), to a girl “waiting for
a bus” with “plush pink /​rabbit ears to match her spring outfit” (48). Although
Mullen usually presents observations without much overt comment, the gen-
eral mood is one of affirmation and wonder at daily life and the uncanniness
of the ordinary.
Indeed, the book’s keynote is a recurring sense of awe at the typically unlovely
and unpoetic stuff of city life and the natural world: highways, mass-​produced
objects, roadside weeds, insects, and as is so often the case in such works, trash.
Mullen, too, deploys the “reversal of hierarchies” trope, whereby garbage is
elevated and made visible and beautiful, as in the passage from which Mullen
draws her title: “Urban tumbleweed, some people call it, /​discarded plastic
bag we see in every city /​blown down the street with vagrant wind” (32). The
poems frequently zoom in, often without judgment and with a matter-​of-​fact
Everyday-Life Projects in Contemporary Poetry 269

eye, on the abundant and strange trash we humans leave behind: “a squirrel
holding /​in its paws a shiny candy wrapper” (79), “red ants converging on a
spot where/​someone’s dropped a greasy bite of pepperoni” (60), “two seagulls
face off in the parking lot /​between Costco and In-​N-​Out, /​quarrelling over
a half-​eaten hamburger bun” (19). When Mullen writes in one tanka “Several
species of elegant butterflies /​are known to be attracted to mountains /​of dung
and decomposing garbage” (35), she sets up an implicit parallel between the
elegant butterflies and those other scavenging animals, and ragpicking poets
like herself, who are equally drawn to cast-​offs and detritus.
The third way Urban Tumbleweed reflects the current everyday-​life project
trend is that the poet’s justification for the work specifically relies on the lan-
guage of attention. For Mullen, the walk-​plus-​tanka project acts as an anti-
dote to distraction and means of increasing the writer’s attentiveness to the
micro-​details of daily life: “With the tanka diary to focus my attention, a
pedestrian stroll might result in a poem” (vii). Mullen’s remark underscores
the link between poetry and attention, since the purpose of the project is to
hone and enhance attentiveness and awareness so that “I became a bit more
aware of my environs” (viii).
Some of the poems explicitly work through the tension between distrac-
tion and attention, as in the poem that reads

Walking along the green path with buds

in my ears, too engrossed in the morning news
to listen to the stillness of the garden.
(6)

With the clever line break surprising us with the twist that these “buds” are
not botanical but, rather, headphones, Mullen underscores that we are all
too often so engrossed, so cut off and insulated by technology, that we fail
to experience our immediate surroundings. In this way, the book charts the
speaker’s ongoing efforts to fend off distraction and improve her attentive-
ness, as in the following tanka, which both presents an observation and then
corrects it with more accurate information, echoing a typical move we saw in
James Schuyler’s work:

So light and delicate, skimming tips

of maidenhair trees. I thought you were butterflies.
Now I see you are the tiniest birds.
(46)

The book also subtly reflects on the space where daily life, racial identity, urban
life and nature intersect.33 In a note at the end of the text, Mullen acknowl-
edges that her “interest in using tanka to explore the question ‘What is natural
270 Attention Equals Life

about being human?’ ” can, in part, be traced to the inclusion of her work in
the anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature, edited
by Camille T. Dungy. As Mullen observes, “Dungy contests the boundaries of
nature poetry as well as African American poetry, resisting typical assump-
tions that ‘green’ is white and ‘urban’ is black” (Urban Tumbleweed, 125). By
opening her book with an epigraph from George Washington Carver, by writ-
ing her tankas under the sign of Richard Wright’s haiku, Mullen challenges
conventional, deeply engrained habits of mind that posit “nature”—​a long
with the well-​worn image of the poet attentively communing with nature so
dear to the long pastoral tradition—​as inherently white.34
To explore this issue, Mullen probes her uneasiness with being a poet of
place, one whose job is to be attuned to nature: “Like many inhabitants of Los
Angeles, I am not native to this state of elemental seasons: wind, fire, flood,
mudslide, and earthquake” (Urban Tumbleweed, viii). She explains that “I too
am a transplant to this metropolis” (viii), positions herself as a “city dweller
taking a ‘nature walk’ ” (x), and acknowledges “I lack a proper lexicon to write
about the natural world” (viii). At times, Mullen connects this discomfort and
outsider status to being a person of color in a primarily “white” place, and, by
extension, within a largely white aesthetic tradition, as when she writes about
her stay in Texas: “Stranger here and even more out of place /​than I am, sap-
phire-​blue peacock /​promenading down Waco Street in Marfa, Texas” (86).
With this project of attention, Mullen self-​consciously participates in an
everyday-​life aesthetic lineage, but she forces us to consider what is at stake
when such tools are used by a writer of color—​when an African-​American,
city-​dwelling poet writes “nature poetry,” when the everyday is no longer
conceived of as neutral, or natural, or uninflected by racial identity and sys-
tems of power and exclusion.
As we have seen, the “everyday-​life project,” a mini-​genre that has its
origins in the modernist avant-​garde (if not in Walden), has proliferated in
the new millennium, in part as a powerful response to the cultural panic
about the fate of attention in an age of distraction. Following the lead of
Kenneth Goldsmith and conceptual writing, but turning against some of
its proponents’ precepts and practices, recent poets—​led in many ways by
women poets and writers of color—​have been increasingly interested in using
constraint-​based projects to both enhance their attentiveness to the quotid-
ian and expose the often unnoticed micropolitical dimensions of urban space
and daily life.
Premeditated, rule-​ governed projects and experiments designed to
prompt sharper awareness of daily experience have spread from the con-
fines of experimental art and literature to many spheres of our culture.
Recent years have seen the explosion of new technological means that
allow individuals to monitor and document every meal they eat or record
a snippet from each day of their lives to share with the world and store for
Everyday-Life Projects in Contemporary Poetry 271

posterity, providing a flood of examples of what Darren Wershler-​Henry

has called “conceptualism in the wild” (“Best Before Date”; see also Bök,
“Conceptualism”).
At their best, contemporary everyday-​life projects—​both within litera-
ture and “in the wild”—​attempt to carve out a space where attention to the
daily and local is possible, to make visible what is already there on the surface
but nearly impossible to see, and to offer practical steps for readers and users
who wish to do so in their own lives. Granted, everyday-​life projects may not
always be successful aesthetically or as works of ideology critique. But they do
at times manage to “reconfigure the geometry of attention” in ways that are
potentially liberating and eye-​opening, and they can often achieve the beauty,
strangeness, and complexity one hopes to find in any aesthetic production.
For better or worse, we live in an age of the project, and such works represent
a new and significant episode in a long, ongoing story about art, realism, and
the everyday.
 Conclusion
Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and Beyond

In 2009, The Onion, the satirical newspaper that often seems to have its fin-
ger on the pulse of the Zeitgeist, ran a mock news piece that began: “In an
effort to combat what organizers are calling ‘our current epidemic of com-
plete and utter obliviousness,’ the American Foundation for Paying Attention
to Things has declared December ‘National Awareness Month.’ ” There is,
of course, no “American Foundation for Paying Attention to Things,” nor is
there a “National Awareness Month,” but perhaps there could or should be.
The parody uncomfortably pokes fun at the idea of a society so addled, dis-
tracted, and mesmerized by the allure of images and digital communication
that its citizens are utterly unaware of the most basic and important aspects
of their day-​to-​day existence:  “That’s why this December we’re asking that
all Americans stop whatever it is they’re doing, and take a moment to open
their eyes for once—​just once—​in their lives” (“December Named”). The sat-
ire also hints at the popularity of deliberate, artificial, time-​bound projects
of attention—​in this case, burlesqued as a month officially dedicated to just
being the least bit aware of one’s basic surroundings.
As I have argued in this book, the crisis of attention in contemporary cul-
ture that this Onion piece mocks has given rise to a widespread “everyday
hunger,” or craving for more intimate contact with and knowledge of the
most familiar, mundane aspects of our daily lives. This hunger has, in turn,
sparked a variety of responses, ranging from reality TV to new technological
methods of documenting the everyday, to new forms of poetry.
As we have seen, in the course of the twentieth century, poets and critics
began to define poetry as both a form of attention and a means of pursu-
ing the ever-​elusive everyday. This predilection has become a hallmark of the
poetry of our age, a historically specific marker of a period style. Today, it
is so widespread in American poetry that one could pick up virtually any
recent volume of poems and find a sustained engagement with the everyday.
Conclusion 273

One need look no further than the endless stream of blurbs and book reviews
praising poets for discovering the extraordinary within the ordinary and
transforming the mundane into the miraculous.
My hope is that Attention Equals Life has helped provide a sense of where
this preoccupation with the everyday comes from and has offered a concep-
tual framework to understand what is at stake—​philosophically, politically,
aesthetically—​in everyday-​life poetry. I  also hope this study has offered
some tools to distinguish among the quite different approaches, modes, and
forms that preoccupation depends on, which fall along a continuum of pos-
sible practices and aesthetic strategies. While acknowledging this spectrum
of possibilities, I  have deliberately foregrounded works that perpetuate a
strain of everyday-​life poetics I call skeptical realism, focusing on works by
poets whose goal in pursuing the quotidian might be summed up in this
remark by Charles Bernstein: “I want to intensify, not rarify or elevate or
moralize about nor transcend or explain (away) everyday experience” (My
Way, 30).
The preceding chapters have stressed the serious implications, even the
ethical stakes, involved in a practice devoted to intensifying the everyday by
changing how we pay attention to it. Few things are as important as how, and
whether, and to what we pay attention. William James, one of the most influ-
ential thinkers on the nature of attention, insisted on its power and impor-
tance, its role in determining and shaping our experience and knowledge of
the world, as when he approvingly cited this comment by Josiah Royce: “Our
own activity of attention will determine what we are to know and what we are
to believe” (quoted in Robert Richardson, William James, 289).
To this way of thinking, the scope and “geometry” of our attention,
inculcated by culture, ideology, and ingrained habits, actually creates what
Jacques Rancière refer to as “partitions” of the “sensible.” For Rancière, the
sensible is contingent and changeable. Art and poetry (and politics) have
the ability to redistribute it, to redraw and broaden the coordinates and
parameters that determine what is visible and perceptible, and reveal what
is relegated to the shadows of oblivion and inattention. If this is true, it
has profound ramifications for our experience and understanding of the
everyday. As many theorists and poets of everyday life have shown, even the
most mundane and minor aspects of everyday life—​t he most invisible and
overlooked details—​a re rife with meaning and marked by the workings of
power and politics.
As Henri Lefebvre writes:

A trivial day in our lives—​what do we make of it? It is likely that the survey
[of everyday life] would reveal that taken socially (examined in the light of the
hidden social side of individual triviality) this trivial day would have noth-
ing trivial about it at all. During a day at work or a holiday, we each enter
274Conclusion

into relations with a certain number of social “things” whose nature we do

not understand, but which we support by our active participation; without
realizing it we are caught up in a certain number of social mechanisms.
(Critique, 1:196)

The goal of a creative, thoughtful critique of everyday life—​whether it takes

the form of poetry, or art, or theory—​is to demonstrate the significance of the
ordinary, to puncture the aura of triviality that masks the political realities
and profound truths of everyday life.
And yet, the everyday is, by its very nature, maddeningly difficult to cap-
ture or represent. Lefebvre acknowledges this central paradox when he notes
that “everyday insignificance can only become meaningful when transformed
into something other than everyday life” (Everyday Life, 98). As this book has
shown, poets of everyday life grapple with this paradox at every turn, seizing
upon it as what Wallace Stevens calls “a motive for metaphor” and for the use
of novel literary forms, and taking it as a central theme. In the process, they
develop a mode of experimental realism that views the pursuit of the quotid-
ian simultaneously as a vital, urgent task and an impossible quest.
In tracing the movement from James Schuyler and A. R. Ammons, to
Bernadette Mayer and her descendants, to Ron Silliman and a wide range
of recent projects of attention, this book has argued that an important facet
of the story of the poetics of everyday life has been a gradual deepening of
its political stakes—​an increasing commitment to pursuing the political
implications of altering the distribution of the sensible. This is not to suggest
that contemporary everyday-​life poets disregard aesthetic matters in favor of
political activism or are uninterested in questions of poetic form. Far from it:
they are highly self-​conscious about how different literary forms and styles
affect and shape the nature of content and subject matter; to put it another
way, they are sharply aware of the politics of poetic form.1 For example, when
Ron Silliman complains “I hate what narrative does to time” (The Alphabet),
he suggests that form matters, and he warns that certain literary conventions
risk distorting the experience of daily life, perhaps even more than others.
When contemporary everyday-​life poets engage in unusual projects (write
one tanka based on a daily walk each day for a year; compile a list naming
every object the poet touches for a day) and explore innovative aesthetic
forms (a prose poem written entirely in questions; a work that reframes the
contents of one’s email inbox as a continuous poem; a poem that exclusively
uses the first-​person plural as its central figure; a long serial prose poem about
mundane experience written in regular iambic meter), they do so because
they believe that such forms, constraints, and projects might provide new,
different, and perhaps more adequate access to the quotidian.2
In recent years, more and more pursuers of the everyday have seen it as their
duty and goal to explore and stretch the boundaries of poetry and aesthetic form
Conclusion 275

in order to make visible the operations of gender, race, sexuality, and capitalism
in daily life. This trend parallels, and has perhaps been fueled by, another sign of
our culture’s current obsession with the everyday: the burst of attention to phe-
nomena like “microaggressions,” “everyday sexism,” and “everyday racism.”3 As
Tanzina Vega noted in a recent New York Times article on the spread of concern
about “microaggressions” on college campuses, “the recent surge in popularity
for the term can be attributed, in part, to an academic article Derald W. Sue,
a psychology professor at Columbia University, published in 2007 in which
he broke down microaggressions into microassaults, micro­insults and micro­
invalidations” (Vega, “Students See Many Slights”). In his book Microaggressions
in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation, Sue defines the term as
“brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to certain individuals
because of their group membership” (xvi).4 As Vega notes,
at least in part as a result of a blog started by two Columbia University stu-
dents four years ago called The Microaggressions Project, the word made
the leap from the academic world to the free-​for-​a ll on the web. Vivian Lu,
the co-​creator of the site, said she has received more than 15,000 submis-
sions since she began the project. To date, the site has had 2.5 million page
views from 40 countries. Ms. Lu attributed the growing popularity of the
term to its value in helping to give people a way to name something that
may not be so obvious. “It gives people the vocabulary to talk about these
everyday incidents that are quite difficult to put your finger on,” she said.
(Vega, “Students See Many Slights”)
Phenomena like The Microaggressions Project and the Everyday Sexism
Project, which have been made possible by the Internet, social media, and other
new technologies, function as potent everyday-​life projects, channeling our
attention to previously unnoticed events and behaviors in daily life and docu-
menting them in archives, with the goal of social critique and political change.
I take it as a telling sign of the times that the most celebrated and widely
discussed volume of poetry in 2014, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American
Lyric, is not only centered on the everyday but also transforms this wider
cultural concern with microaggressions in daily life into a searing work of
art and critique. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and a
finalist for the National Book Award, Citizen seems to have struck a powerful
chord—​as Erika Hunt puts it, “Citizen couldn’t be a more timely collection,
arriving on the crest of the latest social outrage” (Hunt, “All About You”).5
The book erupted in the midst of a moment of national soul searching regard-
ing racism, violence, and police brutality, especially prompted by a string of
incidents involving young unarmed black men and boys being killed at the
hands of white men, most often police officers.
Citizen resembles the other works discussed in this book in that it takes
the everyday as its province, and it, too, exploits an array of experimental
276Conclusion

methods to achieve its goal of attending to it. Joining the extensive list of
book-​length poems devoted to dailiness, Citizen is a genre-​bending work that
mixes prose-​poem paragraphs, photographs, scripts for documentary films,
reproductions of paintings, lyric essay, and disjunctive lineated verse.6 As
I mentioned in my introduction, Rankine provocatively labels the book An
American Lyric, despite (or, perhaps because of) the variety of its forms and
its departure from the conventions of poetry. By doing so, she compels us to
consider questions of form and the definition and history of the lyric itself;
the book becomes as much a comment on poetry as a genre and form as it
is a reflection on politics and racial identity. With its passages of flat report-
age in prose, its inclusion of visual images, its mixture of styles and media,
Rankine’s book (like her previous work, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely) posits that
familiar, self-​contained poems and “poetic” language and expected literary
devices are no longer adequate means for capturing the nature of daily life in
modernity; more specifically, it suggests that its own unusual methods may
be more effective in rendering the way racist discourse and behaviors seep
into every nook and cranny of contemporary American life.
At the heart of Rankine’s book is a series of anecdotes told in the second
person, a carefully chosen formal device that creates an unsettling sense that
we as readers are being addressed, blurs the firm lines of identity, and makes
the protagonist of each vignette more plural than singular. These passages
relay, in a chilling, numb, detached voice, instances when bruising racial
microaggressions surface in the course of daily experience. For example, in
one passage Rankine writes:
Because of your elite status from a year’s worth of travel, you have already
settled into your window seat on United Airlines, when the girl and her
mother arrive at your row. The girl, looking over at you, tells her mother,
these are our seats, but this is not what I expected. The mother’s response is
barely audible—​I see, she says. I’ll sit in the middle. (Citizen, 12)

In such moments, Rankine turns up the volume on the “barely audible” sub-
texts and undercurrents of daily social interactions, making them newly per-
ceptible and tangible. As many reviewers have noted, Rankine’s anecdotes
deliberately highlight her own “elite status”; as Nick Laird observes, she “pres-
ents her life as lived in the mostly Caucasian world of the academy, of privi-
lege: she speaks of tennis lessons, housekeepers, conferences. Many pieces are
about how her color precludes acceptance in this white space she inhabits”
(Laird, “A New Way of Writing”).
In one section, Rankine tells of a visit to a new therapist who “specializes
in trauma counseling,” in which the “you” rings the doorbell, and
When the door finally opens, the woman standing there yells, at the top of
her lungs, Get away from my house. What are you doing in my yard?
Conclusion 277

It’s as if a wounded Doberman pinscher or a German shepherd has

gained the power of speech. And though you back up a few steps, you man-
age to tell her you have an appointment. You have an appointment? she
spits back. Then she pauses. Everything pauses. Oh, she says, followed by,
oh, yes, that’s right. I am sorry.
I am so sorry, so, so sorry. (18)

Throughout the book, Rankine suggests that as such tiny slights and micro-
aggressions accumulate, they begin to incur serious psychological and
“physiological costs” (11) for the individuals who experience them over and
over, day after day—​even amounting to a kind of slow-​motion, never-​end-
ing trauma that becomes increasingly palpable and moving to witness as the
book progresses.
When Rankine discusses Citizen in interviews, it is clear that she thinks of
it as a work of experimental realism, a piece of documentary poetics, aimed
at paying attention to and documenting “things as they are”:  “There’s no
imagination, actually,” she told one interviewer. “Many of the anecdotes in
the book were gathered by asking friends of mine to tell me moments when
racism surprisingly entered in when you were among friends or colleagues,
or just doing some ordinary thing in your day… . And then when you start
paying attention, it’s amazing how many things occur in a single day or week
or month” (Rankine, “In ‘Citizen’ ”).
Rankine has explained that Citizen grew out of an ongoing project of “pay-
ing attention” to and documenting everyday incidents and behaviors. Like
many other everyday-​life poets and artists, Rankine sees her role as a collec-
tor, a gatherer of fragments and pieces of evidence of daily life, that she pieces
together to create what one reviewer refers to (quoting Jack Spicer) as “a col-
lage of the real” (Laird, “A New Way of Writing”): “I see myself as a citizen,
walking around, collecting stories, and using those stories to reflect our lives
through poetry, through essays, creating these hybrid texts and plays that
reflect back to us who we are” (“Using Poetry”).7 She imagines this collage of a
book serving as a kind of archive or repository of everyday experience, where
the scars and traces of quotidian racism can be preserved: “Well, part of my
process is archival. I  am invested in keeping present the forgotten bodies”
(Asokan, “I Am Invested”).
In Citizen, Rankine viscerally demonstrates that subtle acts of racism
and discrimination in private daily life exist on a continuum with, and ulti-
mately make possible, the kind of large-​scale, tragic events that have shaken
American society in the past several years, such as the killing of Trayvon
Martin in Florida and of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; of Eric
Garner in Staten Island, New York; and of Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio. As
Barbara K. Fischer puts it, “the book builds from accounts of misunderstand-
ings to a body count.” Ultimately, Rankine insists that “ ‘everyday’ racism
278Conclusion

does more than make people uncomfortable; it imperils lives.” In an inter-

view with PBS, Rankine explained the connection between the microaggres-
sions she recounts and

these major moments, the murders of black men, these kind of moments in
2014 where you think, how did that happen? And I wanted to track it back
and say, well, if people in their daily lives begin by believing and saying
these small things, they will add up to major, major aggressions against
people just because of the color of their skin. And so the book tracks the
small to the large. (“In ‘Citizen’ ”)

Rankine’s book exemplifies one of the major themes of Attention Equals

Life: to understand the “large,” we have an ethical obligation to try to pay
attention to the “small.” The macro can be, must be, found within the
micro. A recent poem by Juliana Spahr puts a different spin on the same
idea: “It might be that only through the minor can we feel enormity” (That
Winter, 14). As Citizen attests, the everyday is precisely where politics and
power happen, where they are felt by and where they shape individuals.
Rankine’s book, however, is merely one example, one possible direction
that the poetics of the quotidian has taken in our time; many such works
are certainly less directly engaged in politics and cultural criticism. But
across the spectrum of this poetry, one finds a guiding conviction that
resonates at the heart of the tradition of everyday-​life poetics that I have
traced in this book: rather than being a realm of the minor or insignificant,
the humdrum, the trivial and routine, rather than being less important
than moments of rupture and change, heroism and disaster, the everyday is
inexhaustibly rich in value, strangeness, and consequence. It is where one
can gain the most important knowledge about what it means to be human
and alive in the modern world.
But to grasp the everyday, to accept the ordinary as it is, is surprisingly
hard work. As we have seen, poetry, of all things, can be a particularly potent
form that never-​ending task takes. A  poetics of everyday life can help ease
the gnawing hunger for the everyday that plagues our distracted culture. It
can alter the parameters of what we see and deem important, can make the
stone stony, and can reframe the mundane to make it noticeable and vivid. As
skeptical realists, poets of the everyday remain acutely aware that the dream of
mastering the everyday or rendering it objectively is a futile goal, and yet they
still urge us to wake up and look, really look. They tell us to open our eyes so
that the taken-​for-​granted features of the quotidian can become legible—​even,
perhaps, inescapable. These things do have meaning. They’re strong as rocks.8
 { Notes }

Introduction
1. O’Hara’s reputation has steadily grown since his tragic death in 1966, and in recent
years it has become increasingly evident that he is not only one of the most important and
best poets to emerge since World War II but that he has been one of the most influential.
For example, in 2011, Tony Hoagland claimed that “Frank O’Hara has had the most wide-
spread, infiltrating impact on the style and voice of American poetry in the last thirty
years” (“Blame it on Rio,” 78).
2. The literature on this topic is vast, but for a sampling of some of the more impor-
tant and influential works on the mid-​to late twentieth-​century proliferation of mass
media, television, and popular culture, and its complex and often dangerous effects on
postwar culture, society, and literature, see Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
and The Medium is the Massage; Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle; Raymond Williams,
Television: Technology and Cultural Form; Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death;
Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV and Welcome to the Dreamhouse; George Lipsitz, Time
Passages; Cecilia Tichi, Electronic Hearth; Neal Gabler, Life: The Movie: How Entertainment
Conquered Reality; Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies; John Fiske, Television Culture and
“Cultural Studies and the Culture of Everyday Life”; Douglas Kellner, Media Culture;
and Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture. For a recent examination of how the nature of
attention has been irrevocably influenced by the media revolution, see Kenneth Rogers’s
The Attention Complex. For key discussions of media’s effects on literature, see Marjorie
Perloff’s Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media and David Foster Wallace’s
“E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” For a historical overview, see Susan J.
Douglas’s “Mass Media: From 1945 to the Present.”
3. See Nicholas Carr, John Brockman, Richard Lanham, Winifred Gallagher, and
Elizabeth Hanson Hoffman and Christopher D. Hoffman. For good introductions to the
debates and fears about the crisis of attention, see Maggie Jackson, Distracted; Rebecca
Solnit, “Diary”; and Nicholas Carr, The Shallows. Also, for a succinct encapsulation of the
effects of new technologies on our brains, ability to concentrate, attention, and ability to
read, see David Mikics’s chapter on “The Problem” in his Slow Reading in a Hurried Age.
4. As I discuss in more detail in c­ hapter 1, I have adapted this term from David Shields’s
recent book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto.
5. For one version of this long history of “the art of the commonplace,” see George
Leonard’s Into the Light of Things.
6. The word everyday, as an adjective or noun, never appears as a single word in these
texts, but there are several references to “every day” and a handful to “daily life.”
7. Stevens, Collected, 96; Ammons, Collected, 169; Armantrout, Veil, 56; Ryan, The Best
of It, 198; Silliman, The Age of Huts, 51. Schuyler refers to these terms directly throughout
his work; for example, he discusses “the everyday” in his essay on Fairfield Porter that
280Notes

I  discuss later, and mentions “dailiness” and “daily life” in “Hymn to Life” (Collected,
215, 219).
8. For helpful discussions about the evolution of the usage and meanings of the words
ordinary and common, see Raymond Williams’s Keywords, 225–​26, 70–​72. It is notable,
however, that Williams does not include an entry for the word everyday, which suggests
its lack of currency as a critical concept as late as 1983, when the revised edition of his
book was published. A sign of the changes in the fortune of the word everyday can be
seen in the fact that the 2005 collection New Keywords, edited by Tony Bennett, Lawrence
Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris, which bills itself as an updated version of Williams’s
influential book, does feature a useful entry on the history of the term everyday, one that
is attuned to recent developments in everyday life studies (New Keywords, 115–​17).
9. See, for example, Liesl Olson’s Modernism and the Ordinary and Byrony Randall’s
Modernism, Daily Time, and Everyday Life.
10. Olson’s Modernism and the Ordinary argues that “the predominance of ordinariness
has often been overlooked, largely because critics have overwhelmingly considered liter-
ary modernism as a movement away from the conventions of nineteenth-​century realism
and toward an aesthetic of self-​conscious interiority” (3). She explains that “one argument
of this book is that this conception fundamentally obscures modernism’s commitment to
the ordinary, to experiences that are not heightened… . The ordinary is not always trans-
formed into something else, into something beyond our everyday world; the ordinary
indeed may endure in and of itself, as a ‘final good’ ” (3–​4). See also Lisi Schoenbach’s
Pragmatic Modernism, which argues that the familiar narrative of modernist disruption
and shock has obscured the emphasis on habit and routine in American modernist writ-
ers who are influenced by pragmatism, like Henry James and Gertrude Stein.
11. It should be noted that Ramazani rightly goes on to qualify the contrast he sets up,
showing that there are exceptions and that neither modernist nor contemporary poetry
can be defined in monolithic or black-​a nd-​white terms (see Norton Anthology, xliv–​x lvii),
a caveat that I share.
12. For more on the influence of Buddhism on the postwar American avant-​garde,
see Ellen Pearlman, Nothing and Everything; Stephen Fredman, “Mysticism”; and George
Leonard, Into the Light of Things.
13. See, for example, the seminal debates about modernism versus realism carried on
by Georg Lukacs (“Realism in the Balance”), Bertolt Brecht (“Against Georg Lukacs”),
Theodor Adorno (“Reconciliation Under Duress”), and others, collected in Adorno et al.,
Aesthetics and Politics.
14. A  related example within the visual arts can be found in the work of the pho-
tographer and conceptual artist Allan Sekula, who coined the term “critical realism” to
describe his own practice. For more, see Jan Baetens and Hilde Van Gelder’s collection
Critical Realism in Contemporary Art.
15. Critical discussions of twentieth-​and twenty-​first–​century American poetry have
rarely centered on the term or concept of realism, especially in contrast to discussions
of fiction. However, “realism” does play an important role in the poetics developed by
Language writers in the 1970s and 1980s, as I  discuss in c­ hapter  5, on Ron Silliman.
Although it has not often been foregrounded in much of the critical discussion on
Language poetry, see George Hartley, Textual Politics and Language Poetry, and David
Huntsperger, Procedural Form in Postmodern American Poetry, for studies that do reflect
Notes 281

on realism and Language writing. Another important exception to this general neglect is
the critical work of Joan Retallack (a poet-​critic associated with Language poetry), whose
book The Poethical Wager focuses on the avant-​garde’s interest in a new form of realism
that she calls “complex realism.” This mode is closely related to what I am calling skepti-
cal/​experimental realism. In c­ hapter 1, I discuss Retallack’s notion of “complex realism”
and its relationship to attention, ethics, and politics, in greater detail.
16. This remark can be found on the back cover of Armantrout’s book Veil.
17. See Hal Foster’s influential account of “the return of the real” in the visual arts
since 1960.
18. For a recently published study of how twentieth-​century avant-​garde poetry
responds to new technologies of communication and a culture of information overload,
see Paul Stephens, The Poetics of Information Overload.
19. As I discuss in ­chapter 1, there have been few sustained studies that bring atten-
tion and poetry together. See Margaret Koehler’s study of eighteenth-​century poetry and
attention, Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century; and Erin McNellis’s dissertation,
Savage Torpor, which focuses on twentieth-​century literature. Jonathan Crary’s book
Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, has been especially
important in kindling studies of attention and culture and literature, but his focus is on
the later nineteenth century.
20. This study has been enriched by the now rather voluminous interdisciplinary criti-
cal literature devoted to everyday life. For indispensable overviews and introductions
to the key everyday life thinkers and the issues they raise, see studies by Sheringham
(Everyday Life), Highmore (Everyday Life and Cultural Theory), and Gardiner (Critiques of
Everyday Life). Liesl Olson’s review essay “Everyday Life Studies” in Modernism/​Modernity
is another useful introduction to the field and its relationship to literary studies. Other
crucial and illuminating sources include the 1987 special issue devoted to the everyday in
Yale French Studies, and its excellent introduction by Alice Kaplan and Kristin Ross; John
Fiske’s “Cultural Studies and the Culture of Everyday Life”; Laurie Langbauer’s essay in
Diacritics, as well as the book it became a part of, Novels of Everyday Life; Rita Felski’s
influential introduction in New Literary History and her chapter in Doing Time; two other
works by Kristin Ross (“French Quotidian” and Fast Cars); John Roberts’s Philosophizing
the Everyday; Peter Osborne’s The Politics of Time; Perloff’s Wittgenstein’s Ladder; and vari-
ous essays collected in special issues of New Literary History and Cultural Critique on the
everyday. Highmore’s Everyday Life Reader is a valuable resource, collecting together a
broad range of essays and creating a nascent canon. For a number of works that are partic-
ularly invested in cultural studies and sociology, see Fran Martin’s textbook Interpreting
Everyday Culture, and the primers and textbooks Popular Culture and Everyday Life, edited
by Toby Miller and Alec McHoul; Understanding Everyday Life, edited by Tony Bennett
and Diane Watson, Contemporary Culture and Everyday Life, edited by Tony Bennett and
Elizabeth Silva; along with Highmore’s Ordinary Lives, Joe Moran’s Reading the Everyday,
and John Storey’s Cultural Consumption and Everyday Life and his From Popular Culture to
Everyday Life. See Stephen Johnstone’s The Everyday for a wide-​ranging collection of essays
about the everyday within the context of twentieth-​century visual art. Literary studies
that bring together theories of everyday life with literature include Langbauer’s Novels
of Everyday Life; the essays collected in the special issue of Modernist Cultures edited by
Scott McCracken on “Modernism and the Everyday,” including Ella Ophir’s “Modernist
282Notes

Fiction”; and the recent books by Liesl Olson, Randall, and Phillips. Important studies
by Douglas Mao (Solid Objects) and Bill Brown (A Sense of Things) come at similar issues
from a different angle by focusing more on the role of material objects in literary works
than on the everyday per se. See also “Stevens and the Everyday,” the 2013 special issue of
the Wallace Stevens Journal, edited by Bart Eeckhout and Rachel Galvin.
21. The intensity and depth of current interest in the topic of modernism and the
everyday is perhaps best seen in the topic chosen for the 2013 annual conference of
the Modernist Studies Association (“Everydayness and the Event”), held in Brighton,
England. See also Declan Kiberd’s well-​received recent study (Ulysses and Us), which
argues that in Ulysses, Joyce above all else “sought a new style which would show the dig-
nity of everyday living” (10–​11).
22. Of the recent books I’ve mentioned, only Phillips’s studyextends beyond the frame
of modernism, and is thus a welcome exception to this trend. Her book straddles the two
halves of the century, with chapters on Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens joining chapters
on Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill. However, while the focus on the latter pair brings
her study into the postwar period, she only briefly considers the poetry of the past several
decades in her conclusion, where she highlights “everyday poetry’s enduring and evolving
relevance” in works by John Ashbery, Robert Hass, Kay Ryan, and Frank Bidart. Phillips
also does not focus, as I do, on distinguishing particular features of post-​1945 everyday-​
life poetics from that of earlier stages, nor does her book emphasize poetry in relation to
historical and cultural developments (Poetics of the Everyday, 201).
23. In Modernism and the Ordinary, Liesl Olson offers a useful overview of everyday-life
theory, but also dismisses its utility for her discussion of modernism because, she argues,
Lefebvre and other theorists of the everyday come after the heyday of the modernist texts
she studies: “the everyday described by Lefebvre differs historically from the everyday of
literary modernism, a point that this book emphasizes… . Lefebvre’s theoretical model
(and those influenced by it) has a stronger link to the literature of the same period… . For
historical and cultural reasons, then, I do not draw extensively on Lefebvre’s theoretical
ideas” (13). Although Phillips draws on the lexicon of everyday-​life studies, she too does
not find theorists like Lefebvre to be useful for her project: “this study therefore does not
attend to sociological or cultural-​studies work” on the everyday (Poetics of the Everyday,
224n10). In her review essay “Everyday Life Studies,”, Olson points out that recent books
by Randall and Phillips “both minimize theories of everyday life in favor of philosophies
of habit and time” associated with figures like James, Bergson, Kierkegaard, and Freud,
a move Olson seems to favor on the grounds that Lefebvre and de Certeau are anachro-
nistic for a discussion of pre-​World War II modernism: “both studies avoid the pitfalls of
relying on theoretical models that demand careful and extended historicizing in order to
illuminate the literature of modernism” (178–​79).
24. The most important exception to this general neglect is Siobhan Phillips’s excellent
2010 book, The Poetics of the Everyday, which is the most sustained study of American
poetry and the everyday to date. Olson’s Modernism and the Ordinary also includes an
important chapter on Wallace Stevens; nevertheless, her remaining chapters—​on Joyce,
Woolf, Stein’s prose, and Proust—​tilt the balance of her study toward prose.
25. Until recently, the American philosophical tradition has been largely absent from
the discussion of everyday life in Anglo-​American cultural and literary studies. In 2002,
Rita Felski pointed out the “surprising lack of cross-​referencing or acknowledgment
Notes 283

amongst scholars influenced by these disparate thinkers” (Introduction, 613), and urged
closer attention to the American philosophical strain. This has begun to change since
Felski’s 2000 and 2002 essays on the subject; for example, Sheringham does briefly discuss
Cavell in his treatment of the field (Everyday Life, 229–​33); Phillips uses Cavell and James
in her study of everyday poetry (Poetics of the Everyday); Liesl Olson (90–​95) and Randall
(Modernism, 29–​58) discuss James in relation to the modernist everyday; Schoenbach’s
book juxtaposes James, Dewey, and pragmatism’s concept of habit with that of modern-
ism and the avant-​garde (and briefly discusses theories of everyday life as well) (Pragmatic
Modernism, 47–​48, 155–​56ns36, 37). Relevant studies of pragmatism and literature, espe-
cially poetry, include those by Richard Poirier, Jonathan Levin, Joan Richardson, Ross
Posnock, Timothy Parrish, Paul Grimstad, Michael Magee, and Lisi Schoenbach, as well
as my own Beautiful Enemies, which argues for the pragmatist orientation of the New
American poetry of the postwar period.
26. Liesl Olson also notes the prevalence of this paradox (which she discusses in detail
in her book Modernism and the Ordinary) in her review essay on recent everyday life stud-
ies: “the insistent paradox of everyday life continues to infuse new studies with energy
and organization. The paradox can be put this way: to say this is ordinary is to give signifi-
cance to what is insignificant. How do we discuss the ordinary when by its very nature it
should remain overlooked?” (“Everyday Life Studies,” 175–​76).
27. Sheringham makes a similar argument in his book, where he argues that traditional
realism, “established genres,” and entrenched artistic styles fail to do justice adequately
to the complexity of everyday life (Everyday Life, 15). Rather, it is avant-​garde strategies
of “indirection and obliquity, often produced via the friction and fusion of genres” (122),
experimentation with form, and the creation of hybrid works that “have often been pro-
ductive” in laying claim to the everyday (45).
28. The phrase comes from an essay about James Schuyler by poet and critic Douglas
Crase that I discuss in ­chapter 2.
29. For a wide-​ranging account of how a number of twentieth-​century poets use form
to engage with daily time, see Siobahn Phillips, Poetics of the Everyday. For two important,
compelling studies of the postmodernist long poem, see Joseph Conte (Unending Design)
and Brian McHale (The Obligation Toward the Difficult Whole).
30. For incisive recent discussions of poetry as a genre and the historically contin-
gent, constructed notion of “lyric” as a form that has often been deemed equal to poetry
itself, see Virginia Jackson’s Dickinson’s Misery and the essays collected in The Lyric Theory
Reader edited by Jackson and Yopie Prins.
31. For more on the epiphany in literature, see Wim Tigges’s collection of essays,
Moments of Moment, which includes Robert Langbaum’s seminal 1983 essay “The
Epiphanic Mode in Wordsworth and Modern Literature” and Tigges’s own “Typology
of Literary Epiphanies.” See also Jiří Flajšar, Epiphany in American Poetry, who provides
a thorough history of theories of epiphany and the prevalence of epiphany in modern-
ism, before moving past the modernist period to a substantial discussion of “the epiph-
anic mode in contemporary American poetry.” For an enlightening discussion of the
epiphany in modernist writing in relation to anxieties about hyper-​awareness and hyper-​
attentiveness, see Paul Ardoin, “Perception Sickness.” Liesl Olson discusses modernist
and Joycean epiphany (Modernism, 7–​8, 37–​45) and Woolf’s “moments of being” (62–​66),
connecting them to Wordsworth’s “spots of time” (62–​63). Olson and Phillips usefully
284Notes

question and complicate the association of modernist writing with the static epiphany;
see Phillips, Poetics of the Everyday, 9–​11.
32. Perloff remarks dryly that Ashbery here “casts a cold eye on the seemingly end-
less round of epiphanies his contemporaries say they are experiencing” (Poetics of
Indeterminacy, 252).
33. For another, potent version of this critique, see the brief essay, “Poetics of Everyday
Life” by critic and Language poet Michael Davidson. Tacitly alluding to James Wright’s
“Lying in a Hammock” and other similar examples, Davidson critiques the kind of poetry
that “holds out the hope of containing everyday experience as representative, thus link-
ing the immediate and transitory with the metaphysical and eternal. The ‘deep image’
epiphany at the side of the road, the apotheosis of horse turds into epiphenomenal vapor,
the neo-​surrealist juxtaposition of pool table and zebra rug—​t hese are attempts to rep-
resent the casual as special, to escape contingency through better advertising. Instead of
returning us to everyday life, such images strive for continuities outside of time” (173).
34. Pound’s comments, from a letter to his father about the structure of the Cantos, can
be found in Ramazani (Norton Anthology, 1:348). Critics have developed their own lexicon
for such moments, such as “the romantic image” (Frank Kermode, Romantic Image), “the
romantic moment” (M. H. Abrams, quoted in Flajsar, Epiphany in American Poetry, 21) or
“the visionary moment” (Paul Maltby, The Visionary Moment: A Postmodern Critique).
35. The remark by Dubuffet can be found in Karen Rosenberg’s piece on Dubuffet, “A
Creative Vision”; Kaprow’s statement is quoted in Richard Witts, The Velvet Underground,
10; and the Oldenburg remark can be found in Stiles and Selz, Theories and Documents of
Contemporary Art, 336.
36. Christopher Schmidt’s Poetics of Waste provides an extensive exploration of this
topic. See also the final chapter of Maurizia Boscagli’s Stuff Theory, which focuses on
“thinkers, artists, and filmmakers who are formulating a cultural politics out of trash’s
disruptive power” (228).
37. For a brief gloss on the “aesthetic regime of art,” see the appendix to Rancière’s The
Politics of Aesthetics (81), as well as the discussion on pp. 22–​29 of the book: the aesthetic
regime of art “abolishes the hierarchical distribution of the sensible,” the “hierarchy of
the arts, their subject matter, and their genres,” and promotes “the equality of represented
subjects, the indifference of style with regard to content, and the immanence of meaning
in things themselves” (Politics of Aesthetics, 81).
38. See George Leonard (Into the Light of Things) for an important discussion of
“the art of the commonplace” that traces an experimental tradition that stretches from
Wordsworth through Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman to John Cage and the absorption
of Buddhism into the American avant-​garde.
39. For more on this phenomenon, see Scott Timberg, “Meet the Gimmick Books,” and
Steve Almond, “A Year for ‘Year Of’Books.”
40. Rubin’s book positions itself explicitly as a project devoted to attention—​one
chapter is even entitled “Pay Attention” and explores various methods of combatting her
own lack of “mindfulness.” She also acknowledges that her project of living “deliber-
ately” owes a debt to the example of Thoreau: “Of course, this approach isn’t new. Thoreau
moved to Walden Pond in 1845 (he did a two-​year project, instead of a one-​year project,
but the idea was the same). The ‘year of…’ approach resonates with people. Whether
it’s because we measure our lives according to the passing of birthdays or holidays, or
Notes 285

because of the influence of the school schedule, a year feels like the right length of time
for an ‘experiment in living,’ to borrow Thoreau’s phrase. A year feels like enough time
for real change to be possible—​but manageable” (The Happiness Project) https://​gretchen-
rubin.com/​books/​t he-​happiness-​project/​interviews/​.
41. Henry Jenkins defines vernacular culture as “culture that is generated by amateurs”
(Convergence Culture, 293). Also, see Christian Bök, who observes that “Darren Wershler
has coined the phrase ‘conceptualism in the wild’ to describe writing that has arisen
totally outside the purview of poetics, but that has nevertheless seemed absurdly familiar
to practitioners of Conceptual Literature, because (without intending to do so) such writ-
ing appears to exploit the same kind of uncreative techniques, normally deployed by the
avant-​garde for the literary purposes of poetry. Such ‘conceptualism in the wild’ does not
originate from the institutions of literature, nor does it get validated by the practitioners
of literature” (“Conceptualism in the Wild”).
42. The humor website Clickhole (a spin-​off from the satirical newspaper and web-
site The Onion) recently featured a parody skewering the ubiquity of such photo-​a-​
day projects: “Woman Takes One Photo Of Herself Every Day For A Week” (June 19,
2014): “Wow. Just incredible. This woman took a photo of herself every single day for
a week, and the results will blow you away! As the pictures go by, the photographer
undergoes a spectacular transformation that serves as a beautiful reminder of just how
profoundly we can change over the course of seven days. It’s a moving testament to
life’s impermanence.”
43. When the creator of One Second Everyday explains the app’s goals, he deploys
the language of attention and daily life, as he claims that using his app can awaken us,
make us more alert to the mundane and its “priceless data”: “We have a tendency to pull
cameras out when we’re doing something fun or interesting, but we probably don’t think
to record when we’re just sitting at home watching TV. Recording a moment daily started
encouraging me to wake up and seize each day… . Instead of letting the days, months, &
years blend together into a hazy mush, make each day have meaning! This project con-
tinues to provide me with priceless data on how I’m living my life, and it can do that for
you, too.”
44. By “hybrid,” I refer to the notion that over the past two decades a “third way”
poetics has emerged—​a path that avoids the binary logic of “raw” and “cooked,”
“experimental” and “mainstream,” that has so often structured our sense of the period
and limited its possibilities since the dawn of this era in the 1950s. This fence-​sitting,
hybrid mode—​s ymbolized in the name of the widely read journal Fence, which was
founded in 1998—​points to the assimilation of the disruptive, avant-​garde techniques
associated with Language poetry and the fusion of such strategies with more tradi-
tional conventions of lyric poetry. In 1998, the poet and critic Stephen Burt used the
term “Elliptical Poetry” to describe a number of poets working in this mode (Close
Calls with Nonsense, 345–​56), and in 2009 Cole Swensen and David St. John edited a
Norton anthology entitled American Hybrid that sought to define and enshrine this
new “synthesis.”
45. For a thorough account of the distinctive political and cultural developments of
the 1970s, see Bruce Schulman, The Seventies. See also Andreas Killen’s study 1973 Nervous
Breakdown, which argues that the year in his title was “a cultural watershed, a moment of
major realignments and shifts in American politics, culture, and society.”
286Notes

Chapter 1
1. I provide a lengthy list of works on this topic in my introduction. For one among
countless examples, see Nicholas Carr’s best-​selling book The Shallows, which opens with
a similar narrative in which he realizes how easily distracted he has become in recent
years:  “Now my concentration starts to drift after a page or two. I  get fidgety, lose the
thread, begin looking for something else to do” (5). A few pages later he concludes: “The
very way my brain worked seemed to be changing. It was then that I  began worrying
about my inability to pay attention to one thing for more than a couple of minutes” (16).
Carr, like Solnit, registers a profound sense of loss: “I missed my old brain” (16).
2. For more on the rise and “triumph of reality television,” see Leigh Edwards, Triumph
of Reality TV.
3. The success of Overheard in New  York has spawned a series of companion
sites: Overheard in the Office, Overheard at the Beach, and Overheard Everywhere.
4. See Iyer (“Joy of Quiet”), Toohey (“Thrill of Boredom”), Tugend (“Plugged-​In
World”), and J. Jenkins (“Homage”).
5. For more on slow TV, see Heller. “Slow TV Is Here.”
6. In his 2004 book In Praise of Slowness, Carl Honoré coined the phrase “slow move-
ment.” For more, see www.slowmovement.com. See also Solnit’s 2013 “plea for slowness”
(“Diary”).
7. Beginning with the premise that “the Age of Digital Distraction throws up unprec-
edented challenges in the face of readers” (Slow Reading, 7), Mikics offers “a how-​to guide
for the overburdened, hurried person who encounters ‘texts’ all the time—​emails, tweets,
short online news pieces—​but who wants something more rewarding, something that
only slow reading can achieve” (3). Mikics connects his notion of “slow reading” to the
“new movement championing slowness: slow food, slow travel,” and explains that “slow
reading is a part of the new idea of slowness, the answer to the frazzled nerves and some-
times witless frenzy of the linked-​up world we live in” (32).
8. James Wood explicitly praises the novelist for satisfying a hunger for the every-
day in contemporary culture: “Knausgaard’s world is one in which the adventure of the
ordinary—​t he inexhaustibility of the ordinary as a child once experienced it (‘the taste
of salt that could fill your summer days to saturation’)—​is steadily retreating; in which
things and objects and sensations are pacing toward meaninglessness. In such a world, the
writer’s task is to rescue the adventure from this slow retreat: to bring meaning, color, and
life back to the soccer boots and to the grass, and to cranes and trees and airports, and
even to Gibson guitars and Roland amplifiers and Ajax” (“Total Recall,”). See also Ben
Lerner (“Each Cornflake”) on Knausgaard.
9. In my introduction, I mentioned how recent books by Olson, Phillips, and Randall
use—​a nd distance themselves from—​everyday life theory (see introduction, note 23).
10. Although Felski’s juxtaposition of these traditions is extremely sharp and help-
ful, she seems to downplay the dialectical nature of Lefebvre’s work, perhaps over-
stating the emphasis on rupture, defamiliarization, and transformation in the French
critique of the quotidian. She links Lefebvre with the rhetoric of shock and disruption
found in avant-​garde movements like Surrealism (in both the Surrealists and Lefebvre,
she points out, “one finds the same passionate condemnation of everyday repetition,
the stultifying drudgery of the already known, the docile conformity to oppressive
routine” (“Introduction,” 609). Felski elides Lefebvre’s fierce attack in the first volume
Notes 287

of his Critique (110–​23) on the Surrealists (who he felt mistakenly prioritized “the
exceptional and the extraordinary” and “privileged moments” over the everyday as
it is) (on this point, see also Sheringham, Everyday Life, 135). Lefebvre and de Certeau
often accept everyday practices and experiences as they are, and insist on the cre-
ativity and meaning within them, perhaps to a greater degree than Felski suggests.
By the same token, William James was ambivalent rather than completely sanguine
about habit and its effects: he famously refers to habit as “the fly-​wheel of society, its
most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of
ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor”
(Psychology: The Briefer Course, 10).
11. Cavell discusses Emerson as a philosopher attuned to the “vulgar” and common: “he
takes the familiar and low as his study, as his guide, his guru; as much his point of arrival as of
departure” (Senses, 147), and discusses the passage I just quoted from “The American Scholar,”
noting that it “is a list epitomizing what we may call the physiognomy of the ordinary, a form
of what Kierkegaard calls the perception of the sublime in the everyday” (149–​50).
12. For more on James’s profound influence on twentieth-​century writing, especially
experimental modernism and postmodernism, see Poirier (Poetry and Pragmatism; The
Renewal of Literature), Posnock (Color and Culture), Levin (Poetics of Transition), Grimstad
(Experience), Joan Richardson (A Natural History of Pragmatism and Pragmatism and
American Experience), Magee (Emancipating Pragmatism), and Epstein (Beautiful Enemies).
13. See, for example, Heidegger’s discussion of the “undifferentiated character of
Dasein’s everydayness”: “because this average everydayness makes up what is ontically
proximal for this entity, it has again and again been passed over in explicating Dasein.
That which is ontically closest and well known, is ontologically farthest and not known at
all; and its ontological signification is overlooked” (Being and Time, 69).
14. Heidegger discusses what he means by “everydayness” throughout Being and Time;
for example, see pp.  37–​38, 69, and 421–​23. As Cavell points out, the entire method at
the heart of Heidegger’s Being and Time is “meant to unconceal the obvious, the always
present” (In Quest, 165). For more on the role of the everyday in Heidegger’s thought, see
Michael Inwood, Heidegger: A Very Short Introduction, 31–​63.
15. Lefebvre and other later thinkers, like Agnes Heller, criticize Heidegger for viewing
daily life as “inauthentic” and “fallen,” and this is surely a major theme in Being and Time.
In the first volume of his Critique of Everyday Life, Lefebvre uses Heidegger as a foil to
develop his own more positive assessment of daily life (see, for example, 124).
16. On Wittgenstein and poetry, see Perloff’s Wittgenstein’s Ladder. Perloff’s introduc-
tion charts Wittgenstein’s immense influence across various spheres of culture, including
fiction, Cage, Fluxus, and conceptual art. In another piece, she refers to Wittgenstein
as “Cage’s favorite philosopher” (“Difference”) On Porter and Wittgenstein, see Justin
Spring (Fairfield Porter), and John Ashbery’s comment about a letter in which Porter
“quoted from memory a line of Wittgenstein that he felt central to his aesthetics” (Reported
Sightings, 317) and various letters in Porter’s Material Witness (for example, 292). For more
on Cage and Wittgenstein, see Fielding, “Aesthetics of the Ordinary.” Bernstein’s remark,
and other thoughts on Wittgenstein, can be found in his interview with Daniel Benjamin
(“Poetry is a Form”).
17. Cavell discusses his fascination with the similarities between Emerson and Thoreau
and Heidegger and Wittgenstein (and reflects on the gradual process by which he came
288Notes

to accept Emerson and Thoreau as philosophers) in numerous places in his volumi-

nous work. See, for example, his Senses of Walden (131–​16), This New Yet Unapproachable
America (1–​28, 79–​83), and his essays “The Philosopher in American Life” (3–​26) and “The
Uncanniness of the Ordinary” (153–​78) in his In Quest of the Ordinary.
18. Cavell’s sui generis work has been slowly taken up by literary studies and has been
discussed in connection with American poetry (see, for example, Thomas Gardner’s
Regions of Unlikeness, or my own Beautiful Enemies), but until recently at least, it has not
been central to critical discussions of the everyday in literary and cultural theory. He
is not mentioned, for example, in introductions to the field by Gardiner, Highmore, or
Storey, nor is his work excerpted in anthologies edited by Highmore or Johnstone. As
I mentioned, Sheringham does briefly discuss Cavell in the context of everyday-​life the-
ory (Everyday Life, 229–​33), and Phillips prominently includes Cavell in her discussion of
poetry and the everyday (Poetics of the Everyday, 12–​13, 54–​56), and Olson touches on his
work as well. For a recent examination of Cavell, Wallace Stevens, and the everyday, see
Rachel Malkin, “Public Desires, Private Desires.”
19. Siobhan Phillips puts it thus: “Faced with unsolvable uncertainty, Cavell explains,
one must replace the vain attempt to know what is real with the viable effort to acknowl-
edge what is familiar” (Poetics of the Everyday, 12).
20. Lefebvre comes across as perhaps the most important and influential figure in the
studies of everyday-​life theory by Sheringham, Gardiner, and Highmore. Each have sub-
stantial chapters devoted to his contributions to the everyday-​life theory. For more on
Lefebvre, see book-​length studies by Merrifield (Henri Lefebvre), Rob Shields (Lefebvre),
and Elden (Understanding Lefebvre), as well as Kristin Ross’s Fast Cars and Thomas Davis’s
essay “What True Project Has Been Lost?” Lefebvre’s reputation has grown rapidly in
the past couple of decades—​as Kanishka Goonewardena put it in the 2008 book Space,
Difference, Everyday Life:  “Belatedly, Lefebvre’s reputation has grown exponentially as a
leading figure in European philosophy and social theory; and his pioneering works on
space, everyday life, and global urbanization have revitalized urban theory, geography,
planning, architecture, and cultural studies.” One sign of the widespread interest in
Lefebvre today can be seen in a contest held on Twitter in 2014 by Verso Books (which had
just published a new edition of Critique of Everyday Life). The publisher offered to give away
ten copies to selected participants who answered the following prompts: “What makes you
angry about daily life in capitalist society? Lefebvre found both oppression and resistance
in the small details of everyday life and wrote about it in 848 pages—​but we want to hear
from you in just one sentence! To be in with a chance of winning, send us your critique of
everyday life, summed up in one line! Extra points will be given for wit, humor, snark,
bracing observation, giddy optimism/​pessimism, anachronisms, Lefebvre references, and
emoji.” One can only imagine what Lefebvre would have thought of this contest.
21. Sheringham, Gardiner, and Highmore each discuss Situationism in the context of
everyday-​life studies; all three discuss the close and tumultuous dialogue, and eventual
falling out, that occurred between Lefebvre and Debord, especially surrounding the dra-
matic events of May 1968 in France, which shaped the development of both Situationism
and Lefebvre’s own work.
22. For more on Debord and the Situationists, see Merrifield’s Guy Debord, Kaufmann’s
Guy Debord, and the documents collected in Knabb’s Situationist International Anthology.
There has been a resurgence of interest in Situationism in recent years, within poetry as well
as many other spheres of culture. For example, the poet Juliana Spahr recently taught a course
Notes 289

as a visiting writer at the University of Alabama, in which graduate students took part in a
collaborative workshop with the goal of writing “something about Tuscaloosa that … will
get at the ‘psycho’ in ‘psychogeography’ ”; Spahr’s description of the workshop quotes from
Debord’s definition of the dérive, and explains: “We will attempt this: to write something
that captures the flow of acts, the gestures, the strolls, the encounters of Tuscaloosa” (see
Brouwer, “Being There”). Other examples of contemporary poets who write poetry in explicit
dialogue with Situationism are Joshua Clover, starting with the image of The Naked City by
Debord on the cover of his first book, Madonna Anno Domini, and running throughout his
poetry and critical writing; and Lisa Robertson, who cites the Situationists as an influence on
her Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. Furthermore, the
left-wing, anti-​capitalist Occupy Wall Street movement that emerged in 2011 drew overt con-
nections to the Situationists and May 1968. For more, see Kamiya, “The Original Mad Men.”
23. On de Certeau’s role within everyday-​life studies, see chapters by Highmore (Everyday
Life), Gardiner (Critiques of Everyday Life), and Sheringham (Everyday Life); Felski’s dis-
cussions in “Introduction” and “Invention”; and Highmore’s book-​length study, Michel de
Certeau: Analysing Culture.
24. Another fascinating chapter in the story of everyday-​life studies, especially in terms
of the British context, is the emergence of Mass-​Observation, a large-​scale social research
project founded in 1937 that recorded and archived information about the daily lives of
British citizens. For more on Mass-​Observation, see Highmore’s extensive chapter in
Everyday Life and Cultural Theory (75–​112) and Caleb Crain’s essay “Surveillance Society.”
25. Scholars have addressed the gendering of the figure of the flâneur; for example, see
Janet Wolff’s influential essay “The Invisible Flâneur” and the essays collected in D’Souza
and McDonough, The Invisible Flâneuse?
26. For more on this critique, see Langbauer (“Cultural Studies”), Felski (“Introduction”
and “Invention”), and Randall (Modernism).
27. For more on the long history of the association of women with the ordinary, see
Liesl Olson (Modernism and the Ordinary, 16), Randall (Modernism, 17–​19), and Schor
(Reading in Detail). For more on “the marked gender connotations” at work in the history
of the “everyday” as a concept, see Bennett et al., New Keywords.
28. Laurie Langbauer’s oft-​cited 1992 essay in Diacritics was one of the first pieces
to highlight the gendered assumptions and sexism of Lefebvre’s theorization of how
women experience the quotidian. Other important critiques of Lefebvre’s handling
of gender which follow Langbauer’s lead include those by Felski, Randall, and Olson.
Highmore addresses the feminist critique but argues that Lefebvre’s stance on this issue
is more ambivalent and filled with contradiction than such accounts presume. Although
Highmore concurs that the “Hegelian architecture that Lefebvre employs is structured
on the aggressive erasure of differences (ethnic, gendered, sexual and classed differences)
in the name of a universality or totality that implicitly privileges the heterosexual mas-
culine, ethnocentric, bourgeois self,” he also cautions that Lefebvre’s notion of totality
“doesn’t seem to be a totality that erases difference,” since “he seems bent on trying to
offer more and more complex attempts to reveal the unevenness of capitalism and its
structuring of difference” (Everyday Life, 125, 127).
29. Bryony Randall addresses this move: “the commonplace association of ‘everyday
life’ with women is an assumption on which many feminist texts on the everyday also
rest—​in an attempt, perhaps, to redress an emphasis in earlier theorists’ work on the
urban, masculine everyday” (Modernism, 17).
290Notes

30. One site where critical work on the everyday has recently taken up issues of race
and identity has been within Asian-​American studies. See, for example, stimulating
books by Yoon Sun Lee (Modern Minority) and Ju Yon Kim (The Racial Mundane).
31. One exception is Michael Sheringham, who does emphasize the importance of
attention in his study of everyday-​life theory. In the final paragraph of his book, for exam-
ple, he argues that “one should associate the quotidien, above all perhaps, with the act and
process of attention” (Everyday Life, 398).
32. See Crary (Suspension of Perception, 22), for a lengthy footnote that details “a few
of the very large number of works that treat this subject during this period,” including
James’s Principles of Psychology and works by Wilhelm Wundt, Théodule Ribot, F.  H.
Bradley, John Dewey, Henri Bergson, Pierre Janet, Charles Sanders Peirce, Sigmund
Freud, Edmund Husserl, and many others. For an overview of this history, see Johnson
and Proctor:  “Attention has been of interest to the field of psychology since its earli-
est days. This research was first summarized in the book The Psychology of Attention by
Ribot (1890). Eighteen years later, two landmark texts devoted to the topic of attention
were published: Titchener’s (1908/​1973) Psychology of Feeling and Attention and Pillsbury’s
(1908/​1973) Attention. These texts put the study of attention in experimental psychology
on a firm footing” (Attention, 2).
33. Johnson and Proctor’s textbook Attention:  Theory and Practice provides a lucid
introduction for nonspecialists to the field of attention, both its history and the state of
current research in the field.
34. “Attention research has flourished since the middle of the 20th century, in large
part due to the development of theories and models that characterize human information
processing in detail” (Johnson and Proctor, Attention, 23).
35. See, for example, the work of the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, who has
written extensively on attention in his discussions of the erosion of personal and col-
lective subjectivity under capitalism. His book Taking Care of Youth and the Generations
“contends that the greatest threat to social and cultural development is the destruction of
young people’s ability to pay critical attention to the world around them,” as the publisher
puts it. See also Paul North’s The Problem of Distraction (which builds upon and critiques
Crary’s study) and, within the realm of literary studies, see Byrony Randall’s study of
modernism and daily life, which has a chapter on attention in James and Bergson; and
within cultural and media studies, see the chapter on attention and media in Highmore’s
Ordinary Lives. Recent years have seen widespread discussions of the “attention econ-
omy,” the notion that attention has become an increasingly scarce commodity in our
technological age. See Richard Lanham’s The Economics of Attention, Jonathan Beller’s
The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle, and
Kenneth Rogers’s 2014 study The Attention Complex.
36. For more on the importance of “attention” to James and pragmatism, see Joan
Richardson’s Pragmatism and American Experience. At the very end of her book, after
quoting James’s remark that “our beliefs and attention are the same fact,” she concludes
“it matters what you pay attention to” (201).
37. Joan Richardson argues for the importance of this idea to Dewey’s work as well.
As she points out, Dewey can be seen as “complementing and extending William
James’s emphases on interest and attention as the primary constituents of consciousness”
(Pragmatism, 106). For example, Dewey expresses this central pragmatist theme when he
Notes 291

argues that “selective emphasis, with accompanying omission and rejection, is the heart-​
beat of mental life” (quoted in Richardson, Pragmatism, 106).
38. Randall explicitly ties James’s ideas about attention and distraction to his focus on
the everyday (Modernism, 35–​36).
39. Johnson and Proctor discuss James’s notion of “the selective aspect of attention”
and write that “it is this functional, selective aspect of attention that has been emphasized
in most research of the past 50 years” (Attention, 12).
40. For more on recent developments in the field of attention, from the perspective of
both psychology and philosophy, see Mole, Smithies, and Wu, Attention: Philosophical and
Psychological Essays.
41. “The term inattentional blindness entered the psychology lexicon in 1998 when
psychologists Arien Mack, PhD, of the New School for Social Research, and the late Irvin
Rock, PhD, of the University of California, Berkeley, published the book, Inattentional
Blindness, describing a series of experiments on the phenomenon” (Carpenter, “Sight
Unseen”).
42. The video can be found on Chabris and Simons’s website: http://​w ww.theinvisible-
gorilla.com/​gorilla_​experiment.html.
43. Davidson is more sanguine than most about the implications of this study, and
about the upside of selective attention, especially as it pertains to life in a culture of dis-
traction and short attention spans: “Attention blindness is the fundamental structuring
principle of the brain, and I  believe it presents us with a tremendous opportunity… .
[T]‌he gorilla experiment isn’t just a lesson in brain biology but a plan for thriving in
a complicated world” (Now You See It, 2). Where neuroscientists see “the shortcomings
of the individual,” she sees “the opportunity for collaboration”: “fortunately, given the
interactive nature of most of our lives in the digital age, we have the tools to harness our
different forms of attention and take advantage of them” (2). Sounding much like William
James, Davidson notes that “without focus, the world is chaos; there’s simply too much to
see, hear, and understand,” but “because focus means selection, though, it leaves us with
blind spots, and we need methods for working around them.” Presenting her book as “a
field guide and a survival manual for the digital age,” Davidson argues that “the age we
live in presents us with unique challenges to our attention. It requires new forms of atten-
tion and a different style of focus” (10).
44. Retallack uses this passage as an epigraph to one chapter and attributes it to Dita
Fröller, who may well be a fictional source playfully invented by Retallack herself.
45. Ben Highmore also draws upon Rancière in his discussion of everyday life.
(Ordinary Lives, 45).

Chapter 2
1. For example, David Lehman observes that Schuyler “committed himself to the task
of painting what’s there and only what’s there” (Last Avant-​Garde, 273) and “insists on
affirming ‘things as they are’ ” (275). As Raphael Allison recently noted, “it has become
axiomatic in commentary on James Schuyler to call him a poet who celebrates every-
day experiences and ordinary things” (“James Schuyler,” 106). Similarly, in a recent essay,
Daniel Katz points out that a “valorization of careful observation and description” has
dominated discussions of Schuyler’s work: “Schuyler has received little serious attention
292Notes

from scholars and critics. To the extent that a critical tradition does exist, however, it
tends to single out two elements of Schuyler’s work for particular praise:  its ‘precision
of detail’ or ‘descriptive exactness’ along with its attentive immersion in the ‘everyday’ ”
(“James Schuyler,” 143). Such terms of approbation and assessment appear throughout
the excellent collection of tributes gathered for a special issue of Denver Quarterly in 1990
that was devoted to Schuyler’s work just before his death in 1991 (Denver Quarterly 24,
no. 4). The issue features loving and perceptive tributes to Schuyler’s poetry by a diverse
array of poets, whose styles and sensibilities represent the spectrum of contemporary
poetry, including Barbara Guest, Ann Lauterbach, Sherod Santos, Bin Ramke, and Mark
Rudman.
2. Raphael Allison’s essay questions whether fixating on the “celebratory orientation
toward everyday experience” in Schuyler’s work (which is surely there) does justice to
the range and depth of his poetry. Allison writes that “I would like to argue instead that
Schuyler is deeply skeptical of the everyday and ordinary, and that ‘celebration’ is only
half the story” (“James Schuyler,” 107). He goes on to develop a fascinating argument
that distinguishes between what he sees as the celebratory “way Schuyler treats ordinary
‘subjects,’ ” on the one hand, and the more skeptical way he treats “ordinary language,”
on the other. For Allison, this distinction reveals that “Schuyler more often questions
than celebrates the politics of the ordinary” at those moments when he is grappling with
the social and cultural dimensions of ordinary language, as opposed to everyday subject
matter. In general, this piece is especially refreshing and useful because it seeks “to revise
the image of Schuyler as blithe apostle of the ordinary” (110). While I agree with Allison’s
sense of Schuyler’s ambivalence toward everyday language, I will explore how Schuyler’s
treatment of quotidian subjects is just as skeptical and fraught as his handling of ordinary
language.
3. The two poems in Moxley’s Clampdown are “These Yearly Returns” (28–​30)
and “Taking My Own Advice” (31–​3 4). On Moxley’s book, see Ange Mlinko’s review
(“Comfort and Agony”), and Scott Stanfield (Review), who makes the interesting
point that “Moxley’s imitations in Clampdown of Schuyler in his ‘Morning of the
Poem’ vein provide more insight into his work than most critical commentary.” See
also Rob Stanton (“What ‘We’ Did Next”), who notes of Moxley that “two long-​l ined
wonders are written ‘After James Schuyler’ and one ‘After Ashbery’s ‘Clepsydra,’ find-
ing in the New York School a useful model for balancing breezy everyday detail with
more weighty intimations.” . For more on Fitterman’s book, No, Wait. Yep. Definitely
Still Hate Myself, and the Schuyler connection, see Diana Hamilton’s review in Cold
Front.
4. See, for example, the very useful and wide-​ranging pieces on Schuyler by Mark
Silverberg (“James Schuyler”), David Herd (Enthusiast), Christopher Schmidt (“Baby”),
Daniel Katz (“James Schuyler”), and Raphael Allison (“James Schuyler”). In the past few
years, attention to Schuyler’s work has surged, as can be seen in the bevy of recent criti-
cal essays, extended reviews, and appreciations by David Lehman (Lost Avant-​Garde),
Robert Thompson (“James Schuyler”), Timothy Gray (“New Windows”), William Watkin
(“Let’s Make”), Mark Ford (“Like a Lily”), Peter Campion (“Palpable Fact”), W. S. Di Piero
(“Baby Sweetness”), Eric Gudas (“Scrappiness”), and others.
5. Scholars have begun to examine Schuyler’s work as an antecedent to today’s technol-
ogies of social media and self-​disclosure. For example, in a recent lecture on the “Poetics
Notes 293

of Texting and Twittering,” Robert Bennett argued that “poets such as Robert Creeley and
James Schuyler anticipated today’s twittering and texting by nearly half a century. Their
poems provide seemingly mundane updates about their daily lives, using grammatically
suspect sentence structure and shorthand notation to great effect” (“MSU Professors”).
6. See also Nathan Kernan’s comment that Schuyler’s poems “often draw our attention
to the idea of Day as the infinitely varied yet unchanging, inexorable unit of passing time”
(Schuyler, Diary, 9).
7. “February” was one of only four poems by Schuyler included in The New American
Poetry, the epochal 1960 anthology edited by Donald Allen, which ensured that it would
become an early “greatest hit” for the poet. For more on the poem, see Peter Gizzi, “A Note
on Schuyler’s ‘February,’ ” and William Corbett, “Poet of the Present.”
8. The poem’s reflection on repetition could be viewed as Beckettian in mood, and the
last lines even find a strange echo in Beckett’s Endgame, which appeared in 1957, several
years after Schuyler wrote “February.” Near the start of the play, when Hamm says “This is
not much fun. (Pause). But that’s always the way at the end of the day, isn’t it, Clov?” Clov
answers “Always,” to which Hamm replies “It’s the end of the day like any other day, isn’t
it, Clov?” (Beckett, Endgame, 13).
9. Justin Spring’s biography of Fairfield Porter offers perhaps the most exhaustive
account to date of the artistic and personal relationship between Schuyler and Porter.
Spring’s book details, for the first time, Porter’s bisexuality, and recounts that Porter and
Schuyler engaged in an intermittent and sometimes stormy romantic relationship, despite
the outwardly conventional, heterosexual domestic life Porter lived as a husband and
father. After suffering one of his periodic mental breakdowns in 1961, Schuyler became a
de facto member of the Porter family, and spent more than a decade living with them in
their homes in Southampton and Maine; as Anne Porter, Fairfield’s long suffering wife,
said in an oft-​quoted quip, Schuyler “came to lunch one day and stayed for eleven years”
(Lehman, Last Avant-​Garde, 25).
10. When an interviewer asked Schuyler about whether he wrote poems about
Porter’s paintings, he replied “No, but I tried to write poems that were like his paintings”
(Hillringhouse,“James Schuyler:  Interview,” 7). Schuyler also noted with a laugh that
Porter “once said that I was much more visual than he was” (7). As I mentioned, Spring’s
biography of Porter contains much discussion of the Porter-​Schuyler relationship and
their influence on one another’s work; see also Lehman (Last Avant-​Garde, 245, 328), and
Jed Perl, who observes that “the mood of [Porter’s] paintings, exact and ebullient, specific
and yet tied to some enlarging experience, jibes closely with the quotidian romanticism
of the poetry of Porter’s close friend James Schuyler” (New Art City, 533).
11. Spring discusses Porter’s abiding interest in the work of Stevens, which also led
to his inclusion of a volume of Stevens’s Opus Posthumous in one of his most luminous
paintings (Fairfield Porter, 239; see also 30–​31, 62). For more on Porter and Stevens, see
MacLeod, “Wallace Stevens.”
12. Throughout her book, Siobhan Phillips also points out the importance of dawn
and awakening for the poetics of everyday life: “writers of everyday time often use the
moment of waking as a crucial test of quotidian recurrence” (Poetics of the Everyday, 2).
13. For more on this aspect of Porter’s thought, see his “Art and Knowledge,” where he
argues that “Art connects us with the material world, from which mathematics, science
and technology separate us. It is concerned with the particular; it reconciles us to the
294Notes

arbitrary.” At the essay’s conclusion he asserts: “What is real, what is alive is concrete and
singular. In a statement of esthetic belief, Pasternak said, ‘Poetry is in the grass’ ” (Art on
its Own, 264). In a later essay, “Technology and Artistic Perception” (1975), Porter writes
that “as long as we remain dominated by the illusion that the general is truer than the
particular” we are in grave peril and “more and more separated from the inexplicable and
immeasurable world of matters of fact. Artistic perception can restore our connection to
them” (280).
14. Schuyler’s attitude about leaving things alone so they can speak for themselves
also resembles Francis Ponge’s insistence on “taking the side of things” (as his ground-
breaking volume Le Parti des Choses is usually translated), his desire to let things speak
“in terms of their own value and for themselves—​outside of their usual value and sig-
nificance” (Selected, xii). For more on Ponge and the everyday, see my “ ‘The Rhapsody
of Things,’ ” and for a particularly Ponge-​like Schuyler poem, see the early prose poem
“Milk” (Collected, 31–​32).
15. In her essay “Difference and Discipline,” Perloff observes that Wittgenstein was
Cage’s favorite philosopher.
16. Cavell connects Wittgenstein’s idea of philosophy leaving everything as it is to
Heidegger’s notion of thinking as “ ‘letting-​lie-​before-​us’ ” (In Quest, 6; This New Yet, 46),
and connects both to his own philosophy of acknowledgment and recovery. For a useful
discussion of how other aspects of Cavell’s work can help us understand twentieth-​century
poetry of everyday life, see Phillips (Poetics of the Everyday, 6, 12, 18); on Cavell’s philosophy
and Schuyler’s handling of ordinary language, see Allison (“James Schuyler,” esp. 108–​12).
17. As Michael Sheringham observes, “it is therefore modes of acknowledgment that
make up what Cavell calls the practice of the ordinary. Even if Cavell often presents it in
terms of turning and conversion, acknowledging the everyday does not consist in the
adoption of a new view or philosophy but is conceived as a task, a practice, the invention
of ‘an angle towards the world’ ” (Everyday Life, 229–​30).
18. Critics have often noted this feature of Schuyler’s poetry: see, for example, Mark
Silverberg, who makes a thorough case that “Schuyler’s is a poetics most often dedicated
to quiet observation, to ‘leaving the world alone’ ” (a reference to the lines in “Hymn to
Life,” not Wittgenstein) “in other words, to indolence” (James Schuyler,” 28).
19. Regarding the earlier discussion about Schuyler’s complex feelings toward the goal
of faithful description of immediate experience, it should be noted that in this passage
Schuyler does not say that he wants to represent “things as they are” but, rather, accept
them, which is quite a different goal. For an interesting reading of this passage, see Allison
(“James Schuyler,” 111).
20. For a reading of Schuyler that does emphasize the importance of collage to his
work, see David Herd, Enthusiast, especially 172–​75. See also Christopher Schmidt, “Baby,”
which focuses on Schuyler’s recuperation of trash and waste in his work.
21. Jed Perl describes the ubiquity of collage in the New York art world that Schuyler
was a part of: “a considerable number of New York artists were doing collage or assem-
blage in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and shows of work both contemporary and his-
torical abounded” (New Art City, 281; 279–​372 passim). Of particular importance was the
“Art of Assemblage” show exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1961 (in which
Schwitters featured prominently). Perl argues that this surge of interest in collage was due
to a natural affinity between the practice of collage and the daily experience of New York,
Notes 295

between “the artist’s assembling bits of found material and the unfolding juxtapositions
of the city” (a notion we will see explored in Schuyler’s poems)—​“over and over again in
postwar writing about New York, we find the city described as a collage, a patchwork of
variegated elements” (281, 282). Stephen Fredman, Contextual Practice, makes a compel-
ling case for the centrality of collage and assemblage to the New American Poetry (par-
ticularly in its San Francisco incarnation).
22. For more on Schwitters, see the important study by John Elderfield (Kurt Schwitters)
and the 2010 exhibition catalog for a recent retrospective, edited by Isabel Schulz, Kurt
Schwitters: Color and Collage. See also Tyrus Miller’s enlightening discussion of Schwitters
and Jackson Mac Low, another New American Poet and contemporary of Schuyler’s
(“Merzing History: Kurt Schwitters, Jackson Mac Low, and the Aesthetics of Data Trash,”
Singular Examples, 89–​114).
23. For similar comments, see Schuyler interview by Robert Thompson (116). While
Freely Espousing contains some of the purest examples of his experimentation with
Dadaist collage, like “A New  Yorker” and “Walter Scott,” the recent publication of
Schuyler’s uncollected poetry in Other Flowers has provided further evidence of this
stage in his evolution; see, for example, “The Times: A Collage” (18) and “Continuous
Poem” (35).
24. Raphael Allison’s recent essay is the most sustained and rewarding treatment of
Schuyler’s appropriation of found, ordinary language, although he does emphasize its
ordinariness (and its political subtexts) more than the fact that it is so often appropri-
ated rather than invented. Also, see Herd’s very useful discussion of Schuyler’s “poetry
of quotation” (Enthusiast, 172) and the importance of Schuyler’s diary as a repository for
found, quoted language.
25. For more on this topic, see Christopher Schmidt, who argues that Schuyler’s poetry
“recuperates both bodily and consumer waste” as a queer gesture, a sign of his camp sen-
sibility: “Schuyler’s version of camp is staged … through an unabashed embrace of the
abject material of trash and waste… . Schuyler’s camp recuperates the deprecated (waste
and trash) into a source of queer identity and strength, with special attention to how that
identification is routed through the products and waste of late capitalism” (“Baby”).
26. Schuyler mentioned the importance of “Salute” to his development as a poet in
numerous places. For example, see Schuyler’s interview by Hillringhouse (9). “Salute” was
included in the epochal 1960 anthology The New American Poetry, edited by Donald Allen,
and quickly became Schuyler’s signature poem.
27. As Wayne Koestenbaum notes, “Salute” “concerns collecting, the failure to collect,
and the desire to include failure in the poem” (“Epitaph,” 42).
28. In a piece Schuyler wrote for Art News about Brainard himself, he wrote “He is a
painting ecologist whose work draws the things it needs to it, in the interest of complete-
ness and balance, of evident but usually imperceived truths” (Selected Art Writings, 74). In
describing one of Brainard’s pieces made literally from trash, Schuyler admires the way
his friend could find pattern and order in randomness: “A cigarette butt work: he crams
cork-​tipped butts into a space until it is stuffed. The pattern has to find itself, except ‘pat-
tern’ is a poor word: a contiguity, like what polishing shows in a slice of granite, the order
of randomness” (74–​75).
29. See Benjamin’s use of a quotation from Baudelaire about the figure of the ragpicker:
“Here we have a man whose job it is to gather the day’s refuse in the capital. Everything that
296Notes

the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything
it has crushed underfoot he catalogues and collects… . He sorts things out and selects
judiciously: he collects like a miser guarding a treasure.” After quoting from Baudelaire,
Benjamin argues that “This description is one extended metaphor for the poetic method,
as Baudelaire practiced it. Ragpicker and poet: both are concerned with refuse, and both
go about their solitary business while other citizens are sleeping; they even move in the
same way” (Selected Writings, 4:48).
30. Christopher Schmidt makes a similar point in his interesting reading of “The Trash
Book”: “Although ‘The Trash Book’ begins as a paean to matter in its most material state,
it does things only a poem could do… . ‘The Trash Book’ is Schuyler’s version of O’Hara’s
‘Why I Am Not a Painter,’ a testament to the power of poetry, disguised as a meditation
on another medium” (“Baby”).
31. For a more extensive reading of Schuyler’s poems and collage, including “list”
poems like “Sorting, wrapping, packing, stuffing” and “Things to Do,” see my essay
“ ‘Building a Nest.’ ”
32. There are many reasons why Schuyler may have been attracted to the long form,
which has been a consistent lure for poets since antiquity, with American poets especially
interested in writing the long American poem (from Whitman through Pound’s Cantos,
Crane’s The Bridge, Olson’s The Maximus Poems, Zukofsky’s “A,” and so on). Among the
various inspirations and models for his own attempts are Whitman’s Song of Myself (a
poem which Schuyler acknowledged was the spur for his writing his first long work,
“Crystal Lithium”) and long poems by Schuyler’s New York School friends, like O’Hara’s
“Ode to Michael Goldberg (‘s Birth and Other births)” and “Biotherm”; Koch’s “The
Pleasures of Peace” and “The Art of Love”; Ashbery’s “The Skaters,” Three Poems, “Self-​
Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” and so on.
33. For a useful extended reading of “Hymn to Life,” see Silverberg: “ ‘Hymn to Life’ is
a poem concerned with conveying the material texture of days sliding, unbidden, by. It
is the most unbidden of manifestoes in that it has no point to make but rather a point to
receive” (“James Schuyler,” 7). See also discussions of the poem by Tom Clark (“Schuyler’s
Idylls”) and Bin Ramke (“Like a Yellow Jelly Bean”). “Hymn to Life” has found a wide
range of admirers, including the poet-​critic who was the editor of Poetry magazine from
2003 to 2013, Christian Wiman, whose tastes typically run more to the formalist and
traditional side of the aesthetic spectrum. On the Poetry Foundation website, Wiman
recently singled out “Hymn to Life” as one of nine relatively undersung poems he felt were
worthy of canonization: “Hymn to Life,” Wiman wrote, “seems to me a great poem by
one of the greatest poets of the second half of the twentieth century” (“Canon Fodder”).
Wiman has commented several times about the dissonance between his admiration for
Schuyler’s poetry and his usual tastes in poetry. For example, in Ambition and Survival, he
writes that “The only antidote to contingency is an addiction to it. This is how I explain to
myself my love for a poet like James Schuyler, who fulfills none of the formal expectations
I have for poetry” (110).
34. In July 1971, Schuyler experienced a psychotic episode in the Southampton home
of Fairfield Porter, the home he had lived in for a decade and where he was spending
the summer while the Porters were in Maine. At the time, the poet Ron Padgett and his
wife and young son were also staying as guests. As Nathan Kernan writes in his note in
The Diary of James Schuyler, “Over the July 4th weekend, however, Schuyler began to act
Notes 297

strangely and, it seemed, threateningly toward Wayne Padgett, to whom he was ordi-
narily kind and avuncular. Ron Padgett called on nearby friends Kenneth Koch and Joe
Hazan, and with their help and that of Dr. Mary Johnson, who lived next door, Schuyler
was eventually persuaded to go to the hospital in Southampton. From there he was trans-
ferred to the Suffolk County Psychiatric Hospital in Islip, Long Island” (Diary, 123). After
being released several weeks later, Schuyler went to stay with his close friends Kenward
Elmslie and Joe Brainard in Calais, Vermont, but quickly experienced a relapse at the
beginning of August, which so alarmed his friends that they felt they had no choice but to
forcibly commit him to the Vermont General Hospital’s psychiatric ward, where he spent
the next month. As can be seen from his letters during this period, Schuyler was furious at
his friends, especially Elmslie and Ashbery, for having had him institutionalized, and his
understandably shaken friends worried about what to do to help Schuyler. “This episode
began on a night that Schuyler locked himself in a bathroom and proceeded to wash his
money. In the morning Elmslie and Joe Brainard and John Ashbery, who were also stay-
ing in the house, realized that Schuyler was not going to snap out of it. Elmslie called the
state police, who came with a doctor. Not wanting to be institutionalized again, Schuyler
refused to go until Ashbery agreed to accompany him in the police car” (Schuyler, Just
the Thing, 353–​54). For more on the harrowing events of the summer of 1971, the tempo-
rary rifts it caused with his closest friends, and how profoundly it upset those devoted to
Schuyler, see the letters from the period in Just the Thing (350–​72), Schuyler’s diary entries
(Diary, 123–​30), and an account of the incident and its aftershocks within Schuyler’s
extended circle in Spring’s biography of Fairfield Porter (Fairfield Porter, 310–​19).
35. “Calais” could also refer to the town of Calais in Maine, or the small town of
Calais, Vermont, where Schuyler’s friend Kenward Elmslie had a country house at which
Schuyler would regularly stay, particularly in the later 1960s and early 1970s. But it is not
clear that Schuyler had visited Elmslie’s home in Calais by 1961. Further, the name of the
town in either Maine or Vermont is pronounced like “palace,” not like “chalet,” which
would certainly take away from the rhyme the last line seems to contain.

Chapter 3
1. Critics have sometimes noted that the Bloomian reading of Ammons has left a dis-
torted image of his work. See, for example, Jerome Mazzaro, who criticizes the Emersonian
reading for missing how Ammons pulls back from idealism (“Reconstruction,” 19), and
Cary Wolfe (“Symbol Plural”). My chapter shares the spirit of the 2013 special issue of
Chicago Review; in their introduction, the editors Joel Calahan and Michael Hansen
write: “A. R. Ammons’s canonization by major academic critics during the 70s and 80s
has been a mixed blessing. He resisted affiliation with movements and manifestoes, and
this has meant that his poems are typically read through transhistorical frames these
early champions provided: he is a ‘nature poet,’ a transcendentalist, and so on. Ammons’s
innovations and astonishing range tend to get short shrift, as does his close (if idiosyn-
cratic) relation to contemporary poetics and art practice. This issue aims to contextualize
his position in the postwar American tradition and to broaden the critical terms around
his work” (Calahan and Hansen, introduction, 7).
2. This omission becomes even more glaring when one considers that Ammons
does not appear in the major anthologies of postmodernist or experimental poetry,
298Notes

such as the 1994 Norton Postmodern American Poetry anthology edited by Paul Hoover,
revised and expanded in 2013, still without Ammons. For a discussion of this issue,
see Stephen Cushman’s essay in Kirschten (Critical Essays), as well as Kevin McGuirk
(“A. R. Ammons”) and Wolfe (“Symbol Plural”) on the relationship between Ammons
and postmodernism.
3. Several critics have discussed the role of the ordinary and everyday in Ammons’s
work in some detail. For example, see Costello, N. Halpern, McGuirk, and Deane.
4. My approach to Ammons builds on Halpern’s insightful chapter, but differs in that
he is largely concerned with Ammons’s attraction to an everyday voice and ordinary
language—​a plainspoken, colloquial register that contrasts with his penchant for more
oratorical and grander tones—​instead of Ammons’s fascination with everyday experience
more broadly, nor the poet’s tireless engagement with the everyday itself as an intellectual
and aesthetic problem.
5. See, for example, studies by Wolfe (“Symbol Plural”) and Schneider (A. R. Ammons).
6. See Martin Jay for a wide-​ranging discussion of “the cult of experience in American
pragmatism” (Songs of Experience, 261–​310).
7. This skepticism about the limitations of language to adequately capture experience
is also a theme of the American pragmatist strain I discuss in a moment. Martin Jay notes
William James’s “acknowledgment of the ultimate inadequacy of language to capture
the reality he sought to understand” (Songs of Experience, 280). This aspect of pragmatist
poetics is central to Richard Poirier’s discussions of Emersonian pragmatism and litera-
ture in his Renewal of Literature and Poetry and Pragmatism.
8. For example, the poet Craig Morgan Teicher has recently paid tribute to Ammons
in his poetry and on NPR, and David Lehman has cited Ammons as an influence on his
poem-​a-​day books, The Daily Mirror and The Evening Sun.
9. In addition to this timely approach to the everyday and attention, Ammons’s ahead-​
of-​his-​time ecological thinking—​posthumanist in orientation and critical of many of the
naïve assumptions of environmentalism—​has made his work extremely relevant today
from the perspective of ecopoetics. On reading Ammons through an environmental
framework, see Keller, “Green Reading.” See also Wolfe, Schneider (A. R. Ammons), and
Reiman, who reads him as “an ecological naturalist” (22). Furthermore, the mode of long
poem Ammons perfected—​w ith its chatty, looping, digressive, inclusive, and conversa-
tional style—​should also be seen as important forerunner of the “ultra-​talk” trend in
contemporary poetry, associated with figures like David Kirby, Mark Halliday, Albert
Goldbarth. Charles Harper Webb, and many others.
10. More recently, Teicher singled out Ammons’s Tape for praise during a segment
on “this week’s must read” that aired on NPR following in the wake of a Supreme Court
decision about privacy. In the poem, “Ammons shows us his actual mind, crabby, over-​
excited, scared, and endlessly curious” (Teicher, “SCOTUS on Cellphones”). See also
Oren Izenberg’s interesting recent discussion of Tape for the Turn of the Year. Izenberg
was inspired by the poem’s serial, dated structure to undertake an everyday-​life project
of his own: he describes giving the Ammons’s book as a gift to a lover with whom he is
in a long-​distance relationship, with the goal of having the two partners read the book
simultaneously, day by day, from December to January, reading one entry per day. The
experience of Ammons’s poem, including the ultimate failure of his experiment in “col-
lective reading,” leads Izenberg to some compelling reflections on poetry and the social
(Being Numerous, 171–​88).
Notes 299

11. For example, see Richard Poirier’s The Renewal of Literature and Poetry and
Pragmatism, as well as work by Jonathan Levin, Ross Posnock, Timothy Parrish, Joan
Richardson, Frank Lentricchia, Lisi Schoenbach, and Paul Grimstad. For recent studies
that focus specifically on pragmatism and American poetry, see Andrew Epstein, Beautiful
Enemies, Michael Magee, Ann Marie Mikkelsen, Raphael Allison, and Kacper Bartczak.
12. There is no mention of pragmatist philosophy or William James in the book-​length
studies of Ammons by Holder or Schneider), nor do any major critical essays on Ammons
discuss pragmatism or its key thinkers.
13. For one of the only notable references to Ammons and pragmatism, see Cary Wolfe:
“We could do worse than to read Ammons as something of a contemporary pragma-
tist, and in doing so helping to sharpen the contrast between the ideology of Ammons’
work and the Emersonianism that Carlyle so much admired” (“Symbol Plural,” 91).
As I argue, Ammons is affiliated with what Wolfe calls an “earthbound variation of
Emerson,” who seeks to move “beyond representation, beyond the romantic symbolic”
(384). See also the preface to Considering the Radiance, in which David Burak discusses
Ammons’s contradictions by noting that he is “pragmatic and mystical, primitive and
profound” (Burak and Gilbert, Considering, 12). In a 1973 essay included in Harold Bloom’s
collection on Ammons, Jerome Mazzaro notes that “even less has been said of Ammons’
relation to philosophers like Charles Peirce and John Dewey as well as to modern science”
(39–​40). He goes on to discuss Ammons’s long poems in relation to James’s “stream of
consciousness” and Dewey’s Art as Experience (41).
14. Roger Gilbert offers a similar yet slightly different list of binaries:  “Ammons’s
conceptual vision is built around a series of binary oppositions that include abstract/​
concrete, general/​particular, spirit/​matter, unity/​diversity (or simply one/​many), order/​
chaos, formlessness/​form, permanence/​change, stillness/​motion” (“A. R.  Ammons”).
Many other critics follow suit, with their own versions of Ammons’s pet oppositions.
15. For more on Ammons and pragmatism, and particularly his complicated attitudes
about philosophy, see my essay “ ‘Uh, Philosophy.’ ”
16. Similarly, Gilbert Allen notes the flight from the quotidian in Ommateum:  its
“poems renounce the everyday world and its rhetorical gestures” (quoted in Kirtschen,
Critical Essays, 3).
17. Kalstone makes an interesting point in passing when he argues that when one looks
back to Ammons’s early work, one can see “how much he needed the concrete resistance
of contemporary objective styles” (“Ammons’ Radiant Toys,” 133–​34)—​by which Kalstone
means Williams, the Objectivists, the Beats, and the New York School. Although he does
not elaborate, this point reinforces my argument that Ammons was quietly influenced by
the New American Poetry and avant-​garde poetics, a connection that flourished in his
signature work and style.
18. This notebook is archived as “Copybook #1” and is part of the Reid and Susan
Overcash Literary Collection, A.R. Ammons Papers, Joyner Library, East Carolina
University, Greenville, North Carolina.
19. Ammons’s engagement with William James, apparent in this 1959 notebook, con-
tinues throughout his life. Decades later, in 1985, he wrote a poem with the first line
“William James … is to be commended.” A draft of this poem, dated May 17, 1985, can be
found in the Ammons archive at the Cornell University Library, Ithaca, New York.
20. This remark can also be found in the notebook archived as “Copybook #1” in the
A. R. Ammons Papers held at the Joyner Library, East Carolina University.
300Notes

21. A number of critics see “Hymn” as pivotal for Ammons’s evolution. Bloom refers
to “Hymn” as “Ammons’s second start as a poet” (“A. R.  Ammons,” 53). Although the
poem does feel like a turning point in Ammons’s work, I do not agree with Bloom that it
is the poem in which “Ammons fully claims his Transcendental heritage” (54). See also
Kalstone (“Ammons’ Radiant Toys,” 138).
22. For a poem that almost reads like a textbook demonstration of pragmatism and
radical empiricism, in which Ammons makes his preference for pluralism quite explicit,
see “One: Many” (Collected, 138–​39).
23. It would be interesting to consider further Ammons’s version of the “walk poem”
as a response to the flâneur and other modes of urban walking, traveling, and observing,
which have been central to twentieth-​century everyday-​life aesthetics, including James
Schuyler’s “A Vermont Diary,” Silliman’s BART, the walk in Part III of Bernadette Mayer’s
Midwinter Day, Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch’s Ten Walks/​Two Talks, Apollinaire’s “Zone,”
Frank O’Hara’s walk poems, and so on. For an incisive extended treatment of the walk
poem as a genre, and of Ammons in particular, see Roger Gilbert’s Walks in the World.
24. Although critics have often remarked on Ammons’s drive to observe concrete par-
ticulars, variety, and diversity, they have rarely discussed his fascination with attention.
For an exception, see Kevin McGuirk, who argues that Ammons’s long poems aim to
represent “an ontology of everyday distraction” for the media age: “the poems shift rap-
idly in their attentions, breaking at any colon without the kinds of formal signaling …
normative in post-​romantic texts. The horizon of attention expands and contracts at the
poet’s whim, or at points of distraction, his attention caught by something else. It’s clear
that Ammons’ longer poems elaborate an ontology of everyday distraction, rather than,
say, classic and humanistic values like contemplation” (“A. R. Ammons,” 9).
25. By connecting paying attention to the act of praying, Ammons perhaps inadver-
tently recalls Simone Weil’s remark that “attention taken to its highest degree, is the same
thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer”
(Simone Weil, 212). As I mentioned in my introduction, Robert Hass has recently drawn
upon Weil’s notion.
26. In a 1996 reading at the 92nd St. Y in New York City, Ammons read this poem,
which he had written over thirty years earlier. He explained that “Still” is “my wife’s
favorite, or I guess our, favorite of my poems. I called it ‘Still’ and she insists that it should
be called ‘The Lowly’ and I think she’s right”; available at http://​w ww.poetryfoundation.
org/​features/​audioitem/​465.
27. Ammons’s parable-​like poem recalls a passage near the conclusion of Thoreau’s
Walden, one of many where he prefers the low to the mighty: “I called on the king, but
he made wait in his hall, and conducted like a man incapacitated for hospitality. There
was a man in my neighborhood who lived in a hollow tree. His manners were truly regal.
I should have done better had I called on him” (265).
28. For more on Benjamin’s “trash aesthetics,” see Highmore’s Everyday Life and
Cultural Theory. For an excellent study of waste and contemporary poetry, particularly
as an important component of a queer aesthetic, see Christopher Schmidt’s The Poetics of
Waste. See also Boscagli’s Stuff Theory.
29. For more on Garbage, see Frederick Buell, “Ammons’s Peripheral Vision,” as well as
Willard Spiegelman, who discusses Ammons’s transition from a “poetics of accretion” to
a “poetics of excretion” (“Building Up,” 64).
Notes 301

30. See my discussion of catalogs and lists (such as “to do” lists) in the previous chapter
on James Schuyler.
31. See Schneider’s introduction to his collection Complexities for a good overview of
Ammons’s long poems.
32. Along these lines, see Kevin McGuirk (“A. R.  Ammons”), who argues that
Ammons’s long poems should be read as exemplary postmodernist texts that respond
to the new ontological experience of our late twentieth-​century culture of media, dis-
traction, and information overload. McGuirk makes the rare and welcome point that
Ammons’s work responds to our culture of media and distraction, including “the ontol-
ogy of the form of television” and its cultivation of an experience of fragmentation, dis-
persal, and distraction.
33. Spiegelman notes that “Ammons normally works by means of a poetics of accre-
tion.” He likens this aspect of Ammons to “Ovid, Whitman, and all writers of the Big
Book,” and other purveyors of this “easy expansiveness” like Williams, O’Hara, and
Ashbery (“Building Up” 62). In chapter 5, I link this idea of accretion to the notion of
“accumulation,” which is important for Ron Silliman’s poetry, conceptual art, and other
forms of experimental realism. See McGuirk, who argues that Ammons’s long “poems
seem merely to accumulate” (“A. R. Ammons,” 9) and Mazzaro, who mentions that
Ammons’s long poems work by a “method of accretion” (“Reconstruction,” 40).
34. For example, see Richard Howard’s early assessment of this device: Ammons uses
the colon “in its widest application as almost his only mark of punctuation—​a sign to
indicate not only equivalence, but the node or point of passage on each side of which an
existence hangs in the balance” (Considering, 27). For another, see Frederick Buell, who
argues that “thanks to the colon, small mini-​narratives, segments of thought, moments of
perception and observation are formed and held loosely together in the forward-​directed
rush, the ceaseless fluidity that the colon, the same device, also helps create” (“Ammons’s
Peripheral Vision,” 222); and Cary Wolfe, who notes that the colon creates a “closeless”
structure (“Symbol Plural,” 88). As Bonnie Costello notes, the colon “arises as a major
signature of Ammons’s work, a sign with multiple, ambiguous significations, mark-
ing permeable boundaries, tentative sponsorships, as well as analogical possibilities”
(“A. R. Ammons,” 259).
35. In his interview by Philip Fried, Ammons says “I have heard a great many explana-
tions of the use of them, and they all seem quite reasonable to me. I think they’re probably
right. What it feels like to me is a democratization thing, that I won’t allow a word to have
a capital letter and some other, not. That the world is so interpenetrated that it must be
of one tissue of size, of letters.” Although few have mentioned the similarity, Schuyler
also uses the colon extensively, especially in his long poems, and for similar reasons. See
Schuyler’s comments about the colon in his interview by Carl Little (174).
36. Vendler addresses the non-teleological drift and unruliness of Ammons’s long
poems: “the aim of any long piece in lyric form (as of any extensive art piece—​drama,
novel, opera, a painting-​sequence like that of the Sistine Chapel) is to equal the world, to
be a ‘take’ on the whole world. To this end, a long poem should be (in Ammons’ think-
ing) as unmanageable as the world… .Thus the uncontainable form of the long poem
represents the poet’s putting out tentative feelers toward understanding a world not
yet delineated” (Schneider, Complexities, 28). Although she would surely not appreciate
the connection because of her distaste for avant-​garde poetics of Language poetry, the
302Notes

following could easily apply to Silliman as well as it can to Ammons: “he makes his long
poems emblems of a world that has become so full of information that it is no longer fully
graspable” (29). See also Wolfe (“Symbol Plural”), McGuirk (“A.R. Ammons”), Tobin
(“A.R. Ammons”), and others on this aspect of Ammons’s long poems.
37. On Tape as a pivotal poem, see Mazzaro, who points out that it “seems to have pro-
vided the breakthrough for these changes as well as for the preoccupation with process
that Ammons’s subsequent work has shown” (“Reconstruction,” 126).
38. Patrick Deane offers the most sustained discussion of Ammons’s Tape in the
context of the postwar avant-​garde by linking his work with John Cage in particular.
As Deane explains, his comparisons of Ammons with Cage’s process “are not made to
raise the question of influence, but instead to show how strongly Ammons’s Tape can be
tied to the concerns and experiments of the 1960s avant-​garde” (“Justified Radicalism,”
212–3). However, Deane argues that for all its apparent radicalism, Ammons’s project is
ultimately more conservative than his radical counterparts: he “diverges from Cage” by
turning the constraint, the tape itself, into a central metaphor: this, Deane claims, “sepa-
rates him decisively from what has emerged as mainstream Postmodernism” (213). In the
end, Deane argues that “if Ammons’s Tape for the Turn of the Year is important in the
history of postmodern experimentation, it is as an example of that large body of works
in which the avant-​garde sensibility and formal innovativeness are yoked in service to
an essentially conservative, transcendental metaphysics” (221). While I agree with Deane
about the importance of viewing Tape as an example of postwar avant-​garde tendencies,
and would certainly not place Ammons on the most radical edge of these tendencies, I
disagree with his conclusion. In a recent essay, Susan Stewart follows Deane and suggests
that Tape be read in light of “international developments in process art in the 1960s”; she
mentions Arte Povera, Cage, Olson, and “the permutational experiments of Jackson Mac
Low” and argues that Ammons is in “the vanguard of these developments” (“Salience and
Correspondence,” 22–​23).
39. The critical response was more mixed for Tape than for virtually any other Ammons
volume, save the near-​universal panning the poet received for the even more experimental
book The Snow Poems, which I discuss below. For example, in Poetry, Jim Harrison called
it “a disastrously ambitious piece of work; the marriage of the poem and journal a bad
one.” Willard Spiegelman felt it is a “nervously experimental poem” (Didactic Muse, 124)
and Donald Reiman complained, with evident disdain, that Tape is “openly written on
experimental formal principles” (in Kirschten, Critical Essays, 318), as if such a thing
should be kept secret if indulged in at all. Even Ammons’s great champion, Harold Bloom,
was noticeably dismissive of the poem, deeming it “a heroic failure” (“A. R. Ammons,” 77).
Gilbert suggests the reasons behind Bloom’s distaste for Tape: “both in its experimental
form and its quotidian content, Tape represented a side of Ammons for which Bloom had
little patience” (Gilbert, “ ‘I Went to the Summit,’ ” 174). Gilbert also notes “this seems to
have prompted a long letter from Ammons [to Bloom] in which he tries to explain the
rationale behind the poem” (174). While Helen Vendler praised aspects of the poem, she
complained about its reliance on the experiment with the tape to generate the poem, find-
ing the poem “rather willed” (Part of Nature, 331).
40. Frederick Buell argues against the grain of much Ammons criticism that Ammons’s
work is related to the New American Poetry of the postwar period. He notes that in the
so-​called “battle of the anthologies” of the period, “Ammons weighed in on the side of
the poets who rejected New Critical formalism, ‘academic’ poetry, and emphasis on the
Notes 303

poem as a closed, crafted artifact … in favor of the Whitman tradition.” He goes on to

note that “very few commentators have followed Ammons’s own lead … and connected
him significantly to poets like Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Charles Olson, and Frank
O’Hara—​ poets routinely considered avant-​ garde and experimentalist” (“Ammons’s
Peripheral Vision,” 215–​16).
41. Jahan Ramazani views this trend as central to contemporary, as opposed to mod-
ernist, poetry: “Prose genres such as the diary or notebook are the model for many such
[long, serial] poems, sometimes dated to indicate their contingency, their immersion in
history. The contemporary poem places itself within—​not above or outside or beyond—​
the open-​ended course of everyday experience” (Norton Anthology, xlvi). By doing so
in 1963, Ammons would seem to be one of the earlier examples of this phenomenon.
There are a handful of earlier examples from the modernist period, including Williams’s
Descent of Winter, which features dated sections and chronicles the day-​by-​day progress
of a season in ways that preview the structure and theme of Ammons’s poem.
42. In a 1975 essay, William Harmon noted this connection, rather dismissively, point-
ing out that Tape’s “format—​a mong the silliest-​seeming of limits—​at first appears to be
merely a gimmick, like Jack Kerouac’s widely advertised use of long rolls of Teletype paper to
facilitate the unbroken delivery of spontaneous prose” (“How Does One Come Home,” 4).
Frederick Buell notes that: “In Tape, Ammons was and is every bit as much an experi-
mentalist as Kerouac was in On the Road and the poets in Donald Allen’s anthology, even
if Ammons chose to pitch his experimentation in a minor, bourgeois key” (”Ammons’s
Peripheral Vision,” 216). Alex Albright offers the most extensive consideration of the par-
allels between Ammons and Kerouac. Although Albright notes many important sim-
ilarities, he also points out that, according to Ammons at least, the poet did not find
inspiration for Tape in Kerouac’s scroll—​in a letter to Albright, Ammons explained “I was
in South Jersey at the time of T[ape] for the T[urn] of the Year, and I don’t know if I was
aware of the automatic-​extemporaneous writing of Kerouac. I guess I was beat, but not
Beat” (Schneider, Complexities, 90).
43. Ammons quotes this passage of Emerson in at least three interviews—​w ith
Schneider (Complexities, 335–​36), Fried (interview), and Haythe (“An Interview,” 187). In
the interview with Fried he says that what likes best about the Emerson passage is “the
hope, which he expresses, that if you go on doing this somehow or other you will come
to know a deeper thing that unifies all these days”—​in other words, come to know some-
thing about the everyday itself.
44. Several critics have noted an important submerged pun in the poem’s evocation
of the Odyssey as a model—​during the period in which he writes the poem, Ammons is
“waiting to hear if /​Cornell will give me a job” (62). Thus, he hopes to be heading toward
his own Ithaca, just like Odysseus—​Ithaca, New York, that is. See Buell, who notes “with
wonderfully disguised slyness, Ammons seeks another Ithaca, as he is waiting to hear
about a job offer from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York” (“ ‘To be Quiet,’ ” 75).
45. As Buell argues, with “Corsons Inlet” and Tape, Ammons shifts away from hunger
for transcendence and towards “seeking to uneasily domesticate himself in this world
rather than seek a higher state of Being” ( “Ammons’s Peripheral Vision,” 221).
46. Ammons’s happy recounting of doing the dishes, trips to K-​Mart, and meals with
his in-​laws stands in contrast to anxious poems about domesticity by white, male, straight
poets of the period, like Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, or Robert Lowell (see, for example,
Lowell’s “Memories of West Street and Lepke”). There has been a good deal of interesting
304Notes

recent work on this issue. See, for example, Michael Davidson’s Guys Like Us, Andrew
Mossin’s Male Subjectivity and Poetic Form in the New American Poetry, and Rachel Blau
DuPlessis’s “Manhood,” among many others.
47. In his interview with Grossvogel, Ammons discusses his efforts to reproduce a per-
son’s ordinary speech in the poem “Carolina Said Song” and adds “If only we had someone
to record the poems that are being said every day, it would be marvelous” (“Interview,” 53).
48. One sees this tactic in many everyday-life poems, with the most famous example
perhaps being the headlines that appear in O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died” and “Poem
(Lana Turner has collapsed!),” but also in Mayer, Silliman, Armantrout, and many others.
49. The plane crash that Ammons mentions (16–​18, 163) was Pan Am 214, which was
struck by lightning on December 8, 1963, and crashed, killing all eighty-​one aboard. The
burning ship he mentions (99) was the TSMS Lakonia, a Greek cruise ship which caught
fire and sank on December 22, 1963, leaving 128 dead.
50. Although there are references to events in the news, it is rather strange how silent
the poem is about one of the most dramatic and catastrophic events of recent American
history that was occurring during the time the poem was being written. Harmon
notes that the poem was composed right after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In
fact, Ammons’s references to when he bought the roll of tape (a “couple weeks” before
December 6) would place that event right on or about November 22, 1963, the date of the
assassination. Although Harmon notes that the assassination is “an occasion nowhere
distinctly visible and not even present per se in Ammons’s poem,” he adds “I maintain
that we cannot locate Tape in history without realizing the terror of the public setting,
even though the ‘single, falling fact’ itself is never propounded outright. No poem writ-
ten at that time could ignore the assassination, and any poem that seems to must do so
as a deliberate strategy of sublimation, reluctance, compensation, or decorum” (“How
Does One Come Home,” 7). Even though the traumatic aftermath of the president’s death
seems like a strange omission for a poem so devoted to tracking the daily, perhaps the
unspoken national tragedy is one motive for the poem’s insistence on moving forward,
accepting the conditions of life as we find them, its advice that you “do the best you /​can
with it” (203). Stewart seems to follow Harmon in noting the connection: although “he
never mentions the assassination explicitly,” Tape “is only implicitly set forward as an
elegy for the lost president” (“Salience and Correspondence,” 13).
51. Frank O’Hara, among other poets, employs this tactic occasionally, as in “John
Button Birthday,” where he interrupts the flow of the poem to write “And now that I have
finished dinner I can continue,” and then later “Now I have taken down the underwear
/​I washed last night from the various lights fixtures /​and can proceed” (Collected, 267).
52. Glare returns to the everyday with a vengeance, to the displeasure of some crit-
ics. For a scathing assessment, see Christian Wiman’s review: “The poet who once wrote
poems of such severe impersonality that they seemed stripped of human presence, yet
charged with a very particular human consciousness, now finds no detail of his own life
too dull to leave out… . Glare is a sort of poetry in real time.”

Chapter 4
1. To be fair, Ammons’s writing about domesticity frequently depicts the poet himself
engaging in household chores, as we saw in the previous chapter: making lunch for him-
self, going on shopping outings with his wife, paying the bills, doing the dishes, mowing
Notes 305

the lawn. As I argued earlier, Ammons’s inclusion of such material is actually a refreshing
departure from the anxieties about the emasculating nature of bourgeois domesticity,
marriage, and fatherhood to be found in the work of many of his contemporaries, like
Creeley, Lowell, Corso, Kerouac, and others.
2. In her discussion of Mayer, Caitlin Newcomer argues that the everyday experience
Mayer represents is inevitably gendered and embodied.
3. This has been a persistent theme, of course, in theories of everyday life, especially
those rooted in cultural studies, but it has been less prevalent in discussions of the every-
day in literature. Recent work, however, has taken up such issues; for example, see Joon
Sun Lee’s 2013 study of Asian-​American literature and everyday life, which stresses an
approach to the everyday predicated on difference and contingent cultural and political
conditions. The book begins by stating “Everyday life, far from being a simple matter, is
marked by a flickering play of difference… . The ordinary, far from being a baseline con-
dition of uneventfulness outside history, is deeply interwoven with specificities of time
and place, with historically changing forms of labor and leisure, and with modernity’s
modes of presence and absence” (Modern Minority, 3).
4. By highlighting the importance of mothering to this strain of feminist everyday-​life
poetics, I do not mean to suggest any essential link between femininity and maternity or to
fall back on outdated, essentialist notions of gender. There are, of course, multiple versions
of feminist poetics, many of which follow powerful trends in feminist thought in question-
ing and even repudiating connections between womanhood and mothering. This wary
skepticism is shared by the poets I discuss in this chapter, who probe these issues as well
(as can be seen in the title of the anthology I discuss in this chapter, Not for Mothers Only).
5. Notley’s comment appears on the back cover of Midwinter Day.
6. Spahr’s comment appears in an endorsement on the back cover of Laynie Browne’s
book The Desires of Letters, which is written in explicit homage to Mayer’s book.
7. For more on Mayer’s complex relationship to both the New  York School and
Language poetry, as well as her place within institutional histories and movements, see
Daniel Kane (All Poets Welcome), Ann Vickery (Leaving Lines), Maggie Nelson (Women),
Libbie Rifkin (“My Little World”), Gillian White (Lyric Shame), and Lytle Shaw (“Faulting
Description”). Vickery and White discuss how Mayer’s turn to more accessible and per-
sonal modes of writing cause a rift between her and members of the Language movement.
White discusses in detail how Mayer’s poems register the intense discomfort and feelings
of “shame” that Mayer experiences about writing more lyric, quotidian poems after her
earlier, more radical experimentation.
8. On Mayer and the sonnet, see Spahr (“Love Scattered”), and for Mayer and the
long poem, see Newcomer (“Troubling the Lineage”) and Bloch (“Lyric After Epic”). For
more on Mayer and conceptual art, see Russo (“Poetics of Adjacency”), Shaw (“Faulting
Description”), Nelson (Women), Bernes (“Bernadette Mayer”), and Bloch (“Lyric After
Epic”).
9. In her important study Women, the New York School, and Other Abstractions, Maggie
Nelson argues that Mayer and other women poets associated with the New York School,
like Alice Notley and Eileen Myles, often have a “vexed stance toward the fetishized
daily” so dear to the New York School of poetry; in some cases, they even turn against
its fascination with the quotidian. She observes that “certain New  York School tropes
necessarily morph when their practitioners are women, whose historical relationship to
detail, the personal, the local, and the quotidian is somewhat overdetermined. At times,
306Notes

this morphing has entailed a wholesale rejection of some of these tropes” (xxiv). Nelson
argues that whereas Notley and Myles dismiss the everyday, Mayer’s works “extend” the
New  York School’s palette “to include the many anxieties, frustrations, pleasures, and
desires which attend to being or becoming a mother, mothering daughters, being a female
writers, and having a female body” (101). I concur, but will take this insight further and in
a somewhat different direction: Mayer does not only “extend” the reach of the New York
School’s quotidian aesthetic but, as I  have been suggesting, challenges its assumptions
and practices, subverts it, and rewrites it in another key.
10. For some examples of the vast body of writing about literature and motherhood
(including analysis of this traditional lack), see Adrienne Rich’s groundbreaking book
Of Woman Born (which appeared in 1976, just before Mayer wrote Midwinter Day), Susan
Rubin Suleiman’s influential essay “Writing and Motherhood,” Sara Ruddick’s Maternal
Thinking, and the essays collected in Mother Reader: Essential Literature on Motherhood,
edited by Moyra Davey. For a sense of the wide-​ranging nature of the debates sur-
rounding motherhood and contemporary writing, see also the critical essays gathered
in Podnieks and O’Reilly’s Textual Mothers/​Maternal Texts: Motherhood in Contemporary
Women’s Literatures, including the coda by Andrea O’Reilly, which offers a good overview
of the development of “motherhood studies” (367–​73).
11. In her foreword to The Grand Permission, Rachel Blau DuPlessis discusses Tillie
Olsen’s 1971 remark about women’s writing: “almost all distinguished achievement has
come from childless women.” DuPlessis concurs and observes “the ‘childless’ list is
exceedingly impressive: Woolf, for example, Stein, Richardson, Barnes, Nin, Hurston,
Wharton, Mansfield, O’Connor. Surveying modern poets, for every one example of a
modernist woman who combined the two ‘careers’—​H.D. (whose child was often raised
by Bryher anyway) or Loy (who had four children and lost two to death, and left her
children with servants for extended periods of time), there were many others—​Moore,
Dickinson, Lowell, Bishop, Niedecker—​who didn’t have children at all” (vii). In their
introduction to the Grand Permission, Dienstfrey and Hillman note that “most of our
own great literary ‘mothers’ of recent history were childless,” a situation that only began
to change “during the women’s movement of the seventies” (xiv).
12. Stephen Burt, “Smothered to Smithereens”; Mlinko, “As If Nature.”
13. There are too many poets to mention, but for a few prominent, representative exam-
ples, see the work of Laura Kasischke, Rachel Zucker, Beth Ann Fennelly, and Brenda
Shaughnessy. See also the recently inaugurated poetry website “A. Bradstreet,” which
describes itself as “a forum on reading motherhood, taking poetics as the form of its
praxis”; http://​w ww.abradstreet.com/​about.
14. Although it does not focus on poetry alone, one precursor to the recent spate of anthol-
ogies is Cradle and All: Women Writers on Pregnancy and Birth, edited by Laura Chester. This
collection is aesthetically eclectic and rather overtly depoliticized, lumping together work
by everyone from Anne Tyler, Adrienne Rich, Sharon Olds, and Joyce Carol Oates to more
experimental writers, including Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis.
Recent years have seen a flourishing of what one might call “niche” poetry anthologies—​
collections of poems on certain topics, including women’s issues. See, for example, Sweeping
Beauty: Contemporary Women Poets Do Housework, edited by Pamela Gemin.
15. By stressing Mayer’s ties to conceptual art, I am following the lead of Russo, Shaw,
Nelson, and Bernes, who make strong, and slightly different, cases for the “the importance
Notes 307

of placing her work in a conceptual and performative context as well as a literary one”
(Nelson, Women, 107). I argue here that understanding Mayer’s emergence within a con-
ceptual art milieu helps us understand her distinctive, feminist approach to the everyday.
16. This is the rationale behind the anthology I’ll Drown My Book (Bergvall et  al.).
Very aware that “writing women out of the canon is invisible until after the fact” (15),
Laynie Browne explains that one impetus behind the anthology was the desire to confront
“the problem of the under-​representation of women, particularly in key moments when
movements begin to take shape and crystallize and are documented by gatherings, public
events and anthologies” (14).
17. As one of the volume’s editors, Laynie Browne, mentioned in an interview, the
anthology “really begins with Bernadette Mayer for me, the whole impetus for the project,
having her work represented.”
18. For one study from beyond the world of poetry that does examine avant-​garde aes-
thetics, realism, the everyday, and mothering, see Ivone Margulies’s book Nothing Happens,
which focuses on Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, the famous 1975 experimental film
that serves as an interesting point of comparison and contrast with Mayer’s Midwinter Day.
19. For just one of many examples, see Lucy Lippard (Six Years) on Burgy:  “in late
works, Burgy documented: himself—​a ll physical data collected through a variety of tests
undergone during a voluntary stay in the hospital (January, 1969); a pregnancy and birth
(March, 1969); and executed a lie-​detector test with another artist (Douglas Huebler)” (51).
20. See also her recent remarks in the interview with Adam Fitzgerald:  “I took the
month of July 1971—​I took 36 pictures a day as color slides. I kept a journal and I made
the color slides into snapshots and color photographs. I mounted them in a gallery on all
four walls, about four feet high, so it would go around the gallery left to right, and the
narration was made up of my notes combined with the photographs I had projected on
the wall, very small and crisp and clear. And the narration was a combination of the two.
It was eight hours long so I recorded it, and if anyone wanted to see all of the photographs
and listen to the entire narration it was like a day’s work. It was a month of my life. The
month of July” (A. Fitzgerald, “Lives of the Poets”).
21. Years later, Mayer expressed an even more extreme version of this impulse in an
interview with Lisa Jarnot: “I’d like computers to be able to record everything you think
and see. To be like the brain, and to write that out… . And somebody said to me, ‘who
would read it?’ But I thinking that I would love to read it. Like if you had all these docu-
ments of everybody’s experience. It would be amazing” (Mayer, interview by Jarnot, 9).
22. For an example of a conceptual artwork with similar goals, see Lippard’s descrip-
tion of Donald Burgy’s “Rock #5,” which consists of “ ‘Documentation of selected physical
aspects of a rock; its location in, and its conditions of, time and space,’ including among
others: daily weather map and charts … mass spectographic analysis; petrographic analy-
sis and photographs; weight and density data, etc. ‘The scale of this information extends, in
time, from the geologic to the present moment; and, in size of matter, from the continental
to the atomic’” (Six Years, 51).
23. Mayer alludes here to the well-​k nown lines at the start of Ashbery’s Three Poems: “I
thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came
to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way” (Ashbery, Three Poems, 3).
24. Jasper Bernes (“Bernadette Mayer”) argues that this “constitutive tension” drives
Memory and all of Mayer’s writing of the 1970s:  “She wants a writing, a technique of
308Notes

documentation, adequate to the whole of experience, leaving nothing out and includ-
ing all, agile enough to catch every nuance of experience. But because her writing is not
a neutral prosthesis, not a passive reflection of experience but an intervention within
that experience, there is always some remainder: the time spent writing down experience
comes at the expense of experience itself.”
25. See Caitlin Newcomer, “Troubling the Lineage,” for a nuanced discussion of
Midwinter Day as a complex response to the tradition of the genre of the long poem, as
practiced by both male and female modernists.
26. Nelson discusses the book’s “many moments of homage and/​or intertextual refer-
ence” and argues that “Midwinter ends up staging quite a struggle with its (mostly male)
literary forerunners, as is evident in the following ambivalent lines near the book’s begin-
ning: ‘Freud Pound & Joyce /​Are fine-​feathered youth’s fair-​weather friends /​I take that
back, better not to mention them’ (19)” (Women, 112). See also White (Lyric Shame) and
Newcomer (“Troubling the Lineage”), who, like Nelson, discuss Mayer’s mixture of anxi-
ety and defiance about her attempt to speak and write within the largely male tradition of
poetry (especially the epic and long poem).
27. In a lecture at Naropa, Mayer further elaborates on the process that led to the
poem and questions that have been raised about whether she truly could have written
it on a single day: “Nobody ever believes me when I tell them that it was written in one
day, but it almost was. I did rehearsals for the first section, which is dreams… . I also
took photographs and wrote about them later” (“From: A Lecture,” 100–​101). Whether
Mayer actually, or “almost,” wrote the entire book in a single day is a bit beside the
point—​t he fact that Mayer presents the book, and readers receive it, as such is essential
to the work’s status as a conceptual work. For an interesting treatment of this issue, see
White, who reflects on the issue of whether it is fair to say that Mayer actually wrote
the book on a single day or not, and why the issue matters to the work and to its readers
(Lyric Shame, 181).
28. On this feature of Mayer’s poem, see Nelson: “Mayer’s interest in the language of
her daughters persists throughout Midwinter… . Midwinter is, among other things, an
account of the private language that one family shares” (Women, 116).
29. As Vickery, Nelson, and other critics have pointed out, Mayer’s anxieties about this
turn in her life and poetry seem to have been well founded. With their interest in presenting
quotidian details of home and family in a somewhat more accessible form, Mayer’s works
of the mid-​1970s hastened the sense of a rift between Mayer and the Language movement.
As Baker observes, “some poets associated with the Language circle and experimental
poetry generally regarded these works as a serious departure, even a betrayal of the move-
ment. In an interview, Mayer recalls that one leading poet told her she was ‘a failed exper-
imentalist,’ a remark that she says ‘hit me kind of hard’ ” (“Bernadette Mayer”). As Mayer
began writing “in a seemingly transparent style in order to focus on ‘unspeakable’ areas
of experience—​sexuality, motherhood, and desire,” (Vickery, 159)  some of the women
writers at the center of Language poetry recoiled from this new direction in Mayer’s work,
even though they continued to admire her writing:  as Vickery explains, in a letter to
Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian confided that she “had some trouble with the way in which
she saw Mayer trying to make domestic life into a ‘romance’ ” (Leaving Lines, 159). For
an extensive discussion of this issue, see Gillian White, who argues that Mayer’s turn to
a more explicitly personal subject matter in Midwinter Day was also a turn away “from
Notes 309

the aesthetic dictates of the avant-​garde community in which her work had emerged”
(Lyric Shame,156). For White, Mayer struggles in her poetry with her feelings of “shame
and anxiety” about moving, both geographically and stylistically, away from New York
and the avant-​garde precepts associated with the poetry scene there (158). See also Nelson
(Women, 111–​12).
30. For just one of many examples, see the recent interview with the young poet Sandra
Simonds, who discusses her interest in using poetry to grapple with the “material condi-
tions” of motherhood in terms that are impossible to imagine without the space Mayer’s
work opened up: “I want to think about what it means to be a mother in the early 21st cen-
tury inside capitalism with very few social structures to help us survive—​what do we give
up (in art) by having children? What do we gain? … Even though I write about these issues,
I don’t want to give up joy and the fantastic in a poem. I love that a poem can start with
cleaning up a diaper and end up at the bottom of the ocean or in some remote corner of
a spiraling galaxy. Why not?” (Orlowski, “Interview”). See also the interview with Arielle
Greenberg and Rachel Zucker: when asked “Is it possible to be radical or avant-​garde and
be a mother?” Zucker responds: “Obviously I think it’s possible to be radical and avant-​
garde and be a mother. In fact, I think some women become mothers in ways that are radi-
cal and avant-​garde and activist—​in their birthing practices, in their mothering choices, in
their family dynamics, and whether they work or don’t work and how they manage those
things … many women, me included for sure, became radicalized at the same time that we
became mothers” (“An Interview with Rachel Zucker and Arielle Greenberg”).
31. It is worth noting the rather curious fact that Mlinko herself is a big fan of Mayer’s
work, as can be seen in her participation in a tribute to Mayer (PennSound) in 1989.
“Bernadette Mayer Celebration” at the Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania,
October 1, 1998. http://​w riting.upenn.edu/​pennsound/​x /​Mayer.php.
32. See also “Butterflies, Breastmilk, Chinese Jade, Continuous Present & Motorcycles,”
which has a dedication that reads “For My Mother and after B.  Mayer” (Hecate, 38).
Nguyen has also made clear her appreciation for the work of Alice Notley (see, for exam-
ple, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, “Interview with Hoa Nguyen”), Emily Dickinson, Lorine
Niedecker, Charles Olson, Philip Whalen, and Joanne Kyger, among many other poets;
for a number of years, she has held workshops devoted to the work of a single poet, many
of these included. For more, see http://​w ww.hoa-​nguyen.com/​.
33. Nguyen discusses her background and her complicated feelings about being
“Asian-​American” (and an Asian-​American poet) at some length in her interview with
Joshua Marie Wilkinson. She explains that she was born in Vietnam to a Vietnamese
mother and white American father (who worked for the State Department) and left as
toddler, grew up in Maryland, and studied poetry at the New College of California in San
Francisco with Tom Clark and other poets.
34. Like many passages in Nguyen’s poems, this line is an unattributed quotation and
its source is not given. But a Google search indicates that an identical phrase appeared in
a letter to Time magazine (November 16, 2007).
35. I do not mean to imply that O’Hara’s everyday aesthetic is oblivious to class and
economic conditions—​far from it. After all, he is the poet who referred to “the most
dreary of practical exigencies money,” who was very sophisticated about class and cul-
ture, and who portrayed the complexities of daily life lived in the thick of a consumerist
society in myriad ways (Collected, 343). But Nguyen’s cutting revision seems to suggest
310Notes

that it might sound nice to talk about living as variously as possible, but it is quite difficult
in practice, especially for a woman and mother, and particularly within today’s chastened
economic climate.
36. On Rankine’s poem as a work in conversation with Mayer’s work more broadly, see
Newcomer (“Troubling the Lineage”). In his review of Plot, Burt connects the poem to
Mayer as well: “Until the 1970s too few poets in English tried hard to represent pregnancy,
or other specifically female kinds of experience. Rankine and others are making up for
lost time. She draws on recent allies—​particularly Bernadette Mayer, whose sprawling
Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters mulls some of the same ideas. But Rankine’s
poem has other work to do. If it belongs in a line of poems about female experience, it also
belong in a line of long poems about time” (“Mother Tongues”).
37. Vickery makes this connection to Kristeva’s landmark 1979 essay in her discus-
sion of the nine-​months-​of-​pregnancy structure of Mayer’s Desires of Others: “In using a
unit of what Kristeva calls ‘women’s time,’ Mayer investigates authorship as a gendered
process” (Leaving Lines, 160). For an essay on the legacy of Kristeva’s notion of “women’s
time” for feminist theory, see Emily Apter, “ ‘Women’s Time’ in Theory.”
38. Kristeva’s theory of “women’s time” is complex, and it should be noted that she is
careful not to essentialize female subjectivity: “Kristeva’s explicit aim is to emphasize the
multiplicity of female expressions and preoccupations so as not to homogenize ‘woman,’
while at the same time insisting on the necessary recognition of sexual difference as psy-
choanalysis sees it” (Kristeva Reader, 187). I do not mean to oversimplify her ideas here,
but simply to suggest that these poets’ attention to the particular temporalities of preg-
nancy and mothering can be thought of as an attempt to explore the idea, and the bodily
experience, of “women’s time.”
39. This is a recurring theme throughout Dienstfrey and Hillman’s Grand Permission
and the headnotes in Wagner and Wolff’s Not for Mothers Only. For example, Elizabeth
Robinson notes “after my children were born, in addition to sleep deprivation, I under-
went several years of what I call ‘attention deprivation,’ during which I felt that I never had
an opportunity to think an idea or series of thoughts through to a satisfying conclusion.
Every—​but every—​thing got interrupted” (Wagner and Wolff, Not for Mothers Only, 264).
40. For example, Catherine Wagner (co-​editor of Not for Mothers Only) remarks that
after becoming a mother, she had virtually no time to read or write. Rather than cease
writing, Wagner thought of ways of integrating this situation into her life as a writer: “Like
some other writer mothers I know, I realized that if I wanted to write I had to break the
habit of writing alone. I started writing with my son in the room, often while holding
him, and also wrote with other people there. I tried to write at times I hadn’t thought of
as writing time. (Laynie Browne’s work—​see especially Daily Sonnets—​inhabits a similar
practice with wonderful results. Also of course Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer, Lee Ann
Brown, Hoa Nguyen)” (Wagner, interview by Susie DeFord). For another example, see
Kristin Prevallet’s “The Blue Marble Project,” which appears in Bergvall et al., I’ll Drown
My Book. As she explains in a note, the project “happened because of the necessity of
taking daily walks with my baby in her stroller… . In order to bridge the mundane neces-
sity of walking with some larger idea and purpose, I constructed a project with myself.
I bought a bag of marbles from the dollar store and started using them to mark various
landmarks on my walk” (291). Like Mayer, Prevallet views the “mundane necessity” of
mothering a young child not as an impediment to writing or being an artist, but rather as
an opportunity for artistic inquiry and conceptual art-​making.
Notes 311

41. In an interview, she answers the question “When your writing gets stalled, where do
you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?” by responding “To books of
writers I admire, for e.g., Harryette Mullen, Fred Wah, Margaret Christakos, Bernadette
Mayer” (McClennan, “12 or 20 Questions”). In an interview with the Globe & Mail, when
she is asked “Whose work provides sustenance, scaffolding, substance, solace, inspira-
tion for you, not necessarily nor simply poetically, either?” She answers “here’s a partial
list: Nicole Brossard, Fred Wah, Charles Bernstein, Daphne Marlatt, Harryette Mullen,
Bernadette Mayer, Nicole Markotic, Sina Queyras, Suzette Mayr, bp Nichol, Gertrude
Stein, Ron Silliman, and lots more … but these are some I especially admire for their wit,
music, movement and radical translations of our idiom” (J. Fitzgerald, interview).
42. Browne has discussed Mayer frequently in interviews and throughout her work.
In a note in the back of her Daily Sonnets, Browne notes that one poem “was written
for Bernadette Mayer after a reading she gave in San Francisco in 2004. We were hav-
ing dinner at an Italian restaurant” (160–​61). In another note, she mentions that “the
‘shower’ sonnets are inspired by Bernadette Mayer’s experiments. Here is an attempt to
invent time: write a sonnet while standing wrapped in a towel” (162). Furthermore, the
notion of a contemporary, experimental sonnet sequence is obviously indebted to Mayer’s
own Sonnets (as well as The Sonnets by Ted Berrigan, which was, of course, a source for
Mayer). Browne’s later book Desires of Letters is even more explicit—​it is a direct homage
to Mayer’s Desires of Mothers. Furthermore, as I mentioned earlier, Browne has explained
that Mayer was really the impetus behind gathering work together in I’ll Drown My Book,
the Bergvall et  al. volume of conceptual writing by woman that Browne recently co-​
edited. Readers and reviewers have also understandably been quick to connect Browne
to Mayer; for example, on the back cover of Daily Sonnets, Lisa Jarnot calls Browne “an
heiress to the tradition of American experimental writing pioneered by Alice Notley,
Bernadette Mayer, and Joanne Kyger.”
43. As I have been suggesting, the various poets I discuss have several points of con-
tact even when they are not necessarily within the same “movement.” In that regard, it is
worth noting that Ron Silliman gave a rave review to Daily Sonnets on his blog. He calls
Browne’s “big fat beautiful new book” “a stunner & a delight, a heady dose of pure oxy-
gen.” He also notes that her work has “some resonance with the New York School but even
more perhaps with the current wave of post-​feminists who take the gains of feminism if
not exactly for granted, at least as the platform from which to investigate the world anew,
including a very serious & intense focus on parenting” (Silliman’s Blog, April 18, 2007).
44. Clear antecedents for Browne’s concern with dailiness, as well as her effort to write
daily poems, include O’Hara, Mayer, and Ted Berrigan, but more recent examples like
David Lehman’s Daily Mirror and Evening Sun stand behind Browne’s book as well.
45. The headnote for Browne in the new second edition of the Postmodern American
Poetry: A Norton Anthology edited by Paul Hoover states that Daily Sonnets “consists of
151 sonnets written in one-​minute writing intervals while she was caring for her two sons
to whom the book is dedicated” (775). Although Browne titles one poem “One Minute
Sonnet” and refers to this form, among others, in the essay at the end of the book, Browne
does not state that all the poems were written according to this constraint.
46. See also the interview by Jason B. Jones, in which Browne explains that Daily Sonnets
is a “time experiment” in which “I was trying to invent time which did not exist. I experi-
mented with writing in very uncongenial circumstances, such as wrapped in a towel after
a shower for a time limit of one or two minutes… . This was a very liberating experiment
312Notes

and I recommend it to everyone. Whatever constraints you think you live within, in terms
of what time you have to write, try breaking them. Write standing in line, half asleep.
Write in every way except the ways which are habitual. In this way time and form open
tremendously. Suddenly instead of having only an hour here or there, you have all of time.”
47. This element is even more pronounced in Browne’s subsequent book, The Desires of
Letters. In an interview, Browne explained that her book is “inspired by and in conversa-
tion with Bernadette Mayer’s book The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters. The
book begins at the beginning of the war in Iraq and includes lots of pieces to do with the
dynamics, politics and daily life of mothering alongside writing and living in the very
poet-​rich Bay area” (Browne, interview by Jason Jones).

Chapter 5
1. Silliman’s friend and fellow Language poet Charles Bernstein uses this phrase in
a blurb on the cover of Silliman’s Under Albany, a work that Bernstein refers to as “the
shadow movement of Silliman’s epic of everyday life, The Alphabet.”
2. The publication history of Ketjak and The Age of Huts is rather complicated. Ketjak was
written in 1974, but first published as a book by Barrett Watten’s This Press in 1978, an edi-
tion that subsequently went out of print. Around the same time, Silliman also wrote a series
of other poems in prose, many based on formal constraints. Three of these poems (Sunset
Debris, The Chinese Notebook, and 2197) were published under the title The Age of Huts in
1986 by Roof Books, a volume that likewise has long been out of print. Two other texts writ-
ten around the same time—​Sitting Up, Standing, Taking Steps and BART—​were written as
“satellite texts” or adjuncts to The Age of Huts cycle. With the publication of The Age of Huts
(Compleat) in 2007, Silliman has at last gathered the entire cycle under one cover.
3. For more on Silliman’s poetry and poetics, see Perloff (Dance of the Intellect and
“Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject”), Fredman (Poet’s Prose), Lazer (Opposing
Poetries and “Education, Equality”), Perelman (­chapter  4 of Marginalization of Poetry),
Huntsperger (Procedural Form), the essays collected in the special issue of The Difficulties
(1985) (Beckett, “Ron Silliman Issue”), as well as articles in volume 34 of Quarry West
(1998), Jacket 39 (2010) devoted to Silliman, Elisabeth Joyce’s “Time Lapse Poemography”
in Jacket2 (2015), and DuPlessis (“Notes on Silliman and Poesis”).
4. Among the most notorious and vociferous of attacks on Language poetry are Tom
Clark’s two pieces entitled “Stalin as Linguist” (I and II), which advance many of these
claims (Poetry Beat, 65–​83). For more on the typical terms and complaints found in the
strong opposition to Language poetry, see early pieces by Perloff (“The Word as Such” [in
Dance]; as well as McGann (“Contemporary Poetry”), Altieri (“Without Consequences”),
Bartlett (“What Is Language Poetry”), Perelman (Marginalization, 11–​37) and Lazer
(Opposing Poetries).
5. The very first issue of the important movement-​ consolidating magazine
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E opened with a piece by Larry Eigner, a poet who influenced and
became associated with the Language writers; the very first words emphasize a model of
poetry as an approach to both things and to the everyday: “Approaching things /​Some cal-
culus /​Of Everyday Life” (Andrews and Bernstein, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, 3). See Watten
on the significance of this Eigner piece leading off the first issue of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
(“the point of departure for writing is the position of the writer in situ. There is an absolute
identification with day-​to-​day life” [Total Syntax, 50]).
Notes 313

6. Language writing’s preoccupation with theories and practices of everyday life is

too extensive to document fully here, but it is worth noting the important three-​part
symposium “The Poetics of Everyday Life” that Carla Harryman curated in 1988, in San
Francisco, which featured talks by Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten, and Michael Davidson,
among others. (These pieces are collected in Poetics Journal volume 9). See especially
Davidson’s “Poetics of Everyday Life” in that issue for a brief but rich discussion of the
everyday from the perspective of avant-​garde poetics. See also Bernstein’s “The Art and
Practice of the Ordinary” in Attack of the Difficult Poems (173–​180).
7. There is an extensive body of critical writing on the history of Language poetry and
its politics and poetics. In addition to the important early essays mentioned in note 4, also
indispensable are the works of poetics produced by Language poets themselves, including
those collected in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (edited by Bruce Andrews and Charles
Bernstein), and in Silliman’s The New Sentence; Bernstein’s Content’s Dream, A Poetics, and My
Way; Barrett Watten’s Total Syntax and The Constructivist Moment; Lyn Hejinian’s Language
of Inquiry; Andrews’s Paradise and Method; and Bob Perelman’s literary history of the move-
ment he helped found (Marginialization). Other important discussions of Language writing
include books by Perloff (Poetic License, Radical Artifice), George Hartley (Textual Politics),
Hank Lazer (Opposing Poetries), and Ann Vickery (Leaving Lines of Gender).
8. For more on conceptual art and Language writing, see Watten, Total Syntax
(esp. 200–​23) and Hartley, Textual Politics (84–​93). In an interview, Silliman recalls the
formative influence of conceptual art, and the critical work surrounding it, on his milieu
and his work in the early 1970s: “Conceptual art drove a lot of critical writing, some of it
very rigorous and thoughtful until it was absorbed into the structures of the art schools.
Especially valuable was Lucy Lippard’s Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object”
(Marshall and Vogler, “Email Interview,”).
9. This blend can be seen, for example, in recent works like Joshua Clover’s Totality
for Kids, an inspired crossing of Frank O’Hara and Guillaume Apollinaire with Guy
Debord’s Situationism and Walter Benjamin, as well as in the conceptual poetics of the
quotidian practiced by Kenneth Goldsmith, in works like Soliloquy and Day, and other
recent everyday-​life projects that I discuss in c­ hapter 6.
10. This passage is frequently cited as an example of Silliman’s controversial Marxist
critique of capitalism’s dematerializing effects on language and its transformation of
referentiality into a kind of commodity fetish: “What happens when a language moves
toward and passes into a capitalist stage of development is an anaesthetic transformation
of the perceived tangibility of the word, with corresponding increases in its expository,
descriptive, and narrative capacities, preconditions for the invention of ‘realism,’ the illu-
sion of reality in capitalist thought. These developments are tied directly to the function
of reference in language, which under capitalism is transformed, narrowed into referen-
tiality” (New Sentence, 10).
11. For more on Language poetry’s critique of realism and search for new, alternative
realist modes, see Hartley (Textual Politics) and Huntspberger (Procedural Form).
12. For a discussion of Silliman’s interest in achieving a “new realism” through the use
of procedural form, see David Huntspberger (Procedural Form, 14). Huntspberger argues
that Silliman and Hejinian (along with Ted Berrigan and David Antin) are “part of a
postmodern reconfiguration of realism” (15), and he offers an extended reading of how
Silliman’s Tjanting “functions as postmodern reworking of literary realism” (17; see also
97–​130).
314Notes

13. For more on the notion of awakening, dream, and Surrealism in Benjamin’s work,
see Gilloch (esp. 89–​139), who writes: “Benjamin’s ‘Arcades Project’ constitutes ‘an experi-
ment in the technique of awakening’ from the dream-​sleep of capitalism. The need to
move beyond Surrealism is apparent here” (133).
14. Silliman has discussed the origins of Ketjak and its significance to his life and work
on many occasions—​in his works, in interviews, and on his blog. See, for example, the
account in Under Albany, Silliman’s most autobiographical text (61–​62).
15. Silliman has often explained that he sees all of his writing as constituting a single
work, titled Ketjak: “What I am writing is one poem. That it may be composed of poems is a
problem more for poetry than for me. Overall, I have always thought of this project as Ketjak”
(Brito, interview, 153). See, too, the chart in Under Albany, where Silliman illustrates the over-
all structure of his work, all under the title Ketjak; see also his blog post for December 24,
2008.
16. In a 1998 interview, Silliman describes his earliest poems as “publishable but
unmemorable neo-​workshop lyrics” (Marshall and Vogler, “Email Interview,” 12)  and
acknowledges that his first three books were derivative of the New American Poetry and
Clark Coolidge: “I was writing post-​Williams, post-​Creeley, post-​Olson kinds of lyrics,
struggling with the problems implicit in Olson’s equation of the line with breath… .
Mohawk reads like Coolidgeana to me now” (11–​12).
17. For Silliman’s definitive discussion of the “new sentence,” see the title essay of
The New Sentence. For an overview of the “new sentence” and the use of parataxis, see
Perelman (Marginalization, 59–​78). Timothy Yu’s recent discussion of arguments sur-
rounding “the political significance of this aesthetic device” is useful (Race and the Avant-​
Garde, 44–​46). For a discussion of Silliman’s distinctive contribution to the genre of the
prose poem, see Stephen Fredman’s Poet’s Prose (146–​48).
18. On Reich’s importance to Ketjak, see, for example, Silliman’s comments in Under
Albany (61) and in various interviews, including his remarks to Larry McCaffery and
Sinda Gregory about Reich’s use of repetition in Drumming (Alive and Writing).
19. For more on the influence of the Balinese ritual known as ketjak on Silliman’s work,
see his comments in “I Wanted to Write Sentences” (13–​14) and in the interview with
McCaffery and Gregory (Alive and Writing). For a particularly interesting, lengthy discus-
sion of the Balinese ketjak and its relation to his work as a whole, see Silliman’s blog for
September 20, 2003. An extensive critical discussion of the relation between Balinese ket-
jak and Silliman’s poem can be found in Thomas C. Marshall’s essay, “ ‘Nevermore’ Than.”
20. Although Silliman devised this basic scheme for the poem, it should be noted that the
opening paragraphs do not conform exactly to this pattern: for example, the third paragraph
breaks from the pattern by including two new sentences between the two sentences in the
previous paragraph, rather than interspersing them between each of the prior sentences, and
the fourth paragraph features fourteen sentences instead of sixteen. Silliman has discussed
the incorporation of these “errors,” saying that the poem would have followed this scheme
perfectly “had I not made that decision on the run during the opening stages of the poem
and chosen to retain the unrevised structure of the first paragraphs to formally mark the
process and place of the decision itself” (“I Wanted to Write,” 13). See also his remarks in
the essay “Wild Form” on why he decided not to go “back to falsify the text’s record of that
decision” (137).
21. For more on the turn to artifice and formal constraints in modernist and postmod-
ernist literature and art, see Marjorie Perloff’s Radical Artifice (especially her discussion
of the Oulipo and related experiments in chap. 5, 134–​70).
Notes 315

22. In c­ hapter 4, I quoted Clark Coolidge’s recollection about his early affinities with
Bernadette Mayer: “We wanted endless works, that would zoom on & on and include
everything ultimately, we’d talk about the ‘Everything work; which would use every pos-
sible bit flashing through our minds” (Baker, “Bernadette Mayer”).
23. For more on this aspect of Silliman’s work, see Rachel Blau DuPlessis on Silliman
and the longpoem (“Manhood and Its Poetic Projects”) and Jessica Smith’s review of
Revelator, where she writes “We know Silliman cannot write the whole universe—​but his
intense desire to take a snapshot of our mortal lives, to ‘pull everything in,’ provides a
haunting, dense, breathless battle against Time ‘coming to take its breath away.’ ”
24. As I mentioned previously, Silliman envisions all of these works as parts of a single
life-​work entitled “Ketjak.” See his blog post on December 24, 2008.
25. On postmodernism and allegory, see Craig Owens’s influential essay, which dis-
cusses the allegorical significance of “strategies of accumulation” in minimalism and
conceptual art, including the piling up of fragments, the use of parataxis, appropria-
tion, and “mathematical progression” (“Allegorical Impulse,” 207). Charles Bernstein
argues for Silliman’s work as an example of allegory from a slightly different yet related
angle: “Silliman’s structures can be read as political allegory for a society that is nonau-
thoritarian (playful and provisional structures) and multicultural (the absolute right of
difference” (Content’s Dream, 314). Timothy Yu argues that Ketjak offers “through its form
an allegory of a new social order” (Race and the Avant-​Garde, 39).
26. Interspersed among the multitude of sentences in Ketjak are a high number of
sentences—​neither attributed nor set off by quotation marks—​t hat are taken verbatim (or
sometimes slightly altered) from a wide range of texts, including Ludwig Wittgenstein’s
On Certainty, Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, Roland Barthes’s Mythologies, Karl
Marx’s Capital and The Communist Manifesto, works by the philosopher of language W. V.
Quine, avant-​garde composer Iannis Xenakis, Ezra Pound, Jack Spicer (“a poem as long as
California, or summer” (My Vocabulary, 31), Wallace Stevens, Francis Ponge, John Cage,
and Bob Dylan, as well as myriad samples drawn from popular culture, advertising, over-
heard speech, and so on (Age of Huts, 40).
27. For another revisionist reading of the modernist revulsion toward routine,
habit, and repetition that emphasizes instead their importance and necessity, see Lisi
Schoenbach, Pragmatic Modernism.
28. Silliman has suggested that he intended for the “caravan” sentence to function as
a commentary on the text: it is “a metaphor for the progress of the sentence itself,” just
as the “revolving door” sentence is “a metaphor for the reading function of re-​entering
the content in each line” (“Reading Ketjak,” 50). If “revolving door” is meant to allegorize
the poem’s content, the slow migration of these imaginary figures towards the right-​hand
margin and its vanishing point serves as an allegory for the movement of the sentence, and
perhaps by extension, the movement of the text and its form as a whole.
29. As I  mentioned earlier, in The Arcades Project, Benjamin contrasts Surrealism’s
reliance on dream with his own creation of a “constellation of awakening” (458). In the
first volume of Critique of Everyday Life (esp. 103–​29), Lefebvre attacks Surrealism in pre-
cisely these terms (“Surrealism set out to divert interest away from the real and, following
Rimbaud’s lead, to make the other world, the imaginary infinite, spring forth from within
the familiar” and sought “to belittle the real in favour of the magical and the marvel-
lous” [110]). For more on Lefebvre’s brief against Surrealism, see Sheringham (Everyday
Life, 134–​35) and Gardiner (Critiques of Everyday Life, 81–​83). However, it should be noted
that both Sheringham (59–​133) and Highmore (Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, 45–​59)
316Notes

include chapters on Surrealism that offer assessments of Surrealism’s extensive attentive-

ness to the everyday that are more nuanced than Lefebvre’s blanket dismissals.
30. See also Bernstein’s Content’s Dream (305–​ 20), Watten’s Total Syntax (“There
is an ethical value being given to the particulars that are taken in” [109]), and Lazer’s
“Education, Equality” (Silliman’s work is “often overtly political, even didactic in its
attention to the political meaning of daily experience” [82–​83]), among others.
31. In an interview, Silliman held up the sentence featuring the dobro-​playing men
as a prime example of the “ ‘ignored’ areas of experience” he hoped to draw attention to
(McCaffery and Gregory, Alive and Writing).
32. In “The Kingfishers” Olson writes:
I thought of the E on the stone, and of what Mao said
la lumiere”
          but the kingfisher
de l’aurore”
     but the kingfisher flew west
est devant nous!
    he got the color of his breast
     from the heat of the setting sun …
Mao concluded:
      nous devons
           nous lever
              et agir!
(168)
33. After being released from prison, “Big Black” Smith became an activist and a
paralegal who “spent a quarter century successfully fighting for legal damages.” In 2000,
inmates won a $12 million settlement. Smith died in 2004 (D. Martin, “Frank Smith”).
34. I am indebted to Aldon L. Nielsen for suggesting to me that this phrase, as well as
the name Big Black, were connected to the civil rights movement.

Chapter 6
1. For more on Silliman’s BART and its role as a precursor for the contemporary every-
day life project, see my article “Pay More Attention.”
2. For Lasky, works that are conceived of as projects—​rather than springing “from
the earth” by way of intuition—​are severely flawed for a variety of reasons: because the
project all too often garners more attention than the poems themselves, and serves as an
excuse or justification for the writing of inferior poetry; because “everything is set out
before” the writer gets” gets started”; and because they are “pretty boring, at best,” have
“nothing to do with poetry” and “may actually be very toxic to the very notion of poetry”
(n.p.).
3. As Jeffery Nealon has argued, “Goldsmith’s poetics puts him squarely within the
everyday of the internet age” (Post-​postmodernism, 166).
4. This narrative is told, for example, in Goldsmith’s interview with Perloff (Perloff,
“Conversation”) and in Geoffrey Young’s piece “Kenny.”
5. See the often-​quoted passage in “Being Boring” where Goldsmith claims “You really
don’t need to read my books to get the idea of what they’re like; you just need to know the
Notes 317

general concept… . I don’t expect you to even read my books cover to cover. It’s for that
reason I like the idea that you can know each of my books in one sentence.”
6. Detractors have attacked Goldsmith and his coterie for being hypocritical
careerists, mouthing avant-​garde slogans all the way to the bank (or the White House,
or a Comedy Central green room), and have questioned whether such writing can in any
way be oppositional or political, or if it merely replicates the worst of the cultural condi-
tions that give rise to it. Critics have quarreled over whether texts based on appropriation,
transcription, and détournement are radical and liberating or merely boring and unread-
able—​or worse, merely complicit with the dominant political and ideological orders. They
have argued over whether conceptual writing is innovative and truly “avant-​garde,” or
just a pale imitation of decades-​old innovations. They have discussed whether conceptual
poetry kills off lyric subjectivity, genuine feeling, and affect or if it, conversely, reinvents
lyric subjectivity for our time. As I was completing this book, Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa
Place, and conceptualism as a movement have been charged with racial insensitivity and
even outright racism for their appropriation of sensitive, volatile images and texts, includ-
ing Goldsmith’s use of Michael Brown’s autopsy report and, in Place’s case, Margaret
Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind and images of blackface minstrelsy, sparking voluminous
and vigorous debates online, in social media and blog posts. For more on these issues, see
Perloff’s Unoriginal Genius; Craig Dworkin’s “Imaginary Solution”; the Open Letter 12, no.
7 (Fall 2005) special issue on Goldsmith; Cal Bedient’s “Against Conceptualism”; Cathy
Park Hong’s “Delusions of Whiteness”; Brian Reed’s Nobody’s Business; as well as Jennifer
Ashton’s “Sincerity and the Second Person,” Jacquelyn Ardam’s “The ABCs of Conceptual
Writing,” and Alec Wilkinson’s “Something Borrowed.”
7. For example, Goldsmith has proclaimed “I am the most boring writer that has ever
lived” (“Being Boring”) and has said “I’m interested in a valueless practice … retyping
the New York Times is the most nutritionless act of literary appropriation I could conceive
of” (“Uncreativity as Creative Practice”).
8. This statement can be found on the “About” page for Soliloquy on Goldsmith’s
website at the Electronic Poetry Center, http://​w ww.epc.buffalo.edu/​authors/​goldsmith/​
soliloquy/​about.html.
9. As Craig Dworkin and others have pointed out, the most obvious antecedent for
this work is Andy Warhol’s a: A Novel. Warhol’s book presents itself as a verbatim tran-
script of conversations that took place over the course of a single day in Warhol’s Factory.
(Dworkin points out that this is misleading, as it “is in fact the result of at least four dif-
ferent recording sessions erratically transcribed, freely edited, and irresponsibly proofed”
(“Imaginary Solution,” 35). In an amusing passage in Soliloquy, Goldsmith first learns of
the existence of Warhol’s a from a friend in the midst of undertaking this very project,
and yet remains unfazed by the similarity. Dworkin observes that Goldsmith “doubles
the stakes of Warhol’s a and replays its wager, but without the blatant cheating, and the
two books have much in common” (35).
10. Perloff’s “Screening the Page” discusses Soliloquy in terms of new and emerging
poetic forms that rely on computer technology.
11. Perloff expands upon a different aspect of the project’s contrived nature:
“Furthermore, although his talking claims to be random, it is in fact carefully planned,
the author setting up the questions and raising the issues that will resound through-
out the day… . the fact is that when one studies Goldsmith’s text, one quickly finds
318Notes

that it has been much more structured than one would think” (“Screening the Page,”
156–​159).
12. Gordon Tapper points out that “its ubiquitous gossip often makes irresistible
reading, especially if we are familiar with the people whom Goldsmith is talking about.
In this sense, the work is a kind of roman à clef to which no clef is needed” (“Kenneth
Goldsmith’s Soliloquy”). For more on the lack of affect in Goldsmith and conceptual writ-
ing, see Bedient, “Against Conceptualism.”
13. Christian Bök makes a similar point: “Goldsmith parodies the lyrical poetics of
vernacular confession, revealing that, despite the desire of lyric poets to glorify the every-
day language of their casual, social milieu, such a democratic utopianism often balks at
the candour, if not the squalor, of ordinary language” (“A Silly Key,” 63).
14. To take a recent example, on August 23, 2013, Goldsmith tweeted a picture of an
installation of Soliloquy and wrote “Yeah. This is how many words I  spoke during one
week of April in 1996. Almost nothing I said was of value,” https://​t witter.com/​kg_​ubu/​
status/​371065001588834304. For an incisive critical appraisal of waste and Goldsmith, see
Christopher Schmidt, Poetics of Waste.
15. Others have connected Fidget to Beckett; for example, Perloff links Fidget with
Beckett’s spare late fiction and philosophical outlook (“VOCABEL”). Sianne Ngai
includes Goldsmith’s Fidget in her discussion of “the prominence of tedium as an aes-
thetic strategy in avant-​garde practices” (Ugly Feelings, 262) and argues that Goldsmith’s
work “continues a tradition of poetic experimentalism grounded in the work of Stein—​
including her interest in affectively reorganizing the subject’s relationship to language
through stylistic innovation” (260). An example of the affect she calls “stuplimity,” Fidget
is “simultaneously astonishing and deliberately fatiguing—​much like Beckett’s late fic-
tion, or the experience of reading The Making of Americans” (260–​61).
16. Dworkin highlights this aspect of Fidget: the work is an example of “an imaginary
solution: precise and impossible, recording only the exceptions to the thousands of other
bodily activities taking place at the same time, so that its smallest accuracies are bought
only at the cost of its larger failures, on which they are entirely dependent” (“Imaginary
Solution,” 38).
17. The question of whether this poem is a critique of consumerism or merely revels
in it is an open one, as well as one that recalls decades of debate about Warhol and Pop
Art. I read its stance as complex and perhaps ambivalent, but surely Nemerov is at least
partially suggesting that the fact that one’s day, one’s life, one’s self, could be reduced
solely to brand names is a sign of an impoverished existence. On the other hand, Kenneth
Goldsmith reproduced the poem on the blog Harriet under the title “Pro-​Consumerist
Poet #1” and wrote “it’s hard to imagine a more accurate contemporary self-​portrait. And
it doesn’t get ‘sexier,’ ‘cooler,’ or ‘more accessible’ than this.” But does Goldsmith really
think this poem is “pro-​consumerist,” or is this yet another one of his characteristically
Warholian, tongue-​in-​cheek moves? For more on Goldsmith’s enthusiastic endorsement
of pro-​consumerist, Warhol-​like poetry that deals “with consumerism head-​on, in a way
that would make Andy proud,” see his June 12, 2007, blog post, “Pro-​Consumerist Poetry.”
18. In his reading of Nemerov’s poem, Brian Reed takes up the question of whether a
work like this is truly “against expression,” as the title of the anthology and much of the
rhetoric surrounding the movement stress. For Reed, the poem’s apparent impersonality
is misleading: “Although the method of composition here might appear wholly imper-
sonal, Nemerov ends up revealing quite a bit about herself. One can easily reconstruct
Notes 319

her movements and actions based on the spray of proper nouns… . Anyone else who
tried to replicate this exercise would likely reveal an entirely different set of morning
rituals” (“Textbook Uncreative Writing,” 6). Reed argues that “The most illuminating
thing” about the poem is that “Nemerov herself has chosen this manner of cataloguing a
day. The unfurling anaphoric list and the proliferation of brand names conveys the sense
that careful creative consumption and artful display provide her life with stability and
structure” (6)
19. Citing Michael Sheringham and my own essay on Silliman’s BART, Stephens writes
that the poem is “a one-​day ‘project of attention’ that is a chronicle of product usage as
well as a chronicle of information usage” (“Vanguard Total Index,” 764).
20. For one of the most thorough and insightful discussions of the connection between
walking and poetry, see Roger Gilbert, Walks in the World. For a recent feature on contem-
porary walk poems, see the special issue of Jacket2 on walk poems, edited by Louis Bury
and Corey Frost.
21. As I discussed in ­chapter 1, the tactics and lexicon of Situationism have reemerged
in poetry and the broader culture in recent years.
22. For a discussion of Sinclair and psychogeography, Situationism, the flâneur, and
the dérive, see MacFarlane, “A Road of One’s Own.”
23. For more on the flâneur, see the collection of essays edited by Keith Tester; on
O’Hara and the flâneur, see Susan Rosenbaum, “Frank O’Hara, Flâneur of New York.”
24. As Rankine was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and raised in Kingston and in the
Bronx, this was somewhat familiar territory for her. However, she explains in an inter-
view, “I grew up in the Bronx but not in the South Bronx. I  was born in Jamaica, my
parents are New York City immigrants who came over in the early ’70s, late ’60s, early
’70s and we moved to the North Bronx… . I lived in North Bronx in a West Indian com-
munity, very close to New Rochelle. I had never been to the South Bronx because while
I was growing up it had the reputation of being incredibly dangerous and so it was not a
landscape I knew” (“Transcript”).
25. The poem has been described as “an urban archeological dig, a list poem, a collage, a
ready-​made structured by place and time. The complete project includes text, a Super-​Eight
film, and a collection of 100 snapshots” (Koneazny, “Gallery Tour,” 9). In the citation award-
ing the Norma Farber First Book Award to A Handmade Museum, Lyn Hejinian highlighted
some of the key aspects of the work: “the poet-​phenomenologist Brenda Coultas performs
the role of curator, searching out and then presenting a display of places—​a display of forms
that time takes… . Though the project—​and Coultas’s work is markedly project-​oriented—​
has an archeological quality, the results are sudden, immediate, and oddly revelatory… .
There are literary precedents for A Handmade Museum; one could point to the writings
of Thoreau, the Wordsworths (Dorothy as well as William), Robert Smithson, Bernadette
Mayer, and Juliana Spahr, for example. But, in fact, this is an utterly unusual book—​it is ‘a
first book’ in a profound, originating sense” (“Brenda Coultas”).
26. In his review of A Handmade Museum, Ray McDaniel refers to the work as “prose
poem,” but then adds “I only use the term to give the reader an approximate idea of what
the pieces look like; I encourage you now to discard your preconceived notions of what a
prose poem can do. In fact, I encourage you to ditch most normalizations of what poetry
must be. No one can say for certain, and the more zealous the quest for certainty becomes,
the less possible our appreciation for work like Coultas’, which has a refreshing uncon-
cern for any register of appropriateness outside the sphere of what she herself has chosen.”
320Notes

27. When excerpts of “The Bowery Project” were published in the journal Ecopoetics
before it appeared in book form, Coultas’s preface listed Mayer’s Memory among other
sources that the poem draws upon (although this remark does not appear in the book
itself) (“From ‘The Bowery Project’ ”).
28. See Susan Briante (“Coultas and Robertson”) on the ethnographic dimension of
the poem, and Jaime Robles (“Brenda Coultas”), who discusses the poem’s naïve, neutral
tone and its effects and argues that Coultas “is able to assume, in a poetic version, the
perspective and methodology of a journalist or scientist.”
29. The implicit politics of Coultas’s project resemble Ben Highmore’s discussion
of Benjamin’s “Trash Aesthetics”:  “Benjamin’s approach to history is through ‘trash’—​
through the spent and discarded materials that crowd the everyday… . Everyday life reg-
isters the process of modernization as an incessant accumulation of debris: modernity
produces obsolescence as part of its continual demand for the new (the latest version
becomes last year’s model with increasing frequency)” (Everyday Life, 61).
30. Susan Briante writes at length about “The Bowery Project” as an ethnographic
work, making the point that Coultas attempts to “rewrite traditional ethnography.”
Briante connects Coultas’s work to James Clifford’s notion of “ethnographic moder-
nity,” and argues that Coultas “is both native of the neighborhood and yet has a differ-
ent relationship to it than the indigent people with whom the neighborhood has been so
frequently identified. Instead of relying on existing ethnographic documents written by
someone who has come to observe the neighborhood—​or resorting the language of urban
development—​Coultas uses an ethnographic model to generate her own documents, her
own archive” (“Coultas and Robertson”).
31. For more on Wright’s turn to the haiku, see Richard Wright, Haiku: The Last Poems
of An American Icon, and Yoshinobu Hakutani, Richard Wright and Haiku.
32. Mullen’s earlier work has displayed her debt to the Oulipo movement, which Perec was
a member of (including her use of Oulipean tactics in a number of poems in Sleeping with the
Dictionary, including the “n + 7” method, which calls for the writer to replace each noun in
an existing text with one seven nouns later in the dictionary). This suggests that she may well
be familiar with the opening epigraph in the work many consider to be Perec’s masterpiece.
33. Although it is beyond the scope of my argument here, it should be noted that Urban
Tumbleweed is also a powerful example of the recent turn to ecopoetics, as it probes our
complex relationship with nature. Constantly blurring the cultural and the natural (as
in the hybrid image Mullen uses for a title), the book confronts our daily experience of
“nature” in a rapidly changing, environmentally degraded, posthuman world, an espe-
cially vexing issue at a moment “when what we call natural or native is more than ever
open to question” (viii).
34. See Dungy’s introduction to Black Nature for an incisive discussion of this issue,
and for an excellent exploration of the origins and meanings of this set of attitudes in
nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century American literature, see Paul Outka’s Race and Nature.

Conclusion
1. This phrase is perhaps most closely associated with Charles Bernstein and debates
surrounding Language poetry. For example, see Bernstein’s 1989 edited collection by
that title.
Notes 321

2. I am referring to Ron Silliman’s “Sunset Debris,” which is written entirely in ques-
tions; Noah Eli Gordon’s Inbox, which presents the contents of his personal email as a long
poem; Juliana Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, which relies on the plural
first person; and Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s poem “Metropole,” which is a long prose poem
written in iambic meter. On the latter, see O’Brien’s comments in Adam Fitzgerald, “Both
Coasts,” an interview in which he explains the relationship between the use of a novel
formal constraint and the pursuit of the everyday: in “Metropole,” O’Brien’s plan was “to
place a lineated verse feature, in this case iambic rhythm, where one would least expect
to find it sustained: in prose. This ghosting of the metrical also provides a technology of
capture for the rhythms of daily experience: humming regularities interrupted by the soft
shock of substitution.”
3. For a recent New York Times article on this trend, see Vega, “Students See Many
Slights as Racial ‘Microaggressions.’ ” The article discusses a popular website called “The
Microaggressions Project: Power, Privilege, and Everyday Life,” www.microaggressions.
com. See also the recently published book Everyday Sexism by Laura Bates, and “The
Everyday Sexism Project,” http://​everydaysexism.com/​, a related website where individu-
als can post “instances of sexism experienced by women on a day to day basis.”
4. Sue notes that the term was coined by Chester Pierce in 1970, who defined racial
microaggresions as “subtle, stunning, often automatic, and nonverbal exchanges which
are ‘put downs’ ” (Microaggression in Everyday Life, xvi).
5. By the standards of most books of poems, Citizen has been a rare sensation: it has
received extensive review coverage, with major reviews, coverage, and interviews in the
New York Times, The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times,
Bookforum, Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Boston Review, as well as on NPR and
PBS. The book has gone into multiple printings, has been nominated for and won multiple
major awards, and has stirred up spirited conversation and devotion. Nearly every review
mentions “microaggressions” or “everyday racism”—​for example, see the NPR story titled
“In ‘Citizen,’ Poet Strips Bare the Realities of Everyday Racism.”
6. One indication of the book’s unusual hybridity is that Citizen was nominated for
the National Book Critics Circle Award in both poetry and nonfiction, which was appar-
ently unprecedented.
7. In her interview in The New Yorker, Rankine explained the process of collecting
that led to the writing of Citizen. She discussed how she began to notice little moments
of “invisible racism—​moments that you experience and that happen really fast” while
watching Serena Williams playing tennis, and she thought to herself “I’m going to start
documenting these… . And as I  began documenting them in Serena Williams’s play-
ing life, I started doing it in my own life. Then I started interviewing people and asking
them for stories in their lives. I specifically said, to people I met and to friends, ‘Tell me
a moment when you suddenly found yourself feeling invisible or internally unsettled by
something that came down to a moment that you then read as racism, but I want it to hap-
pen between you and a friend.’ I didn’t really care too much about what people were doing
in Ferguson, at this level. I meant in their day-​to-​day working lives. And then, as people
began to tell me stories, I began to see it in my own life, everywhere, happening, and I just
started writing them down” (Schwartz, “On Being Seen”).
8. See Frank O’Hara’s poem “Today,” in the Collected Poems (15).
 { WORKS CITED }

NOTE:  Here are URLs for several websites which are cited multiple times in this
Works Cited.

The Awl: http://​w ww.theawl.com/​.

Bookslut: http://​w ww.bookslut.com/​.
Electronic Poetry Center: http://​epc.buffalo.edu/​.
Modern American Poetry: http://​w ww.english.illinois.edu/​maps/​.
Poetry Daily: http://​poems.com/​.
Poetry Foundation /​Harriet blog: http://​w ww.poetryfoundation.org/​harriet/​.

Acconci, Vito, and Bernadette Mayer, eds. 0 to 9: The Complete Magazine: 1967–​1969. Brooklyn,
NY: Ugly Duckling, 2006.
Adams, Hazard, ed. Critical Theory Since Plato. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971.
Adorno, Theodor, and Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Georg Lukács.
Aesthetics and Politics. London: Verso, 2010.
Aji, Hélène. “The Weather [to] Day:  Overexposure to and of the Media in Kenneth
Goldsmith’s Work.” Paper presented at the University of Maine, October 13, 2009.
http://​epc.buffalo.edu/​authors/​goldsmith/​Aji-​on-​Goldsmith.pdf.
Allen, Donald M., ed. The New American Poetry. New York: Grove, 1960.
Allen, Mark. “Proudly Fraudulent:  An Interview with MoMA’s First Poet Laureate,
Kenneth Goldsmith.” The Awl, February 6, 2013.
Allison, Raphael. “David Antin’s Pragmatist Technophobia.” Journal of Modern Literature
28, no. 4 (2005): 110–​34.
Allison, Raphael. “James Schuyler’s Beef with Ordinary Language.” Journal of Modern
Literature 34, no. 3 (2011): 106–​27.
Almond, Steve. “A Year for ‘Year Of’ Books.” NPR News broadcast, December 26, 2007.
Altieri, Charles. “Without Consequences Is No Politics:  A  Reply to Jerome McGann.” In
Politics and Poetic Value, ed. Robert von Hallberg, 301–​308. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1986.
Amato, Joseph A. On Foot: A History of Walking. New York: New York University Press, 2004.
Ammons, A. R. A Coast of Trees: Poems. New York: Norton, 1981.
Ammons, A. R. Collected Poems: 1951–​1971. New York: Norton, 1972.
Ammons, A. R. Garbage. New York: Norton, 1993.
Ammons, A. R. Glare. New York: Norton, 1997.
Ammons, A. R. Northfield Poems. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966.
Ammons, A. R. The Really Short Poems of A.R. Ammons. New York: Norton, 1990.
Ammons, A. R., “The Ridge Farm.” The Hudson Review 36, no. 1 (1983): 75–110.
Ammons, A. R. “Selected Letters, Journals, and Papers (1954–​1974).” In “This Is Just a Place,”
ed. Roger Gilbert, 592–​652. Special issue of Epoch 52, no. 3 (2004).
Ammons, A. R. Selected Poems. Expanded ed. New York: Norton, 1986.
324Works Cited

Ammons, A.  R. Selected Poems. Edited by David Lehman. New  York:  Library of
America, 2006.
Ammons, A. R. Set in Motion: Essays, Interviews, and Dialogues. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1996.
Ammons, A. R. The Snow Poems. New York: Norton, 1977.
Ammons, A. R. Sphere: The Form of a Motion. 1974. New York: Norton, 1995.
Ammons, A. R. Tape for the Turn of the Year. 1965. New York: Norton, 1993.
“An Interview with Rachel Zucker and Arielle Greenberg.” A. Bradstreet, May 1, 2013. http://​
www.abradstreet.com/​post/​49376302488/​a-​bradstreet-​interview-​with-​rachel-​zucker.
Andrews, Bruce. Paradise and Method:  Poetics and Praxis. Evanston, IL:  Northwestern
University Press, 1996.
Andrews, Bruce, and Charles Bernstein, eds. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.
Apter, Emily. “‘Women’s Time’ in Theory.” Differences 21, no. 1 (2010): 1–​18.
Ardam, Jacquelyn. “The ABCs of Conceptual Writing.” Comparative Literature Studies 51,
no. 1 (2014): 132–​58.
Ardoin, Paul, Perception Sickness:  Modernist Literature and the Dangers of a Heightened
Awareness. Dissertation, Florida State University, 2014. Available at Electronic Theses,
Treatises and Dissertations, paper 8726.
Armantrout, Rae. Collected Prose. San Diego: Singing Horse, 2007.
Armantrout, Rae. Veil: New and Selected Poems. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University
Press, 2001.
Armantrout, Rae. Versed. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009.
Ashbery, John. Reported Sightings:  Art Chronicles 1957–​1987. Edited by David Bergman.
New York: Knopf, 1989.
Ashbery, John. Selected Poems. New York: Penguin, 1985.
Ashbery, John. Three Poems. New York: Penguin, 1972.
Ashton, Jennifer. “Sincerity and the Second Person:  Lyric after Language Poetry.”
Interval(le)s 4, no. 5 (2009). http://​labos.ulg.ac.be/​cipa/​w p-​content/​uploads/​sites/​22/​
2015/​07/​8_​ashton.pdf.
Asokan, Ratik. “I Am Invested in Keeping Present the Forgotten Bodies.” Interview with
Claudia Rankine. The Believer, December 10, 2014.
Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Orig. 1988. London: Continuum, 2007.
Baetens, Jan, and Hilde Van Gelder, eds. Critical Realism in Contemporary Art:  Around
Allan Sekula’s Photography. Leuven: Leuven University, 2006.
Baker, Peter. “Bernadette Mayer.” In American Poets Since World War II: Fourth Series, ed.
Joseph Conte. Vol. 165 of Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Research, 1996.
Available online.
Bartczak, Kacper. “Pragmatism and Poetry:  The Neo-​ Pragmatist Difference in the
Discussion of Contemporary American Poetry.” Pragmatism Today 2, no. 2 (2011).
http://​w ww.pragmatismtoday.eu/​w inter2011/​Bartczak.pdf.
Bartlett, Lee. “What Is Language Poetry?” Critical Inquiry 12 (1986): 741–​52.
Bates, Laura. Everyday Sexism. London: Simon and Schuster, 2014.
Beckett, Samuel. Endgame: A Play in One Act, Followed by Act Without Words, a Mime for
One Player. New York: Grove, 1958.
Beckett, Tom. “An Interview with Ron Silliman.” The Difficulties 2, no. 2 (1985):  34–​46.
Available on Modern American Poetry website.
Works Cited 325

Beckett, Tom, ed. “Ron Silliman Issue.” The Difficulties 2, no. 2 (1985).
Bedient, Cal. “Against Conceptualism: Defending the Poetry of Affect.” Boston Review,
July 24, 2013. Available at https://bostonreview.net/poetry/against-conceptualism.
Beller, Jonathan. The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of
the Spectacle. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2006.
Benjamin, Daniel. “Poetry Is a Form of Sophism Rather than of Truth.” Interview with
Charles Bernstein. Sibila: Poesia e Critica Literária, March 20, 2010.
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings, Vol 4:  1938–​1940. Edited by Howard Eiland and
Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Bennett, Tony, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris, eds. New Keywords: A Revised
Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Malden, MA: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2005.
Bennett, Tony, and Elizabeth B.  Silva, eds. Contemporary Culture and Everyday Life.
Durham, NC: Sociology, 2002.
Bennett, Tony, and Diane H. Watson, eds. Understanding Everyday Life. Oxford: Blackwell,
2002.
Benson, Steve. Blue Book. Great Barrington, MA: The Figures, 1988.
Bergvall, Caroline, Laynie Browne, Teresa Carmody, and Vanessa Place, eds. I’ll Drown
My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women. Los Angeles: Les Figues, 2012.
Berkson, Bill. Introduction, James Schuyler reading at San Francisco Art Institute,
February 10, 1989. Available at Penn Sound. http://​w riting.upenn.edu/​pennsound/​x /​
Schuyler.php.
Berkson, Bill, and Joseph LeSueur, eds. Homage to Frank O’Hara. Bolinas, CA: Big Sky, 1988.
Bernes, Jasper. “Bernadette Mayer and the Capitalization of Everyday Life.” 2008.
Available on National Poetry Foundation website. http://​vectors.usc.edu/​t hought-
mesh/​publish/​130.php.
Bernstein, Charles. A Poetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Bernstein, Charles. Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2011.
Bernstein, Charles. Content’s Dream: Essays 1975–​1984. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1986.
Bernstein, Charles. My Way: Speeches and Poems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1999.
Bernstein, Charles, ed. The Politics of Poetic Form:  Poetry and Public Policy. New  York:
Roof, 1989.
Berrigan, Ted. Collected Poems. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Bessa, A.  S. “Exchanging Emails with Kenneth Goldsmith:  An Interview.” 2000. Available on
Electronic Poetry Center website. http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/goldsmith/bessa.html.
Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Boston: Faber
and Faber, 1994.
Blanchot, Maurice. “Everyday Speech.” Yale French Studies 73 (1987): 12–​20.
Bloch, Julia. Lyric After Epic: Gender and the Postwar Long Poem. Dissertation, University
of Pennsylvania, 2011.
Bloom, Harold. Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Bloom, Harold, ed. A. R. Ammons. New York: Chelsea House, 1986.
Bloom, Harold. “A. R. Ammons: ‘When You Consider the Radiance.’” In Considering the
Radiance: Essays on the Poetry of A. R. Ammons, ed. David Burak and Roger Gilbert, 45–​88.
New York: Norton, 2005.
326Works Cited

Bök, Christian. “A Silly Key:  Some Notes on Soliloquy by Kenneth Goldsmith.” Open
Letter 7 (2005): 62–​68.
Bök, Christian. “Conceptualism in the Wild.” Harriet (Poetry Foundation blog), April
10, 2012. Available at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2012/04/conceptual-
literature-in-the-wild/​.
Boscagli, Maurizia. Stuff Theory:  Everyday Objects, Radical Materialism. New  York:
Bloomsbury, 2014.
Briante, Susan. “Coultas and Robertson Write the City from Surface to Detritus, from I to
We.” Jacket 36 (2008). http://​jacketmagazine.com/​36/​briante-​robertson-​coultas.shtml.
“Briefly Noted.” Unsigned review of Arda Collins, It is Daylight. The New Yorker, April 27,
2009.
Brito, Manual. Interview with Ron Silliman. In A Suite of Poetic Voices: Interviews with
Contemporary Poets, ed. Manual Brito, 145–​166. Santa Brigida, Spain: Kadle, 1992.
Brockman, John, ed. Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net’s Impact on Our
Minds and Future. New York: Harper Perennial, 2011.
Brouwer, Joel. “Being Here.” Harriet (Poetry Foundation blog), September 18, 2009.
Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2003.
Browne, Laynie. Daily Sonnets. Denver: Counterpath, 2007.
Browne, Laynie. The Desires of Letters. Denver: Counterpath, 2010.
Bruns, Gerald L. “Francis Ponge on the Rue de la Chaussée Antin.” Comparative Literature
53, no. 3 (2001): 193–​213.
Buell, Frederick. “Ammons’s Peripheral Vision: Tape for the Turn of the Year and Garbage.
In Complexities of Motion, ed. Steven P. Schneider, 214–​38. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press, 1999.
Buell, Frederick. “ ‘To Be Quiet in the Hands of the Marvelous’: The Poetry of A. R.
Ammons.” Iowa Review 8, no. 1 (1977): 67–​85.
Burak, David, and Roger Gilbert, eds. Considering the Radiance: Essays on the Poetry of A.
R. Ammons. New York: Norton, 2005.
Burt, Stephen. Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf,
2009.
Burt, Stephen. “Mother Tongues.” Review of Plot by Claudia Rankine. The Village Voice
April 10, 2001: 122.
Burt, Stephen. “Smothered to Smithereens: The Poetics of Motherhood.” Boston Review,
January/​February 2010. Available at http://​new.bostonreview.net/​BR35.1/​burt.php.
Bury, Louis, and Corey Frost, eds. “Walk Poems: A Series of Reviews of Walking Projects.”
Special issue, Jacket 2 (2011). Available at https://​jacket2.org/​feature/​walk-​poems.
Cage, John. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press,
1961.
Cain, Stephen. “Kenneth Goldsmith.” Alan Filreis’s website. n.d. Available at http://​w ww.
writing.upenn.edu/​~afilreis/​88v/​goldsmith-​bio.html.
Calahan, Joel, and Michael Hansen. Introduction to Special Issue on A.  R. Ammons.
Chicago Review 57, nos. 1–​2 (2013): 7–​9.
Campion, Peter. “Between Ordinary and Ecstatic.” Review of Edward Hirsch, The Living
Fire: New and Selected Poems. New York Times, March 25, 2010.
Campion, Peter. “Palpable Fact: James Schuyler and Immediacy.” PN Review 28, no. 5
(2002): 50–​51.
Works Cited 327

Canby, Vincent. “Attica: Moving Documentary of Riot.” New York Times, April 12, 1974.

Carpenter, Siri. “Sight Unseen.” Monitor on Psychology 32, no. 4 (2001): 54.
Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.”
The Atlantic July/​August 2008. Available at http://​w ww.theatlantic.com/​magazine/​
archive/​2008/​07/​is-​google-​making-​us-​stupid/​306868/​.
Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows:  What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New  York:
Norton, 2010.
Cavell, Stanley. In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Cavell, Stanley. This New Yet Unapproachable America:  Lectures After Emerson, After
Wittgenstein. Albuquerque, NM: Living Batch, 1989.
Cavell, Stanley. “The Ordinary as Uneventful.” In Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes,
184–​94. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Cavell, Stanley. The Senses of Walden: An Expanded Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1981.
Caws, Mary A., ed. Manifesto: A Century of Isms. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001.
Chabris, Christopher, and Daniel Simons. “The Invisible Gorilla.” Available at http://​
www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/​.
Chang, Victoria. “13 Poetry Collections for People Who Think They Don’t Like Poetry.”
Huffington Post, April 1, 2014.
Chester, Laura, ed. Cradle and All: Women Writers on Pregnancy and Birth. Boston: Faber
and Faber, 1989.
Clark, Tom. Poetry Beat:  Reviewing the Eighties. Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan
Press, 1990.
Clark, Tom. “Schuyler’s Idylls: Notes and Reflections on the Collected Poems.” American
Poetry Review 23, no. 4 (May/​June 1994): 7–​13.
Clover, Joshua. Madonna Anno Domini: Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1997.
Clover, Joshua. The Totality for Kids. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Collins, Billy. Nine Horses: Poems. New York: Random House, 2002.
Collins, Billy. Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems. New York: Random
House, 2001.
Collins-​Hughes, Laura. Review of Robert Hass, What Light Can Do. Boston Globe, August 28,
2012.
Conrad, CA, and Frank Sherlock. The City Real & Imagined. New  York:  Factory
School, 2010.
Conte, Joseph M. Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1991.
Corey, Joshua, and G. C. Waldrep, eds. The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern
Pastoral. Boise, ID: Ahsahta, 2012.
Corbett, William. “Poet of the Present.” Denver Quarterly 24, no. 4 (1990): 49–​52.
Costello, Bonnie. “A. R.  Ammons:  Pilgrim, Sage, Ordinary Man.” In Considering the
Radiance: Essays on the Poetry of A. R. Ammons, ed. David Burak and Roger Gilbert,
248–​80. New York: Norton, 2005.
Cotner, Jon, and Andy Fitch. Ten Walks/​Two Talks. Brooklyn, NY: Ugly Duckling, 2010.
Cotter, Holland. “On Sontag: Essayist as Metaphor and Muse.” New York Times, August 18,
2006.
328Works Cited

Coverly, Merlin. The Art of Wandering: The Writer as Walker. Harpenden, UK: Oldcastle,

2012.
Coultas, Brenda. A Handmade Museum. Minneapolis: Coffee House, 2003.
Coultas, Brenda. “From ‘The Bowery Project.’” Ecopoetics 1 (2000). Available at https://​
ecopoetics.files.wordpress.com/​2008/​06/​eco1.pdf.
Crain, Caleb. “Surveillance Society.” The New Yorker, September 11, 2006.
Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.
Crase, Douglas. “A Voice Like the Day.” Poetry 163, no. 4 (1994): 225–​38.
Creeley, Robert. Collected Poems: 1945–​1975. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
Dargis, Manohla, and A. O. Scott. “In Defense of the Slow and Boring.” New York Times,
June 3, 2011.
Davey, Moyra, ed. Mother Reader: Essential Literature on Motherhood. New York: Seven
Stories, 2001.
Davidson, Cathy N. Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the
Way We Live, Work, and Learn. New York: Viking, 2011.
Davidson, Michael. Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2004.
Davidson, Michael. “Poetics of Everyday Life.” Poetics Journal 9 (1991): 171–​74.
Davis, Thomas S. “‘What True Project Has Been Lost?’: Modern Art and Henri Lefebvre’s
Critique of Everyday Life.” In Modernism and Theory: A Critical Debate, ed. Stephen
Ross, 65–​79. New York: Routledge, 2008.
Deane, Patrick. “Justified Radicalism: A. R. Ammons with a Glance at John Cage.” Papers
on Language and Literature 28, no. 2 (1992): 206–​22.
“December Named National Awareness Month.” The Onion, November 17, 2009.
De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley:  University of California
Press, 2002.
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone, 1994.
Debord, Guy. “Theory of the Dérive.” In Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken
Knabb, 62–​66. Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1995.
Deford, Susie. “F*cking Poetry.” Interview with Catherine Wagner. Bomb (2010). Available
at http://​bombmagazine.org/​article/​4541/​f-​cking-​poetry.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Corrected Edition, 1997.
Dienstfrey, Patricia, and Brenda Hillman, eds. The Grand Permission:  New Writings on
Poetics and Motherhood. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003.
Di Piero, W.  S. “‘Baby Sweetness Blew His Cool Again…’” Poetry 187, no. 4 (2006):
307–​17.
Douglas, Susan J. “Mass Media: From 1945 to the Present.” In A Companion to Post-​1945
America, ed. Jean-​Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig, 78–​95. Malden, MA and
Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.
D’Souza, Aruna, and Tom McDonough, eds. The Invisible Flâneuse?:  Gender, Public
Space, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-​Century Paris. Manchester, UK:  Manchester
University Press, 2006.
Dungy, Camille T., ed. Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry.
Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009.
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. “Manhood and its Poetic Projects:  The Construction of
Masculinity in the Counter-​Cultural Poetry of the U.S. 1950s.” Jacket 31 (2006).
Works Cited 329

DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. “Notes on Silliman and Poesis.” Journal of Poetics Research 2
(2015). Available at http://​poeticsresearch.com/​article/​rachel-​blau-​duplessis-​notes-​on-​
silliman-​a nd-​poesis-​2/​.
Dworkin, Craig Douglas. “The Imaginary Solution.” Contemporary Literature 48, no. 1
(2007): 29–​60.
Dworkin, Craig D., and Kenneth Goldsmith, eds. Against Expression: An Anthology of
Conceptual Writing. Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011.
Dworkin, Craig. “Zero Kerning.” Open Letter 12, no. 7 (2005): 10–​20.
Eeckhout, Bart, and Rachel Galvin, eds. “Stevens and the Everyday.” Special issue. Wallace
Stevens Journal 36, no. 1 (2012).
Edwards, Leigh H. The Triumph of Reality TV: The Revolution in American Television. Santa
Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2013.
Elden, Stuart. Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible. London: Continuum,
2004.
Elderfield, John. Kurt Schwitters. London: Thames and Hudson, 1985.
Eldridge, Richard T., and Bernard Rhie, eds. Stanley Cavell and Literary Studies: Consequences
of Skepticism. New York: Continuum, 2011.
Eliot, T. S. Complete Poems and Plays. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays and Lectures. New York: Library of America, 1983.
Epstein, Andrew. Beautiful Enemies:  Friendship and Postwar American Poetry.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Epstein, Andrew. “‘Building a Nest Out of Torn Up Letters’:  James Schuyler, Trash,
and the Poetics of Collage.” Jacket 2 (2012). Available at http://​jacket2.org/​article/​
building-​nest-​out-​torn-​letters.
Epstein, Andrew. “‘Pay More Attention’: Silliman’s BART and Contemporary ‘Everyday
Life Projects.’” Jacket 39 (2010). Available at http://​jacketmagazine.com/​39/​silliman-​
epstein-​bart.shtml.
Epstein, Andrew. “‘The Rhapsody of Things as They Are’: Stevens, Francis Ponge, and the
Impossible Everyday.” Wallace Stevens Journal 36, no. 1 (2012): 47–​77.
Epstein, Andrew. “‘Uh, Philosophy’:  A.R. Ammons, Pragmatism, and ‘The Philosophy
Poem.’” The Account:  A  Journal of Poetry, Prose, and Thought 2 (2014). Available at
http://​t heaccountmagazine.com/​?article=uh-​philosophy-​a-​r-​a mmons-​pragmatism-
​a nd-​t he-​philosophy-​poem.
“Every Sizzler Restaurant in America?!” 10 Zen Monkeys, October 8, 2009. Available at
http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2009/10/08/every-sizzler-restaurant-in-america/.
Felski, Rita. Introduction to special issue, “Everyday Life.” New Literary History 33, no. 4
(2002): 607–​22.
Felski, Rita. “The Invention of Everyday Life.” In Doing Time:  Feminist Theory and
Postmodern Culture, 77–​98. New York: New York University Press, 2000.
Fielding, James, M. “The Aesthetics of the Ordinary:  Wittgenstein and John Cage.”
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 72, no. 2 (2014): 157–​67.
Fischer, B. K. “Chokehold.” Review of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. Boston Review December
9, 2014. Available at https://​w ww.bostonreview.net/​poetry/​bk-​fischer-​claudia-​rankine-
​citizen-​a merican-​lyric-​chokehold.
Fisher, Tom. “Making Sense: Jacues Rancière and the Language Poets.” Journal of Modern
Literature 36, no. 2 (Winter 2013): 156–​74.
Fiske, John. “Cultural Studies and the Culture of Everyday Life.” In Cultural Studies, ed.
Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, 154–​73. New York: Routledge, 1992.
330Works Cited

Fiske, John. Television Culture. New York and London: Routledge, 1987.

Fitterman, Robert. No. Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself. Brooklyn, NY:  Ugly
Duckling, 2014.
Fitzgerald, Adam. “Both Coasts:  An Interview with Geoffrey G.  O’Brien.” Los Angeles
Review of Books, February 14, 2011.
Fitzgerald, Adam. “Lives of the Poets:  Bernadette Mayer.” April 4, 2011. Available at
Poetry Foundation website.
Fitzgerald, Judith. Interview with Susan Holbrook. Globe and Mail, November 18, 2009.
Flajšar, Jiří. Epiphany in American Poetry. Olomouc, Czech Republic: Palacký University
Press, 2003.
Fleming, Richard, and Michael Payne, eds. The Senses of Stanley Cavell. Lewisburg,
PA: Bucknell University Press, 1989.
Flescher, Jennifer, and Robert N. Caspar. “An Interview with Claudia Rankine.” Jubilat 12
(2006). Available on Poetry Daily website.
Ford, Mark. “Like a Lily Daché Hat.” Poetry Review 92, no. 3 (2002): 56–​61.
Foster, Hal. The Return of the Real: The Avant-​Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1996.
Fredman, Stephen. Contextual Practice: Assemblage and the Erotic in Postwar Poetry and
Art. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010.
Fredman, Stephen. “Mysticism: Neo-​Paganism, Buddhism, and Christianity.” In A Concise
Companion to Twentieth-​Century American Poetry, 191–​211. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.
Fredman, Stephen. Poet’s Prose: The Crisis in American Verse. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1990.
Frede, Dorothea. “The Question of Being:  Heidegger’s Project.” In The Cambridge
Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles B.  Guignon, 42–​69. Cambridge:  Cambridge
University Press, 1993.
Fried, Philip. Interview with A. R. Ammons. Manhattan Review (1980). Available at http://​
www.terrain.org/​2009/​interviews/​interview-​w ith-​a-​r-​a mmons/​.
Frost, Robert. The Road Not Taken:  A  Selection of Robert Frost’s Poems, edited by Louis
Untermeyer. New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1971.
Gabler, Neal. Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality. New York: Knopf, 1998.
Gamard, Elizabeth Burns. Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau:  The Cathedral of Erotic Misery.
New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000.
Gallagher, Winifred. Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. New York: Penguin, 2009.
Gardiner, Michael. Critiques of Everyday Life. London: Routledge, 2000.
Garner, Dwight. “The Bad Father, and Other Childhood Memories.” Review of Karl Ove
Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book Three. New York Times, May 27, 2014.
Garner, Dwight. “The Words We Heard as Horrors Sank In.” Review of Kenneth
Goldsmith, Seven Deaths and American Disasters. New York Times, June 18, 2013.
Gardner, Thomas. Regions of Unlikeness:  Explaining Contemporary Poetry. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1999.
Gaughan, Patrick. “Hard Facts.” Interview with Jena Osman. BOMB (2012). Available at
http://bombmagazine.org/article/6994/.
Gemin, Pamela, ed. Sweeping Beauty:  Contemporary Women Poets Do Housework. Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press, 2005.
Gilbert, Elizabeth. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India
and Indonesia. New York: Viking, 2006.
Works Cited 331

Gilbert, Roger, “A. R. Ammons.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography 165: American Poets

Since World War II, 4th series, ed. Joseph Conte. Detroit: Gale Research Group, 1996.
Available online.
Gilbert, Roger. ‘I Went to the Summit’:  The Literary Bromance of A.  R. Ammons and
Harold Bloom.” Genre 45, no. 1 (2012): 167–​93.
Gilbert, Roger, ed. “This Is Just a Place.” Special issue on A. R. Ammons. Epoch 52, no. 3
(2004).
Gilbert, Roger. Walks in the World:  Representation and Experience in Modern American
Poetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Gilloch, Graeme. Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2002.
Gizzi, Peter. “A Note on Schuyler’s ‘February.’” In Dark Horses: Poets on Overlooked Poems,
ed. Joy Katz and Kevin Prufer. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Available at
James Schuyler page, Electronic Poetry Center website. http://​epc.buffalo.edu/​authors/​
schuyler/​schuyler_​gizzi_​on_​february.html.
Goldberg, RoseLee. Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. New York: Abrams, 1988.
Goldsmith, Kenneth. “Being Boring.” 2004. Available at Electronic Poetry Center
website. Available at http://​e pc.buffalo.edu/​authors/​goldsmith/​goldsmith_​b oring.
html.
Goldsmith, Kenneth. “Being Dumb.” The Awl, July 23, 2013. Available at http://​w ww.
theawl.com/​2013/​07/​being-​dumb.
Goldsmith, Kenneth. Capital: New York: Capital of the 20th Century. London: Verso, 2015.
Goldsmith, Kenneth. “Conceptual Poetics.” 2008. Available at Poetry Foundation web-
site. http://​w ww.poetryfoundation.org/​harriet/​2008/​06/​conceptual-​poetics-​kenneth-​
goldsmith/​.
Goldsmith Kenneth. Day, Great Barrington, MA: The Figures, 2003.
Goldsmith, Kenneth. Fidget. Toronto: Coach House, 2000.
Goldsmith, Kenneth. “Introduction to Flarf vs. Conceptual Writing.” 2009. Available at
Electronic Poetry Center website. http://​w ings.buffalo.edu/​epc/​authors/​goldsmith/​
whitney-​intro.html.
Goldsmith, Kenneth. “If I Were to Raise My Children the Way I Write My Books, I Would
Have Been Thrown in Jail Long Ago.” Harriet (Poetry Foundation blog), April 27, 2010.
Available at http://​w ww.poetryfoundation.org/​harriet/​2010/​04/​if-​i-​were-​to-​raise-​my-​
children-​t he-​way-​i-​w rite-​my-​books-​i-​would-​have-​been-​t hrown-​in-​jail-​long-​ago/​.
Goldsmith, Kenneth. No. 111: 2.7.93–​10.20.96, Great Barrington, MA: The Figures, 1997.
Goldsmith, Kenneth. “Pro-​Consumerist Poetry.” Harriet (Poetry Foundation blog), June 12,
2007. Available at http://​w ww.poetryfoundation.org/​harriet/​2007/​06/​pro-​consumerist-
​poetry/​.
Goldsmith, Kenneth. “Pro-​Consumerist Poet #1.” Harriet (Poetry Foundation blog), June 13,
2007. Available at http://​w ww.poetryfoundation.org/​harriet/​2007/​06/​pro-​consumerist-
​poet-​1/​.
Goldsmith, Kenneth. Seven American Deaths and Disasters. Brooklyn, NY: PowerHouse,
2013.
Goldsmith, Kenneth. Soliloquy. New York: Granary, 2001.
Goldsmith, Kenneth. Sports. Los Angeles: Make Now, 2008.
Goldsmith, Kenneth. Traffic. Los Angeles: Make Now, 2007.
Goldsmith, Kenneth. Uncreative Writing:  Managing Language in the Digital Age.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
332Works Cited

Goldsmith, Kenneth. “Uncreativity as Creative Practice.” n.d. Available at Electronic

Poetry Center website. http://​epc.buffalo.edu/​authors/​goldsmith/​uncreativity.html.
Goldsmith, Kenneth. The Weather. Los Angeles: Make Now, 2005.
Goonewardena, Kanishka. Space, Difference, Everyday Life:  Reading Henri Lefebvre.
New York: Routledge, 2008.
Gordon, Noah Eli. Inbox: A Reverse Memoir. Kenmore, NY: BlazeVOX, 2006.
Gould, Emily. “The Stunt Book Trend Must Die.” Gawker, May 16, 2007.
Gould, Timothy. “The Names of Action.” In Stanley Cavell, ed. Richard Eldridge, 48–​78.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Gray, Timothy. “New Windows on New York: The Figurative Vision of James Schuyler
and Jane Freilicher.” In Urban Pastoral: Natural Currents in the New York School, 100–​
20. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010.
Grimstad, Paul. Experience and Experimental Writing: Literary Pragmatism from Emerson
to the Jameses. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Gros, Frédéric. The Philosophy of Walking. London: Verso, 2014.
Grossvogel, D. I. “An Interview with A. R. Ammons.” Diacritics 3, no. 4 (1973): 47–​53.
Gudas, Eric. “Scrappiness.” Review of James Schuyler, Other Flowers. Los Angeles Review
of Books, June 30, 2011. Available at https://​lareviewofbooks.org/​review/​scrappiness.
Gudding, Gabriel. Rhode Island Notebook. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2007.
Hakutani, Yoshinobu. Richard Wright and Haiku. Columbia:  University of Missouri
Press, 2014.
Halpern, Daniel, ed. The Antaeus Anthology. Toronto: Bantam, 1986.
Halpern, Nick. Everyday and Prophetic: The Poetry of Lowell, Ammons, Merrill, and Rich.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.
Hamilton, Diana. Review of Robert Fitterman, No. Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself.
Cold Front, August 23, 2014.
Harmon, William. “How Does One Come Home: A. R. Ammons’s Tape for the Turn of the
Year.” Southern Literary Journal 7, no. 2 (1975): 3–​32.
Harrison, Jim. “Muse & Hearth.” Poetry 107, no. 5 (1966): 330–​31.
Harryman, Carla, et al. The Grand Piano. Part 4. Detroit: Mode A, 2007.
Hartley, George. Textual Politics and Language Poetry. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1989.
Hass, Robert. What Light Can Do:  Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World.
New York: Ecco, 2012.
Haythe, Cynthia. “An Interview with A. R. Ammons.” Contemporary Literature 21, no. 2
(1980): 173–​90.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson.
New York: Harper & Row, 1962.
Hejinian, Lyn. “Brenda Coultas.” 2004. Available at Poetry Society of America website.
https://​w ww.poetrysociety.org/​psa/​awards/​a nnual/​w inners/​2004/​award_​8/​.
Hejinian, Lyn. The Language of Inquiry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Hejinian, Lyn. My Life. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1987.
Hejinian, Lyn, and Barrett Watten. A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded
Field, 1982–​1998. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013.
Heller, Nathan. “Slow TV Is Here.” The New Yorker, September 30, 2014.
Herd, David. Enthusiast! Essays on Modern American Literature. Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2007.
Higgins, Hannah. Fluxus Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Works Cited 333

Highmore, Ben. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction. London: Routledge,

2002.
Highmore, Ben. The Everyday Life Reader. London: Routledge, 2002.
Highmore, Ben. Michel De Certeau: Analysing Culture. London: Continuum, 2006.
Highmore, Ben. Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday. New York: Routledge, 2011.
Hillringhouse, Mark. “James Schuyler:  An Interview” American Poetry Review 14
(1985): 5–​12.
Hirsch, Edward. The Living Fire:  New and Selected Poems 1975–​2010. New  York:
Knopf, 2010.
Hoagland, Tony. “Blame it on Rio: The Strange Legacy of the New York School Poetics.”
The Writer’s Chronicle, September 2011, 76–​84.
Hoffman, Elizabeth Hanson, and Christopher D. Hoffman. Staying Focused in the Age of
Distraction:  How Mindfulness, Prayer, and Meditation Can Help You Pay Attention to
What Really Matters. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 2006.
Holder, Alan. A. R. Ammons. Boston: Twayne, 1978.
Hong, Cathy Park. “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-​Garde.” Lana Turner 7 (2014).
Available at http://www.lanaturnerjournal.com/7/delusions-of-whiteness-in-the-
avant-​garde.
Honoré, Carl. In Praise of Slowness: How a Worldwide Movement Is Challenging the Cult of
Speed. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004. Print.
Hoover, Paul, ed. Postmodern American Poetry:  A  Norton Anthology. New  York:
Norton, 1994.
Hoover, Paul, ed. Postmodern American Poetry:  A  Norton Anthology. 2nd edition.
New York: Norton, 2013.
Hopkins, David. Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004.
Horvath, Brooke. “James Schuyler’s Early Art Criticism and the Poetics of Action Poetry.”
Denver Quarterly 24, no. 4 (1990): 53–​68.
Horvitz, David. Everything That Can Happen in a Day. New York: Mark Batty, 2010.
Hunt, Erika. “All About You.” Review of Claudia Rankine, Citizen. Los Angeles Review of
Books, December 8, 2014.
Huntsperger, David. Procedural Form in Postmodern American Poetry:  Berrigan, Antin,
Silliman, and Hejinian. New York: Palgrave, 2010.
“In ‘Citizen,’ Poet Strips Bare The Realities Of Everyday Racism.” Interview with Claudia
Rankine. NPR broadcast, January 3, 2015.
Inwood, Michael. Heidegger: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000.
Isherwood, Charles. “Have You Ever Visited the Broncks?” New York Times, September 18,
2009.
Iyer, Pico. “The Joy of Quiet.” New York Times, December 29, 2011.
Izenberg, Oren. Being Numerous:  Poetry and the Ground of Social Life. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.
Jacobs, A J. The Know-​It-​All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the
World. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.
Jacobs, A J. The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as
Literally as Possible. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007.
Jackson, Maggie. Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. New York:
Prometheus, 2008.
334Works Cited

Jackson, Richard. “Event: Corrective: Cure.” Interview with A. R. Ammons. In Critical

Essays on A. R. Ammons, ed. Robert Kirschten, 213–​19. New York: G.K. Hall, 1997.
Jackson, Virginia. Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2013.
Jackson, Virginia, and Yopie Prins, eds. The Lyric Theory Reader:  A  Critical Anthology.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.
James, William. The Principles of Psychology. Vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1981.
James, William. Psychology:  The Briefer Course. Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University
Press, 1984.
James, William. The Writings of William James: A Comprehensive Edition. Edited by John
J. McDermott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977.
Jarnot, Lisa. “An Interview with Bernadette Mayer.” St. Marks Poetry Project Newsletter
168 (1998): 6–​9.
Jay, Martin. Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal
Theme. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture:  Where Old and New Media Collide. New  York:
New York University Press, 2006.
Jenkins, Jessica Kerwin. “Homage to the Idols of Idleness.” New York Times, November
29, 2013.
Johnson, Addie, and Robert W. Proctor. Attention: Theory and Practice. Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage, 2004.
Johnstone, Stephen, ed. The Everyday. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
Jones, Jason B. “An Interview with Laynie Browne.” Bookslut, January 18, 2008.
Joyce, Elisabeth. “Time Lapse Poemography.” Jacket 2 (2015). Available at http://​jacket2.
org/​article/​time-​lapse-​poemography.
Joyce, James. Ulysses. Orig.1922. New York: Vintage, 1986.
Kalstone, David. “Ammons’ Radiant Toys.” In Considering the Radiance: Essays on the Poetry
of A. R. Ammons, ed. David Burak and Roger Gilbert, 125–​49. New York: Norton, 2005.
Kamiya, Gary. “The Original Mad Men.” Salon. October 21, 2011.
Kane, Daniel. All Poets Welcome: the Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003.
Kaplan, Alice, and Kristin Ross. Introduction. Special issue on “Everyday Life.” Yale
French Studies 73 (1987): 1–​4.
Katz, Daniel. “James Schuyler’s Epistolary Poetry: Things, Postcards, Ekphrasis.” Journal
of Modern Literature 34, no. 1 (2010): 143–​61.
Kaufmann, Vincent. Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Keller, Lynn. “Green Reading:  Modern and Contemporary American Poetry and
Environmental Criticism.” In Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American
Poetry, ed. Cary Nelson, 602–​23. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Keller, Lynn, and Cristanne Miller. “Feminism and the Female Poet.” In A Concise
Companion to Twentieth-​ century American Poetry, ed. Stephen Fredman, 113–​ 34.
Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.
Kellner, Douglas. Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity, and Politics between the Modern
and the Postmodern. London: Routledge, 1995.
Works Cited 335

Kermode, Frank. Romantic Image. London: Routledge and Paul, 1957.

Kiberd, Declan. Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce’s Masterpiece. New York:
Norton, 2009.
Killen, Andreas. 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-​Sixties
America. New York: Bloomsbury, 2006.
Kim, Ju Y. The Racial Mundane: Asian American Performance and the Embodied Everyday.
New York: New York University Press, 2015.
Kirsch, Adam. “Over Easy.” The New Republic, October 29, 2001.
Kirschten, Robert, ed. Critical Essays on A.R. Ammons. New York: G.K. Hall, 1997.
Knabb, Ken, ed. Situationist International Anthology. Berkeley, CA:  Bureau of Public
Secrets, 1995.
Koehler, Margaret. Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century. New  York:  Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012.
Koestenbaum, Wayne. “Epitaph on 23rd Street: The Poetics of James Schuyler.” Parnassus
21, nos. 1–​2 (1995): 33–​57.
Koethe, John. “A Brief Appreciation.” Denver Quarterly 24, no. 4 (1990): 33.
Koneazny, Paula. “Gallery Tour.” Review of Brenda Coultas, A Handmade Museum.
American Book Review 25, no. 1 (2003): 9.
Kooser, Ted. Delights & Shadows. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 2004.
Kristeva, Julia. The Kristeva Reader. Edited by Toril Moi. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1986.
Kristeva, Julia. “Women’s Time.” Signs 7, no. 1 (1981): 13–​35.
Laird, Nick. “A New Way of Writing About Race.” Review of Claudia Rankine, Citizen.
New York Review of Books, April 23, 2015.
Lally, Michael, ed. None of the Above: New Poets of the USA. Trumansburg NY: Crossing
Press, 1976.
Langbauer, Laurie. “Cultural Studies and the Politics of the Everyday.” Diacritics 22, no.
1 (1992): 47–​65.
Langbauer, Laurie. Novels of Everyday Life: The Series in English Fiction, 1850–​1930. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1999.
Lanham, Richard. The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Lasky, Dorothea. Poetry Is Not a Project. Brooklyn, NY: Ugly Duckling, 2010.
Lazer, Hank. “Education, Equality, and Ethnography in Ron Silliman’s The Alphabet.”
Quarry West 34 (1998): 68–​97.
Lazer, Hank. Opposing Poetries:  Issues and Institutions. Evanston, IL:  Northwestern
University Press, 1996.
Lear, Jonathan. “Leaving the World Alone.” Journal of Philosophy 79, no. 7 (1982):
382–​4 03.
Leddy, Michael. Review of James Schuyler, Selected Poems. World Literature Today 63,
nos.1–​2 (1989): 104.
Lee, Yoon Sun. Modern Minority: Asian American Literature and Everyday Life. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013.
Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life. Vol. 1. Orig.1958. London: Verso, 2008.
Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life. Vol. 2. Orig.1961. London: Verso, 2002.
Lefebvre, Henri. “The Everyday and Everydayness.” Yale French Studies 73 (1987): 7–​11.
336Works Cited

Lefebvre, Henri. Everyday Life in the Modern World. London: Penguin, 1971. Published in
French in 1968.
Lefebvre, Henri. “Toward a Leftist Cultural Politics:  Remarks Occasioned by the
Centenary of Marx’s Death.” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary
Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 78–​88. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988.
Lehman, David. The Daily Mirror: A Journal in Poetry. New York: Scribner, 2000.
Lehman, David. The Evening Sun: A Journal in Poetry. New York: Scribner, 2002.
Lehman, David. The Last Avant-​Garde:  The Making of the New  York School of Poets.
New York: Doubleday, 1998.
Lehto, Leevi. “Interview with Kenneth Goldsmith: Nude Media, or Benjamin in the Age
of Ubiquitous Connectivity.” 2002. Available at Electronic Poetry Center website.
http://​epc.buffalo.edu/​authors/​goldsmith/​lehto_​inerview.html.
Lentricchia, Frank. Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James, Wallace Stevens.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988.
Leonard, George J. Into the Light of Things: The Art of the Commonplace from Wordsworth
to John Cage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Lerner, Ben. “Each Cornflake.” Review of Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book Three.
London Review of Books, May 22, 2014.
Levin, Jonathan. The Poetics of Transition:  Emerson, Pragmatism, and American Literary
Modernism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.
Lippard, Lucy R. Six Years: the Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972: A Cross-​
Reference Book of Information on Some Esthetic Boundaries. New York: Praeger, 1973.
Lipsitz, George. Time Passages:  Collective Memory and American Popular Culture.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990.
Little, Carl. “An Interview with James Schuyler.” Talisman 9 (1992): 176–​80.
Livingston, Reb. “An Interview with Hoa Nguyen.” We Who Are About to Die, 2008.
MacLeod, Glen. “Wallace Stevens and Fairfield Porter: Kindred Spirits of American Art.”
Archives of American Art Journal 24, no. 1 (1984): 2–​12.
Magee, Michael. Emancipating Pragmatism:  Emerson, Jazz, and Experimental Writing.
Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004.
Malkin, Rachel. “Public Desires, Private Desires: The Satisfactions of Stevens and Stanley
Cavell.” Wallace Stevens Journal 36, no. 1 (2012): 105–​33.
Maltby, Paul. The Visionary Moment: A Postmodern Critique. Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2002.
Manson, Douglas, Jonathan Skinner, and Isabelle Pelissier. “Dumpster Surveillance/​A
Conversation with Brenda Coultas.” Ecopoetics 1 (2000): 25–32.
Mao, Douglas. Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1998.
Margulies, Ivone. Nothing Happens:  Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1996.
Marshall, Thomas C. “‘Nevermore’ than: Form, Content and Gesture in Ketjak.” Quarry
West 34 (1998): 52–​67.
Martin, Douglas. “Frank Smith, 71, Is Dead; Sought Justice After Attica.” New York Times,
August 2, 2004.
Martin, Fran, ed. Interpreting Everyday Culture. London: Arnold, 2003.
Marshall, Thomas C., and Thomas Vogler. “An Email Interview with Ron Silliman.”
Quarry West 34 (1998): 10–​44.
Works Cited 337

Mayer, Bernadette. A Bernadette Mayer Reader. New York: New Directions, 1992.

Mayer, Bernadette. The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters. West Stockbridge,
MA: Hard Press, 1994
Mayer, Bernadette. “From: A Lecture at Naropa Institute, 1989.” In Disembodied Poetics:
Annals of the Jack Kerouac School, ed. Anne Waldman and Andrew Schelling, 95–​102.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997.
Mayer, Bernadette. The Helens of Troy, NY. New York: New Directions, 2013.
Mayer, Bernadette. Midwinter Day. New York: New Directions, 1999.
Mayer, Bernadette. Studying Hunger. Bolinas, CA: Adventures in Poetry/​Big Sky, 1975.
Mayer, Bernadette, Lee Ann Brown, Jen Hofer, and Danika Dinsmore. The 3:15 Experiment.
Woodacre, CA: Owl, 2001.
Mazzaro, Jerome. “Reconstruction in Art.” Diacritics 3, no. 4 (1973): 39–​44.
McClennan, Rob. “12 or 20 Questions with Susan Holbrook.” June 16, 2008. Rob
McClennan’s Blog, Avaiilable at http://​robmclennan.blogspot.com/​2008/​06/​12-​or-​20-​
questions-​w ith-​susan-​holbrook.html.
McLuhan, Marshall. The Medium is the Massage:  An Inventory of Effects. 1967. Corte
Madera, CA: Gingko, 2005.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media:  The Extensions of Man. 1964. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1994.
McCaffery, Larry, and Sinda Gregory. Interview with Ron Silliman. In Alive and Writing:
Interviews with American Authors of the 1980s, 240–​56. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1987. Available at Modern American Poetry website.
McCracken, Scott, ed. “Modernism and the Everyday.” Special Issue. Modernist Cultures
20, no. 1 (2006).
McDaniel, Raymond. “Affect and Autism: Kenneth Goldsmith’s Reconstitution of Signal
and Noise.” 2007. Available at Electronic Poetry Center website.
McDaniel, Raymond. Review of Brenda Coultas, A Handmade Museum. Constant Critic,
August 14, 2003.
MacFarlane, Robert. “A Road of One’s Own.” Times Literary Supplement, October 7, 2005.
McFee, Michael. “A. R. Ammons and The Snow Poems Reconsidered.” In Critical Essays on
A. R. Ammons, ed. Robert Kirschten, 59–​65. New York: G.K. Hall, 1997.
McGann, Jerome. “Contemporary Poetry, Alternative Routes.” Critical Inquiry 13
(1987): 624–​47.
McGrath, Charles. “A Literary Visitor Strolls in From the Airport.” New  York Times.
December 6, 2006.
McGuirk, Kevin. “A. R. Ammons and the ‘Only Terrible Health’ of Poetics.” Postmodern
Culture 9, no. 1 (1998). Available at http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/
issue.998/9.1mcguirk.txt.
McHale, Brian. The Obligation Toward the Difficult Whole:  Postmodernist Long Poems.
Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004.
McNellis, Erin Margaret. Savage Torpor: Forms of Attention in Twentieth-​Century American
Literature. Dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 2011. ProQuest, UMI
Dissertations Publishing, 3474950.
Menand, Louis. Pragmatism: A Reader. New York: Vintage, 1997.
Merrifield, Andy. Guy Debord. London: Reaktion, 2005.
Merrifield, Andy. Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Mikics, David. Slow Reading in a Hurried Age. Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University
Press, 2013.
338Works Cited

Mikkelsen, Ann Marie. Pastoral, Pragmatism, and Twentieth-​Century American Poetry.

New York: Palgrave, 2011.
Miller, Toby, and A. W. McHoul. Popular Culture and Everyday Life. London: Sage, 1998.
Miller, Tyrus. Singular Examples:  Artistic Politics and the Neo-​Avant-​Garde. Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009.
Mlinko, Ange. “As If Nature Talked Back To Me: A Notebook.” Poetry (September 2009).
Available at http://​w ww.poetryfoundation.org/​poetrymagazine/​article??/​237506.
Mlinko, Ange. “Comfort and Agony: Jennifer Moxley’s Clampdown.” The Nation, June 8,
2009.
Mlinko, Ange. “Why I Am Not a Poet-Mom.” Harriet (Poetry Foundation blog),
August 15, 2007. Available at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2007/08/
why-i-am-not-a-poet-mom/
Mole, Christopher, Declan Smithies, and Wayne Wu, eds. Attention:  Philosophical and
Psychological Essays. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Moran, Joe. Reading the Everyday. London: Routledge, 2005.
Moss, Howard. “James Schuyler: Whatever Is Moving.” American Poetry Review 10 (May/​
June 1981): 14–​16.
Mossin, Andrew. Male Subjectivity and Poetic Form in “New American” Poetry. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Moxley, Jennifer. Clampdown. Chicago: Flood, 2009.
“MSU Professors talk about the poetics of texting.” March 26, 2010. Available on Montana
State University website, http://​w ww.montana.edu/​cpa/​news/​nwview.php?article=8277.
Mullen, Harryette. Recyclopedia. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2006.
Mullen, Harryette. Sleeping with the Dictionary. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2002.
Mullen, Harryette. Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf,
2013.
Murphy, Kate. “First Camera, Then Fork.” New York Times, April 6 2010.
Naik, Gautam. “Boredom Enthusiasts Discover the Pleasures of Understimulation.” Wall
Street Journal, December 28, 2010.
Nealon, Jeffrey T. Post-​postmodernism, Or, the Logic of Just-​in-​Time Capitalism. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2012.
Nelson, Maggie. Women, The New  York School, and Other True Abstractions. Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press, 2011.
Neville, Brian, and Johanne Villeneuve, eds. Waste-​Site Stories: The Recycling of Memory.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002.
Newcomer, Caitlin Elizabeth. Troubling the Lineage: Women, Innovation, and the American
Long Poem in the Twentieth Century and Beyond. Dissertation, Florida State University,
2014.
Newman, Andy. “Block-​a-​Thon.” New York Times, October 30 2009.
Newman, Richard. Borrowed Towns. Cincinnati, OH: Word, 2005.
Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Nguyen, Hoa. Hecate Lochia. Prague, Czech Republic: Hot Whiskey, 2009.
Nicholson, Geoff. The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Literature
of Pedestrianism. New York: Riverhead, 2008.
North, Paul. The Problem of Distraction. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011.
O’Brien, Geoffrey G. Metropole. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.
Works Cited 339

O’Hara, Frank. Collected Poems, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971.

O’Hara, Frank. Standing Still and Walking in New York. Edited by Donald Allen. Bolinas,
CA: Grey Fox, 1975.
Olson, Charles. Selected Writings. New York: New Directions, 1966.
Olson, Liesl. “Everyday Life Studies:  A  Review.” Modernism/​Modernity 18, no. 1 (2011):
175–​80.
Olson, Liesl. Modernism and the Ordinary. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Ophir, Ella. “Modernist Fiction and ‘The Accumulation of Unrecorded Life.” Modernist
Cultures 2, no. 1 (2006): 6–​20.
Orden, Erica. “Sir, There’s a Camera in Your Head.” Wall Street Journal, November 16, 2010.
Orlowski, Krysia. “An Interview with Sandra Simonds.” Barn Owl Review. Available at
http://​w ww.barnowlreview.com/​simonds_​interview.html.
Osborne, Peter. The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-​Garde. London: Verso, 1995.
Osman, Jena. Public Figures. Wesleyan, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012.
Outka, Paul. Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Owens, Craig. “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism.” In Art
After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, 203–​26. New York: New Museum of
Contemporary Art, 1984.
Parrish, Timothy. Walking Blues:  Making Americans from Emerson to Elvis. Amherst,
MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001.
Pearlman, Ellen. Nothing and Everything:  The Influence of Buddhism on the American
Avant-​Garde, 1942–​1962. Berkeley, CA: Evolver, 2012.
Perec, Georges. Life A User’s Manual. Boston: David Godine, 1987.
Perec, Georges. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. London: Penguin, 1997.
Perelman, Bob. The Marginalization of Poetry:  Language Writing and Literary History.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Perl, Jed. New Art City: Manhattan at Mid-​Century. New York: Random House, 2005.
Perloff, Marjorie. “A Conversation with Kenneth Goldsmith.” Jacket 21 (2003). Available at
http://​jacketmagazine.com/​21/​perl-​gold-​iv.html.
Perloff, Marjorie. The Dance of the Intellect. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1985.
Perloff, Marjorie. “Difference and Discipline:  The Cage/​ Cunningham Aesthetic
Revisited.” Contemporary Music 31, no. 1 (2012): 19–​35. Available at http://​marjorieper-
loff.com/​stein-​duchamp-​picasso/​cage-​aesthetic/​.
Perloff, Marjorie. “Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject: Ron Silliman’s Albany, Susan
Howe’s Buffalo.” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 3 (1999): 405–​34.
Perloff, Marjorie. Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric. Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press, 1985.
Perloff, Marjorie. The Poetics of Indeterminacy:  Rimbaud to Cage. Princeton:  Princeton
University Press, 1981.
Perloff, Marjorie. Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1991.
Perloff, Marjorie. “Screening the Page/​Paging the Screen:  Digital Poetics and the
Differential Text.” In New Media Poetics:  Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories, ed.
Adelaide Morris and Thomas Swiss, 143–​64. Cambridge and London:  MIT Press,
2006. Available at www.marjorieperloff.com.
340Works Cited

Perloff, Marjorie. Unoriginal Genius: Poetry By Other Means in the New Century, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Perloff, Marjorie. “‘VOCABEL SCRIPTSIGNS’:  Differential Poetics in Kenneth
Goldsmith’s Fidget.” n.d. Available at Electronic Poetry Center website.
Perloff, Marjorie. Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Phillips, Siobahn. The Poetics of the Everyday:  Creative Repetition in Modern American
Verse. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.
Place, Vanessa, and Robert Fitterman. Notes on Conceptualisms. Brooklyn, NY:  Ugly
Duckling, 2009.
Plait, Phil. “A Year’s Worth of Days.” Slate, August 10, 2013.
Plath, Sylvia. Ariel. New York: Harper and Row, 1965.
“Poetics of Everyday Life.” Poetics Journal 9 (1991): 166–​205.
Podnieks, Elizabeth, and Andrea O’Reilly, eds. Textual Mothers/​ Maternal Texts:
Motherhood in Contemporary Women’s Literatures. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier
University Press, 2010.
“Poet: Internet Has Revolutionized Reading.” CNN broadcast, June 3, 2014.
Poirier, Richard. Poetry and Pragmatism. Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University
Press, 1992.
Poirier, Richard. The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1987.
Pol-​Droit, Roger. Astonish Yourself:  101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life.
New York: Penguin, 2003.
Ponge, Francis. Selected Poems. Edited by Margaret Guiton. Winston-​Salem, NC: Wake
Forest University Press, 1994.
Ponge, Francis. The Voice of Things. Edited and translated by Beth Archer. New  York:
McGraw-​Hill, 1972.
Porter, Fairfield. Art on Its Own Terms:  Selected Criticism 1935–​1975. Cambridge, MA:
Zoland, 1979.
Porter, Fairfield. Material Witness:  The Selected Letters of Fairfield Porter. Edited by Ted
Leigh. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005.
Posnock, Ross. Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.
New York: Viking, 1985.
Powell, Julie. Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously. New York: Back Bay, 2009.
Ramazani, Jahan, ed. The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. 2 vols.,
3rd ed. New York: Norton, 2003.
Ramke, Bin. “Like a Yellow Jelly Bean, An Inner Glow: Schuyler’s Hymn to Life.” Denver
Quarterly 24, no. 4 (1990): 81–​88.
Rancière, Jacques. Aesthetics and Its Discontents. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2009.
Rancière, Jacques. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. London: Continuum, 2010.
Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics:  The Distribution of the Sensible. London:
Continuum, 2004.
Randall, Bryony. Modernism, Daily Time, and Everyday Life. Cambridge:  Cambridge
University Press, 2008.
Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2014.
Rankine, Claudia. Plot. New York: Grove, 2001.
Works Cited 341

Rankine, Claudia. The Provenance of Beauty. 2009. Foundry Theater website, http://​t he-
foundrytheatre.org/​t he-​provenance-​of-​beauty/​.
Rankine, Claudia. Transcript of conversation with Claudia Rankine. 2012. Available at
National Endowment of the Arts website, http://​arts.gov/​audio/​claudia-​rankine.
Reed, Brian M. Nobody’s Business:  Twenty-​ first Century Avant-​ Garde Poetics. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2013.
Reed, Brian M. “Textbook Uncreative Writing.” Review of Dworkin and Goldsmith,
Against Expression. American Book Review 32, no. 4 (May/​June 2011): 5–​6.
Reiman, Donald H. “A. R. Ammons: Ecological Naturalism and the Romantic Tradition.”
Twentieth-​Century Literature 31 (1985): 22–​51.
Retallack, Joan. The Poethical Wager. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
Revell, Donald. The Art of Attention: A Poet’s Eye. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2007.
Rich, Adrienne. The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New 1950–​1984. New York:
Norton, 1984.
Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood As Experience and Institution. New York:
Norton, 1976.
Richardson, Joan. A Natural History of Pragmatism:  The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan
Edwards to Gertrude Stein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Richardson, Joan. Pragmatism and American Experience:  An Introduction. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Richardson, Robert D. William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism: A Biography.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.
Rifkin, Libbie. “‘My Little World Goes on St. Mark’s Place’: Anne Waldman, Bernadette
Mayer and the Gender of an Avant-​Garde Institution.” Jacket 7 (1999). Available at
http://​jacketmagazine.com/​07/​rifkin07.html.
Roberts, John. Philosophizing the Everyday: Revolutionary Praxis and the Fate of Cultural
Theory. London: Pluto, 2006.
Robertson, Lisa. The Cinema of the Present. Toronto: Coach House, 2014.
Robertson, Lisa.  Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture.
Toronto: Coach House, 2011.
Robles, Jaime. “Brenda Coultas: On the Transmigration of Objects.” OmniVerse. n.d. Available
at http://​omniverse.us/​jaime-​robles-​brenda-​coultas-​on-​the-​transmigration-​of-​objects/​.
Rogers, Kenneth. The Attention Complex: Media, Archeology, Method. New York: Palgrave,
2014.
Rohrer, Finlo. “Just What Is ‘Annualism’?” BBC News broadcast, August 24, 2009.
Rosenbaum, Susan. “Frank O’Hara, Flâneur of New York.” In The Scene of My Selves: New
Work on New York School Poets, ed. Terence Diggory and Stephen Paul Miller, 143–​74.
Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 2001.
Rosenberg, Karen. “A Creative Vision, So Down to Earth: Jean Dubuffet at the Museum
of Modern Art.” New York Times, January 1, 2015.
Ross, Kristin. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.
Ross, Kristin. “The French Quotidian.” In The Art of the Everyday: The Quotidian in Postwar
French Culture, ed. Lynn Gumpert and Tom Bishop, 19–​30. New  York:  New  York
University Press, 1997.
Rubin, Gretchen. The Happiness Project:  Or Why I  Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the
Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun.
New York: HarperCollins, 2009.
342Works Cited

Ruddick, Sara. Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. Boston: Beacon, 1989.

Russo, Linda. “Poetics of Adjacency: 0-​9 and the Conceptual Writing of Bernadette
Mayer & Hannah Weiner.” In Don’t Ever Get Famous: Essays on New York Writing after
the New York School, ed. Daniel Kane, 190–​231. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2006.
Ryan, Kay. The Best of It: New and Selected Poems. New York: Grove, 2010.
Safronoff, Tara Neelakantappa. Review of Marie Howe, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time.
Boston Review, July 1, 2009. http://bostonreview.net/safronoff-howe-kingdom-
ordinary-time
Saterstrom, Selah. “Interview with Eleni Sikelianos.” Coach House Press website,
Available at http://​coffeehousepress.org/​authors/​eleni-​sikelianos/​.
Schillinger, Liesl. “His Peers’ Views Are in the Details:  Karl Ove Knausgaard’s ‘My
Struggle’ Is a Movement.” New York Times, May 21, 2014.
Schjeldahl, Peter. “Shades of White:  A  Robert Ryman Retrospective.” New  Yorker
December 21, 2015.
Schmidt, Christopher. “Baby, I Am the Garbage”: James Schuyler’s Taste for Waste.” Iowa
Journal of Cultural Studies 10–​11 (2009).
Schmidt, Christopher. The Poetics of Waste: Queer Excess in Stein, Ashbery, Schuyler, and
Goldsmith. New York: Palgrave, 2014.
Schneider, Steven P. A.R. Ammons and the Poetics of Widening Scope. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press, 1994.
Schneider, Steven P. “From the Wind to the Earth: An Interview with A. R. Ammons.”
In Complexities of Motion, ed. Steven P. Schneider, 325–​49. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press, 1999.
Schneider, Steven P., ed. Complexities of Motion: New Essays on A. R. Ammons’s Long Poems.
Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999.
Schoenbach, Lisi. Pragmatic Modernism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Schor, Naomi. Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine. New York: Routledge, 1989.
Schulman, Bruce J. The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics.
New York: Free Press, 2001.
Schulz, Isabel, ed. Kurt Schwitters:  Color and Collage. New Haven and London:  Menil
Collection/​Yale University Press, 2010.
Schuyler, James. Collected Poems. New York: Noonday, 1993.
Schuyler, James. The Diary of James Schuyler. Edited by Nathan Kernan. Santa Rosa, CA:
Black Sparrow, 1997.
Schuyler, James. Just the Thing:  Selected Letters of James Schuyler 1951–​1991. Edited by
William Corbett. New York: Turtle Point, 2004.
Schuyler, James. Other Flowers:  Uncollected Poems. Edited by James Meetze and Simon
Pettet. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2010.
Schuyler, James. Selected Art Writings. Edited by Simon Pettet. Santa Rosa, CA:  Black
Sparrow, 1998.
Schwartz, Alexandra. “On Being Seen: An Interview with Claudia Rankine from Ferguson.”
The New Yorker, August 22, 2014.
Shaw, Lytle. “Faulting Description:  Clark Coolidge, Bernadette Mayer and the Site of
Scientific Authority.” In Don’t Ever Get Famous: Essays on New York Writing after the
New York School, ed. Daniel Kane, 232–​66. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2006.
Shields, David. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, New York: Knopf, 2010.
Shields, Rob. Lefebvre, Love, and Struggle: Spatial Dialectics. London: Routledge, 1999.
Works Cited 343

Sheringham, Michael. Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present.
Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique.” In Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams,
796–​805. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971.
Sikelianos, Eleni. Body Clock: Poems. Minneapolis: Coffee House, 2008.
Silliman, Ron. The Age of Huts (Compleat). Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
Silliman, Ron. The Alphabet. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008.
Silliman, Ron. “I Wanted to Write Sentences:  Decision Making in the American
Longpoem.” Sagetrieb 11 (1992): 11–​20.
Silliman, Ron, ed. In the American Tree: Language, Realism, Poetry. Orig. 1986. Orono, ME:
National Poetry Foundation, 2002.
Silliman, Ron. The New Sentence. New York: Roof, 1987.
Silliman, Ron. “Reading Ketjak.” Quarry West 34 (1998): 46–​51.
Silliman, Ron. Revelator. Ottawa, Ontario: BookThug, 2013.
Silliman, Ron. Silliman’s Blog, October 27, 2002; September 20, 2003; April 18, 2007;
April 26, 2008; Deember 24, 2008; October 13, 2009. Available at http://​ronsilliman.
blogspot.com/​.
Silliman, Ron. Under Albany. Cambridge, UK: Salt, 2004.
Silliman, Ron. What. Great Barrington, MA: The Figures, 1988.
Silliman, Ron. “Wild Form.” Quarry West 34 (1998): 134–​39.
Silliman, Ron, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Steve Benson, Bob Perelman, and Barrett
Watten. “Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry: A Manifesto,” Social Text 19/​
20 (1988): 261–​75.
Silliman, Ron, Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Lyn Hejinian, Charles Bernstein, and Bob
Perelman. “For Change.” In In the American Tree, ed. Ron Silliman, 468–​72. Orono,
ME: American Poetry Foundation, 2002.
Silverberg, Mark. “James Schuyler’s Poetics of Indolence.” Literary Imagination 11, no. 1
(2009): 28–​42.
Sinclair, Iain. London Orbital: A Walk Around the M25. London: Granta, 2002.
Smith, Jessica. “Against apocalypse:  A  review of Ron Silliman’s ‘Revelator.’” Jacket 2
(2014). Available online. https://​jacket2.org/​reviews/​against-​apocalypse#2.
Snyder, Gary. No Nature: New and Selected Poems. New York: Pantheon, 1993.
Solnit, Rebecca. “Diary.” London Review of Books, August 29, 2013.
Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Viking, 2000.
Sontag, Susan. “The Aesthetics of Silence.” In Styles of the Radical Will, 3–​34.
New York: Picador, 1969.
Spahr, Juliana. “‘Love Scattered, Not Concentrated Love’:  Bernadette Mayer’s Sonnets.”
Differences 12, no. 2 (2001): 98–​120.
Spahr, Juliana. That Winter the Wolf Came. Oakland, CA: Commune Editions, 2015.
Spahr, Juliana. This Connection of Everyone with Lungs. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2005.
Spicer, Jack. My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer. Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008.
Spigel, Lynn. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Spigel, Lynn. Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2001
344Works Cited

Spiegelman, Willard. “Building Up and Breaking Down:  The Poetics of Composting.”

In Complexities of Motion, ed. Steven P.  Schneider, 51–​67. Madison, NJ:  Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press, 1999.
Spiegelman, Willard. The Didactic Muse: Scenes of Instruction in Contemporary American
Poetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.
Spring, Justin. Fairfield Porter: A Life in Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.
Stanfield, Scott. Review of Jennifer Moxley, Clampdown. Ploughshares 35, no. 4, 2009.
Stanton, Rob. “What ‘We’ Did Next.” Jacket 37 (2009). Available at http://​jacketmagazine.
com/​37/​r-​moxley-​rb-​stanton.shtml.
Stephens, Paul. “Vanguard Total Index: Conceptual Writing, Information Asymmetry,
and the Risk Society.” Contemporary Literature 54, no. 4 (2013): 752–​84.
Stephens, Paul. The Poetics of Information Overload:  From Gertrude Stein to Conceptual
Writing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. New York: Library of America, 1997.
Stewart, Susan. “Salience and Correspondences: Tape for the Turn of the Year.” Chicago
Review 57, nos. 1–​2 (2013): 12–​26.
Stiegler, Bernard. Taking Care of Youth and the Generations. Stanford, CA:  Stanford
University Press, 2010.
Stiles, Kristine, and Peter Selz, eds. Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art:  A
Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Stone, Brad. “For Web’s New Wave, Sharing Details Is the Point.” New York Times, April
22, 2010.
Storey, John. Cultural Consumption and Everyday Life. London: Arnold, 1999.
Storey, John. From Popular Culture to Everyday Life. New York: Routledge, 2014.
Sue, Derald W. Microaggressions in Everyday Life:  Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation.
Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010.
Suleiman, Susan Rubin. “Writing and Motherhood.” In The (M)Other Tongue: Essays in
Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, ed. Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, and
Madelon Sprengnether, 352–​77. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985.
“Susan Holbrook and her Six Cats.” Interview. Canadian Poets Petting Cats website. http://canadi-
anpoetspettingcats.tumblr.com/post/27405107824/susan-holbrook-with-her-six-cats.
Svendsen, Lars F. H. A Philosophy of Boredom. London: Reaktion, 2005.
Swensen, Cole, and David St. John, eds. American Hybrid:  A  Norton Anthology of New
Poetry. New York: Norton, 2009.
Tapper, Gordon. “Kenneth Goldsmith’s Soliloquy.” 2007. Available on Electronic Poetry
Center website. http://​w ings.buffalo.edu/​epc/​authors/​goldsmith/​tapper.html
“Ted Kooser.” (2010) Biography on Poetry Foundation website.
Teicher, Craig Morgan. Brenda Is in the Room & Other Poems. Fort Collins, CO: Center for
Literary Publishing, 2007.
Teicher, Craig Morgan. “SCOTUS on Cellphones and the Privacy of Poetry.” National
Public Radio broadcast, June 27, 2014.
Tester, Keith, ed. The Flâneur. London: Routledge, 1994.
Thompson, Robert. “An Interview with James Schuyler.” Denver Quarterly 26 (1992): 105–​22.
Thompson, Robert. “James Schuyler’s ‘Spots of Time.’” In The Scene of My Selves:  New
Work on New York School Poets, ed. Terrence Diggory and Stephen Paul Miller, 287–​
308. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 2001.
Works Cited 345

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. New York: Library of America, 1991.

Tichi, Cecelia. Electronic Hearth: Creating an American Television Culture. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1991.
Tigges, Wim, ed. Moments of Moment:  Aspects of the Literary Epiphany. Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 1999.
Timberg, Scott. “Meet the Gimmick Books.” Los Angeles Times, September 5, 2009.
Tobias, Richard. Review of James Schuyler, The Morning of the Poem. World Literature
Today 55, no. 3 (1981): 476.
Tobin, Daniel. “A.R. Ammons and the Poetics of Chaos.” In Complexities of Motion, ed.
Steven P. Schneider, 113–​137, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999.
Toohey, Peter. Boredom: A Lively History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.
Toohey, Peter. “The Thrill of Boredom.” New York Times, August 6, 2011.
Tugend, Alina. “In a Constantly Plugged-​In World, It’s Not All Bad to Be Bored.” New York
Times, November 30, 2012.
Turner, Graeme. British Cultural Studies: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 1996.
Tursi, Mark. “An Interview with Ron Silliman.” Double Room: A Journal of Prose Poetry
and Flash Fiction 6 (Fall /​Winter 2005/​2006). Available at http://www.webdelsol.com/
Double_Room/issue_six/Ron_Silliman.htm.
Upton, Lee. “The Weather of the Poem.” Denver Quarterly 24, no. 4 (1990): 119–​22.
“Using Poetry to Uncover Moments that Lead to Racism.” Interview with Claudia
Rankine. NPR broadcast, December 4, 2014. Available at http://​w ww.pbs.org/​news-
hour/​bb/​using-​poetry-​uncover-​moments-​lead-​racism/​.
Vaneigem, Raoul. The Revolution of Everyday Life. 1967. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012.
Vega, Tanzina. “Students See Many Slights as Racial ‘Microaggressions.’” New York Times,
March 21, 2014.
Vendler, Helen. “New York Pastoral.” In Soul Says: On Recent Poetry, 62–​70. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.
Vendler, Helen. Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1980.
Vickery, Ann. Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing. Hanover,
NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000.
Viegener, Matias. 2500 Random Things About Me Too. Los Angeles: Les Figues, 2012.
Wagner, Catherine. My New Job. Albany, NY: Fence, 2009.
Wagner, Catherine, and Rebecca Wolff. Not For Mothers Only: Contemporary Poems on
Child-​Getting and Child-​Rearing. New York: Fence, 2007.
Waldman, Katy. “The Year We Quantified Everything and Learned … Anything?” Slate,
December 27, 2013.
Wallace, David Foster. “E Unibus Pluram:  Television and U.S. Fiction.” Review of
Contemporary Fiction 13, no. 2 (1993): 151–​94.
Watkin, William. “‘Let’s Make a List’ ”:  James Schuyler’s Taxonomic Autobiography.”
Journal of American Studies 36 (2002): 43–​68.
Watten, Barrett. The Constructivist Moment:  From Material Text to Cultural Poetics.
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003.
Watten, Barrett. Total Syntax. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985.
Weil, Simone. Simone Weil: An Anthology. Edited by Siân Miles. New York: Grove, 1986.
Wershler-​Henry, Darren. “Best Before Date.” April 4, 2012. Available at http://​w ww.alien-
ated.net/​poetics/​best-​before-​date/​.
346Works Cited

Wershler-​Henry, Darren. “Uncreativity is the New Creative:  Kenneth Goldsmith Not

Typing.” Open Letter 7 (2005): 152–​59.
White, Gillian. Lyric Shame: The “Lyric” Subject of Contemporary American Poetry. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass:  The First (1855) Edition. Edited by Malcolm Cowley.
New York: Penguin, 1986.
Wieseltier, Leon. “After the Flood.” New York Times, December 26, 2009.
Wilkinson, Alec. “Something Borrowed.” The New Yorker, October 5, 2015.
Wilkinson, Joshua Marie. “An Interview with Hoa Nguyen.” Bookslut, January 2008.
Available at http://​w ww.bookslut.com/​features/​2008_​01_​012155.php.
Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Rev. Ed. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1983.
Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. New York: Schocken, 1975.
Williams, William Carlos. The Collected Poems. Volume 1: 1909–​1939. Edited by A. Walton
Litz and Christopher MacGowan. New York: New Directions, 1986.
Wiman, Christian. Ambition and Survival. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 2007.
Wiman, Christian. “Canon Fodder.”2007. Available at Poetry Foundation website. http://​
www.poetryfoundation.org/​article/​178456.
Wiman, Christian. Review of A. R. Ammons, Glare. Poetry 172, no. 5 (1998): 277–​79.
Winer, Andrew. “Our Distraction: Franzen’s Kraus Project.” Los Angeles Review of Books,
September 22, 2013.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E.  M. Anscombe.
Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.
Witts, Richard. The Velvet Underground. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.
Wolf, Gary. “The Data-​Driven Life.” New York Times Magazine, April 28, 2010.
Wolfe, Cary. “Symbol Plural: The Later Long Poems of A. R. Ammons.” In Critical Essays
on A. R. Ammons, ed. Robert Kirschten, 373–​87. New York: G.K. Hall, 1997.
Wolff, Janet. “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity.” Theory,
Culture & Society 2, no. 3 (1985): 37–​46.
Wood, James. “Total Recall: Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle.” The New Yorker, August
13, 2012.
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Orig. 1925. New York: Harcourt, 1990.
Wright, James. Collected Poems. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971.
Wright, Richard. Haiku: The Last Poems of an American Icon. New York: Arcade, 2012.
Young, Geoffrey. “Kenny.” Open Letter 7 (2005): 46–​49.
“Youth and Experience Team Up at Poets Out Loud.” Fordham University website, April 16,
2010. Available at http://​news.fordham.edu/​arts-​a nd-​culture/​youth-​a nd-​experience-
​team-​up-​at-​poets-​out-​loud-​2/​.
Yu, Timothy. “Asian American Poetry in the First Decade of the 2000s.” Contemporary
Literature 52, no. 4 (2011): 818–​51.
Yu, Timothy. Race and the Avant-​Garde:  Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since
1965. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.
Ziegenhagen, Eric. “James Schuyler in the Spotlight.” 2009. Available at Poetry Foundation
website. http://​w ww.poetryfoundation.org/​article/​238132.
Zucker, Rachel. Museum of Accidents. Seattle, WA: Wave, 2009.
Zweig, David. “This Is a Longreads on the Internet:  The Inroads of Slow Art in a Fast
Culture.” The Awl, March 5, 2013. Available at http://​w ww.theawl.com/​2013/​03/​
this-​is-​a-​longreads-​on-​t he-​internet-​t he-​inroads-​of-​slow-​art-​in-​a-​fast-​culture.
 { Index }
0 to 9 (poetry journal), 164, 166–​68, 170, 188, 256
3:15 Experiment (Mayer et al.), 230
“3/​23/​66” (Schuyler), 77
4’33” (Cage), 29, 234
365 Project (Internet photo-​a-​day project), 33
2197 (Silliman), 198, 202
2500 Random Things About Me Too (Viegener), 230
a: A Novel (Warhol), 239–​40, 317n9
“The Abstracted Heat of Hours & Days”
(Sikelianos), 189
Abstract Expressionism, 80–​82
Acconci, Vito, 164, 166–​68, 240
Akerman, Chantal, 8, 167
“Adagia” (Stevens), 82
Adorno, Theodor, 52
Aesthetics and Its Discontents (Rancière), 40,
67, 221
“Aesthetics of Silence” (Sontag), 66
“After James Schuyler” (Moxley), 74
Against Expression (anthology), 254–​55, 257
“Against Idealism” (Porter), 81
The Age of Huts (Silliman). See also Ketjak
(Silliman)
poetry of the everyday in, 197–​98
publication of, 200, 312n2
Aji, Hélène, 238
allegory
in Ammons’s Tape for the Turn of the
Year, 140
in Ammons’s The Snow Poems, 153
in Silliman’s Ketjak, 199, 214, 216–​17, 315n25
Allen, Donald, 6
Allison, Raphael, 291–​92n1, 292n2,
295n24, 299n11
The Alphabet (Silliman), 210
Althusser, Louis, 52, 201
Amato, Joseph, 256
An American Family (television show), 43
“The American Scholar” (Emerson), 78
“American trilogy” (The Weather, Traffic, Sports;
Goldsmith), 237, 250
Ammons, A.R. See also specific works
American Romantic poetry tradition and, 110
attentiveness in the poetry of, 14, 68–69,
116, 125–​31, 133, 144, 154, 300n42,
300n25, 301n32
boredom in the poetry of, 115–​16, 150–​2
and John Cage, 140, 302n38
collage in the poetry of, 154–​5
the domestic in the poetry of, 111, 139, 142–​43,
145–​47, 156–​58, 303–​4n46, 304–​5n1
Emerson and, 117, 141, 303n43
environmental concerns in the poetry of, 112,
134–​36, 298n9
epiphany and, 114, 133
garbage and refuse in the poetry of, 94, 111,
119, 134–​37, 152, 154, 259
gender dynamics in the poetry of, 146–​47
inclusive nature of poetry of, 111, 135–​7, 144–​6
on the invisibility of the impoverished,
132–​33, 262
William James and, 16, 117–​129
linguistic skepticism of, 116, 169
long poems as characteristic of, 100, 102,
137–55, 170, 301–​2n36
negative capability in the poetry of, 114
New American Poetry and, 38, 112, 140,
299n17, 302n38, 302–​3n40, 303n42
noninterventionist approach to experience
and, 114–​15, 125
“one and many” problem and, 118,
120–​22, 124–​25
poetry of the everyday and, 5, 13, 19–​20,
36–38, 56, 94, 110–​59, 170, 215, 217, 231, 236,
238, 246, 251, 259, 262, 274
postmodernism and, 112, 297–​8n2, 301n32
pragmatism and, 16, 113, 117–​19,
121–​24, 299n13
radical empiricism and, 113, 117–​25
repetition in the poetry of, 115–​16, 124, 139–​40
reversal of hierarchies in poetry of, 111,
131–​37, 141
skeptical realism and, 116, 122, 149, 153
the sublime in the poetry of, 110, 113, 117, 153
walk poems and, 124, 217, 300n23
Anderson, Hephzibah, 31
Andrews, Bruce, 202–​4, 221
annualism, 31
Antin, David, 117, 240, 246–​47
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 159, 161, 173,
300n23, 313n9
348
appropriation
conceptual writing and, 237–​38, 250–​4
contemporary women poets and, 164–​65
everyday-​life projects and, 19, 54, 230, 232,
237–​8, 250–​4
found language and, 19, 42, 44, 73, 90, 147,
154, 180, 237–​8, 250–​4
Aragon, Louis, 204, 219, 258
The Arcades Project (Benjamin), 17, 52, 94,
204–5, 227, 250, 260
The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern
Pastoral (2012 anthology), 13
Ariel (Plath), 162
Armantrout, Rae
poetry of the everyday and, 5, 10–​11, 69, 147,
180, 203
skeptical realism and, 10–​11, 203
“Art as Technique” (Shklovsky), 65
The Art of Attention: A Poet’s Eye (Revell), 12
Ashbery, John. See also specific works
collage and, 89
epiphanies viewed skeptically by, 26
formal constraints and the work of, 207
New York School poets and, 74
poetry of attention and, 11
poetry of the everyday and, 6, 37
pragmatism and, 117
Schuyler and, 101, 297n34
“An Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and
Solid Foodstuffs Ingurgitated By Me in
The Course of the Year Nineteen Hundred
and Seventy-​Four” (Perec), 29, 32, 34, 136
An Attempt to an Exhaust a Place in Paris
(Perec), 231
attention
in Ammons’s poetry, 14, 68–​69, 116, 125–​31,
133, 144, 154, 300n42, 300n25, 301n32
“as life,” 2, 63–​64, 129
“crisis” of, 3–​4, 11–​12, 30, 35, 37, 41–​42, 60, 116,
199, 272
definitions of, 62, 64
ethics of, 12, 14, 83, 66–​69, 126–​7, 129, 204,
227–​8, 233, 278
everyday life and, 4, 11–​14, 16, 20, 35, 60,
64–69, 290 n31
everyday-​life projects and, 233–​34, 285n43
geometries of, 67–​68, 126, 271, 273
habit and, 35, 63, 126–​27, 133, 138, 205,
209, 226
history and genealogy of, 4–​5, 60–​66
inattention and distraction contrasted with,
3–​4, 13, 63–​66, 74, 127–​30, 133, 269, 273
William James on, 61–​64, 66, 125–​27, 129, 250,
273, 290n36, 291n38, 291n39
in Mullen’s poetry, 266–​67, 269–​70
Index
in O’Hara’s poetry, 14, 63–​64, 127, 129
Language poetry and, 67–​68
Porter’s artwork and, 80–​81, 83, 225
pragmatist philosophy and, 64
as prayer, 13, 300n25
radical empiricism and, 50, 64
Rancière on, 67–​69, 133
in Rankine’s poetry, 277, 321n7
in Schuyler’s poetry, 14, 69–​7 1, 74–​75, 78, 81,
83, 96, 104, 127, 269
selectivity of, 62–​64, 127, 130, 250–​51, 291n43
in Silliman’s poetry, 14, 198–​99, 210, 226–​29
studies of, 60–​65, 290n32, n33, n34,
n35, 291n40
“Attention” (Ammons), 116
attentional blindness, 66
attention deficit disorder, 3–​4
Attica (documentary film), 227
Attica prison uprising (1971), 226–​27
“Aunt Jennifer's Tigers” (Rich), 162
Auschwitz, 7
awakening. See under morning
Badiou, Alain, 252
“The Ball” (Benson), 233
Baraka, Amiri, 117
BART (Silliman)
aesthetic of everyday life in, 168, 229–​30, 246,
256, 258, 264, 316n1
attentiveness and, 229
the city as focus of, 256, 258
as everyday-​life project, 237, 261
process of composing, 229
Barthes, Roland, 14, 16–​17, 47, 201, 315n26
Baudelaire, Charles, 57, 135, 257
Baudrillard, Jean, 53
The Beats, 6, 98, 140, 201
Beckett, Samuel
aesthetics of the everyday and, 8, 14, 29,
216, 293n8
boredom in the work of, 151–​2, 216, 318n15
endless chatter in the work of, 246
minimalism in the work of, 248–​49
Beckett, Tom, 206–​10
Bed (Rauchenberg), 90
“Being Boring” (Goldsmith), 45, 239, 251–​52
“Being Dumb” (Goldsmith), 239
Benjamin, Daniel, 51
Benjamin, Walter
aesthetics of the everyday and, 14, 17, 47, 52,
56, 159, 227
capitalism’s false consciousness and, 204, 226
on collecting, 94, 261, 295–​96n29
Coultas and, 17, 260–​61
the flâneur and, 52, 57, 257–​58, 260
Index
Goldsmith and, 236, 250
Marx and, 17, 56
Surrealism criticized by, 204, 219
“trash aesthetic” of, 134–​35, 259, 262,
295–​96n29, 320n29
Benson, Steve, 26, 233
Bergson, Henri, 61–​62, 290n32, 290n35
Bergvall, Caroline, 164, 237
Berkson, Bill, 76, 127
Bernes, Jasper, 308–​09n24
Bernstein, Charles
on Language poetry and realism, 202–​4
on the poetics of everyday life, 69, 201, 213,
215, 273
on poetry as an “ethical engagement” with
everyday life 69,
on Wittgenstein, 51
Berrigan, Ted, 73, 166, 173, 311n42,
311n44, 313n12
Bessa, A.S., 239, 242
“Best Before Date” (Wershler-​Henry), 271
“Big Black” (Frank Smith), 226–​27
“Birches” (Frost), 96
Bishop, Elizabeth, 14, 36, 161
Blackburn, Paul, 140
Black Mountain School of poets, 6, 140, 199, 201
Black Nature: Four Centuries of African
American Nature (anthology), 270
“The Black Snake” (Oliver), 24
Blake, William, 131
Blanchot, Maurice, 17, 47, 71, 116
“A Blessing” (James Wright), 23, 86
blogging, 43–​45, 74, 234
Bloom, Harold, 110, 114–​15, 126, 152–​53, 302n39
“The Blue Marble Project” (Prevallet), 310n40
“A Blue Shadow Painting” (Schuyler), 105
Body Clock (Sikelianos), 187–​89
Bök, Christian, 237, 285n81, 318n13
Bonfire of the Brands (Boorman), 31
Boorman, Neil, 31
Booth, Philip, 26
boredom
in Ammons’s poetry, 115–​16
Blanchot on, 71
contemporary fascination with, 45–​6, 286n4
everyday life and, 8, 26, 53–​5, 71, 99, 115–​6, 177
in Goldsmith’s poetry, 45, 237, 238–​40, 244,
249, 252, 318n15
Lefebvre on, 53, 71, 221–​22
in Mayer’s poetry, 177, 196
repetition and, 53, 71
in Schuyler’s poetry, 71, 97, 99, 134
in Silliman’s poetry, 213, 216–​17
Boredom: A Lively History (Toohey), 45
“Boring 2010” conference, 45
349
Borrowed Towns (Newman), 21
Bourdieu, Pierre, 14, 47
“The Bowery Project” (Coultas), 19, 94, 136,
259–​65, 320n30
Brainard, Joe, 89, 93–​96, 295n28, 297n34
Brenda is in the Room (Teicher), 117
Breton, Andre, 258
The Bridge (Crane), 24, 170
“A Brief Appreciation” (Koethe), 73
Briefer Course (William James), 62–​63
British cultural studies, 15, 55–​56
Brown, Michael, 232, 277, 317n6
Browne, Laynie
and conceptual writing by women, 307n16
Mayer and, 39, 305n6, 307n17, 311n42,
312n, 312n47
motherhood and, 37, 156, 159, 193–​96, 231
poetry of the everyday and, 36–​37, 39, 159,
190, 193–​96, 200, 231, 310n40
repetition in the work of, 195
and Silliman, 311n42
Bruegel, Pieter, 5
Bruns, Gerald, 66
Buddhism, 7
“Buried at Springs” (Schuyler), 70
Burt, Stephen, 161, 163, 285n45, 310n36
Buuck, David, 257
Cage, John
aesthetics of attention and, 31, 66–​67, 84,
151, 225
aesthetics of the everyday and, 8, 14, 29, 31,
234, 239–​40
conceptual writing influenced by, 164, 236–​7
everyday-​life projects of, 31
Goldsmith and, 236–​37, 239, 246
philosophy of non-​intervention and
acceptance, 84, 114
process-​oriented work of, 140, 302n38
Wittgenstein and, 51, 84
Calle, Sophie, 260
Campion, Peter, 25
Canby, Vincent, 227
Cantos (Pound), 170, 241
Capital: New York, Capital of the 20th Century
(Goldsmith), 250
Carr, Nicholas, 4, 286n1
Carver, George Washington, 267, 270
“Catalyst” (Ammons), 134–​35, 259
Cavell, Stanley
on Emerson, 51, 287n11, 287–​8n17
on the everyday as a response to skepticism,
10, 51–​52, 84
on the everyday as “our habitat,” 109, 143
on “having to accept the given,” 83–​4, 114
350
Cavell, Stanley (Cont.)
on Heidegger, 50, 87
on philosophy and the everyday, 10, 14–​15,
17, 47, 48, 50–​2, 73, 82, 87, 109, 113–​14, 201,
282–​3n25, 288n18
on “philosophy as descent,” 97
on the recovery of the ordinary, 10, 84, 109, 132
on Wittgenstein, 50–​51, 84, 87, 287n17, 294n16
“The Cenotaph” (Schuyler), 83, 98
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
(University of Birmingham), 55
Chang, Victoria, 21
Charbis, Christopher, 64–​65
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 5
Child, Julia, 32
The Chinese Notebook (Silliman), 216–​17
“The Circus” (Koch), 218
Citizen: An American Lyric (Rankine)
attentiveness and, 277, 321n7
critical reception of, 275, 321n5
everyday racism depicted in, 56,
59–​60, 275–​78
poetic form and, 20, 276
use of second-​person, 276–​7 7
the city
Benjamin on, 52
Coultas’s poetry on, 259–​65
Eliot’s depiction of, 6
epiphany and, 58
everyday-​life projects and, 231, 256–​60
the flâneur, 57, 73, 191
gender and, 57–​59, 111, 159, 171
Joyce and, 159, 171
in Mayer’s poetry, 164, 173, 191, 264
in Mullen’s poetry, 265–​70
in Rankine’s poetry, 257–​59, 264
rigid planning in, 54
in Schuyler’s poetry, 73, 79, 96, 102–​3
in Silliman’s poetry, 229, 256, 258, 264
“The City Limits” (Ammons), 134
The City Real & Imagined (Conrad and
Sherlock), 256
Clampdown (Moxley), 74
Cleo de 5 à 7 (Vardas), 167
“Closed Gentian Distances” (Schuyler), 99
Clover, Joshua, 313n9
A Coast of Trees (Ammons), 128–​29
Cold War culture, 7
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 5, 11, 246
collage
Dada and, 72, 88
garbage and, 89, 92–​95
aesthetics of the everyday and, 6, 19, 33,
72–74, 87–​97, 134, 137, 154, 180, 202, 207,
214, 259–​60, 263–​64, 294–​95n21, 295n23
video editing and, 32–​33
Index
Collins, Arda, 21
Collins, Billy, 2, 21–​22, 241
Collins-​Hughes, Laura, 13
“Combines” (Rauchenberg), 89
conceptual art
use of constraints in, 201–​2
Coultas inspired by, 260
and the everyday and, 31, 166, 168–​69, 280n14
everyday-​life projects and, 31–​2, 140, 234,
258, 307n22
Goldsmith inspired by, 31, 236
influence on Language poetry, 313n8
Mayer inspired by, 160, 164–​66, 169, 202,
306–​7n15
Silliman inspired by, 201–​2, 313n8
conceptualism
everyday-life aesthetic and, 31, 165, 229–​7 1
neutral stance of, 232
in the “wild,” 32, 271
conceptual writing
antecedents of, 164
appropriation and, 237–​38, 250
avant-​garde nature of, 9, 31
critiques of, 238, 317n6
as “enacted simulacrum,” 243
the everyday and, 236–​256
gender and, 165, 254
Goldsmith and, 9, 31, 36, 232, 236–​254, 257,
259, 266, 270, 317n6
Mayer and, 164–​5
“poetry of motherhood” and, 165
political implications of, 232, 254–​6,
267, 317n6
race and, 60, 232, 254, 266–​70, 317n6
and realism and “radical mimesis” 9, 239,
244–​45, 248–​50
“uncreativity” and, 237–​38, 251
confessional poetry, 162
Conrad, CA, 256
“The Constant” (Ammons), 115
constraints, see also everyday-​life projects
in Ammons’s Tape for the Turn of the Year,
138–​39, 148, 246, 303n42
conceptual art and, 201–​2
criticism of poetry relying on, 230, 249–​50
everyday-​life projects and, 30–​31, 34, 74, 170,
190–​91, 194, 200, 230–​31, 234, 237, 244,
254–​55, 263
generative qualities of, 164–​65, 194, 200,
207–​8, 274
in Goldsmith’s Soliloquy, 243
in the poetry of motherhood, 170, 190–​91,
194, 196
in Silliman’s Ketjak, 207–​8
Conte, Joseph, 283n29
Content's Dream (Bernstein), 201
Index
Coolidge, Clark, 169, 206, 314n16, 315n22
Corbett, William, 105
Corey, Joshua, 13
Corn, Alfred, 209
Cornell, Joseph, 89, 93–​96, 260, 264–​65
Corso, Gregory, 6
“Corsons Inlet” (Ammons), 112, 124–​25,
137, 217
Costello, Bonnie, 112, 301n34
Cotner, Jon, 256, 300n23
Cotter, Holland, 14
Coultas, Brenda. See also specific works
attentiveness and, 69
Benjamin and, 17, 260–​61
the city in the poetry of, 259–​65
collage in the poetry of, 259–​60, 263–​64
conceptual art as inspiration for, 260
everyday-​life poetry projects of, 259–​65
as flâneur, 260
garbage in the poetry of, 94, 136, 259–​65
homeless population in the poetry of, 133,
262, 265
and the long poem as a form, 260
Mayer and, 259
and poetry as act of accumulation, 265
poetry of the everyday and, 36, 232, 259–​65
and Thoreau, 263, 319n25
Coverley, Merlin, 256
Cradle and All anthology, 306n14
Crain, Caleb, 289n24
Crane, Hart, 24, 170, 237
Crary, Jonathan, 61–​62, 281n19, 290n32
Crase, Douglas, 18, 74, 75, 81, 101–​2, 106–​7
Creeley, Robert
diary-​style poems of, 140
and domesticity, 303–​4n46
poetry of the everyday and, 6, 8, 37, 78, 115,
140, 292–​3n5
radical minimalism in work of, 8, 206
Silliman and, 205–​6
Critique of Everyday Life (Lefebvre),
53, 221–​2 2
Critiques of Everyday Life (Gardiner), 15, 48
Cruz, Victor Hernandez, 11
“The Crystal Lithium” (Schuyler), 98, 100
cultural studies
attention as a focus in, 61
British cultural studies and, 15, 55–​56
on the consumer as producer, 54–​55
everyday life as a focus in, 15, 48, 55–​56, 60,
113, 159
Felski’s critique of, 48
feminist critiques of, 59, 159
Marx and, 56
“Culture Is Ordinary” (Raymond
Williams), 55
351
Dada, 31, 72, 88, 257–​8
The Daily Mirror: A Journal in Poetry
(Lehman), 31
Daily Sonnets (Browne), 193–​96, 310n40, 311n43,
311n45, 311–​12n46
Dante Alighieri, 5, 141
Dargis, Manohla, 45
Dasein (Heidegger), 50, 287n13
Davidson, Cathy, 65, 256, 291n43
Davidson, Michael, 256, 284n33
dawn. See under morning
Day (Goldsmith), 19, 176, 237, 250–​53
“The Day” (Goldsmith), 251
A Day Book (Creeley), 37, 140
“The Day Lady Died” (O’Hara), 2, 251
Deane, Patrick, 140, 302n38
Debord, Guy
capitalism’s colonization of daily life
and, 220
the dérive and, 53–​54
and the everyday, 14, 17, 47, 53–​54, 159,
201, 219–​20
gender and the city in work of, 57, 159
Goldsmith and, 17, 236
Marx and, 17, 56
psychogeography and, 54
reversal of hierarchies and, 28
“Dec. 28, 1974” (Schuyler), 77
de Certeau, Michel
on the consumer as producer, 54–​55, 256, 264
and the everyday and, 14, 17, 37, 47, 54–​56,
201, 256, 264, 286–​7n10, 289n23
the flâneur, 257
gender and the city in work of, 57
Goldsmith and, 17, 236
Marx and, 17, 56
reversal of hierarchies and, 28
“Deep Image” poetry, 23, 212
defamiliarization, 4, 48, 59, 65, 84, 238, 249, 278
De Kooning, Willem, 88
Denby, Edwin, 2
dérive, 53–​54, 256, 267
Derrida, Jacques, 11, 52–​53
Descartes, René, 48
The Desires of Letters (Browne), 193, 196,
311n42, 312n47
The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters
(Mayer), 160, 164, 187
Dewey, John, 14, 47, 49, 61, 113, 117, 282–​3n25,
290–​1n37
dialectical materialism, 49
Diaries (Pepys), 173
Dickinson, Emily, 161
Dienstfrey, Patricia, 162–​63, 189
“Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of
the World” (Silliman), 202
352 Index

Dissensus (Rancière), 28, 68
Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the
Coming Dark Age (Jackson), 3
distraction. See under attention
“Distraction” (Ammons), 116, 128–​29
documentary
film, 31, 39, 227, 276
poetry as, 35, 227, 230, 249, 259, 261
television in the style of, 43
the domestic
in Ammons’s poetry, 111, 139, 142–​43, 145–​47,
156–​58, 303–​4n46, 304–​5n1
devaluations of, 159
feminist scholarship on, 58–​59
gender and, 57–​59, 111, 146–​47, 303–​4n46,
304–​5n1
in Mayer’s poetry, 146, 156, 158, 164, 170–​74,
176–​7 7, 189, 308–​9n29
in Nguyen’s poetry, 182–​84
repetition in, 146
in Schuyler’s poetry, 73, 107–​9, 111
Donnelly, Jean, 163
Don't Let Me Be Lonely (Rankine), 276
Dr. Seuss (Theodore Seuss Geisel), 161, 173
Drumming (Reich), 207
DuBois, W.E.B., 117
Dubuffet, Jean, 28
Duchamp, Marcel
aesthetics of the everyday and, 6, 14, 264
and appropriation of found materials, 44
conceptual writing influenced by, 164
Goldsmith and, 236–​37
Duncan, Robert, 6, 205–​6
“Dung” (Ponge), 134, 269
Dungy, Camille T., 270
Dunn, Anne, 101
Dunn, Stephen, 23–​24, 26
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 303–​4n46, 306n11,
306n14, 315n23
Dworkin, Craig, 237–​38, 245, 254, 257, 317n6,
317n9, 318n16
“An East Window on Elizabeth Street”
(Schuyler), 96–​97, 259
Eat, Pray, Love (Gilbert), 31–​32
Edwards, Leigh, 286n2
Eldridge, Richard T., 51
Eliot, George, 203
Eliot, T.S., 6, 44, 126, 146
Ellison, Ralph, 117
Éluard, Paul, 258
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
“The American Scholar” and, 78
Ammons and, 117, 141, 303n43
Cavell on, 51, 287n11, 287–​8n17
and the everyday, 14, 17, 49, 51, 78, 113, 141
“Self-​Reliance” and, 141
Empire (Warhol), 167, 240
The Enlightenment, 48
epiphany
Ammons and, 114, 133
the city and, 58
Joyce and, 27
modernism and, 7, 27, 58
poetry of the everyday and, 18–​19, 22–​27, 133,
200, 209, 283n31
skepticism toward, 11, 26–​27, 86–​7, 101, 114,
200, 209, 247, 284n33
transformation tropes and, 22–​27, 86–​7, 200,
209, 284n33
“Essay on Poetics” (Ammons), 126, 137
ethical dimension of everyday life poetics,
12, 14, 83, 66–​69, 97, 108, 126–​7, 129, 204,
227–8, 233, 278
“Eurasiacan” (Nguyen), 185
“Everyday and Everydayness” (Lefebvre), 17
everyday hunger
definition of, 4
everyday-​life projects and, 34, 234–​35
increasing levels of in contemporary culture,
34, 37, 41–​46, 272, 286n8
“the slow movement” and, 46
technological change and, 34, 37, 41–​2,
43–​46, 272
everyday life. See also everyday-​life projects
alienation from, 4–​5, 8, 53
as antidote to idealism, 73, 81, 84, 143
attention and, 4, 11–​14, 16, 20, 35, 60, 64–​69,
290 n31
boredom and, 8, 26, 53–​5, 71, 99, 115–​6, 177
capitalism and, 5, 11, 16, 40, 53–​56, 68, 69,
174, 186, 200, 204–​5, 218–​22, 232, 235, 254,
255–​56, 258, 262, 264, 275, 288n20, 290n35,
295n25, 309n30, 313n10, 314n13
feminist scholarship on, 58–​59, 69
gender and, 11, 17, 39, 57–​60, 68–​69, 73,
156–96, 220, 223–​24, 254, 275
genealogy of societal concerns
regarding, 4–​5
normative assumptions regarding
concept of, 38
paradoxical nature of, 17–​18, 53, 71, 72, 74,
97–​100, 107, 115, 148, 176, 204, 215, 217, 225,
233, 244, 274, 283n36
race and, 11, 17, 22, 36, 39, 59–​60, 69, 180,
185, 220–​1, 223–​24, 254, 257, 265–​70,
275–​78, 305n3
as refuge, 104
sexual orientation and, 38, 73, 159, 190,
223, 295n25
Index
theories of, 3, 14–​18, 20, 37–​8, 47–​60, 66–​9, 82,
83–​87, 113–​6, 159, 189, 201–​2. 205, 215, 227,
236, 255–​7, 273–​4, 281n20, 282n23, 282–​3n25
and the transformation trope, 21–​26
everyday-​life projects
allure of, 34–​35, 232–​236
appropriation and, 230, 232
attentiveness and, 30, 233–​34, 285n43
backlash against, 32, 230, 235, 253, 272,
285n42, 316n2
in broader culture, 3, 29–​34, 234–​35, 285nn42–​43
the city and, 231, 256–​60
conceptual art and, 31, 233–​234
constraints and, 30–​31, 34, 74, 170, 190–​91,
194, 200, 230–​31, 234, 237, 244, 254–​55, 263
definition of, 29–​30, 231
everyday hunger and, 29–​34, 234–​35
garbage as concern within, 231, 239
poetry and, 19, 29–​31, 39, 56, 74, 111, 163–​64,
167–​68, 180, 187, 190–​91, 229–​7 1, 274,
298n10, 302n38, 310n40, 316n2, 317n9,
319n19, 319n25
Quantified Self movement and, 33–​34,
285nn42–​43
repetition in, 233
reversal of hierarchies and, 231, 239
walking and, 231
Everyday Life Reader (anthology), 15, 281n20
Everyday Life Studies, see also “everyday life,
theories of,” 14–​18, 47–​60, 281n20
“Everyday Life Studies” (Olson), 52, 58, 281n20
Everyday Sexism Project, 275
“Everyday Speech” (Blanchot), 17, 71, 116
Everything That Can Happen in a Day
(Horvitz), 168
Expressions of Sea Level (Ammons), 131, 139
the extraordinary, 1, 5, 21, 27, 28, 73, 82, 113, 200,
252–​4, 273
“Extremes and Moderations” (Ammons), 137
“Eyesight” (Ammons), 128–​29
Facebook, 33, 44, 46, 234–​35
“February” (Schuyler), 77–​79, 293n7
Felski, Rita, 17, 47–​48, 50, 57–​59, 73, 108, 189,
215, 217, 281n20, 282–​83n25, 286–​87n10,
289n23, 289n26, 289n28
feminism, 39, 57–​60, 68–​69, 156–​196, 305n4,
306n10, 309n30, 310n37, 310n38
“A Few Days” (Schuyler), 71–​72, 98, 100, 103, 109
Fidget (Goldsmith), 20, 240, 248–​50, 254,
318nn15–​16
“First My Motorola” (Nemerov), 56, 254–​56,
318–​19n18, 318n17
Fisher, Tom, 67–​68
Fitch, Andy, 256, 300n23
353
Fitterman, Robert, 9, 74, 237
Fitzgerald, Adam, 307n20, 321n2
the flâneur, 39, 124, 159, 173, 257, 300n23, 319n23
Benjamin on, 52, 57, 257–​58, 260
class assumptions regarding, 267
Coultas’s “The Bowery Project” and, 260
everyday-​life projects and, 257–​60, 267, 300n23
gender assumptions regarding, 57, 159, 173,
267–​68, 289n25
O’Hara’s poetry and, 57, 73, 257, 319n23
racial assumptions regarding, 39, 267–​68
Fleming, Richard, 52
Flickr, 32–​33, 234
Fluxus, 31, 140, 167, 234
“Follow” (Buuck), 257
Foster, Hal, 281n17
Foucault, Michel, 17, 52, 54
Found (website), 44
Foursquare (online platform), 234
Frankfurt School, 52–​53
Franzen, Jonathan, 4
Fraser, Kathleen, 189–​90
Fredman, Stephen, 280n12, 294–​5n21,
312n3, 314n17
Freely Espousing (Schuyler collection of
poems), 77, 90
“Freely Espousing” (Schuyler poem), 90–​92
Freilicher, Jane, 79, 87
Freud, Sigmund, 49, 61
Frost, Robert, 35, 96, 117, 247, 282n22
“Futurist Manifesto” (Marinetti), 27–​28
Galvin, Rachel, 281–​82n20
garbage
aesthetic of the everyday and, 24, 27–​29, 56,
88–​89, 92–​94, 97, 111, 134–​37, 231, 239, 247,
259–​65, 268–​69, 284n36, 300n28
in Ammons’s poetry, 94, 111, 119, 134–​37, 152,
154, 259
Benjamin and, 134–​35, 259, 262, 295–​96n29,
300n28, 320n29
collage and, 88–​90, 92–​95
in Coultas’s poetry, 94, 136, 259–​65
in Dunn’s poetry, 24
everyday-​life projects use of, 231, 239
in Goldsmith’s poetry, 239, 247, 318n14
in Mullen’s poetry, 268–​69
postwar avant-​garde art and, 28–​29
reversal of hierarchies and, 28–​29, 134, 239,
260, 268–​69
in Schuyler’s poetry, 87–​97, 134, 259,
294n20, 295n25
in Schwitters, 88–​89
in Silliman’s poetry, 94, 218, in Stevens’s
poetry, 94, 134
354 Index

Garbage (Ammons), 94, 119, 134–​35, 137, 152, 259 Gould, Emily, 32

Gardiner, Michael, 15, 48, 281n20, 288n18, Gould, Timothy, 83
288nn20–​21, 315–​16n29 Graham, Dan, 166
Garner, Dwight, 46, 253 Graham, Jorie, 11
Garner, Eric, 277 Gramsci, Antonio, 55
Gaughan, Patrick, 257 The Grand Permission (Dienstfrey and
Geertz, Clifford, 47 Hillman), 163, 189, 306n11
gender Greenberg, Clement, 80
the city and, 57–​59, 111, 159, 171 Gregg, Linda, 209
the domestic and, 57–​59, 111, 146–​47, 156–​96, Grenier, Robert, 206
303–​4n46, 304–​5n1 Grimstad, Paul, 282–​83n25, 299n11
in everyday life, 11, 17, 39, 57–​60, 68–​69, 73, Gros, Frédéric, 256
156–​96, 220, 223–​24, 254, 275 Gudding, Gabriel, 29–​30
the flâneur and, 57, 159, 173, 267–​68 “Guide” (Ammons), 123–​24
postwar “crisis” in, 146–​47
sexism and, 11 Haacke, Hans, 166–​67
“Get Debt Relief” (Nguyen), 186 Habermas, Jürgen, 47
Gilbert, Elizabeth, 31–​32 habit
Gilbert, Roger, 110, 114, 116, 122, 152–​3, 257, attention impacted by, 35, 62–​63, 126–​27, 133,
299n14, 300n23, 302n39, 319n20 138, 205, 209, 226
Ginsberg, Allen, 6, 78, 205–​6, 240, 246–​47, cultural studies analysis of, 48, 59
302–​03n40 disruption of, within everyday-​life
Glare (Ammons), 137, 152, 304n52 aesthetics, 7, 47–​48, 59, 65, 167–​68, 207,
Godard, Jean-​Luc, 8, 172 214, 225–​27, 234, 256, 266
Goldbarth, Albert, 21 everyday-​life studies and, 47–​48, 57, 73, 189,
Goldsmith, Kenneth. See also specific works 286–​87n10
Benjamin and, 236, 250 William James on, 49, 62–​64, 286–​87n10
boredom in the poetry of, 45, 237, 238–​40, Perec on, 225–​27
244, 249, 252, 318n15 pragmatist philosophy and, 17, 48–​49,
Cage and, 236–​37, 239, 246 56, 62–​64
conceptual art as inspiration for, 31, 236 Hahn, Kimiko, 189–​90
controversies regarding race and politics, Hall, Stuart, 55
232, 254, 317n6 Halpern, Nick, 112, 298n4
Duchamp and, 236–​37 A Handmade Museum (Coultas), 259–​65,
everyday-​life poetry projects of, 9, 19, 20, 29, 319nn25–​26
39, 176, 230, 236–​53 Happenings, 167
and everyday-​life theorists, 17, 236 The Happiness Project (Rubin), 32, 284–​85n40
experimental realism and, 9, 239–​40, Happy Days (Beckett), 216
243–​45, 248–​50 Harryman, Carla, 26
garbage in the poetry of, 239, 247, 318n14 Hass, Robert, 12–​13, 18, 282n22
Language poetry and, 236 Hebdige, Dick, 55
long poems as characteristic of, 230, 240–​41, Hecate Lochia (Nguyen), 178, 180–​87
244, 246, 250–​51 Heidegger, Martin
minimalism in the work of, 249–​50 Cavell on, 50, 87
O’Hara and, 236, 239–​41, 246–​47, 249, 251, 254 noninterventionist approach to experience
poetry of the everyday and, 9, 19–​20, 22, and, 84
29, 31, 36, 176, 232, 236–​54, 257, 259, 266, and the everyday, 14, 17, 47, 50–​52, 84, 87,
270, 317n6 287nn13–​15
repetition in the poetry of, 249 Hejinian, Lyn, 10, 11, 26, 37, 101, 197, 199, 201,
turn away from the everyday, 252–​54 308n29, 313nn6–​7, 319n25
Warhol and, 45, 232, 236–​37, 238, 239–​40, 246, on realism, 10, 197, 203, 239, 313n12
248, 253, 317n9, 318n17 skeptical realism and, 10
White House performance (2011) of, 237 The Helens of Troy, NY (Mayer), 164
Whitman, 237, 240–​41, 247 Heller, Agnes, 14, 47
Gordon, Noah Eli, 321n2 Heraclitus, 4
Index 355

Herd, David, 96–​97, 292n4, 294n20, 295n25 Ammons and, 16, 118, 117–​29

the heroic, 5, 27, 76 and attention, 61–​64, 66, 125–​27, 129, 250, 273,
“Hibernaculum” (Ammons), 114–​15, 126–​27, 137 290n36, 291n38, 291n39
Higgins, Hannah, 114 on the conjunction “and”, 138
Highmore, Ben, 15, 17–​18, 28, 54, 57, 258, 262, on habit, 49, 62–​64, 286–​87n10
267, 281n20, 288n20, 288n21, 289n23, “one and many” problem and, 118–​20,
289n24, 289n28, 290n35, 291n45, 123, 125
315n29, 320n29 and the everyday, 14, 17, 47, 49–​50, 113, 117–​23,
Hillman, Brenda, 162–​63, 189 151, 282–​83n25, 287n12
Hiroshima, bombing of (1945), 7 pragmatism and, 16, 49, 117–​23
Hirsch, Edward, 12, 21, 24–​25, 108 radical empiricism and, 49, 50, 64, 119–​20,
Hoagland, Tony, 279n1 122, 125
Hoggart, Richard, 55 Jay, Martin, 49, 298n6
Holbrook, Susan, 38, 187, 190–​93, 231 Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080
Homer, 5, 141–​42 Bruxelles (Akerman), 8, 167
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 136 Jenkins, Henry, 32, 279n2, 285n41
Horkheimer, Max, 52 Johnson, Addie, 61, 64
Horvitz, David, 168 Johnston, Jill, 84
Howe, Marie, 21 “Jones” (Silliman), 190–​91, 233
Howe, Susan, 117 Jouet, Jacques, 191
Howells, William Dean, 203 Joyce, James. See also Ulysses
Huebler, Douglas, 166 aesthetics of the everyday and, 6–​7, 14, 159,
Humans of New York (blog), 44 170, 171, 173, 236, 248, 282n21
Hunt, Erika, 275 the city in the work of, 159, 171
Husserl, Edmund, 47 epiphany and, 27, 283n31
“Hymn” (Ammons), 122–​24, 176 gender and, 159
“Hymn to Life” (Schuyler), 37, 38, 83, 85, 98, 99, Goldsmith and, 236, 248
100–​106, 108, 296n33 lists in the work of, 172–​73
Judd, Donald, 81
“I Hear America Singing” (Whitman), 146, 157 Juhasz, Susanne, 58
I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing Julie and Julia (Powell), 32
by Women (anthology), 164–​65, “June 30, 1974” (Schuyler), 107–​8
307nn16–​17, 310n40
Imagism, 6–​7 Kalina, Noah, 32
“I’m Going to Start Living Like a Mystic” Kalstone, David, 113, 121
(Hirsch), 24–​25 Kaprow, Allan, 28
inattention. See under attention Keats, John, 123
inattention blindness, 64–​65 Keller, Lynn, 162, 298n9
“In Defense of the Slow and the Boring” Kelly, Kath, 31
(Dargis and Scott), 45 Kennedy, John F., 304n50
Instagram, 32–​33, 44, 234 Kerouac, Jack, 6, 140, 218, 303n42
In the American Tree anthology, 203–​4 Ketjak (Silliman), 14, 33, 37, 198–​228
“Into the Dusk-​Charged Air” (Ashbery), 136 Balinese inspiration for, 207, 215, 314n19
“Introduction to the Pebble” (Ponge), 28 as breakthrough poem, 199, 205–​08
“invisible gorilla” experiment, 64–​66, capitalism critiqued in, 200, 204–​05, 219–​23
291nn42–​43 use of constraints in, 200, 202, 207, 229
Isherwood, Christopher, 258–​59 inclusive aspirations of, 223–​24
length of, 153, 202, 216
Jackson, Maggie, 3 morning in, 204, 211–​12, 224–​26
Jackson, Richard, 127, 154 publication of, 200, 312n2
Jackson, Virginia, 283n30 repetition in, 199, 207, 212, 214–​18, 225
Jacobs, A.J., 32 “revolving door” in, 216, 218–​19, 315n28
Jacobsen, Josephine, 126 as title for his whole body of work,
James, Henry, 63, 117 205, 314n15
James, William walking in, 216
356
Kiberd, Declan, 282n21
“Kind” (Ammons), 130
The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (Howe), 21
“The Kingfishers” (Olson), 226, 316n32
King Lear (Shakespeare), 199
Kirby, David, 298n9
Kirsch, Adam, 2
Kirschten, Robert, 110, 152–​53
Knausgaard, Karl Ove, 46, 286n8
Koch, Kenneth, 90, 166, 218
Koehler, Margaret, 60–​61, 281n19
Koestenbaum, Wayne, 99, 295n27
Koethe, John, 73
Kooser, Ted, 12, 21–​22
“Korean Mums” (Schuyler), 98–​99
Kristeva, Julia, 189, 310nn37–​38
Kunzru, Hari, 46
Kyger, Joanne, 140
Laird, Nick, 276–​7 7
Langbauer, Laurie, 58–​59, 69, 289n28
Language poetry, 3, 26, 36, 51, 67–​68, 101, 160,
190, 198–​203, 212, 219, 228, 236, 239, 254,
266, 284n33, 285n45, 312–​13nn4–​8
attention and, 67–​68
critiques of, 200–​201, 228, 312n4
the everyday and, 26, 67–​68, 101, 198, 200–​2,
254, 313n6
Goldsmith and, 236, 243
Mayer and, 160, 305n7, 308n29
Mullen and, 266
and realism, 202–​4, 280n15, 313n11, 313n12
Silliman and, 3, 26, 36, 38, 198–​203, 205,
212, 219
Lao-​Tse, 114
Lasky, Dorothea, 230, 316n2
“Latest Freed Man” (Stevens), 125
Lazer, Hank, 201, 213, 221
Lear, Jonathan, 83–​84
Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 5, 27
Lefebvre, Henri
on boredom and repetition, 71, 221–​22
on capitalism and everyday life, 16, 52–​54, 69,
186, 220–​22, 232, 255, 258
on consumption as production, 255–​56
on the everyday, 14, 16, 17–​18, 28, 47–​48,
52–​54, 56–​57, 69, 71, 82, 115–​16, 133, 198,
200–​201, 204, 215, 217, 219, 220–​22, 232, 255,
258, 273–​74, 282n23, 286–​87n10, 287n15,
288nn20–​21, 289n28, 315n29
on everyday life’s eluding of
institutionalization and form, 18
gendered notions of the everyday and, 57–​59,
159, 289n28
Marx and, 17, 53, 56
Index
on repetition in everyday life, 71, 215, 221–​22
reversal of hierarchies and, 28
on Surrealism, 219, 315n29
Lehman, David, 31, 70, 79–​80, 291n1, 292n4,
293n10, 298n8, 311n44
Lehto, Leevi, 243, 246–​47
Le Meridien de Paris (Réda), 29
LeSueur, Joseph, 127
Levertov, Denise, 6
Levin, Jonathan, 282–​83n25, 287n12, 299n11
Levine, Philip, 209
LeWitt, Sol, 140, 166
Life A User’s Manual (Perec), 127, 267
Lippard, Lucy, 307n19, 307n22, 313n8
“Litany” (Ashbery), 154
“Locality” (Armantrout), 10–​11
Locke, Alain, 117
London Orbital (Sinclair), 29, 256
long poems
accumulation in, 102, 137
aesthetics of everyday life and, 7, 19, 33, 74,
100–​102, 137–​38, 170, 216–​17, 240–​241,
250–51, 268, 283n29, 296n32, 298n9
Ammons and, 100, 102, 137–​55, 170, 300n24,
301n32, 301–​2n36
Goldsmith and, 230, 240–​41, 244, 246, 250–​51
Mayer and, 100, 160, 163, 170, 174
modular units in, 7, 260
repetition in, 100, 102, 199, 202, 216–​217
Schuyler and, 100–​101, 137, 296n32
Silliman and, 100–​102, 153, 198–​99, 205, 208,
210, 216–​18, 226–​27
Lowell, Robert, 23, 140, 209, 303n46
Lukacs, Georg, 280n13
Lu, Vivian, 275
“Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s
Farm In Pine Island, Minnesota” (James
Wright), 23, 86
Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth and Coleridge), 5
lyric, as a form and genre, 2, 18–​20, 35, 87, 101,
144, 162–​63, 165, 183–​84, 206, 232, 241, 276,
283n30, 285n45
Mac Low, Jackson, 295n22, 302n38
Mack, Arien, 64
Magee, Michael, 282–​83n25, 287n12
Malkin, Rachel, 288n18
“Man on the Dump” (Stevens), 94, 134
Manson, Douglas, 260, 263
Mao, Douglas, 281–​82n20
Mao Zedong, 226, 316n32
Marinetti, F. T., 27–​28
Martin, Trayvon, 277
Marx, Karl, 17, 49, 53, 201, 204, 315n26
Marxist criticism, 16, 52–​53, 113, 227, 313n10
Index
“Master of the Golden Glow” (Schuyler), 92
maternal everyday, poetics of the, 156–​96. See
also motherhood
as alternative to women’s lyric poetry, 162–​63
definition of, 59, 68, 159–​60
and politics, 159–​60, 163, 174–​179, 181–​87,
192–​96, 309n30
The Maximus Poems (Olson), 170
Mayer, Bernadette. See also specific works
0 to 9 (poetry journal) and, 164, 166–​68, 170
attentiveness and, 14, 164, 165, 172
boredom in the poetry of, 177, 196
Browne and, 39, 305n6, 307n17, 311n42,
312n, 312n47
the city in the work of, 164, 173, 191, 264
conceptual art and, 160, 164–​170, 202, 305n8,
306–​7n15
conceptual writing and, 164–​65
Coultas and, 259
the domestic in the poetry of, 146, 156, 158,
164, 170–​74, 176–​7 7, 189, 308–​9n29
everyday-​life poetry projects of, 19, 37,
163–64, 166–​69, 170–​7 7, 180, 230, 238, 240,
254, 261, 274, 307n20, 308n29, 315n22
Language poetry and, 160, 305n7, 308n29
linguistic skepticism of, 169–​70
long poems as characteristic of, 100, 160, 163,
170, 174
motherhood in the poetry of, 56, 68, 158–​65,
170–​7 7, 187, 190, 193, 196, 308–​9n29, 310n30
New York School of poetry and, 36, 39,
160–61, 165–​66, 168, 180, 259, 305n7,
305–​6n9
Nguyen and, 39, 179–​80, 186, 309 n32
poetry of the everyday and, 13, 19, 21, 36–​37,
39, 56, 59, 68, 113, 158–​7 7, 180, 187, 189–​91,
193, 196, 231, 238, 242, 246, 248, 251, 254,
264, 267, 274, 307n21
repetition in the poetry of, 176–​7 7
Schuyler and, 39
Silliman and, 39
Mayer, Rosemary, 166, 188
McDaniel, Ray, 239–​40
McDermott, John J., 64, 120
McFee, Michael, 155
McGuirk, Kevin, 118, 300n24, 301n32
McHale, Brian, 283n29
McRobbie, Angela, 55
“Memorial Day 1950” (O’Hara), 28
Memory (Mayer), 37, 163–​65, 168–​70, 261,
307–​08n24, 320n27
Menand, Louis, 119–​20
Merz collages (Schwitters), 88, 295n22
microaggressions, 38, 60, 69, 275–​78
The Microaggressions Project, 275
357
Midwinter Day (Mayer), 37, 158, 160, 165, 167,
170–​7 7, 189, 231, 248
lists in, 172–​73, 251
political events cited in, 174–​76
process of composing, 160, 171, 246, 308n27
Ulysses and, 170, 248
Mikics, David, 46, 279n3, 286n7
Miller, Cristanne, 95, 162
Miller, Tyrus, 295n22
Milton, John, 141
“Miss Batie” (Schuyler), 78
Mlinko, Ange, 163, 178–​79, 183, 309n31
modernism, recognition of the everyday in,
5–​7, 236
monotony. See boredom
Moore, Marianne, 11, 90, 117, 161
morning
awakening and, 24, 40, 81, 107, 204–​5, 224,
226–​27, 263
dawn and, 40, 226
in Goldsmith’s Fidget, 248–​49
in Mayer’s Midwinter Day, 177
in Porter’s art, 81, 106–​17
in Schuyler’s poetry, 81, 99–​100, 106–​8
in Silliman’s Ketjak, 204, 211–​12, 224–​26
in Thoreau’s Walden, 225
“The Morning of the Poem” (Schuyler), 74, 77,
92, 97, 100, 103
Moss, Howard, 70, 85
motherhood
in Browne’s poetry, 37, 156, 159, 193–​96, 231
constraints and, 170, 190–​91, 194, 196, 310n40
feminist poetics and, 37, 159, 305n4
in Mayer’s poetry, 56, 68, 158–​65, 170–​7 7, 187,
190, 193, 196, 308–​9n29, 310n30
in Nguyen’s poetry, 37–​38, 159, 178,
179–​87, 200
nursing and, 161, 163, 181, 183–​84, 190–​93
poetry of the everyday and, 37–​38, 39,
56–57, 68, 156–​96, 305–​06n9, 306nn10–​14,
308n29, 310n30, 310n40
politics and, 159–​60, 163, 174–​179, 181–​87,
192–​96, 309n30
pregnancy and, 161, 163–​64, 179–​81, 187–​89,
310nn36–​37
in Rankine’s poetry, 37, 159, 187, 189, 310n36
“stealing time” and, 189–​90, 193–​94,
310nn39–​40
“Mountain Talk” (Ammons), 119, 130
Moxley, Jennifer, 74, 292n3
Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), 7, 108, 170–​7 1, 173, 251
Mullen, Harryette
and attention, 266–​67, 269–​70
the city in the poetry of, 265–​70
conceptual poetry and, 266, 270
358 Index

Mullen, Harryette (Cont.) class in the poetry of, 185–​87

ecopoetics and, 320n33 collage in the poetry of, 180
everyday-​life poetry projects of, 31, 265–​271 the domestic in the poetry of, 179–​187
garbage in the poetry of, 268–​69 Mayer and, 39, 179–​80, 186, 309 n32
Language poetry and, 266 motherhood in the poetry of, 37–​38, 159, 178,
poetry of the everyday and, 19, 36, 39, 59, 232, 179–​187, 200
265–​70, 311n41 O’Hara and, 186–​87, 309–​10n35
race in the poetry of, 36, 39, 59, 232, 266–​70 poetry of the everyday and, 36–​38, 178,
repetition in the poetry of, 266, 268 180–​87, 200
reversal of hierarchies in the poetry pregnancy in the poetry of, 180–​81
of, 268–​69 race in the poetry of, 59, 180, 185, 309n33
walking poems of, 39, 265–​70 skeptical realism and, 180
Murphy, Kate, 32 Nicholson, Geoff, 256
My Life (Hejinian), 37, 197, 199, 201, 203 Niedecker, Lorine, 36, 113, 161, 180
Nine Horses (Collins), 22
Naik, Gautam, 45 No. 111: 2.7.93–​10.20.96 (Goldsmith), 237, 250
Narrative Clip (small camera device), 44, 242 Notes on Conceptualisms (Place and
naturalism, 5 Fitterman), 9
Nelson, Maggie, 165, 169, 171, 173, 305–​6nn7–​9, Not for Mothers Only anthology, 161–​63, 189–​91
306–​07n15 Notley, Alice, 160, 162–​63, 193, 305–​06n9,
Nemerov, Alexandra, 56, 69, 254–​56, 318n17, 309n32, 311n42
318–​19n18 Now You See It (Davidson), 65, 291n43
New American Poetry “Nursery” (Holbrook), 190–​93
Ammons and, 38, 112, 140, 299n17, 302 n38,
302–​3n40, 303n42 Objectivists, 36, 199, 201
Cold War culture and, 7 The Odyssey (Homer), 141–​42
Goldsmith and, 236, 246 The Office (television show), 43
modernism and, 7 Of Woman Born (Rich), 196, 306n10
pragmatism and, 117, 282–​3n25 O’Hara, Frank. See also specific works
and the poetics of everyday life, 6–​8, 23, 39, attentiveness and, 14, 63–​64, 127, 129
78, 101, 112, 140, 200–​201, 205–​206, 236, collage in the work of, 89–​90
246, 294–​5n22 diary-​style, “I do this I do that” poems and,
Silliman’s critique of, 39, 205–​6, 224, 314n16 2, 20, 140, 173, 241, 249, 254
The New American Poetry: 1945–​1960 (1960 the flâneur and, 57, 73, 173, 257, 319n23
anthology), 6, 293n7, 295n26 Goldsmith and, 236, 239–​41, 246–​47, 249,
New Criticism, 6, 23 251, 254
Newcomer, Caitlin, 305n2, 305n8, 308n25 Nguyen and, 186–​87, 309–​10n35
Newman, Richard, 21 poetry of the everyday and, 1–​2, 6–​7, 14, 16,
new media, 3–​4, 32–​33, 44, 46, 234–​35. See also 20, 110, 113, 166, 180, 186–​87, 239–​41, 249,
specific media 251, 254, 279n1, 300n23, 304n48, 304n51,
New York School of poets 309–​10n35, 313n9, 321n8
Ammons and, 140 pragmatism and, 117
Browne and, 193, 311n43 reversal of hierarchies and, 28
Coultas and, 259 Schuyler’s elegy for, 70
Goldsmith and, 243 Oldenburg, Claes, 28
male-​centered poetics of, 39, 161, 174, 180 Olds, Sharon, 163
Mayer and, 36, 39, 160–​61, 165–​66, 168, 180, Oliver, Mary, 24, 26–​27, 108, 241
259, 305n7, 305–​6n9 Olson, Charles, 4, 6, 78, 170, 205–​6, 226, 296n32,
Nguyen and, 180 302n38, 302–​3n40, 303–​4n46, 309n32,
poetry of the everyday and, 3, 6, 36, 39, 70, 314n16, 316n32
140, 159, 160, 161, 166, 168, 174, 180, 193, 199, Olson, Liesl, 5–​6, 15, 57–​58, 280nn9–​10,
201, 259, 292n3, 305–​6n9 281n20, 282nn23–​25, 283n26, 283–​4n31,
Schuyler and, 6, 36, 70, 74, 79, 82, 90, 296n32 286n9, 289n27
Silliman and, 199–​200, 201, 206 Ommateum (Ammons), 121, 124, 142
Nguyen, Hoa “the one and the many” problem, 118–​22, 124–​25
Index
One Second Everyday (smart phone app),
44, 285n43
The Onion (satirical newspaper), 272
On the Road (Kerouac), 140, 303n42
Oppen, George, 14, 36
“An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”
(Stevens), 6
Osman, Jena, 31, 257
Ostriker, Alicia, 161–​62, 190
Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems (Schuyler),
74–​75, 105
Oulipo writers, 191, 207, 314n21, 320n32
Outka, Paul, 320n34
Overheard in New York (blog), 44
Padgett, Ron, 89, 166, 296–​97n34
“Pastoral” (Williams), 28
Pater, Walter, 27
Paterson (Williams), 170
“Patriarchal Poetry” (Stein), 193
Pepys, Samuel, 173
Perec, Georges
aesthetics of the everyday and, 14, 37, 168–​69,
172, 207, 225–​26, 227
attentiveness and, 127, 225–​26, 267
everyday-​life projects of, 29, 32, 34, 136,
168–69, 172–​73, 231
formal constraints employed by, 207, 320n32
on habit, 225–​27
Oulipo movement and, 320n32
Perelman, Bob, 26, 220
performance art, 19, 42, 163–​64, 171
Perl, Jed, 81–​82, 293n10, 294–​95n21
Perloff, Marjorie, 26, 84, 240, 243–​50, 279n2,
281n20, 284n32, 287n16, 312nn3–​4, 313n7,
314n21, 317n6, 317nn10–​11, 318n15
“The Permeable ‘I,’ A Practice,” (Browne), 194
Perreault, John, 166
phenomenology, 48, 50, 214
Phillips, Siobhan, 15, 281–​2n20, 282nn22–​24,
282–​83n25, 283n29, 283–​4n31, 286n9,
288nn18–​19, 293n12, 294n16
Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein),
50–51, 57, 83, 87, 216
A Philosophy of Boredom (Svendsen), 45
A Philosophy of Walking (Gros), 256
Picasso, Pablo, 6
Pieces (Creeley), 140
“A Pile of Conflicting Emotions About
Garbage” (Coultas), 262
Piper, Adrian, 166
Place, Vanessa, 9, 237, 239, 317n6
Plait, Phil, 233
Plath, Sylvia, 126, 162–​63, 195
Plot (Rankine), 187–​89, 310n36
359
Poèmes du Métro (Jouet), 191
“Poem to Read at My Wedding”
(Teicher), 116–​17
The Poethical Wager (Retallack), 66–​68, 126,
132, 233
“Poetics of Everyday Life” (Michael
Davidson), 284n33
Poetry Is Not a Project (Lasky), 230
“The Poetry of Everyday Life” (Mayer), 165
Poetry Project at St. Marks, the, 164–​65
Poirier, Richard, 117, 282–​83n25, 287n12,
298n7, 299n11
“Polaroid Street Works,” 167
Pol-​Droit, Roger, 168
Ponge, Francis, 28, 66, 134, 209, 294n14, 315n26
Pop Art, 39, 140, 236
Porter, Anne, 89
Porter, Fairfield
aesthetic of the everyday and, 75–​87, 105, 225,
293–​94n13
attentiveness and, 80–​81, 83, 225
collage and, 89
death of, 89
figurative painting style of, 79–​80, 105
morning in art and, 81, 106–​7
noninterventionist approach to experience
and, 83–​85
Schuyler and, 16–​17, 75–​87, 89, 92, 93, 101, 105,
279–​80n7, 293nn9–​10 296–​97n34
skeptical realism and, 80–​82
Stevens and, 80, 293n11
Wittgenstein and, 17, 51, 87, 287n16
Posnock, Ross, 282–​83n25, 287n12, 299n11
“Post-​9/​11 Sonnet” (Browne), 196
postmodernism, 5, 8, 11, 34, 42, 112, 200, 301n32,
302n38, 315n25
post-​structuralism, 11, 52–​3
Pound, Ezra, 13, 126, 284n34, 308n26, 315n26
Cantos and, 170, 241, 296n32
poetry of the everyday and, 6–​7, 27
Powell, Julie, 32
The Practice of Everyday Life (de Certeau), 37,
54, 264
pragmatism, see also William James,
Ammons and, 16, 113, 117–​29, 299n13
attention and, 61–​64, 66, 125–​27, 129, 250, 273,
290n36, 291nn38–39
everyday life and, 17, 26, 48–​50, 117–​25,
280n10, 282–​83n25, 298nn6–7
habit and, 17, 48–​49, 56, 62–​64
and James’s definition of the pragmatist,
119, 122
pragmatist lineage in literature, 17, 117,
282–​83n25, 287n12
“Pray Without Ceasing” (Ammons), 137
360
pregnancy. See under motherhood
The Prelude (Wordsworth), 241
Prevallet, Kristin, 310n40
Prins, Yopie, 283n30
The Principles of Psychology (James), 62–​63,
66, 126
procedural poetics. See everyday-​life projects
“Pro-​Consumerist Poet #1” (Goldsmith), 318n17
Proctor, Robert W., 61, 64
projects of attention. See everyday-​life projects
The Provenance of Beauty (Rankine), 257–​59,
264, 267–​68
psychogeography (Debord), 54, 256–​59, 267,
288–​89n22, 319n22
Public Figures (Osman), 31, 257
Quantified Self movement, 33–​34, 242
race and racism
conceptual writing and, 60, 232, 254,
266–​70, 317n6
in everyday life, 11, 17, 22, 36, 39, 59–​60, 69,
180, 185, 220–​1, 223–​24, 254, 257, 265–​70,
275–​78, 305n3
microaggressions and, 38, 60, 69, 275–​78,
321nn3–​5
in Mullen’s poetry, 36, 39, 59, 232, 266–​70
in Nguyen’s poetry, 59, 180, 185, 309n33
in Rankine’s poetry, 22, 36, 38, 59–​60, 69,
232, 257–​59, 267–​68, 275–​78, 321n7
radical empiricism
Ammons and, 113, 117–​25
attention and, 50, 64
everyday experience as a focus in, 49, 50
James and, 50, 64, 120, 122
Schuyler’s poetry and, 72, 89
Rainer, Yvonne, 166
Ramazani, Jahan, 7, 280n11, 303n41
Rancière, Jacques
and the everyday, 14, 28, 40, 47
on art’s inseparability from politics, 221
attentiveness and, 67–​69, 133
reversal of hierarchies and, 28
on “the distribution of the sensible,” 40,
67–​69, 132–​33, 144, 159, 192, 210, 213, 234,
273, 284n37
Randall, Bryony, 15, 58, 280n9, 281–​82n20,
282n23, 282–​83n25, 289nn26–​9,
290n35, 291n38
Rankine, Claudia
attentiveness in the poetry of, 277, 321n7
the city in the poetry of, 257–​59, 264
collage technique in the poetry of, 277
experimental realism of, 277
Index
motherhood and, 37, 159, 18789, 310n36
poetry of the everyday and, 19–​20, 22, 36–​38,
56, 59–​60, 56, 159, 187, 188, 189, 232, 257–​59,
264, 275–​78, 321n7
race in the poetry of, 22, 36, 38, 59–​60, 69,
232, 257–​59, 267–​68, 275–​78, 321n7
Surrealism and, 257–​58
Rauschenberg, Robert, 89–​90, 92, 96, 264
realism
conceptual writing and, 9, 239,
244–​45, 248–​50
experimental forms of, 9–​11, 18–​9, 26–​27,
29, 38, 42, 66–​69, 72–​73, 80–​83, 122, 143,
149, 165, 180, 182, 197, 202–​4, 208–​09, 211,
213, 217, 219, 223, 232, 235, 239–​50, 274, 271,
273–​74, 277, 280nn14–​15, 281n17, 283n27,
307n18, 313n12
postmodern suspicion of, 8–​9
recognition of the everyday and, 5, 18, 21, 50,
122, 202–​04
skeptical realism and, 9–​11, 26–​27, 36, 70–71,
80–​83, 116, 149, 153, 169–​70, 180, 197,
202–04, 219–​20, 239–​250, 273–​74, 278
“traditional” realism, 5, 8–​9, 18, 50, 202, 271,
280n13, 313n10
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Shields), 42, 279n4
reality television, 4, 39, 42–​43, 242–​43
The Really Short Poems of A.R. Ammons, 111
The Real World (television program), 43
Recyclopedia (Mullen), 265–​66
Réda, Jacques, 29
“The Red Wheelbarrow” (Williams), 6, 28
Reed, Brian, 317n6, 318–​19n18
Reich, Steve, 207, 214–​15, 314n18
Reinhardt, Ad, 89
repetition
in Ammons’s poetry, 115–​16, 124, 139–​40
boredom and, 53, 71
everyday-​life projects and, 19, 139–​40, 233,
255, 266
everyday-​life studies and, 53, 59, 73,
286–​87n10, 315n27
gendered notions of, 59, 73
in Goldsmith’s poetry of, 249
in long poems, 100, 102
in Mayer’s poetry, 176–​7 7
in Mullen’s poetry, 266, 268
in Schuyler’s poetry, 78–​79, 97–​98, 106, 293n8
in Silliman’s poetry, 199, 202, 204, 207, 212,
214–​18, 225
Retallack, Joan, 66–​68, 126, 132, 233,
280–​81n15, 291n44
Revell, Donald, 12
reversal of hierarchies
Index
Ammons’s poetry and, 111, 131–​37, 141
avant-​garde art and, 27–​29
defined, 27–​28
discomfort caused by, 28–​29
everyday-​life projects and, 28–​29, 231, 239
garbage and, 28–​29, 134, 239, 260, 268–​69
in Mullen’s poetry, 268–​69
Rancière on the, 28, 284n37
in Schuyler’s poetry, 133, 198
in Silliman’s poetry, 133, 198
in Williams’s poetry, 28, 198
Reznikoff, Charles, 239
Rhie, Bernard, 51
Rhode Island Notebook (Gudding), 29–​30
Rice, Tamir, 277
Rich, Adrienne, 162–​63, 196, 306n10
Richardson, Joan, 287n12, 290n36,
291–​92n37, 299n11
Richardson, Robert, 62–​63, 273
“The Ridge Farm” (Ammons), 134, 137
Rivers, Larry, 79
Road Not Taken (Frost), 96
Robertson, Lisa, 68–​69, 288–​89n22
Rock, Irvin, 64
Rorty, Richard, 113
Rosenbaum, Susan, 319n23
Ross, Kristin, 281n20, 288n20
Roubaud, Jacques, 191
Royce, Josiah, 273
Rubin, Gretchen, 32, 284–​85n40
Ryan, Kay, 5
“Salute” (Schuyler), 74, 92–​94, 98, 259, 295nn26–​7
Sanders, Ed, 259
San Francisco Renaissance, 6
Satellite (Rauchenberg), 90
Schjeldahl, Peter, 37
Schoenbach, Lisi, 280n10, 282–​83n25,
299n11, 315n27
Schneider, Steven P., 118–​19, 141
Schuyler, James. See also specific works
accumulation in the poetry of, 265
appropriation in the poetry of, 72, 295n24
Ashbery and, 101, 297n34
attentiveness and, 14, 69–​7 1, 74–​75, 78, 81, 83,
96, 104, 127, 269
boredom in the poetry of, 99, 109, 134
the city in the poetry of, 73, 79, 96, 102–​3
collage in the work of, 73–​74, 87–​97, 154,
294–​95n21
diary-​style poems and, 140
the domestic in the poetry of, 73, 107–​9, 111
epiphany refused by, 86, 101
garbage in the poetry of, 87–​97, 134, 259,
361
294n20, 295n25
gay identity of, 38, 73, 75, 159, 295n25
gender hierarchies challenged by, 73
linguistic skepticism of, 10, 169
long poems as characteristic of, 100–​101,
137, 296n32
Manhattan window vantage point of, 38, 73,
77–​78, 96, 159
Mayer’s dialogue with, 39
mental illness of, 75, 104–​5, 296–​97n34
morning in the poetry of, 81, 99–​100, 106–​8
New York School of poets and, 6, 36, 70, 74,
79, 82, 90, 296n32
noninterventionist approach to experience
and, 83–​87, 114, 121, 294n14, 294n18
O’Hara and, 70
poetic conventions rejected by, 78, 101
poetry of the everyday and, 5–​6, 13–​14, 19,
36–​39, 56, 70–​109, 115, 147, 166, 176, 180,
205, 215, 236, 238, 246, 251, 254, 259, 274,
291–​92n1, 292n2, 296n30
Porter and, 16–​17, 75–​87, 89, 92, 93, 101, 105,
279–​80n7, 293nn9–​10 296–​97n34
radical empiricism and, 72, 89
realism and, 70–​73
religion rejected by, 104
repetition in the work of, 78–​79, 97–​98,
106, 293n8
reversal of hierarchies in the poetry of,
133, 198
skeptical realism and, 10, 80, 82, 116,
149, 244
Stevens and, 80, 82, 107–​08
symbolism viewed skeptically by, 96
transformational tropes viewed
skeptically by, 73
walking and, 86–​87
Wittgenstein and, 16, 80, 83–​87
Schwitters, Kurt, 72, 88–​89, 93, 95–​96, 134,
260, 295n22
Scott, A.O., 45
“Second Avenue” (O’Hara), 90
Sekula, Allan, 280n14
Seinfeld (television show), 43
Self, Will, 256
“Self-​Reliance” (Emerson), 141
“Sentences on Conceptual Art” (LeWitt), 166
September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, 37, 196, 251
Seven American Deaths and Disasters
(Goldsmith), 237, 252–​53
Sexton, Anne, 162
Shakespeare, William, 5, 165, 199
Shapiro, David, 81
Shaw, Lytle, 168, 305nn7–​8, 306–​7n15
362
Sheringham, Michael, 15, 18, 29, 50, 53, 191, 204,
281n20, 282–​283n25, 283n27, 286–​87n10,
288n18, 288n20, 288n21, 289n23, 290n31,
294n17, 315–​16n29
on everyday-​life projects (“projects of
attention”), 30, 233
Sherlock, Frank, 256
Shields, David, 42, 279n4
“Shit List; or, Omnium-​Gatherum of Diversity
into Unity” (Ammons), 20, 94, 135–​37, 259
Shklovsky, Viktor, 65–​66
Sikelianos, Eleni, 159, 187–​90, 231
Silence (Cage), 84, 225
Silliman, Ron. See also specific works
accumulation in the poetry of, 210, 214–​19,
265, 301n33, 315n25
attentiveness and, 14, 198–​99, 210, 226–​29
boredom in the poetry of, 213, 216–​17
Browne’s Daily Sonnets reviewed by, 311n43
capitalism critiqued by, 200, 204–​5,
218–​23, 313n10
the city in the work of, 229, 256, 258, 264
collage in the poetry of, 202, 206–07,
212, 214
conceptual art and, 201–​2, 313n8
epiphany viewed skeptically by, 26–​27, 200,
209, 213, 216
everyday-​life poetry projects by, 197–​228,
229–​230, 237–​38, 261
experimental realism of, 202–​3, 208, 211,
217, 219
garbage and refuse in the poetry of, 94, 218,
228, 231
inclusive aspirations of, 153, 206,
210–​11, 223–​24
In the American Tree anthology introduction
by, 203–​4
Language poetry and, 3, 26, 36, 38, 198–​203,
205, 212, 219
long poems as characteristic of, 100–​102,
153, 198–​99, 205, 208, 210, 216, 218,
226–​27, 315n23
Mayer’s dialogue with, 39
New American poetry critiqued by, 39,
205–6, 224, 314n16
New York School of poetry and, 199–​200,
201, 206
“The New Sentence” and, 206–​7, 212, 314n17
philosophical influences on, 17, 201,
227, 315n26
poetry of the everyday and, 5, 13, 19, 21, 29,
33, 36–​38, 56, 69, 113, 147, 168, 180, 190–​91,
197–​231, 233, 236, 238–​39, 241, 246, 256, 258,
264, 274
politicized cultural critique in work of, 200,
204–​5, 218–​22
Index
prison reform movement and, 227
race in the poetry of, 223
repetition in the poetry of, 199, 202, 204, 207,
212, 214–​18, 225
reversal of hierarchies in the poetry of,
133, 198
skeptical realism and, 9–​10, 219, 244
Surrealism critiqued by, 212, 218–​19
Silverberg, Mark, 292n4, 294n18, 296n33
Simonds, Sandra, 310n30
Simons, Daniel, 64–​65
Sinclair, Iain, 29, 256
Sitting Up, Standing, Taking Steps (Silliman), 197
Situationism, 28, 53–​54, 57, 167, 201, 226,
234, 256, 258, 267, 288nn21–​22, 313n9,
319nn21–​22
skeptical realism, see also realism
aesthetics of the everyday and, 10, 36, 273
Ammons and, 116, 122, 149, 153
balancing of representational and abstract
in, 10, 80, 116, 219
constraints of everyday-​life projects and, 244
defined, 9–​11
Goldsmith and, 244, 249
as a hybrid form, 10, 27
postmodernism and, 11
as “realism beyond realism,” 9, 82
Schuyler and, 80, 82, 116, 149, 244
Silliman and, 219, 244
skepticism. See also skeptical realism
recovery of the everyday as response to, 10,
51–​52, 84
regarding epiphany, 11, 26–​27, 86–​7, 101, 114,
200, 209, 247, 284n33
regarding representation, 8, 73, 149, 219, 224
regarding transcendence and spirituality, 5,
26, 72, 81–​82, 85, 96, 104, 113–​14, 125
“Skies” (Silliman), 29, 190
Sleep (Warhol), 8, 167, 240
Sleeping with the Dictionary (Mullen), 265–​66
“the slow movement,” 46, 286nn5–​8
Smith, Dorothy, 47
Smith, Frank (“Big Black”), 226–​27, 316n33
Smith, John E., 49
Smithson, Robert, 166
“Smothered to Smithereens” (Burt), 161
The Snow Poems (Ammons), 37, 112, 134, 137,
152–​55, 302n39
Socrates, 40
Soliloquy (Goldsmith), 31, 240–​248, 317n9,
318nn12–​14
Solnit, Rebecca, 41–​43, 256
“Some Might Say That All I've Done is Stack Up
a Heap of Objects” (Coultas), 263–​64
“Some Months Ago” (Ammons), 121
“Song of Myself” (Whitman), 27, 241
Index 363

Sontag, Susan, 14, 66 use of constraints in, 112, 116–​17, 137–​42,

Spahr, Juliana, 160, 278, 288–​89n22, 305n8, 147–48, 246, 302n38, 303n42
319n25, 321n2 the domestic invoked in, 139, 142–​43,
Species of Spaces (Perec), 37, 168, 226 145–​47, 156–​58
S*PeRM**K*T (Mullen), 266 Teicher, Craig Morgan, 116–​17, 298n10
Sphere (Ammons), 37, 120–​21, 124, 128, 131, 137, Tender Buttons (Stein), 6, 19, 192
143, 151–​53, 154, 155 Ten Walks/​Two Talks (Cotner and Fish), 256
Spicer, Jack, 6, 78, 205, 277, 315n26 “Tet 2006, the Year of the Dog”
Spiegelman, Willard, 118, 300n29, (Nguyen), 185–​86
301n33, 302n39 There's a Wocket in My Pocket (Seuss), 173
Sports (Goldsmith), 237, 250 “Thinking of Bernadette” (Nguyen), 180, 186
Spring, Justin, 85, 287n16, 293nn9–​11, 297n34 Thompson, Robert, 71, 82, 292n4
Spurlock, Morgan, 31 Thoreau, Henry David
Stein, Gertrude and the everyday, 17, 113, 225, 284n38,
aesthetics of the everyday and, 5–​6, 14, 19, 287–88n17, 300n27, 319n25
35, 161, 190, 193, 201, 247, 254, 266, 280n10, attentiveness and, 225
282n24, 306n11, 311n41, 318n15 and Walden as everyday-​life project, 30–​31,
Stephens, Paul, 255, 281n18, 319n19 234, 263, 284–​85n40
Stevens, Wallace. See also specific works Three Poems (Ashbery), 37
garbage in the poetry of, 94, 134 “Three Poetry Events” (Perreault), 166
morning in the poetry of, 108 “The Times: A Collage” (Schuyler), 90
noninterventionist approach to the everyday “Today” (O’Hara), 1–​2, 278, 321n8
and, 121 Tokyo infra-​ordinaire (Roubaud), 191
poetry of attention and, 11 Toohey, Peter, 45
poetry of the everyday and, 5–​6, 10, 14, “Toward the Verrazano” (Dunn), 23–​24
48, 107–​08, 118, 121, 123, 125, 134, 217–​19, Traffic (Goldsmith), 237, 250
236, 281–​82n20, 282n22, 282n24, 288n18, transformation trope, the
293n11, 315n26 defined, 20–​21
pragmatism and, 117 epiphany and, 22–​27, 200
Schuyler and, 80, 82, 107–​08 poetics of everyday and, 21–​26
Stiegler, Bernard, 290n35 skepticism toward, 22–​27, 73, 86–​7, 200,
“Still” (Ammons), 68, 131–​33, 262 209, 284n33
“Street Works” issue (0 to 9 poetry magazine), trash. See garbage
167, 256 “The Trash Book” (Schuyler), 74, 93–​95,
Studying Hunger (Mayer), 163, 168 134, 296n30
Sue, Derald W., 275 Trebitsch, Michel, 256
“A Summary of a Public Experiment” Trimmings (Mullen), 266
(Coultas), 265 The Truman Show (film), 242
“Summer Session” (Ammons), 137 “Tuesday” (Nguyen), 184
“Sunday Morning” (Stevens), 107–​08 “Tulips” (Plath), 162
Sunset Debris (Silliman), 19, 94, 209 Turner, Graeme, 55
Super Size Me (Spurlock), 31 Twitter, 33, 234–​35
Surrealism, 10, 23, 31, 52, 89, 159, 212, 219, 257–​58, Tzara, Tristan, 258
261, 284n33, 286–​87n10, 314n13, 315–​16n29
critiques of, 204, 212, 219, 284n33, 315–​16n29 Ulysses (Joyce)
everyday-​life experiments and, 31, 257–​58 aesthetics of the everyday and, 6–​7, 248, 282n21
fascination with “the outmoded” in, 261 the flâneur motif and, 173
Suspensions of Perception (Crary), 61–​62, Homer’s Odyssey and, 141
281n19, 290n32 single-​day framework of, 170, 248, 251
Svendsen, Lars, 45 “Unbroken” (Ammons), 115
Under Albany (Silliman), 207, 216
Taoism, 114 Universe (Silliman), 211, 315n23
Tape for the Turn of the Year (Ammons), 19, “Up Nursing” (Nguyen), 183–​84
112, 116–​17, 137–​152, 155, 156–​58, 167, 170, Upton, Lee, 107
231, 246, 251, 298n10, 302nn37–​39, 303n42, Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary
303n45, 304n50 (Mullen), 19, 31, 265–​70
364
Vaneigem, Raoul, 28
Vardas, Agnes, 167
Vega, Tanzina, 275
Vendler, Helen, 153, 301–​2n36, 302n39
Vermeer, Johannes, 5
“A Vermont Diary” (Schuyler), 85–​87, 97
The Vermont Notebook (Ashbery), 37, 136
Verne, Jules, 267
Versed (Armantrout), 10
Vickery, Ann, 305n7, 308n29, 310n37, 313n7
Viegener, Matias, 230
Virgil, 5, 141
Vuillard, Edouard, 87
Wagner, Catherine, 29, 159, 189, 310n40
Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 8, 29, 216
Walden (Thoreau), 30–​31, 225, 234, 263, 270,
284–​85n40
walk poems
Ammons and, 124, 217, 300n23
the city as focus of, 256–​57
driving poems as an extension of, 257–​59
epiphany and, 25, 86
everyday-​life projects and, 256–​57, 319n20
Mullen and, 39, 265–​70
Roger Gilbert on, 257, 300n23, 319n20
Wallace, David Foster, 279n2
Warhol, Andy. See also specific works
aesthetics of the everyday and, 8, 14, 31,
239–​40, 318n17
boredom in the work of, 45
conceptual writing influenced by, 45,
164, 236–​38
everyday-​life projects and, 5, 31, 167, 238,
240, 317n9
Goldsmith and, 45, 232, 236–​37, 238, 239–​40,
246, 248, 253, 317n9, 318n17
Warsh, Lewis, 160
waste, see garbage
“Water that Falls from the Sky” (Nguyen), 185–​86
Watten, Barrett, 26, 203, 208, 220, 312n2, 312n5,
313nn6–​8, 316n30
“Way to Go” (Ammons), 114
“The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica”
(Mayer), 165
The Weather (Goldsmith), 237–​38, 250
Weber, Max, 5
Weil, Simone, 13, 300n25
Weiner, Lawrence, 166
Wershler-​Henry, Darren, 32, 271
Whalen, Philip, 6, 140, 205
What (Silliman), 9–​10, 221, 224
What Light Can Do (Hass), 12–​13
“What Pragmatism Means” (James), 119, 122
“When the Sun Tries to Go On” (Koch), 90
Whitehead, Alfred North, 80–​81
Index
Whitman, Walt
Ammons and, 112, 132–​33, 136, 146, 157, 301n33
cataloging and enumerations in the poetry
of, 20, 136, 169, 172
Goldsmith and, 237, 240–​41, 247
poetics of the everyday and, 5, 27, 70, 169,
201, 247, 284n38
reversal of hierarchies in, 27
Schuyler and, 70, 296n32
Wieseltier, Leon, 3
Williams, Raymond, 14, 16, 47, 55, 201,
279n2, 280n8
Williams, William Carlos. See also specific works
Goldsmith and, 236, 247
poetry of ordinary speech and, 247
poetry of the everyday and, 6–​7, 14, 28, 35,
110, 170, 198, 201, 236, 241, 254, 301n33,
303n41, 314n16
reversal of hierarchies and, 28, 198
Silliman and, 198, 314n16
Willis, Paul, 55
Winkfield, Trevor, 89
Wittgenstein, Ludwig
artists and writers influenced by, 16–​17, 51,
80, 84, 287n16, 315n26
Cavell on, 50–​51, 84, 87, 287n17, 294n16
on the hidden in the familiar, 87
influence on conceptual art, 51
noninterventionist approach to experience
and, 83–​85, 114, 294n16
and the everyday, 14, 16, 17, 47, 50–​51, 56, 73,
83–​87, 201, 287n16, 315n26
on repetition, 217
Schuyler and, 16, 80, 83–​87
Wittgenstein’s Ladder (Perloff), 84
Wolfe, Cary, 297n1, 297–​98n2, 299n13
Wolff, Rebecca, 189
Wood, James, 286n8
Woolf, Virginia. See also Mrs. Dalloway
aesthetics of the everyday and, 6–​7, 14, 27, 41,
108, 161, 170, 236, 282n24, 283–​84n31
the domestic in the works of, 108
“moments of being” and, 27, 283–​84n31
Wordsworth, William, 5, 11, 27, 131, 241, 246–​47,
283–​84n31, 284n38
Wright, James, 22–​24, 26–​27, 86–​87, 108, 284n33
Wright, Richard, 267, 270, 320n31
A Year from Monday (Cage), 84
Yeats, William Butler, 18
YouTube, 44, 46, 234
Yu, Timothy, 180, 223–​24, 314n17, 315n25
Zola, Émile, 9, 239
Zucker, Rachel, 159, 178–​79, 309n30
Zweig, David, 46