Poetics, Polemic, and the Question of Intelligibility
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 09, Number 1, September 1998 |
|
Benjamin Friedlander
Department of English
State University of New York at Buffalo
bef@acsu.buffalo.edu
Why does a poet write a statement of poetics? What can readers learn from reading such statements? Rather than answer directly, I would like to turn my attention to “Wild Form”1 by Ron Silliman, a brief essay (1200 words) currently available on-line at SUNY-Buffalo’s Electronic Poetry Center.
Silliman’s title comes from a letter Jack Kerouac wrote to John Clellon Holmes, cited by Michael Davidson in The San Francisco Renaissance. A portion of this letter stands as the epigraph to Silliman’s essay:
What I'm beginning to discover now is something beyond the novel and beyond the arbitrary confines of the story... into realms of revealed Picture... wild form, man, wild form. Wild form's the only form holds what I have to say--my mind is exploding to say something about every image and every memory.... I have an irrational lust to set down everything I know.
Strangely, while Silliman does discuss, briefly, Kerouac’s phrase “revealed Picture,” he never again refers to the term “Wild Form.” Instead, shearing away the ragged word “Wild,” he focuses on “form as such,” beginning his account with the following statement:
Form is of interest only to the extent that it empowers liberation.
There are thus two openings to the essay–the epigraph from Kerouac (which gives a basis for the title), and Silliman’s own definition (which narrows the focus from “wild form” to “form as such”). In what follows, I want to address the connection between these two openings, in order to show how writers demonstrate as well as state their aims–in order to show, that is, the important role formal pattern and characteristic gestures play in the writing of poetics.
Silliman’s first paragraph, a single sentence, is direct and clear:
Form is of interest only to the extent that it empowers liberation.
Later statements elaborate on this notion. “Form is social,” we read, and also, “The purpose of the poem… is to change the world.” To some extent, these ideas echo Kerouac, who expresses a desire to escape “the arbitrary confines of the story.” Kerouac’s interest in form, like Silliman’s, is liberation, “an irrational lust to set down everything I know.” For Kerouac, however, at least as quoted in the epigraph, liberation occurs through the practice of writing–is aesthetic liberation. Silliman, though he never says so directly, appears to mean political liberation. Playing on a famous phrase of Marx, he enjoins poetry “to change the world.”2 Focusing on form as a social rather than an aesthetic phenomenon, he defines the poet as an agent of social change–a definition made plainer in Silliman’s 1989 response to Jean Baudrillard, “What Do Cyborgs Want?”:
The question confronting poetry is not what is the best poem, nor even the best poetry, but what are the social roles of the poem and how can these be raised to the level of consciousness so that the power relations upon which poetry itself is constituted become perceptible and vulnerable to challenge. (36)
As a consequence of these intimations, the undefined connection between Silliman’s epigraph and first sentence partly resolves into an unspoken connection between two forms of liberation–one centered on writing as aesthetic object, the other on writing as socio-political act.
Adapting Silliman’s later comment on Louis Zukofsky, we might say that he begins the essay by offering two distinct interpretations of the meaning of the word liberation–liberation as “suggestion of possibility” (art), and liberation as “horizon or limit” (politics). Of course, in adapting this distinction between “suggestion of possibility” and “horizon or limit” to the opening of Silliman’s essay, I’ve overturned the priority Silliman himself assigns these terms. For Silliman, “suggestion of possibility” is clearly preferable to “horizon or limit,” at least as regards the work of Louis Zukofsky. As we shall see, however, this overturning of received hierarchies of value is one of Silliman’s most characteristic rhetorical effects. Indeed, more than a mere effect, this process of transformation is itself a value–perhaps the one underlying value of Silliman’s work.
For Kerouac, “form” is linked to discovery; the “irrational lust to set down everything I know” leads to a new and freer approach to writing. Only this new approach, Kerouac declares, will be able to “hold” what his “mind” is now “exploding to say.” The paradoxical combination of freedom (“exploding”) and boundedness (“holds”) results in a somewhat oxymoronic coinage,” wild form,” italicized by Kerouac as if to emphasize the improbability of the linkage. Improbable or not, however, the doubleness is essential. Assisted by “wild form,” the author would journey “beyond the arbitrary confines” of art into “realms of revealed Picture.” Writing (placed under the rubric of “Wild Form”) becomes both verb (journey) and noun (realm). Silliman’s definition likewise shows two aspects. For Silliman too, writing is both noun and verb, object and act. Placing writing under the rubric of “form as such,” Silliman notes:
The term form is often misused. What people often mean by it is not form as such--structure that proves generative and inherent--but pattern, exoskeletal reiteration.
Form is at once inherent “structure” (object), and a force that “proves generative” (act). But a shift has occurred; if Kerouac’s goal is discovery, Silliman’s is growth. The metaphor of realm and journey has given way to a subtle organicism. At the same time, the person who takes the journey, the discoverer, has disappeared, and has been replaced in a ghostly manner by the work itself. In other words, in Silliman’s poetics it is not the artist who “proves generative,” but the artist’s work. The artist exploding to speak has now become a form that speaks by exploding.
Silliman’s first sentence asserts a causal link between “Form” and “liberation”: the one is said to further the aims of the other. How? This we aren’t told. Nor are we told if different kinds of form are required for different kinds of liberation. But then, the essay doesn’t speak of liberation in the plural; the distinction between political and aesthetic freedom–freedom in the world and freedom in writing–is at best implicit. Nonetheless, toward the end of his essay, in a passage of peculiar intricacy, Silliman does allude to this difference between aesthetics and politics– an allusion set off in quotation marks, disguised as a self-rebuke. Without actually addressing liberation, focusing instead on form (form which “empowers” liberation), he declares:
The relation of the poem to the world is not simply accumulative, any more than it is reflective or expressive. The perfection of new forms as interventions to nature. The purpose of the poem, like that of any act, is to change the world.
"The sort of person who could confuse the fibonacci number system with class struggle." Rather conjoin, to contrast, contest, and compare.
The intricacy of the passage is partly due to its odd construction–five sentences incorporating an unattributed quote and a transition between two paragraphs. Who speaks the quoted sentence? Why is it cited? And how do the two paragraphs relate to one another? Does the space between them indicate a shift in focus? Or is this paragraph break a graphic iteration of the uncertain connection between “poem” and “world”?
The fulcrum of the passage is Silliman’s assertion that “The purpose of the poem… is to change the world.” On either side of that assertion we are offered two opposing opinions, almost as if two see-saws were balanced on the opposite ends of a third. On one side of the fulcrum, addressing a famous dictum by William Carlos Williams, Silliman writes:
WCW: "The perfection of new forms as additions to nature." This axiom, which I once felt close to in my own writing, seems too passive to me now. The relation of the poem to the world is not simply accumulative.... The perfection of new forms as interventions to nature.
This is see-saw one, “accumulation” vs. “intervention.” On the other side of the fulcrum, describing see-saw two (“confuse” vs. “conjoin“), Silliman addresses the dictum of someone unknown:
"The sort of person who could confuse the fibonacci number system with class struggle." Rather conjoin, to contrast, contest, and compare.
The symmetry is especially important because it helps to establish a link between the two paragraphs; allows us to read the two paragraphs as a single utterance. Ignoring the symmetry, the two paragraphs are simply two separate chains of assertions; taken together, they constitute a form (Figure A).
Theory
(see-saw three)
.
. "intervention"
. (see-saw one,
. upside)
. ---
. ---
--- .
--- .
"accumulation" .
(see-saw one, .
downside) .
.
(fulcrum)
.
. "conjoin"
. (see-saw two,
. upside)
. ---
. ---
--- .
--- .
"confuse" .
(see-saw two, .
downside) .
.
Practice
(see-saw three)
Figure A
I noted before that Kerouac’s metaphor of journey becomes, in Silliman’s poetics, a subtle organicism. On first reading, therefore, it might seem that Silliman is becoming inconsistent. Superficially, “accumulation” appears the more “generative” option; “intervention,” by contrast, recalls Kerouac’s movement “beyond… arbitrary confines.” But the inconsistency is only apparent. The original definition reads:
The term form is often misused. What people often mean by it is not form as such--structure that proves generative and inherent--but pattern, exoskeletal reiteration.
Accumulation–what William Carlos Williams calls “additions to nature”–appears “generative” but in fact is mere “reiteration”; is “exoskeletal,” not “inherent.” Somehow, then, the “inherent” form “proves generative,” not as “accumulation,” but as an “intervention.” On see-saw one, Silliman is counterposing two distinct notions of nature and form. There, on that side, he places “pattern,” “exoskeletal reiteration,” “accumulation”; here, on this side, “structure”–“inherent” and “generative”–and “intervention.” Describing the passage in this way, of course, as a kind of see-saw, we are responding to Silliman’s representations about nature and form as precisely that–representations, a form of debate in which argument as such gives way to contrasting chains of words. In this context, moreover, it is worth noting the political connotations of two of these words: “Intervention” suggests political intervention; “accumulation” suggests accumulation of capital.
Let us now look at the other side of the fulcrum, the second see-saw:
"The sort of person who could confuse the fibonacci number system with class struggle." Rather conjoin, to contrast, contest, and compare.
At issue here is the connection between art and politics–between the fibonacci number system (used by Silliman to compose his long poem Tjanting) and class struggle. Silliman has discussed this matter in an interview with Tom Beckett, published in 1985 in The Difficulties:
With Tjanting, it took me more than eight months to go from my first rough sketches of what a piece built on the concept of the Fibonacci number series might look like to the composition of a two-word first sentence….
What factors enter into a decision to use a given procedure?
...Again to use Tjanting as case in point, the original impulse there was a question that had been recurring to me for at least 5 years: what would class struggle look like, viewed as a form? (35)
As Silliman goes on to note, the Fibonacci number series is a sequence in which “each term is the sum of the two previous terms: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34,” and so on ad infinitum (35). Because Silliman proposed in Tjanting to write a poem shaped, dialectically, as a sequence of alternating, opposed paragraphs, “the most important aspect of the Fibonacci series turned out to be… the fact that it begins with two ones” (36).3 That quirk, along with the fact that the numbers increase asymmetrically, “not only permitted the parallel articulation of two sequences of paragraphs, but also determined that their development would be uneven, punning back to the general theory of class struggle” (36). In Tjanting, the number of sentences in each paragraph matches in sequence the numbers of the Fibonacci series; beginning with two one-sentence paragraphs (“Not this” and “What then?”), the poem proceeds through to two final paragraphs of 2,584 and 4,181 sentences each. The sense of alternation and opposition is maintained by a mathematically plotted repetition of sentences–the repetitions “rewritten so as to reveal their constructedness, their artificiality as elements of meaning, their otherness” (36). As the poem proceeds and the paragraphs grow longer, the repeated sentences all but disappear, ghostly echoes of history giving circumspect coherence to a world of rapidly exploding language.
According to Silliman’s comments in his Difficulties interview, the relationship between art and politics in Tjanting is principally a matter of analogy–or more accurately, representation. The poem (Tjanting) is an attempt to show what one particular aesthetic form (the Fibonacci number series) “might look like” as text; the aesthetic form is in turn an attempt to show what one particular political content (class struggle) “would… look like, viewed as a form.” The phrase “look like” is important: we are dealing here with analogies, with mimetological constructs. Whether one really does resemble the other is of secondary importance. The emphasis, fundamentally, is on the general schematic correlation Silliman proposes to explore between aesthetic form and political content. The goal of the project, its “original impulse,” is speculative: to put into play one particular representation of the relationship between art and politics. The resulting work (Tjanting) may well fail to bear out the assumptions underlying the proposed schema. This doesn’t mean, however, that the underlying “impulse” is faulty. Nor does it mean, necessarily, that the work itself is without interest. The real question, therefore, is not the reliability of the specific representation (“fibonacci” as “class struggle”) but the usefulness of the general correlation proposed between art and politics. In “Wild Form,” the quoted remark (“‘The sort of person who could confuse…'”) is focused on the specific mode of representation enacted in Tjanting, but Silliman is quick to appreciate the applicability of this rebuke to his schema’s underlying assumptions. Indeed, while the humor of the rebuke lies in its implausibility (no one would ever confuse “fibonacci” and “class struggle”), the sting derives from a less literal reading: that Silliman is confused about the difference between aesthetics and politics; that the poem Tjanting papers-over a nonrelation between political content and aesthetic form. Silliman’s inclusion of the rebuke–and his rejoinder–is therefore an important clue to his views on the connection between the two kinds of liberation (aesthetic, political) alluded to in his essay’s opening. In a sense, the see-saw between “confuse” and “conflate” represents in miniature a kind of politico-aesthetic disputation. Its subject: the relation or nonrelation between the freedom of writing and the writing of freedom.
Silliman’s rejoinder takes the form of a substitution. “Confuse” becomes “conjoin,” and then (in a chain of substitutions) “contrast,” “contest,” and “compare.” Taking this “form,” the rejoinder illustrates one of Silliman’s central ideas: that the poem is an “act” and that the poem’s goal is “change.” Elaborating on this notion, I would say that the poem, for Silliman, being principally an act, is only secondarily a statement. This is Silliman’s most important difference from Kerouac, who describes himself to John Clellon Holmes as “exploding to say something,” “to set down everything I know.” Charged with the crime of confusion, Silliman’s response is better described as a counter-action than a counter-statement. True to the poem’s purpose as act, he changes the word.
Such a response may not satisfy the one who makes the rebuke (the original charge, after all, was Silliman’s ostensibly illegitimate substitution of “fibonacci” for “class struggle”); the response is nonetheless a consistent extension of Silliman’s form (a chain of possible substitutions entered into an ever-widening context) from the realm of art into the world contextualizing art. Like “Wild Form” as a whole, the rejoinder is a moment of polemic. For despite the welter of definitions and asides, Silliman’s “Wild Form” is less an accumulation of positions than an intervention in the world where positions accumulate.
Earlier in “Wild Form,” having discussed the importance of context, form’s “situational specificity,” Silliman makes brief reference to another literary intervention, another moment of polemic:
Here we discover in part the confusion that caused the first battle of the San Francisco poetry wars to become so intense: the meaning of Robert Duncan’s “problem” with Barrett Watten’s schematic representation of Zukofsky’s form differed from that of David Levi Strauss….
But there have always been two possible readings of Zukofsky--Zukofsky as suggestion of possibility and Zukofsky as horizon or limit.
Despite the importance Silliman ascribes to this moment in contemporary literary history–he calls it the first battle of a war–he offers no narrative account of what transpired and no summation of the positions taken by the various combatants. For the moment, therefore, let us look at this passage solely as a formal pattern, a structural model for discussing poetry’s intervention in the world. Viewed solely as a model, the similarity of this structure to the pattern of Silliman’s discussion of Tjanting becomes evident. As before, we see a set of see-saws (“Duncan” and “Strauss” vs. “Watten,” “suggestion of possibility” vs. “horizon or limit”) set into motion on the opposite ends of another fulcrum. Again, the cue is confusion–the word Silliman cites in rebuke to himself in the passage concerning fibonacci and class struggle. There, the confusion is due, ostensibly, to Silliman’s innovative conception of form–a conception which creatively seeks to link aesthetic form and political content. In the passage concerning “the first battle of the San Francisco Poetry Wars,” the confusion also has something to do with form–more specifically, the representation of form, “Barrett Watten’s schematic representation of Zukofsky’s form,” a representation problematic for two different poets for two different reasons. (The earlier confusion also has to do with representation–Silliman’s use of fibonacci to represent class struggle.) In the conflict between Duncan/Strauss and Watten we therefore discover a polemic analogous to that between Silliman and the unnamed critic who faults Tjanting‘s discontinuous leap from art into politics.
What to make of this symmetrical set of references to confusion? And what of the parallel Silliman draws between the two controversial notions of form (Silliman’s and Watten’s)? A closer look at the second passage as a whole only amplifies the mystery:
The meaning of any second generation is always the reification of the past, even if only to stabilize a sense of the present in order to render it less threatening and chaotic.
Here we discover in part the confusion that caused the first battle of the San Francisco poetry wars to become so intense: the meaning of Robert Duncan’s “problem” with Barrett Watten’s schematic representation of Zukofsky’s form differed from that of David Levi Strauss. While both Duncan and Levi Strauss were committed to a fundamentalist reduction of Zukofsky’s work, their relationship to the sacred text was substantially different.
But there have always been two possible readings of Zukofsky--Zukofsky as suggestion of possibility and Zukofsky as horizon or limit.
We begin with an assertion about the “meaning of any second generation.” Since Silliman’s definition of form privileges the “generative,” we might expect “second generation” to stand as proof of success. But success, apparently, leads ineluctably to stabilization, to “reification” (a kind of “exoskeletal reiteration”), to frightened retreat. The “meaning” of success is “always” failure. In this dialectical formulation “we discover,” writes Silliman, “the confusion that caused the… poetry wars to become so intense.” But do we? What has the difference between Robert Duncan and David Levi Strauss got to do with the “meaning” of each’s “‘problem'” with Barrett Watten? And what has this “‘problem'” to do with the “two possible readings of Zukofsky”? More to the point, where exactly does the confusion lie? Whose confusion? About what?
Both Duncan and Strauss, writes Silliman, “were committed to a fundamentalist reduction of Zukofsky’s work,” yet “their relationship to the sacred text was substantially different.” Since Silliman describes both poets (Duncan and Strauss) as readers of Zukofsky, it’s difficult to see how their “substantially different” forms of reading bear out the earlier claim about the difference between first and second generation. With regard to Zukofsky, wouldn’t both poets be “second” generation? Wouldn’t Watten too? (Further, is “reification” the same thing as “fundamentalist reduction”? What about Watten’s “schematic representation”?) Complicating our reading of this passage is Silliman’s decision not to make explicit his generational distinctions, or even his understanding of the word “generation.” Presumably, he means to say that Zukofsky (b. 1904), Duncan (b. 1919), and Watten (b. 1948) are all equally innovators, and thus all equally members of a “first” generation; Strauss (b. 1954) would consequently stand as the lone example of “second.” Stated in this manner, it becomes clear that Silliman’s use of the word “generation” is itself a reification; in the end, what substantiates his distinction between “first” and “second” is not an empirical relation (like that between older and younger poet, originator and elaborator, master and apprentice), but rather, the nature of a poet’s accommodation to a “threatening and chaotic” present. Generation as such is irrelevant. The latecomers are those whose attunement to the present falls under the heading of “reification of the past”–those whose strategy of intervention takes the form of stabilization.
“To reify” means, among other things, to render abstractions in concrete terms–a process of transformation which inevitably tends toward distortion. To be sure, the result of this process isn’t simply distortion; nor is this distortion an entirely useless phenomenon. As Silliman’s own attempt to render “class struggle” as “fibonacci” indicates, the process of reification–even when ending in “confusion”–often leads to the discovery of entirely new abstractions. The problem, apparently, with “reification of the past” is not so much the distortion which results from rendering abstract concepts concrete as the fact that this process is focused on the past. Of course, as Silliman himself notes, this “reification of the past” is itself a form of focus on the present–an attempt “to stabilize a sense of the present in order to render it less threatening and chaotic.” Viewed from this perspective, the difference between “first” and “second” generation–no longer an empirical designation–is not even a matter of whether or not a given poet remains fixed on the past or present. In the end, the principal basis for assigning a poet to one generation or another is the value ascribed to that fixity by the one who does the assigning. By declaring a poet engaged in “reification of the past”–even if this “reification” is a strategy of relation to the present–Silliman defines the poet, ipso facto, as the member of a “second” generation. Presumably, by declaring this same poet attuned to the present–even if this attunement remains a strategy of relation to the past–Silliman would be able to raise him or her to the status of “first.” The difficulty we have getting a handle on this definition may be partly due to a slight misstatement in Silliman’s original formulation:
The meaning of any second generation is always the reification of the past, even if only to stabilize a sense of the present in order to render it less threatening and chaotic.
The qualification “even if” suggests that stabilization is a reasonable basis for reification–a form of self-preservation against threat and chaos–but reading this passage within the context of “Wild Form” as a whole, it’s clear that this reasonable desire for stability is precisely the problem. In Kerouac’s terms, stabilization of the present means settling for “the arbitrary confines of the story” rather than risking a journey through threat and chaos into “realms of revealed Picture.” For Silliman, the intelligibility of “story” is decidedly “second”; “first” comes apparent “confusion,” “threatening and chaotic,” what Kerouac calls “wild.”4
According to Silliman, both Duncan and Strauss, despite their shared “‘problem'” with Watten’s “schematic representation of Zukofsky’s form,” each maintained a “substantially different” relation to “the sacred text.” Further, he tells us that this difference helps to explain why “the first battle of the San Francisco poetry wars” became “so intense.” The suggestion is that the war was fought between Duncan and Strauss over Watten’s Zukofsky, but this is not the case. What Silliman calls “the first battle” is in fact a compression of two separate conflicts: the earlier was instigated by Duncan and waged against Watten over Zukofsky (1978); the later was begun by Strauss and waged by Watten’s and Duncan’s friends over a recapitulation of the Duncan/Watten episode of 1978 (1984).5 Collapsing these two occasions into one, the serial nature of Duncan’s and Strauss’s problems with Watten falls away. That is, in Silliman’s account the actual object of aggression (“Barrett Watten’s schematic representation of Zukofsky’s form”) drops from the picture, replaced by the difference between Duncan and Strauss.
The nature of this substantial difference between Duncan and Strauss remains unclear. Unclear also is the importance of this difference for Silliman’s essay as a whole. Here again is the relevant passage:
[T]he meaning of Robert Duncan’s “problem” with Barrett Watten… differed from that of David Levi Strauss. While both Duncan and Levi Strauss were committed to a fundamentalist reduction of Zukofsky’s work, their relationship to the sacred text was substantially different.
But there have always been two possible readings of Zukofsky--Zukofsky as suggestion of possibility and Zukofsky as horizon or limit.
Reading these lines in ignorance of the so-called “first battle of the San Francisco poetry wars,” one might easily assume that the “two possible readings of Zukofsky” Silliman has in mind are Duncan’s and Strauss’s. Knowing some of the history involved makes it likely, of course, that Silliman associates Watten (who wrote the introduction to Tjanting) with the first type of reading (“Zukofsky as suggestion of possibility”), and Duncan and Strauss (each “committed to a fundamentalist reduction”) with the second (“Zukofsky as horizon or limit”).6 Why Watten’s “schematic representation” should correspond to “possibility” nonetheless remains unclear–unclear because, as noted above, Silliman never develops a characterization of Watten’s reading; Watten has fallen away, as has the promise of explaining the “intensity” of the war which erupted around his reading. The problem, apparently, is the inapplicability of Silliman’s binary constructions (of which there are two: the first involving generation, the second involving styles of reading) to his three-fold example, his three readers of Zukofsky (Duncan, Watten, and Strauss).
Silliman proposes in this passage to explain why a battle became “intense.” He proposes also to help us discover an important confusion. Unfortunately, if we follow Silliman through in these two proposals, we discover a different sort of confusion altogether–one that is strangely reminiscent of the rebuke Silliman cites with regard to Tjanting, the claim that he has confused “fibonacci” and “class struggle.” In both instances, Silliman conflates two incommensurate terms of debate. In the case of “fibonacci” and “class struggle,” the terms are incommensurate because they derive from the supposedly discrete worlds of art and politics. Here, in the case of “the first battle of the San Francisco poetry wars,” the incommensurability between the two parts of the argument (reading, generation) derives instead from a slippage, a shift in Silliman’s attention from the unexplained “problem” between Duncan/Strauss and Watten, to the unexplained difference between Duncan and Strauss. More accurately, of course, the former case discusses a slippage while the latter enacts one; the analogy, qua analogy, nonetheless holds. In the case of “the first battle of the San Francisco poetry wars,” Silliman’s argument moves (Figure B) in a manner structurally analogous to that of the passage where he discusses “fibonacci” and “class struggle”–as a set of see-saws, each balanced on the opposite ends of yet another see-saw. (If the third see-saw were to then become the first see-saw in a new set, the structure would assume the classic Marxist form of historical progress.) The chief difference between the two cases lies in the nature of the underlying relation, the third see-saw. In Figure A, this third see-saw marks out a relationship between theory (see-saw one) and practice (see-saw two). In Figure B, the purpose of the third see-saw remains unintelligible. Earlier, in commenting on the unattributed critique of Tjanting, I noted that Silliman’s general insight about the correlation of aesthetic form and political content retains intellectual force quite apart from the success or failure of any specific text. Another way of putting this would be to say that the architectural plan remains sound even if the building erected on that plan’s basis fails to meet code. The two passages sketched in Figures A and B bear this contention out, if indirectly, by utilizing the same formal pattern in successful and unsuccessful manners, respectively.7
?
(see-saw three)
.
. Watten
. (see-saw one,
. upside)
. ---
. ---
--- .
--- .
Duncan/Strauss .
(see-saw one, .
downside) .
.
.
(fulcrum)
.
. Duncan
. (see-saw two,
. upside)
. ---
. ---
--- .
--- .
Strauss .
(see-saw two, .
downside) .
.
(see-saw three)
?
Figure B
Let us now return to the unexplained matter of Silliman’s double opening, the discontinuity between Silliman’s epigraph (from Kerouac) and his first lines (which replace Kerouac’s definition of form with Silliman’s own). The oblique oddness of this opening resolves into two questions: On one hand, why cite Kerouac if Kerouac’s definition of form is faulty? On the other hand, why alter the definition if Kerouac’s intuitions remain fundamentally correct? The answer to this pair of questions lies in the underlying meaning of Silliman’s characteristic gesture–a transformation of meaning enacted through conscious and unconscious slippage, through the overturning of received hierarchies of value, through the construction of chains of substitution. To accept Kerouac’s definition of “Wild Form” without alteration would be tantamount to a self-suppression of this gesture–would mean, in Kerouac’s own terms, remaining stuck in “the arbitrary confines of the story” instead of risking the journey “into realms of revealed Picture.” In order for Silliman’s appreciation of Kerouac to remain true to the source, to be a journey, he must follow his own insights beyond the now “arbitrary confines” of Kerouac’s discovery, “Wild Form.” This Silliman does by immediately shifting the focus from aesthetics to politics, from the freedom of writing to the writing of freedom. At the same time, following the characteristic path of his own thought, Silliman subjects his own insights to a process of transformation in which the ultimate meaning of his statement remains in doubt.
Silliman’s characteristic gesture is to avoid the risk of stabilizing his own position by setting in motion a see-saw of contrasting stances (his own and another’s) and then abandoning the see-saw in toto for a second see-saw whose relation to the first remains largely unspoken. For this reason, however intelligible Silliman’s writing may be sentence by sentence, the text as a whole aspires to a state beyond intelligibility, a paratactic state of signification in which the relations between sentences bear much of the burden of meaning. Is Silliman successful in this aspiration? Probably not. The particular positions adopted along the way–on see-saw one and see-saw two–tend to linger in memory, resisting the text’s overall resistance to stabilization, falling prey, at last, to the arbitrary confines of intelligibility. Sometimes, too, parataxis fails to lend coherence and the text falls prey to mere confusion. Still, the effort involved is remarkable, and retains intellectual force on a global scale despite the local failure of this or that attempt at transformation.
I began this essay by asking why poets write statements of poetics. An answer particular to Silliman might begin by asserting that the very phrase “Statement of Poetics” embodies a contradiction, that statements offer refuge from the risk of confusion, while poetics offer refuge from the risk of intelligibility. Yoking the two aims together suggests something like a desire to confront–and so transcend–the contradiction outright. Silliman’s succinct articulation of this desire in Tjanting–the twin, repeated sentences “Not this. What then?”–provides the structural model for this movement of transcendence:
Not this.
What then?
I started over & over. Not this.
Last week I wrote “the muscles in my palm so sore from halving the rump roast I cld barely grip the pen.” What then? This morning my lip is blisterd.
Of about to within which. Again & again I began. The gray light of day fills the yellow room in a way wch is somber. Not this. Hot grease had spilld on the stove top.
Nor that either. Last week I wrote “the muscle at thumb’s root so taut from carving that beef I thought it wld cramp.” Not so. What then? Wld I begin? This morning my lip is tender, disfigurd. I sat in an old chair out behind the anise. I cld have gone about this some other way.
Wld it be different with a different pen? Of about to within which what. Poppies grew out of the pile of old broken-up cement. I began again & again. These clouds are not apt to burn off. The yellow room has a sober hue. Each sentence accounts for its place. Not this. Old chairs in the back yard rotting from winter. Grease on the stove top sizzled & spat. It's the same, only different. Ammonia's odor hangs in the air. Not not this. (11-12)
In these first seven paragraphs of Tjanting (corresponding to the 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 and 13 of the Fibonacci series), Silliman’s oblique observations and repetitions seem to share very little, both formally and in their content, with the pointed pronouncements of “Wild Form.” Note, however, the conjunction of writing and meat-cutting, a conjunction which proposes the “carving” of a “beef” (i.e., polemic) as Silliman’s model for the composition of poetry. Note too the Duncan-like contractions of “blisterd,” “spilld” and “disfigurd,” a poetic allusion which highlights just the sort of generational debt Silliman explores more prosaically in “Wild Form.” “It’s the same, only different.” Like the rewritten sentences of Tjanting–mathematically plotted repetitions aspiring in their totality to a condition beyond that of mere form: aspiring, that is, to a condition of “class struggle”–so too the underlying see-saw structure of “Wild Form,” a characteristic formal pattern which reveals more vividly than Silliman’s direct statements the transcendent aspirations animating his work as a whole.
A text that moves forward–in the manner of Silliman’s “Not this. What then?”–with an eye toward escaping its own “arbitrary confines” is like a see-saw on a see-saw, always in motion, unable to keep balance except by setting more see-saws in motion on the further ends of newly discovered fulcrums. Caught between confusion and intelligibility, such a text will speak most authoritatively–in Silliman’s terms, “empower liberation” most directly–in its underlying formal patterns. To read such a text will therefore require, first and foremost, a careful attending to these formal patterns, a decipherment of their meaning and a weighing of their efficacy. This is what Silliman has in mind when he notes that the structure of his work, however obscure, is not “hidden,” but rather “available through the process of reading the text.” Visual and musical patterns such as those which structure the sonnet are discernible to the eye and ear; not so the numerically plotted repetitions of Tjanting, and not so the triple see-saw form of “Wild Form.” The discovery of Tjanting‘s form and the form of “Wild Form” is only possible through a reading of the text. Further, to read those texts without attending to their underlying structures would be to miss the point entirely. As Silliman himself notes at the end of the essay “Of Theory, to Practice”:
Every mode of poem is the manifestation of some set of assumptions. It's no more foolish to be conscious of them--and their implications extending into the daily life of the real world--than it is to actually have some idea how to drive before getting behind the wheel of a car. (The New Sentence 62)
In order to understand what the poet is driving at, one needs to know what and how he or she is driving–an appropriately automotive metaphor given the genealogy of Silliman’s thinking in the work of Kerouac.
Notes
1. All quotations lacking specific page numbers refer to this electronic text.
2. See, e.g., the last of Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach”: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it” (145).
3. I say that the poem is shaped dialectically, but insofar as Tjanting‘s interchange of ideas occurs formally and not as a mode of argumentation, it is far from certain whether the resulting work is itself dialectical. Borrowing a motif from deconstruction, it may be more accurate to describe Silliman’s poetic adaptations of Marxist-Hegelian structures as a “quasi-dialectic.” (See, e.g., Geoffrey Bennington’s comments on “the prefix ‘quasi-‘ or the adverb ‘quasiment'” in Jacques Derrida [268].) Silliman himself has spoken of poetic structure as a matter of “syllogistic flow,” but here too there is a lingering analogical reference to class struggle (and thus dialectical materialism) as Silliman’s notion of “syllogistic movement” is based on the work of Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, whose “Linguistics and Economics argues that language-use arises from the need to divide labor in the community, and that the elaboration of language-systems and of labor production, up to and including all social production, follow parallel paths” (The New Sentence, 178, 90, 78). My reliance in the present essay on the metaphorical term “see-saw” is thus partly a consequence of my dissatisfaction with both “dialectics” and “syllogism” as descriptions of the logic underlying Silliman’s critical and poetic writings.
4. This theoretical privileging of confusion over intelligibility is hinted at in “The Chinese Notebooks,” a Wittgensteinian investigation from the 1970s where Silliman asks, in entry no. 123, “What is the creative role of confusion in any work?” (The Age of Huts 55). “Wild Form” suggests an answer to this question, namely, that confusion is a calculated risk essential to the work’s function as a journey of discovery beyond the so-called “arbitrary confines” of any given set of ideas or ideology.
5. After a brief respite, a second “battle” erupted in 1985. Watten was once again the focus of antagonism, but this time the instigator was Tom Clark. For an account of the 1984 events, see De Villo Sloan, “‘Crude Mechanical Access’ or ‘Crude Personism’: A Chronicle of One San Francisco Bay Area Poetry War.” Nils Ya analyzes the 1978 confrontation in I Am a Child: Poetry after Bruce Andrews and Robert Duncan.
6. See, e.g., “Negative Solidarity: Revisionism and ‘New American’ Poetics,” where Silliman speaks of the “vociferous and hostile… reaction” to Language Poetry by writers “associated within or relatively close to the older New American project” (171). In a footnote, he specifically names Duncan and Strauss, including them in a list of critics “who commented upon ‘language poetry’ in terms that echo Norman Podhoretz’ dismissal of the ‘Know-Nothing Bohemians'” (176 n. 10). For a brief response, see David Levi Strauss, “A Note on Us & Them.”
7. I say “successful” and “unsuccessful,” but insofar as Silliman, at strategic moments, privileges confusion over intelligibility, the valuations I apply to these two instances of argumentation might well be reversed. In this respect, entry number 120 in “The Chinese Notebooks” provides a useful reminder of the central issue at stake in my reading of “Wild Form”: “Only esthetic consistency constitutes content…. Applied to writing one arrives at the possibility of a ‘meaningful’ poetry as the sum of ‘meaningless’ poems” (The Age of Huts 55).
Works Cited
- Bennington, Geoffrey and Jacques Derrida. Jacques Derrida. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.
- Davidson, Michael. The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.
- Marx, Karl. “Theses on Feuerbach.” The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: W.W. Norton, 1978.
- Silliman, Ron. The Age of Huts. New York: Roof Books, 1986.
- —. “Interview” [with Tom Beckett]. The Difficulties 2:2 (1985): 34-46.
- —. “Negative Solidarity: Revisionism and ‘New American’ Poetics.” Sulfur 22 (Spring 1988): 169-76.
- —. The New Sentence. New York: Roof Books, 1987.
- —. Tjanting. Berkeley: The Figures, 1981.
- —. “What Do Cyborgs Want? (Paris, Suburb of the Twentieth Century).” Jean Baudrillard: The Disappearance of Art and Politics. Ed. William Stearns and William Chaloupka. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.
- —. “Wild Form.” Electronic Poetry Center. http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/silliman/wildform.
- Sloan, De Villo. “‘Crude Mechanical Access’ or ‘Crude Personism’: A Chronicle of One San Francisco Bay Area Poetry War.” Sagetrieb 4:2-3 (Fall-Winter 1985): 241- 54.
- Strauss, David Levi. “A Note on Us & Them.” Temblor 9 (1989): 121.
- Ya, Nils. “I Am a Child.” I Am a Child: Poetry after Bruce Andrews and Robert Duncan. Ed. William R. Howe and Benjamin Friedlander. Buffalo: Tailspin Press, 1994. 43-57.