Nicky Marsh

Department of English
University of Southampton, UK
ebpd0@central.susx.ac.uk

 

Susan Howe, Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974-1979. New York: New Directions, 1996.
and
Leslie Scalapino, Green and Black: Selected Writings.Jersey City: Talisman, 1996.

 

Frame Structures and Green and Black are single-author collections written by two poets associated with the Language movement in American poetry. Leslie Scalapino’s collection gathers together excerpts from a number of her long poems published in the previous eleven years and ends with a new poem that shares the title of the collection, “Green and Black.” Susan Howe’s collection contains unabridged (although slightly altered) versions of her four earliest poems which, in their original form, are no longer in print. The central difference between the two collections, as Howe gathers her earliest work for publication and Scalapino excerpts from her latest, can possibly be explained by the relatively different standing the two poets have accrued within the academy; as Howe is tentatively accepted by the mainstream, Scalapino remains more thoroughly “experimental.” What these two poets share in these texts, however, beyond their imprecise categorization as experimental or Language writers, is an apparent, and for both largely new, desire to locate the significance of these poetics for the reader.

 

“Note on My Writing” is the promisingly explicatory title of the opening essay in Leslie Scalapino’s latest collection. This title suggests, as do the other three “notes” that interleave the excerpts from Scalapino’s poems, that these short essays offer some process of initiation–that they bring to light how this sometimes unyielding and sometimes dazzling verse should be read, or at least how Scalapino would like it to be read. Susan Howe’s collection is similarly prefaced with a sense of introduction and elucidation. Frame Structures is not only the title of the book but the title of an extended inaugural essay in which Howe in her eclectic chronicling of fragmentary history left by the marginalized, familiar to readers of her other works, now turns to examine her own past and familial genealogy. This sense of literary autobiography/family history opens this collection of Howe’s earliest poems: the “frame structure” this combination delivers, from within which we are reading, seems to be that of the poet herself.

 

The introductions or explanations with which these two works begin may be part of the acceptance by many of the writers involved in Language writing’s linguistically disruptive and politically skeptical project that they are being published and read as substantial contributors to American poetics. The collections by Howe and Scalapino can be placed alongside the other anthologies and literary histories–Douglas Messerli’s From the Other Side of the Century, Maggie O’Sullivan’s Out of Everywhere, and Bob Perelman’s The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History–that have emerged in the mid-nineties as testament to the growing significance of Language writing within the mainstream American literary academy. However, these works by Scalapino and Howe also call into question any homogeneity of meaning or intent that Language writing either claimed or received by attribution. Their putative foregrounding of the materiality of language now seems to be a construct that many key participants in the movement are more than willing to deconstruct. Hence, these collections indicate not only the growing popularity of the experimentalism associated with Language writing, but also how complex and varied this writing actually is.

 

The differences between Susan Howe and Leslie Scalapino are borne out by the stylistically distinct ways in which they locate the significance of their own work. In “Note on My Writing,” Scalapino is tersely explicit about what her writing means to her. The sentences are sharp and blatant: “I intend this work to be the repetition of historically real events the writing of which punches a hole in reality (as if to void them but actively)” (1). The energy that Scalapino suggests her work conveys is coiled up into the spring-like keenness of the writing. Nothing can be wasted when “a segment in the poem is the actual act of event itself” in a poetics that denies the distance between the text and its referents, making the text its own action (1). Scalapino’s writing inverts the insight that social constructions are always necessarily mediated through language (a notion integral to Language writing’s most basic poststructuralist precepts), suggesting instead that these vehicles of mediation are themselves the central constituents of experience–hence the text becomes the act. Scalapino asks that the reader acknowledge that the text doesn’t simply represent reality for us (albeit in an ideologically governed way) but produces a reality on its own terms.

 

Susan Howe’s Frame Structures does not share either this laconic style or its invocation of text as action. Consistent with much of Howe’s earlier work, the text’s use of narrative shards of “local histories, antiquarian studies, bibliographies” is descriptive, elaborate, and assured (19). “Historical imagination,” the text informs us on the first page, “gathers in the missing,” and as the poem continues we are made aware that Howe’s own sense of the “missing” is being sought not only in historical documents, family letters, and diaries but in personal memories and family anecdotes. The materiality of the physical word (the antiquarian document, the markings in a family book of poetry) becomes prominent in this text because of its apparently stalwart ability to resist the homogenizing implications of what culture sanctions as “history”–because, like memory, texts can hold the eccentric and unsettling truths written out of official history which Howe elsewhere suggests is “the record of winners” (Europe of Trusts 11).

 

Although both Scalapino and Howe emphasize the materiality of language in these introductions, the corresponding poetics suggested by these collections are quite different. Leslie Scalapino’s foregrounding of language is part of her attempt to overcome the divisions between the internal and external, past and present, that structure our experience. In “Note on My Writing,” Scalapino explains how she uses the comic strip or cartoon form to problematize these divisions: “Cartoons are a self-revealing surface as the comic strip is continuous, multiple, and within it [cartoons] have simultaneous future and past dimensions” (3). The extracts collected in Green and Black suggest how Scalapino makes sense of her relationship with the outside world through the form of comics.

 

Winos were laying on the sidewalk, 
   it's a warehouse district; I happen 
   to
be wearing a silk blouse, so it's 
   jealousy, not    
that they're jealous of me
necessarily.

They're not receded, and are inert--as 
   it happens are bums (6)

 

This extract is characteristic of much of the writing in this anthology. Scalapino makes apparent how our possession of mainly metropolitan space is organized around the social politics of class and gender. Moreover, this awareness also embraces the complexities of these categories. The woman narrator’s sensitivity to the “winos” comes not only through her apprehensive vulnerability (because of the sheerness of her clothes) but from her awareness that these same clothes also denote the place of privilege she occupies. The “bums” are visible to her–they are “not receded”–because she is acutely aware of the disparity of her own position, and that they are “static” in contrast to her own movement, that the “bums” lack the mobility that comes with social power.

 

These twin themes of mobility and visibility, of location and social power, emerge throughout the various poems included in the collection. Indeed, Scalapino intersperses unannounced photographs from her book Crowd and Not Evening or Light within Green and Black almost to emphasize the significance of the landscape–the visible image–to the effect her text is trying to create. Her examination of the way these antagonisms disrupt the easy categories of public and private, class and gender, is extended in her erotic writing where the sex act is often defamiliarized in order to lay these constructions bare.

 

having  
swallowed the 
water
lily bud--so having
it in
him when he'd 
come on some
time with her (44)

 

The motif of the lily is one that recurs in sexual scenarios throughout much of Scalapino’s work. The apparent coyness of the image (with its combination of a phallic stem and a feminine “flowering”) is constantly undercut by lengthy and decidedly unerotic images of the mechanics of sex–of fluid, movements, and deadpan orgasms. These rather estranging sequences seem to remove intercourse from its more customary overdetermined presentation, to deny it romantic, moralizing, or medical discourses and to return it to the everyday.

 

The last poem in the collection is the previously unpublished “Green and Black.” This poem, like Scalapino’s other work from the mid-nineties such as New Time and Front Matter Dead Souls, attempts to bring Scalapino’s poetics, her resistance to the most foundational of dualities (you/me, inside/outside, then/now), to bear not only upon the public realm but upon specifically named public events. Scalapino’s reach over these events encompasses, and often seems to make no distinction between, the landscape, the economic system, and individual interaction. In all cases she attempts to bring out what we are inoculated against witnessing, what we are encouraged to accept.

 

     Slavery of  people in  events--
        their having
no entrance--
as there being no other ground as 
   oneself
     only occurrence there's no 
   observing 

     putting people down was the 
   fascist act inherently--in 
every
case ? 
     the teachers in my schools 
   created 
     pets--as cowardly groupies
--and waifs jeered---there (95)

 

Scalapino problematizes the unity or authenticity of the individual’s view of events, “there being no ground as oneself,” but stresses that domination, be it the play of power within a classroom or an allusion to racial subjugation (although perhaps Scalapino too easily suggests the two are comparable), structures our world, so that new ways have to be found to interpret domination if we would learn to negotiate it.

 

Although Howe shares Scalapino’s suspicion of a lyrical presence and similarly foregrounds language in place of either self or narrative, the poems collected in Frame Structures explore a very different type of poetics from that which I have ascribed to Scalapino. Although these very early texts are marked by a lack of historical specificity, they do not share the references to “real” documents and voices that have come to characterize Howe’s later poems; they still attempt to make manifest the secrets concealed within language. The poems “Hinge Picture” and “Cabbage Gardens” intermingle snatches of narrative with mesmerizing chains of words and sounds.

 

Remembered a fragment of the king's 
   face
remembered a lappet wing
remembered eunuchs lip to lip in 
   silent profile
kissing
remembered pygmies doing battle with 
   the cranes
remembered bones of an enormous size 
   as proof of 
the existence of giants   (41)

 

Howe’s anaphoric “remembered” works as both a verb and a noun: the incredible nature of what is being recalled throws the act of memory, and the limitations of narrative against which it is posited, into relief. The frequent slips into neologism often focus attention more on the visual and aural effect of the words themselves than on any meaning they may lead us to–the sensuality of Howe’s early training as a painter is especially apparent in these early texts.

 

However, the listing of the fantastic that dominates this work is often structured around a sense of quest. What becomes in Howe’s later work a search for hidden truths and voices here emerges as a much more playful venture. The activities of the various mythical protagonists seem to have no final destination or goal in mind; it is the hazards of the journey that Howe seems most keen to capture.

 

Zingis filled
nine sacks 
with the ears of his enemies

in winter
the Tartars
passed the D
anube on ice (47)

 

It is only occasionally, as in the poem “Chanting at the Crystal Sea,” that the sense of foreboding that emerges in later work surfaces, a sense that seems rooted in the same anxieties as Howe returns again and again in her work to lost origins that can never be recovered, to losses that are often at once personal and historical.

 

I left you in a group of grownup 
   children and went in search
wandered sandhills snowy nights
calling "Mother, Father"

A Dauphin sat down to dine on dust
alone in his field of wheat

One war-whoop toppled a State. (63)

 

“The Secret History of the Dividing Line,” the last and thus most recent poem in this collection, is similarly resonant with the impossibility of the fairy tale. However, in this text Howe is concerned to counter the fantastic with a more specific interrogation of the relationship between language and domination: an interrogation that alludes simultaneously to early America and a more personal sense of past. The word “mark,” for example, is given multiple meanings early on in the poem.

 

MARK
border
bulwark. An object set up to indicate 
   a boundary or
position
hence a sign or token
impression or trace (90)

 

These composite meanings of the sound are acknowledged to possess some degree of historical specificity; Howe intervenes in the play of signifiers whilst acknowledging it is uncontrollable. The poem’s ostensible concern to narrate the “war whoop in each dusty narrative” begins by focusing on the inequities associated with the claiming–symbolically and literally–of American land (99). Marking territory with “an object set up to indicate a boundary or position,” becomes synonymous with the systems of power and dominance that Howe’s poetry constantly seeks to evade. Like the poems collected in The Singularities anthology, this text is concerned to trace the devastation of native American common land ownership, and consequently culture, caused by the cartographic project inherent in the colonization of America. In the righthand corner of the following page appear the words: “for Mark my father and Mark my son.” The word here also intimates, although with an affection suggestive of the complex qualifications that always mar attempts to map easy political allegiances onto Howe’s work, the system of paternal naming upon which female identity has symbolically foundered. Finally, and crucially, the word centrally refers to the hierarchical project of writing itself, the very project that Howe’s agenda most often attempts to examine and disrupt.

 

These two collections seem to participate in what the critic Marjorie Perloff has described as Language poetry’s “coming of age,” a newfound maturity she attributes to the re-examination of the principles of Language poetry as discussed by its “New York and San Francisco founding fathers” (558). Crucially, the authors of this examination are a surge of experimental women writers. The publication of these collections by Scalapino and Howe, and their accompanying acts of exegesis, thus suggest not only the slowly increasing readership that this writing has begun to accrue, but also that “this” writing (be it Language, innovative, or avant-garde) has begun to negotiate the issues surrounding politics and representation in new and expansive ways. When placed in contrast, Scalapino’s and Howe’s work most obviously illustrates that an investment in the text, a foregrounding of language as a site of privileged action or insight, can result in a poetics with political agendas and landscapes dramatically different from what has gone before. Howe moves assuredly, and often invisibly, through tracts and traces of early Americana, whereas Scalapino grazes on and against the contemporary urban spaces of this country. What these collections seem to demand above all, however, is a careful and generous reading capable of scrutinizing the assumptions and politics that lie concealed within these written landscapes.

Works Cited

 

• Howe, Susan. The Europe of Trusts. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1990.
• —. Singularities. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1990.
• Messerli, Douglas. From the Other Side of the Century. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1994.
• O’Sullivan, Maggie. Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America and the UK. London: Reality Street Press, 1996.
• Perelman, Bob. The Marginalisation of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996.
• Perloff, Marjorie. “The Coming of Age of Language Poetry.” Contemporary Literature 38.3 (1997): 558-567.
• Scalapino, Leslie. Crowd and Not Evening or Light. San Francisco: O Books, 1992.
• —. The Front Matter, Dead Souls. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1996.
• —. New Time. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1996.