Elisabeth Frost

Department of English
Dickinson College
frost@dickinson.edu

 

How can one be a ‘woman’ and be in the street? That is, be out in public, be public–and still more tellingly, do so in the mode of speech.

 

–Luce Irigaray¹

 

A 1984 anthology of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group of poets included a section in which the writers commented on their contemporaries–most of whom are still unfamiliar to readers of American poetry. Rae Armantrout wrote about Susan Howe, Barrett Watten about Ron Silliman, Charles Bernstein about Hannah Wiener. There are 56 of these entries. At the head of this section, announcing what might be perceived as a principal source for the positions on aesthetics (and politics) in the various selections that follow, the editors chose a single text for several of the poets to respond to. That text was Stein’s Tender Buttons.²

 

The entries in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book’s “Readings” section–all appreciations of Tender Buttons and all written by men–bear witness to Stein’s importance to this particular “movement.” Yet among what I will call feminist avant-garde poets–writers who make use of experimental language to distinctly feminist ends–Stein’s influence is just as potent, even inescapable. A number of recent feminist avant-garde poets linked to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing owe a debt to Tender Buttons, and Stein’s work in general remains a subject of homage. But at the same time, many of the changes working their way through feminist discourse in America appear as well in feminist avant-garde writing. In particular, recent feminist avant-garde poets don’t simply acknowledge Stein’s language experiments, as the contributors to The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book did, but contest them–and her–as well.

 

Over the eighty years that have elapsed since Stein wrote Tender Buttons, a number of experimental women poets have reexamined the connections between the symbolic domain of language and the subjective experience of sensuality that Stein pioneered in her erotic, and other, poetry. Stein’s language experiments in Tender Buttons serve as a fundamental influence. But Stein’s tendency to isolate intimate, personal experience from the public sphere is being revisited by recent feminist avant-garde writers who perhaps have more ambivalence toward Stein’s politics than some of their male colleagues. Poets like Susan Howe disrupt conventional language in writing that conspicuously combines an awareness of gender with public discourse–in her case, actual historical documents form the backdrop to an examination of the gendering of language, history, and nation.³ In recent years, feminist theorists like Luce Irigaray and Monique Wittig have focused on the social implications of language and sexual difference, challenging women writers to create a distinctly feminine writing or to eliminate the “mark of gender” altogether on female speech.⁴ Unlike Stein herself, these theorists stress the political implications of speech in the public sphere, the impossibility of separating the symbolic realm of language from the social realities language reflects, a conviction that surfaces in writing like Howe’s and in that of feminist avant-garde artists working in a variety of media, from Barbara Kruger to Karen Finley. While Stein is not the only source for feminist avant-garde writing today, her body of work, particularly Tender Buttons, remains a source to be reckoned with for a range of artists who see Stein as among their most important, and sometimes troubling, predecessors.

 

In what follows, I examine the influence of, and divergence from, Steinian poetics in two writers whose feminist avant-garde agendas lead them back to, and in contest with, this formidable woman forebear. Both Harryette Mullen (who has published three books of poetry, and is soon to issue a fourth)⁵ and Leslie Scalapino (author of nine books of poetry, prose, and criticism) use a fundamentally Steinian language yet voice differences from Stein’s politics by engaging with questions that Stein tended to avoid in her poetry–issues of race, class, and inequity in American culture. In their recastings of Stein’s “modern” vision, Mullen and Scalapino merge public speech and “private” experience–the language of the public spheres of the street and the marketplace with the experiences of intimacy and the erotic. In this writing no intimate experience is ever strictly “personal”; Mullen and Scalapino blur the border between public and private discourse that Stein relied upon in order to reveal (and, paradoxically, not reveal) her lesbian sexuality in a revolution of ordinary domestic language. The body as public, in public–this idea is at the core of both Mullen’s and Scalapino’s growing body of work. Each one revisits and, in Adrienne Rich’s term, “re-vises” Stein’s poetics to illuminate language as a locus of the political and the erotic, attacking and altering both eroticized and “public” language as signs of a culture in need of a fundamental awareness about the relationships between our most private and public acts.⁶

 

Stein attempted to make us self-conscious about consciousness–to make us think about how we perceive the world–by challenging the forms of written language. In this respect both Mullen’s Trimmings (1991) and Scalapino’s way (1988) are indebted to Stein’s earlier project. Trimmings is Mullen’s second book, and her third, S*PeRM**K*T (1992), employs the same distinctive form and a similar play with the signs of American culture. In the more recent work, her target is what she calls “the erotics of marketing and consumption”–the supermarket that is, in a remarkably altered form, her title.⁷ Trimmings, however, is more explicitly indebted to Tender Buttons, borrowing elements of Stein’s feminine landscape and her oblique relation to femininity itself. Here Mullen first combined African-American speech and blues references with a similar sort of word-play to that of Stein’s prose poetry in Tender Buttons; and here, too, she “tries on” Stein’s fascination with the erotic charge of feminine objects. Mullen’s prose poems, like Stein’s pioneering language experiments, work mainly by association, and in this they plumb the richness of the spoken and written word.

 

By contrast, Scalapino, a writer with ties to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group, is interested less in speech than in perception, as experienced and recorded on the page. But in her considerable body of work she also interrogates the politics of the erotic, employing allusions to what she calls “the erotica genre” in refigured forms. Sometimes she redeems and “re-genders” erotic fantasy itself (as in way, the text I will focus on), and sometimes she uses a deliberate dead-pan to critique the mechanism of disengaged or voyeuristic “watching” on which some pornographic images depend. Throughout her work, she makes use of an essentially infinite or “serial” form, with no defined beginning, middle, or end. In way this seriality is a means of demonstrating how language and the experiences of the body are connected. While in Mullen’s work language proffers a multiplicity of meaning that bears witness to the subtlety and evocativeness of both the spoken and written word, in way Scalapino develops a more visually-based poetics in which small blocks of text represent moments of perception or feeling, even as the language itself remains provocatively flat in its tone.⁸ But despite pronounced differences in both form and preoccupations, both poets inherit one of Stein’s most fundamental interests and make use of it in singular ways: exploring the relationships between language and sexuality.

 

While Stein is certainly not the only source for either poet’s growing body of work,⁹ my own reading of Trimmings and way makes it clear that Mullen and Scalapino both take up Stein’s fascination with the link between the erotic and ordinary, everyday language. Yet that connection doesn’t mean that Mullen and Scalapino adhere to a similar view of either world or text. In fact, both poets challenge Stein’s famous hermeticism in the interest of bringing closer together the two poles that Denise Levertov has called, simply enough, the “poet” and the “world.” For Tender Buttons is an unabashedly closed text. All three sections (“Objects,” “Food,” and “Rooms”) evoke a world not simply of ordinary domestic objects but of private associations. In the view of scholars like William Gass and Lisa Ruddick, Stein uses this hermetic space to create a private language of lesbian experience, in which particular words function as clues. As only one example, the name “Alice,” for Alice B. Toklas, and her nickname “Ada,” appear in numerous versions–“alas,” “ail-less,” and “aid her”–that exploit sound-play to suggest Stein’s own intimate, erotic life. Individual words also function as codes for sexual experience (the color “red” or the word “cow”), as Elizabeth Fifer and others have documented.¹⁰ And, as I have argued elsewhere, Stein’s fetishization of language both exalts language to the status of a material object and participates in disguising the erotic “content” of Tender Buttons as a whole.¹¹

 

Such readings as my own “decode” the poem, and in the process assume that meaning does, in fact, inhere in Stein’s apparent non-sense, that there is a profoundly important symbolic process at work. Yet the opposite approach has also been taken to Stein’s difficult text. Charles Bernstein, one of the most prolific theorists among the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, argues that Stein’s greatest achievement in Tender Buttons is in fact that she abandoned the signifying function of language altogether, evoking instead the sounds, the non-referentiality, of words, “the pleasure/plenitude in the immersion in language, where language is not understood as a code for something else or a representation of somewhere else–a kind of eating or drinking or tasting, endowing an object status to language” (Bernstein 143). As he sees it, the desire to decode Stein’s writing merely reflects the reader’s urge to “make sense” of the poetry–an impulse that counters the most radical aspects of Stein’s project. It is the non-referentiality in Stein, Bernstein implies, that has become her most important legacy to the present, especially to poets, like those of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group, who attempt to use their texts as a means of bringing the whole mechanism of reference to the foreground of writing and reading.

 

These approaches constitute the two ends of the Steinian critical spectrum–the desire to push her text toward sense, especially (in recent years) a feminist one, and the urge to embrace the radical non-meaning of her experiments with language. Yet both of these interpretive positions, for very different reasons, ultimately support the view that the “rooms” of Stein’s domestic domain barely leave the door ajar to the world outside.¹² Clearly a private erotic language threatens to shut that door, and, indeed, this significant aspect of Stein’s text required a host of feminist critics, bolstered by the advent of theorists like Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva, to break the code.¹³ And, on the other hand, in Bernstein’s view of the radical non-signifying of Tender Buttons, the reader is kept at a deliberate, perhaps infuriating, distance. Breaking the rules of syntax, denotation, and logic, Tender Buttons, by either approach, surely qualifies as what we might call a “subversive” text, overturning linguistic conventions and forging a distinctly new form from the seemingly intractable material of everyday words. Yet Stein’s poetic experiment remains separate from the social and political realms that avant-garde artists of her day addressed in their highly polemical and disorienting art and manifestoes. One need only compare Tender Buttons to any number of Marinetti’s pronouncements, or to Apollinaire’s “Merveilles de la Guerre,” or even Breton’s first surrealist manifesto, to see the extent to which Stein insisted on the privacy of her language.

 

In their own ways, Mullen and Scalapino have both entered into this debate about and with Stein, each from a distinctly feminist point of view. In embracing a feminism that doesn’t make recourse to polemics or to personal utterance–that is more deeply interested in the kinds of subjectivity language creates–their work is profoundly indebted to Stein. Yet the best indication of each one’s re-vision of a Steinian poetics lies in the other influences on that work. For Mullen, these include Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, and the writers of the Black Arts Movement. For Scalapino, George Oppen, Robert Creeley, and Philip Whalen are crucial influences, along with the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers of the San Francisco Bay Area where Scalapino lives. For both Mullen and Scalapino, the other sources that have helped form their poetics are distinctly more engaged with the articulation, and theoretical awareness, of a social/political vision, or an engagement with history in general, than Stein ever was. As a lesbian poet, Stein relied on the privacy of her “codes” precisely to construct a radical language of difference. Mullen and Scalapino have pushed her language in the opposite direction from the one she chose–back to an awareness of the social construction of identity, and the complex relationships in American culture among race, sexuality, and economic privilege. In short, the erotic can no longer be perceived as private. The unmasking of the politics of sexual experience is at the core of both Trimmings and way, and in this Stein is both the mother of their inventions and the predecessor who needs to be taken to task in the interests of a feminist avant-garde that clearly cannot stand still.

 

Obviously an understanding of both Mullen’s and Scalapino’s work requires that each be seen in a broader frame than that provided just by examining their various debts to Stein. Yet, tracing Stein’s pronounced influence on both of these poets–the more striking because of their stylistic divergences–sheds light on changes among a number of recent feminist artists. If Mullen’s and Scalapino’s work can be taken as any indication, one group of feminist avant-garde artists has moved toward a different sort of exploration of sexual politics.¹⁴ In contrast to a writer like Howe, whose explorations of the gendered nature of history and nation involve no recourse to the erotic as subject matter, Mullen and Scalapino both inherit from Stein a fascination with pleasure and a reluctance to dissociate pleasure from language. In the process, though, the burden of their poetry is precisely to situate this pleasure in a landscape that sometimes seems as bleak and violent as Howe’s Puritan America. Adapted by Mullen and Scalapino, Stein’s innocent eroticism, and her pleasure in parody, become more self-conscious as well as more conscious of the social forces that eroticism is inevitably shaped by.

 

In Trimmings (fittingly published by a small press that is, in fact, called “Tender Buttons”), Mullen takes Stein’s 1914 text as a provocative point of departure. Operating through association rather than logic, sound-play rather than denotation, Mullen’s pun-laden prose poems take the domestic landscape of Tender Buttons and “trim” it down to a central trope: feminine clothing. The “trimmings” of Mullen’s title suggest a re-stitching of Stein’s project, as well as a focus on the odds and ends, the scraps, of contemporary culture. But the most prominent meaning involves the politics of women’s clothing. “Trimmings” can be both adornments and things discarded; the word can imply both frivolity and violence. In the poems there are belts, earrings, stockings, hats and purses, not unlike the petticoats, umbrellas, and shoes of Stein’s poem. As Stein does in Tender Buttons, Mullen uses linguistic play to hint at the relations between the physical sensations of the body and the experience of using language. Like Stein, she suggests that the female body and the word need not be divorced, as much recent theory insists. (Even Kristeva’s opposing categories of the semiotic and the symbolic imply that soma and symbol are in constant battle, an opposition Stein–and Mullen–expose as unfounded.)¹⁵ As in Tender Buttons as well, Mullen plays with words to release the reader’s own associative powers. There is, indeed, great pleasure for the reader in the process.

 

Among the briefest of the prose poems in Trimmings is one that consists of just two lines: “Night moon star sun down gown. / Night moan stir sin dawn gown” (Tr 23). In this paratactic list, vowel shifts (rather than syntax) bear the burden of reference. There are certainly associations and near-meanings (sundown and evening gown can be easily teased out), and the possibility of a setting (the romantic moon and star), yet the larger implications (for instance, that come “dawn,” the “sin” will be “done”) are merely hinted at, left to the reader’s own associative powers to piece together. The poem moves from word to word by generating relationships among sounds and creating localized meanings, rather than by employing linear logic. These tactics that skew and defer meaning, even if somewhat less disjunctive, are overtly Steinian, resurrecting Stein’s fascination with repetition and circularity, with what she called “knowing and feeling a name” and “adoring [and] replacing the noun” in poetry (LIA 231). Like Stein, Mullen signals the erotic without directly treating it as subject matter. But she also critiques the erotics of our attire. Consider the very shortest of Mullen’s poems: “Shades, cool dark lasses. Ghost of a smile” (Tr 62). Charged puns (“dark lasses” conjuring “glasses”; “shades” as sunglasses for the stylish and as a racist word denoting African-Americans) render the final, simple phrase (“ghost of a smile”) ambiguous: the smile might suggest a pleasurable memory or an invitation, but it is also inseparable from the implication that “shades”–in the racial sense–are “ghosts,” invisible presences in a culture bent on cover-ups, on hiding behind its own, often rose-colored, glasses.

 

In this way Mullen uses a Steinian linguistic play to address not just the pleasures of language and clothing, but their larger social implications, the very issues that Stein most frequently avoided. Trimmings removes Tender Buttons from its hermetically sealed locale and, so to speak, takes it out of the closet and into the street, by underlining the conjunctions between racial identity and gender in a semiotics of American culture. In choosing Stein as intertextual companion, Mullen uses what Henry Louis Gates identifies as a strategy frequently employed in African-American writing: the elaboration of repetition and difference. “Signifying,” Gates says, is the playing of various kinds of rhetorical games in black vernacular, and it can mean “to talk with great innuendo, to carp, cajole, needle, and lie,” as well as “to talk around a subject, never quite coming to the point” (Gates 54). Signifying contrasts with the “supposed transparency of normal speech”; it “turns upon the free play of language itself, upon the displacement of meanings” (53). There is a political, and not just a formal “play” here that applies to Trimmings: signifying involves a “process of semantic appropriation”; words are “decolonized,” given a new orientation that reflects a rejection of politics as usual. According to Gates, this double-voicedness is associative, and it employs puns and figurative substitutions to create an indeterminacy of interpretation (49, 22).

 

Strikingly matching Gates’s theory of signifying, Mullen’s version of Steinian writing involves an assertion of difference. Mullen encodes cultural and racial specificity into her word games, in deliberate contrast to what I see as Stein’s private, largely hermetic codes. Allusions to contemporary life are everywhere, mixed in with more lyrical, “poetic” language. Commercials, for example, are not shut out, precisely because such references are, all by themselves, a commentary on American culture. Here is the subject of clothing-become-laundry and, more specifically, laundry detergent:

 

Heartsleeve’s dart bleeds whiter white, softened with wear. Among blowzy buxom bosomed, give us this–blowing, blissful, open. O most immaculate bleached blahs, bless any starched, loosening blossom. (Tr 31)

 

In rich and lyrical language (especially the outburst, “O most immaculate. . .”), Mullen bears witness to some un-lyrical truths–that the struggle to attain the “whiter white” (a redundant operation of either language or color) raises questions about America’s obsession not just with cleanliness (the subject of TV ads) but with the valorization of what is as light as possible, in shirts or skin-tone. Here the poetic tradition of the beauty of clothing, of feminine or other attire, has to confront the “immaculate bleached blahs” that represent mass culture “bleached” for a white audience.

 

The poems insist on such meetings of the ecstatic and the drab in women’s lives (as in the title for Mullen’s most recent work in progress–“Muse and Drudge”), whether the act in question is hanging clothes on the line or watching TV. Whenever TV seeps into women’s lives, in fact, there is both the urgency created by commodification and the potentially lobotomizing effect of the medium. Of nylon stockings Mullen writes, “The color ‘nude,’ a flesh tone. Whose flesh unfolds barely, appealing tan . . . body cast in a sit calm” (16). The issue of what color “nude” is–the fact that the “model” for this neutral skin tone is an Anglo one–is too often taken for granted by white women. At the same time, any woman whose “whose flesh unfolds barely” has become a commodity, like the many items sold on TV, where viewers, too, are objects in front of a screen, “body cast in a sit calm,” static and passive, as though in a “body cast,” under an unidentified injunction not to move. Other TV allusions, such as one to the evening news, suggest the banality of women’s lives: “Mild frump and downward drab. Slipshod drudge with chance of dingy morning slog” (49). Words, just barely altered from their “originals” in a TV or radio weather report, testify to women’s representation in the mass media, the source that may well affect whether or not they see the morning, or themselves (the “drudges” in question), as “dingy” and “drab.” In this processed language, all of us hear a horoscope for the day, our lives; in such representations, we are–and this applies especially to women–caught in our own “mild frump,” as though our routines were items we would prefer not to purchase.

 

Yet Mullen makes it clear that, however potentially controlling, mass media don’t obliterate culturally specific language. Mullen marks her text with both “mainstream” speech and the black vernacular in what she calls a “splicing together of different lexicons” that would be hard to see in Stein’s defamiliarized language in Tender Buttons. In one such gesture, Mullen appropriates clichés linked to African-American culture and forces us to ask what “black” and “white” culture actually consist in–where the lines are drawn:

 

Her red and white, white and blue banner manner. Her red and white all over black and blue. Hannah’s bandanna flagging her down in the kitchen with Dinah, with Jemima. Someone in the kitchen I know. (Tr 11)

 

The “bandanna” and the Jemima figure suggest stereotypes of black women. Mullen has suggested to me that even though such images are most likely drawn from the white minstrel tradition, they constitute nonetheless a powerful “pseudo-black folklore” that has shaped views of blackness in America. By refusing to exclude even these representations from her own language, Mullen implies that there is an important source for this language, one that needs to be traced: such images get constructed both from our “red, white and blue” national identity and from the politics of violence (“all over black and blue”), also based on color. In the “blues” alluded to here, another kind of “folklore” is also conjured, one that may seem more “genuine” or “authentic” than that of Hannah and Jemima. But Mullen’s text refuses to make clear distinctions among the sources for what she calls her “recycled” language. This word-play reclaims all and any expressions that concern women’s cultural “place” (literally, the “kitchen,” repeated twice in this brief passage) in the service of an explicit critique of those words that serve as designations to divide black from white–and different women from each other.

 

In some of the poems, Mullen “signifies” on Stein even more overtly. There are several instances where Mullen infuses the very diction of Tender Buttons with her own agenda–an investigation of the ways in which racial and gender identities are constructed in and by language. Stein has a dialogue between “distress” and “red” which Mullen recasts as an excursion into black vernacular speech, with Steinian intonations:

 

When a dress is red, is there a happy ending. Is there murmur and satisfaction. Silence or a warning. It talks the talk, but who can walk the walk. Distress is red. It sells, shouts, an urge turned inside out. Sight for sore eyes. The better to see you. Out for a stroll, writing wolf- tickets. (Tr 34)

 

The most immediate Steinian source is the heading “THIS IS THIS DRESS, AIDER,” and the text of that “tender button” reads:

 

        Aider, why aider why whow, whow stop touch, aider whow, aider stop the muncher,

muncher, munchers.

A jack in kill her, a jack in, makes a meadowed king, makes a to let. (TB 476)

 

One of the most frequently glossed sections in Tender Buttons, this passage has often been read as punning on “distress,” as well as on the notion of “aid” and one of Stein’s nicknames for Alice, “Ada” (“Aider, why aider . . .”). The passage is crucial to readings that emphasize that Tender Buttons is really about female sexuality. For some, this involves a critique of the “meadowed king” who rises at the expense of “her,” as Ruddick suggests; among others, Gass sees an explicit (and joyful) sexual scene; and, as I have detailed elsewhere, I believe that Stein provides a typical double perspective here–that of lesbian eroticism and a patriarchal observer’s panic about that eroticism.¹⁶ For all these readings, sexuality provides the backdrop for Stein’s polyvalent language. In Mullen’s appropriation, however, a double perspective about sexuality and language alerts us instead to the social construction of the sexual moment. There is a different sort of doubleness at work–that of black America itself, the experience of a division that W.E.B. Du Bois first called “double consciousness” and which Black Arts writers in the 1960s and 1970s converted into experiments with a specifically black consciousness in radical new forms.¹⁷

 

Mullen’s own revisionary feminist dialogue with Stein is clear from the start. The short, uninflected questions (“Is there murmur and satisfaction,” for example) are reminiscent of Tender Buttons, and so is the diction–the mixture of simple monosyllabic words (“dress,” “red,” “talk”) with words describing states of consciousness (“happy,” “satisfaction,” “urge”). But clearly Mullen’s “talk” here is not just words exchanged between lovers but the specific language of a whole culture: “dis” both alludes to the sound of “this” in black English, and to the verb “to dis,” or “disrespect,” someone, echoed in the competition of “talks the talk.” A similar conjunction is that of European fairy tale (red riding hood’s “better to see you”) and black English (“writing,” instead of “selling,” “wolf-tickets”). But the primary question is what happens when the seductive “red dress” is donned; is there “satisfaction” for flirtatious partners, a desire to shout with joy, or is there fear of violence–silence, warning? As Mullen points out, Trimmings is a “compressed meditation on the whole idea that how a woman dresses is responsible for how she gets treated in the world”: “is there a happy ending” for any woman’s Cinderella-like transformation “when a dress is red”–when she puts on a piece of clothing that signifies passion and seduction, or availability and provocativeness? How is such a color “read” by male on-lookers? Without providing any simple or polemical answers, Mullen links sexuality, clothing, violence and desire, even as she forces the literary tradition of Stein to confront the vernacular traditions of African-American speech and writing.

 

Mullen’s dialogue with Stein in Trimmings has everything to do with the exclusion of questions of race from feminist criticism that has recently been the subject of passionate critique and rethinking.¹⁸ Mullen has described her desire to “get a read on Stein and race,” and at the time she was writing Trimmings she was reading both Tender Buttons and “Melanctha,” whose overtly racist and classist images are the subject of reappraisals by critics as diverse as Sonia Saldívar-Hull and Charles Bernstein.¹⁹ Mullen’s play on Stein’s famous “rosy charm” is perhaps the most striking instance of her recasting of Tender Buttons so as to explore questions of race that Stein didn’t take on in her poetry but made all too clear in “Melanctha”:

 

A light white disgraceful sugar looks pink, wears an air, pale compared to shadow standing by. To plump recliner, naked truth lies. Behind her shadow wears her color, arms full of flowers. A rosy charm is pink. And she is ink. The mistress wears no petticoat or leaves. The other in shadow, a large, pink dress. (Tr 15)

 

Stein’s text is “A PETTICOAT,” and it reads, in its entirety: “A light white, a disgrace, an ink spot, a rosy charm” (TB 471). The passage is most likely about female creation, both on the page and of the body. As Ruddick convincingly argues, the white of a woman’s undergarment is connected to the blank page, and the stain of blood to the writer’s ink, a “rosy charm” whose power Stein asserts.²⁰ Mullen has described this passage as her opening into Tender Buttons–perhaps even the point of departure for Trimmingsas a whole. Mullen sees Stein’s text as an allusion to Manet’s provocative painting “Olympia”–the white woman staring boldly at the viewer, in a state of “disgraceful” sexual permissiveness, with the near-by “ink spot” (a black servant) waiting behind her. Mullen encodes the painting into her response to Stein, calling up the representation of the nude white woman reclining luxuriously on a couch, while behind her the black woman in “a large, pink dress” holds a bunch of flowers, presumably a love-token, in a position of attentive servitude to her mistress.

 

Mullen’s take on “Olympia,” and on “A PETTICOAT,” concerns the supposed “disgrace” of sexuality in conjunction with her awareness about the difference of blackness in a culture in which femininity is equated with the naiveté of “pink” and the skin color “white.” This motif of color pervades the book. Mullen writes that in Trimmings

 

The words pink and white kept appearing as I explored the ways that the English language conventionally represents femininity. As a black woman writing in this language, I suppose I already had an ironic relationship to this pink and white femininity. (Tr “Off the Top”)

 

Throughout Mullen’s work, evocations of the blues tradition and African-American speech confront the deficiencies of conventional language in representing blackness. Yet in her “rewriting” of the painting “Olympia,” the very ownership of sexuality is at stake: the transgressive eroticism–of the sort Stein championed and Manet supposedly celebrated–is, in Manet’s depiction, available only to the “light white” woman, not to her “shadow standing by.” While clearly a feminist reading of Olympia” might suggest that Manet “owns” (or names) the white woman’s sexuality as well, Mullen’s own attention is drawn to the dynamics between black and white: there is implicitly a problem not just for the black woman depicted here, but for the African-American woman writer as well. The “ink” of blackness is literally “in shadow” (the word is repeated three times), as the white woman, clothed in what Mina Loy called “ideological pink”–in this case nothing more than her own pink skin–“wears an air.”²¹ In another section of Trimmings, girlhood and the color pink are also associated (“Girl, pinked, beribboned. Alternate virgin at first blush” [Tr 35]). This passage uses the same technique of multiple meanings and the connotation of innocence conjured by the color pink to point out the disturbing “naked truth”: “pink” is “a rosy charm” in the white world only when it’s worn by someone “pale,” “white,” and “sugary.” The one whose skin is “ink” remains in shadow. She is, literally, incomplete: the word “pink” minus the “p” gives us “ink.” And yet, she still has the power to signify–after all, writing is produced with “ink.” It is this most important “signifying” on Stein’s text about the “rosy charm” of female sexuality, a celebration of the erotic that nonetheless reveals considerable limitations to any black women reader, that produces the revisionist poetry of Trimmings.

 

Far from innocuous, the “pale,” “sugary” femininity that Mullen unveils is also part of a culture that, in addition to privileging whiteness, condones violence against women in covert, as well as overt, forms. Mullen uses Steinian disruptive language to expose this violence, which lurks just beneath accepted standards of femininity. Even seemingly harmless items, like the feminine attire of the pocketbook, are emblematic of theft, assault, rape:

 

Lips, clasped together. Old leather fastened with a little snap. Strapped, broke. Quick snatch, in a clutch, chased the lady with the alligator purse. Green thief, off relief, got into her pocketbook by hook or crook. (Tr 8)

 

The purse is metonymic for female genitalia; on one level, getting “into her pocketbook” is the male game of conquest. Yet the puns on currency (“strapped,” “broke,” “green,” “relief”) show the close ties between money and desire (as in some men’s ability to purchase female companionship) and allude to the ways women are frequently economically exploited–simply put, ripped off. There is double-meaning as well in the word “snatch,” and the covert violence of “snap,” “strapped,” “clutch,” and even “chased” (traditionally, women are sought after, or “chased,” if pure–“chaste”). The word-play and subject rhymes, in familiar idioms and rhythms, convey the very real violence women are often subject to, whether by the “thief” (purse-snatcher) or the man intent on sexual assault.²²

 

This violence is, then, insidious even in its less obvious forms–jewelry, to take another example. Of earrings, Mullen writes: “Clip, screw, or pierce. Take your pick. Friend or doctor, needle or gun” (Tr 40). Earrings carry a weight beyond their immediate function; these small items refer to more profound mutilations of the female–and male–body. There are choices among modes of violation here (“clip, screw, or pierce”), yet the “pick” is merely between “friend or doctor,” figures of betrayal, whether personal or institutional. And, most significantly, the intrusion into the black body is metaphoric of social exploitation and the prevalence of the “needle or gun”–drug-use and other violence. Here a simple female “adornment” can no longer be seen, or written about, as innocent. Mullen evokes a semiotics of clothing, the language that is revealed in those items women decorate their bodies with (“such wounds, such ornaments,” as Mullen concludes in this “trimming”). This language reveals, however subtly and covertly, what Mullen calls ironically a “naked truth”–that black women and men are, still, psychologically and otherwise, subject to violence and mutilation, symbolized by the very objects women use to make themselves seem different, to meet our culture’s standards of beauty.

 

Mullen has written that “Gender is a set of signs which we tend to forget are arbitrary. In these prose poems I thought about language as clothing and clothing as language” (Tr 68). In the final poem of Trimmings, Mullen links her interest in literary signification with the importance of a poetic utterance that remains conscious of how the signifier functions in the public sphere:

 

Thinking thought to be a body wearing language as clothing or language a body of thought which is a soul or body the clothing of a soul, she is veiled in silence. A veiled, unavailable body makes an available space. (Tr 66)

 

Placed at the end of the book, this “trimming” serves as Mullen’s ars poetica, the explanation for her use of the trope of clothing. That which is “veiled” shows through language–the “unavailable” or often invisible “body” of the black woman “makes” its own space. Moving away from simply being “veiled in silence” is precisely Trimmings‘s project. It is a goal that diverges from Stein’s “play,” which, however radical an expression of its time,²³ is nonetheless kept safely indoors. Stein tended to abstract the objects she wrote about from their specific contexts, to see them in formal terms, which is one reason her work is often associated with Cubism. She wrote of the process of looking at objects as the inception of the poetry of Tender Buttons; she focused intently on an object in order to name it without using its name. While Mullen also uses words to “re-name” objects, her interest lies not just in form but in a semiotics of American culture. Each gesture, each belt or buckle, reveals the society that created it. Less arbitrary than the “signs” of language, the semiotics of clothing reflects women’s position in the culture at large. Signifying on Stein, as well as playing by some of her rules, Mullen makes it clear that she cannot simply “use” Stein’s poetic language uncritically. In fact, by simultaneously inhabiting and altering Stein’s non-traditional language, Mullen encodes in Stein’s own hermetic diction the divergent perspective provided by an African-American woman. Stein’s codes must, indeed, be broken; to have social significance, linguistic “play” has to evoke aspects of a shared, social identity, and not simply constitute an idiosyncratic, private language. In part, Trimmings is indeed homage to Stein, a writer whose poetry attempts to change consciousness, and even our own relation to our bodies, through a changed language. Yet for Mullen, the experiment now appears too circumscribed. Her “signifying” on Tender Buttonslays down a challenge: women’s dress (their “distress”) constitutes a social semiotics, the “language” of a culture whose racial and sexual politics we would do well to change.

 

In contrast to Mullen’s dialogue with Stein, Scalapino’s is less exclusively linked to Tender Buttons. Instead, it is as closely tied to Stein’s philosophical writings–most of which (with the exception of “Composition as Explanation”) appear in Lectures in America–as it is to Stein’s erotic codes. Yet Scalapino focuses just as sharply as Mullen does on developing a Steinian poetics in which the erotic is inseparable from what I might broadly call the public sphere. Scalapino draws from the Objectivist tradition that includes (in addition to Stein) Oppen, Robert Duncan, Creeley, and, more recently, many L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers.²⁴ These poets agree on a central issue: they dispute the primacy granted to the ego–the experiential, the psychological–in more Romantic-derived American poetry, seeking instead to reflect a greater scope than the self in meditation that Marjorie Perloff (for one) associates with Stevensian Romanticism.²⁵

 

Yet, as I see it, Scalapino also owes a particular debt to Stein–to a poetics that first made repetition the stuff of poetic knowledge. Scalapino’s writing consists of diverse fragments organized in what Joseph Conte describes as serial form–in Scalapino’s case, discrete units, often with involved repetitions and permutations, that are potentially infinite in number rather than structured by either generic constraints or the more basic linearity of a definable beginning, middle, and end. This is the same sort of form Stein associated with “the natural way to count”; that is, “One and one and one and one and one” (not needing to make two). This sort of counting, according to Stein, “has a lot to do with poetry” (LIA 227), particularly the poetics of repetition, as in “A rose is a rose is a rose.”²⁶ Through an epigraph to her book way, Scalapino likens this infinite serial form to the principles of theoretical physics, quoting physicist David Bohm. Bohm describes “the qualitative infinity of nature” and asserts that because there is “no limit to the number of kinds of transformations, both qualitative and quantitative, that can occur,” it follows that “no . . . thing can even remain identical with itself as time passes.” Stein’s studies with William James and her later work in medical school reflect a similar orientation toward both science and epistemology. Yet, while Stein applied her musings about numbers, grammar, and the passage of time mainly to the realms of literature and the imagination,²⁷ Scalapino elicits in her serial poems–poems about both “the qualitative infinity of nature” and about private sexual experiences–the pressing question of how individual desire is situated within existing social categories.

 

Scalapino’s primary debt to Stein has to do with the very notion that there might be an epistemology of composition.²⁸ In an essay entitled “Pattern–and the ‘Simulacral,'” Scalapino writes about the poet Michael McClure, in whose work the “self” becomes a simulacrum identified with an infinite universe: “the author or the sense of self and the investigation of its desire is the pattern, which is neither present time nor past time. It is potentially infinite in form and number” (Phenomena 28-9). I believe the notion here is that subjectivity, its pattern, assumes an infinite form, which the text mimics. Scalapino culls this epistemology of form in part from Stein, whose essay “Composition as Explanation” is the starting point for Scalapino’s observations. Stein asserts a radical subjectivity: “The composition is the thing seen by every one living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition”; consequently, “The time when and the time of and the time in that composition is the natural phenomena of the composition” (qtd. in Ph 27). Scalapino explains that she is drawn to the notion of the “continuous present” Stein posits, a kind of composition that leads to individual acts of perception that need not be connected in linear fashion–in other words, an infinite series, with attendant combinations and permutations of elements. She summarizes her position elsewhere: “I am concerned in my work with the sense that phenomena appear to unfold. (What is it or) how is it that the viewer sees the impression of history created, created by oneself though it’s occurring outside?” (Ph 119). The central notion is how perception, informed by the internal narratives of subjective experience, creates the history we attribute to what occurs “outside.”²⁹

 

This Steinian epistemology is experienced through the text itself, often in writing that adapts the forms of pop culture.³⁰ Particularly in her trilogy (The Return of Painting, The Pearl, and Orion), Scalapino explores “writing which uses the genre of comic books” (Ph 22). In Scalapino’s work–in contrast to Andy Warhol’s or Roy Lichtenstein’s silk screens and paintings–the “frames” consist solely of language. They take the form of small windows of text that Scalapino finds congenial to exploring our experiences of the present moment, its individual, disparate acts of perception, as though in cartoon-sized boxes. In the trilogy, Scalapino plays with the images of film noir (one character is “a sort of tight sweater version of Lana Turner” [63]) in conjunction with more conceptual reflections, reminiscent of Stein’s writing in Lectures in America: “To not do rhetoric–so that it is not jammed in on itself.” Or: “To have a convention–not the way it is spoken, but the way it is heard” (54). Scalapino has said of Stein:

 

     I took her writing as having to do with wanting 
     to be able to write the essence of something,
     of an emotion or a person [or] an object, and 
     that's impossible; she's fully aware that it's
     impossible, so she's in a mode of conjecture 
     about things, a curiosity and experimentation.

 

In both her trilogy and in way, Scalapino embarks on similar projects–inviting a “mode of conjecture” about poetic language and perception itself.

 

Yet however linked Scalapino’s serial form is to theories of perception, Scalapino also inherits Stein’s fascination with erotic codes, which Stein articulated through the “continuous present” and the “infinite form” that Scalapino finds so intriguing.³¹ For Scalapino, seriality is, in fact, inherently erotic. While some might find the pre-determined structure of a romance novel–or a sonnet–both comfortingly accessible and erotically charged, Scalapino associates closure (literary or otherwise) with entrapment. Without what she sees as the enforced structure of pre-determined forms, “you can feel comfortable and relaxed in something”; whether in pop culture incarnations like soap opera or in poetry like her own, Scalapino finds that serial form “has to do with just pleasure, the notion that we generate certain things that are pleasurable.”³² Differing from Pound’s serial yet epic Cantos (Pound’s definition of epic being–very much like his Cantos–a “poem including history”),³³ Scalapino’s serial form, like that of Tender Buttons, emerges from pleasure–the pleasure of not ending.³⁴

 

“The floating series” is one of several “infinite series” that make up way. The most erotic of its sections, “The floating series” consists of brief, thin poems–visually, the inverse of Mullen’s “Trimmings.” Small lines of type meander down the page and abruptly end, with dashes or no punctuation, to continue on the facing page. These various comic-book-like “frames” of words and perceptions are overtly erotic in their subject matter, as I will show. Yet the form is minimalist in the extreme, and the language stylized in a way that hearkens back to Tender Buttons. Like Stein, Scalapino suggests both the eroticization of ordinary objects, culled from daily experience, and a playful means of using poetry to allude to the female body. Like Stein’s codes for Alice, or her use of words like “milk” or “cow” to signal sexual experience, some of Scalapino’s individual words–used repeatedly–take on sexual connotations, particularly the motifs of the “lily pad” and “bud”:

 

     the
     women -- not in
     the immediate
     setting
     -- putting the 
     lily pads or
     bud of it
     in
     themselves

     a man entering
     after
     having
     come on her -- that
     and
     the memory of putting
     in
     the lily pad or the
     bud of it first,
     made her come (way 65, 66)

 

The figures of the bud and lily pad recall icons of sexual organs (reminiscent as well of the Buddhist “way” used in Scalapino’s title): in Taoism, jadestalk, swelling mushroom, and dragon pillar represent the male; while jade gate, open peony, and golden lotus denote the female. It is possible to praise God through a celebration of these sexual parts, both playful and pleasurable.³⁵ Scalapino explains that her purpose in using the recurring words “lily pad” and “bud” was to “imply things about the female body that are pleasurable” through terms that are both sensual and deliberately not anatomical. As Stein does in Tender Buttons, Scalapino eroticizes language; she employs an iconography of her own in a clearly sexual context, from the woman’s point of view and, in the very notion of a “floating” form, she alludes to the potentially amniotic experience linked to the female body. The lack of syntactical markings here and the isolation of particular words defamiliarize their meanings, even down to the articles and prepositions which Stein found so fetching.³⁶In this passage (like many others in the permutations of “The floating series”), the attention to a stylized but explicitly sexual physical experience makes the female body the subject of meditation. Yet this detailing of what resides “in” or “on” the female body in the moment of orgasm is also accompanied by an analogous attention to language as physical presence: the deliberate highlighting of prepositions and conjunctions (“in,” “and,” “after”) on single lines permits us to pay heed to the connectives of language, to focus on words as words, and to think of language, too, as a material, immanent force. In this way Scalapino makes language material, employs it for the pleasures of its textures and sounds–and this is very like Stein.

 

Yet the nature of this sort of erotic–and linguistic–experience in Scalapino is problematic. There is an apparent lack of affect in this and other passages, a flattened tone, and a deliberate vagueness in phrases like “immediate setting” and “in that situation.” Marjorie Perloff points out that Scalapino’s seemingly ordinary, transparent language typically breaks down and turns into deliberate artifice that highlights the surface of language rather than its referent (Radical Artifice 50-1). In the passage I quoted, the “he” and “she” are engaged in an anonymous act of intercourse (which is repeated, with changes, later on), yet it is one that also defamiliarizes the “act” and focuses as much on memory and language as on sensual experience. Scalapino’s comments on the work of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet Ron Silliman illuminate her own practice: “A series or list of simple sentences creates simple states of being, requiring that consciousness exist only in the moment of each sentence, i.e., in an infinite series of succeeding moments” (Ph 30). Clearly it is not just the sexual coupling of these bodies that concerns Scalapino, but also the very nature of perception and repetition, the concerns Stein elaborates in “Portraits and Repetition” and in her poetry. Hence the stylistic spareness, the minimalism that emphasizes small permutations, the use of repetition and difference. How should we reconcile these philosophical and formal preoccupations with the specifically sexual motifs of “The floating series”?

 

However much Scalapino’s interest in Stein has to do with epistemologies of composition, as I see it Scalapino’s invocation of charged erotic material also involves her in a further dialogue with Stein’s erotic writings. One of Scalapino’s goals is clearly to provide a contemporary alternative to the long-standing literary conventions used to portray sex, much as Tender Buttons succeeded in doing. And in creating her own poetic grammar and using it to elaborate a sexual motif, Scalapino also destabilizes masculine and feminine positions. Her permutations enact a textual version of the “gender trouble” or indeterminacy that Judith Butler endorses as perhaps the most threatening of all social/sexual gestures to an established heterosexual culture.³⁷ The lily bud, which initially suggests the penis, eventually suggests as well the clitoris–or, in more general terms, the sexual exchange itself, as though neither party had to be defined in terms of difference:

 

     having
     swallowed the 
     water
     lily bud -- so having
     it in
     him -- when he'd
     come on some
     time with her (way 85)

 

The indeterminate “water / lily bud” represents the process of sexual exchange, more than a bodily part. Scalapino has even suggested that the “bud” represents a way of imagining pregnancy as though from a child’s point of view–as a growth within the body. This shifting of symbols within the text is appropriate, given Scalapino’s views of her work as a particular kind of feminist enterprise–the sort that strives to conceive of gender itself as ideally “not being in existence–the idea that there is no man and no woman, that that’s a social creation.” For Scalapino, contemplating gender perceptions entails “a process of unravelling the hypothesis and the conclusion” of supposed gender difference. Clearly, then, Scalapino’s phenomenology of composition is not simply a philosophical game. To the contrary, it has everything to do with a reconceptualization of gender itself, a process that can be compared to Stein’s exploration of lesbian sexuality in Tender Buttonsand “Lifting Belly.”

 

For Scalapino, however, even indeterminacy needs to be placed in context, and that contextualization is part of Scalapino’s project to situate sexuality within a broader socio-economic picture. Most significantly, Scalapino uses a Steinian elusive language not to cover over the sexuality that is her subject (as in Stein’s private codes) but to expose its relation to prevalent social conventions between men and women, reflected as well in literary forms. In “A sequence,” a serial poem in Scalapino’s earlier book that they were at the beach, men and women are, in flattened diction, identified as having leopard parts, and in this way the body appears as objectified in moments of arousal (“The parts of their bodies which had been covered by clothes were those of leopards” [57]). Here, Scalapino says, she tried to be “completely dead-pan, flat,” and in fact to create something “not palatable erotically.” Her intention in this disorienting series is to reveal the workings of domination in erotic representations, whether in the photographs in mass market magazines or in the involved plots of historical romances.

 

In way, however, the erotic is not flattened out; as in Stein’s text, it is pleasure itself that emerges. But in contrast to Stein’s eroticism in poems like Tender Buttons and “Lifting Belly,” this pleasure is not disjunct from, but part of, a broader context, which includes daily interactions in the public sphere. In fact, the “convention” Scalapino explores in both way and that they were at the beach is not simply literary or formal–and here is one of the points at which she parts company with Stein. For Scalapino, as I will show, rethinking literary conventions about everything from syntax to portrayals of sexual experience necessarily entails engaging as well with the particulars of economics and class in the public world as they exist outside the confines of the erotic exchange. But for Scalapino this broader context is already connected to the erotic–through the very notion of convention. For what Scalapino calls, in general terms, “social convention” is also embedded in literary forms, including those devoted to what she calls “the erotica genre.” In Tender Buttons, Stein left her erotic clues in a mesh of seemingly non-referential words, focusing on language and thwarting literary convention at every turn, but leaving the broader sweep of public experience largely out of the equation. Scalapino, taking a different tack, allows us to see the interdependence of various aspects of our social selves and that most “private” aspect of our lives–our sexual acts.In way and other texts (from the early Considering how exaggerated music is to the more recent Crowd and not evening or light), Scalapino uses a Steinian method–to a distinctly non-Steinian end.

 

The method involves fragmentation, juxtaposition, and repetition. The goal is to inscribe in her text the socially-defined nature of private, erotic experience.³⁸ The first clue precedes a reading of the poem, yet typifies Scalapino’s technique. The cover of way shows two photographs by Andrew Savulich, who placed them together on a postcard which, Scalapino told me, she saw and later decided to use for the cover of the book. One is labeled “couple dancing in bar,” the other, “men fighting on sidewalk.” The poses are remarkably similar–the possibilities of homoeroticism in fighting, and of violence in sexuality, emerge through the juxtaposition, which succeeds in linking two acts that we are sometimes invested in perceiving as culturally dissimilar, yet which in fact are intricately linked. The use of juxtaposition as technique subverts the possibly “erotic” content of the one photograph while eroticizing the other–thus using form itself to expose a romantic mythology that would have us separate erotic and overtly violent struggle.³⁹

 

This is the device that emerges, in linguistic terms, in “The floating series” in way. As the poem continues, any doubt we might have had about its function as “just” erotic writing, an eroticism disjunct from a larger context, quickly dissolves. While the first several sections concern the repetition of a sexual encounter, at the very point when the form starts to seem familiar, we move outside the parameters of the “genre” Scalapino has taken care to establish: we move outside the bedroom, beyond the couple; as in Trimmings, we leave Stein’s flat at 14, rue du Fleurus far behind. The first such instance is jarring but vague:

 

     people who're
     there
     already -- though
     the other
     people aren't
     aware of that (way 68)

 

The writing is open-ended: what people? People other than the “he” and “she” of the couple? And who are the “other people” whose awareness is lacking? The secrecy of the sexual encounter seems to be challenged–one thinks of a primal scene, a child walking in on parents in a compromising position, or a couple unaware that they are being observed in a restaurant or car–a position on the fringe of the “outside” world. Yet there is a political implication to the “people who’re / there / already” underlined in the next fragment: “not / being able to / see the / other people.” The possibility of colonization is made more likely in that people don’t “see” others because they are in various ways culturally invisible, whether because of race, class or other hierarchical systems that delineate privilege. The trope of invisibility and difference has, of course, long been a presence in African-American literature and theory, from W.E.B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson to Ralph Ellison and, more recently, Michele Wallace.⁴⁰ In white America, there is seeing and not seeing, awareness and its lack, depending on one’s position as subject or object of the gaze. A few sections later, we come across a reference to “the city,” with more “people having / been / there,” and “others not / aware of them” (way70). Without a doubt, we have moved from the conjoining of two–seemingly without specific context, focused instead on the “convention” of erotica–to a larger public context (in this case, an urban scene), an increasingly imposing structure far from the private relation that recurs, as well, throughout the series.

 

Scalapino continues to juxtapose these two sorts of scenes in the rest of the series–the woman and the man, using erotic language, and the anonymous “people” of the unnamed city. The juxtaposition inevitably comes down to money and politics. New elements enter into the play of Scalapino’s permutations, including the words “livelihood,” “jobs,” “high rents,” “public figure,” “small store,” “race,” “means,” and “not enough.” Such linguistic allusions to economics and to public enterprises and interactions alternate with the motifs from the first few passages–the symbolic lily pad and bud, the woman and the man. One passage suggests the very real presence of class barriers:

 

     having the
     high rents
     with
     an attitude that
     they
     shouldn't live in
     this
     place -- who're poor (way 76)

 

Suddenly the man and woman engaged in their own private experience are seen in context, as only one element in a larger, socio-economic picture. In isolation, this passage has nothing to do with sexuality, but its juxtaposition with the other passages about the man and the woman underlines a central point: that our sexual exchanges need to be contextualized, however resistant we are to that notion, as the two within the couple might well be. The space of the poem, then, has moved from indoors to out, from the private to the public sphere. Scalapino suggests that there is in fact a corollary to the phenomenology of composition, which concerns the space we inhabit, and the “conventions” (social and linguistic) that we impose on it. Scalapino makes a direct analogy between space, political structure, and poetic form: “As (spatially) infinity is all around one, it creates a perspective that is socially democratic, individual (in the sense of specific) and limitless” (Ph 119). “Style is cultural abstraction” (Ph 28), Scalapino writes, meaning, I believe, that style “speaks” for its culture, just as, for Mullen, clothes “speak” women’s lives, and, in Scalapino’s hands, a disorienting style can also be a means of critiquing the very culture it emerges from.⁴¹

 

The minimalist writing in way addresses the conventions of language and sexuality as social conventions. There are two phrases Scalapino links in her essay: “[T]he process of creating convention–the description of ourselves as a culture” (Ph 32). The link here demonstrates the reason for this poetry of repetition and juxtaposition. While Stein’s interest in composition as explanation takes her into the realms of epistemology, linguistics and sexuality, Scalapino forces all these fields to confront the businesses opened, the rents unpaid, the unnamed “people” we encounter in the public space of the street or marketplace. In this respect, Scalapino opens Stein’s erotic discourse in poems like Tender Buttons to the public sphere, one that women have frequently been excluded from, and that women poets, in efforts to combat the lack of value placed on affect and the “personal,” have sometimes deliberately shunned. Just as Stein rejects referentiality, Scalapino rejects the “confessional” or personal tradition of women’s writing, even when that writing is politically engaged–and she rejects this mode as dramatically as any poet today.⁴² Scalapino has defended the erotic, attacked by some as “quintessentially subjective and egoistic” and by others as “inherently sexist.” For Scalapino, separation of the erotic from socially engaged writing is neither efficacious nor desirable in any way: “If eroticism is eliminated, that leaves only that social context, which has ‘seen’ it as sexist; there is no area existing for apprehension or change. We are split from ourselves” (Talisman 47). For Scalapino, then, the erotic is related to “social context” in a way Stein never felt the need to explore.

 

Whether those relationships involve the “city” (its mass of individuals) or the “man and woman” in their most “private” lives, Scalapino’s poetry is fundamentally about things in relation. The Buddhist influence in way–the notion of “the middle path, meaning something that’s totally in the center and has no point of vantage,” what Scalapino calls “the motions of experience”–converges with the physicist David Bohm’s theory of the transformation of time and matter, which I quoted earlier, concerning the nature of identity. For Scalapino, both take on a political charge, since neither one is disjunct from economic and other social marks of difference, like the “high rents” and invisible “other people” who inhabit way. The “span” of perception Scalapino includes in her text differs from Mullen’s explorations of the way language constructs individual identity and social categories–the way that the clothing that is language creates both what we are and how we are perceived. Yet to make vivid the relationship between identity and language, Scalapino, like Mullen, evokes the connections between eroticism and violence, along with the very real pleasure that words afford. However different stylistically, these texts share a central goal: to forge a disjunctive language that will direct our attention to both sexuality and the public sphere–to illuminate, in a feminist avant-garde poetics, the inevitable link between our public selves and our most private acts.

 

Neither of these writers’ recent works would be possible without Stein’s ventures into the relationships among language, consciousness, and sensuality. It is precisely this series of relationships which is constantly changing, as culture and speech continually shift, and as new voices take on new forms of various experimental “traditions.” For writers concerned with feminine subjectivity, with race and cultural politics, and with opening up the boundaries of language, Stein’s linguistic experiments remain a source, yet one that needs revision, that cannot go unchallenged. Such rewriting is a testament to both continuity and change in feminist avant-garde writing by American women. For Mullen and Scalapino, the task is to bring Stein’s often insular discourse to the language of the world outside. That two poets as different as Mullen and Scalapino both turn to Stein–to contribute to an existing poetic discourse and to alter its orientation–bears witness to the strength of women’s commitment to experimentation with language and consciousness and to a feminist avant-garde poetics they hope will alter the landscape of American culture.

 

Notes

 

1.Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One 144.

 

2.See The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book 195-207, a reprint of entries from the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E 1-3. The writers in the section on Stein were Michael Davidson, Larry Eigner, Bob Perelman, Steve McCaffery, Peter Seaton, Jackson Mac Low, and Robert Grenier. See also In the American Tree for what is perhaps the most comprehensive collection of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writings, both poetry and theory.

 

3.This is particularly true if Howe’s Articulation of Sound Forms in Time, republished in the collection Singularities. But Howe has made use of historical documents throughout her poetic texts, from the early Defenestration of Prague through the more recent (and highly scholarly) “Melville’s Marginalia,” in The Nonconformist’s Memorial.

 

4.The “mark of gender” is Wittig’s phrase, borrowed, of course, from linguistics. Her emphasis on eliminating the difference encoded in language (even more pronounced in French than in English)–and her Marxist orientation–is in marked contrast to a theory like Irigaray’s, which assumes that Western culture has in fact never truly acknowledged feminine difference in the first place, relying instead on a logic of “the same,” whether in Plato, Freud, or other thinkers. She is also critical of Marxist rhetoric. See Irigaray’s Speculum for her elaborate critique of the entire Western tradition. Criticisms of Marxism appear in This Sex Which Is Not One, particularly 32 and 81.

 

5.Like S*PeRM**K*T, the new book, Muse and Drudge, will be published by Singing Horse Press.

 

6.I am indebted to the notion of “writing as re-vision,” in the path-breaking 1971 essay “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” by Adrienne Rich.

 

7.Interview, March 26, 1993. Where not noted otherwise, citations from both Mullen and Scalapino are culled from unpublished interviews with the authors.

 

8.Concerning that they were at the beach , Scalapino describes the attempt to arrive at a sort of “neutral tone,” a dead-pan, that would elicit responses from the reader precisely because it’s flat: “It doesn’t have depth, and because it doesn’t have depth you have a reaction to that” (interview).

 

9.This essay is an adaptation of the final chapter of a book devoted to feminist avant-garde poets from Stein to the present. As the book begins with Tender Buttons, I use this final chapter to focus on Stein’s continuing influence on recent feminist avant-garde poets. While I would hardly minimize the other important sources for both of the poets discussed here (such as Brooks’s considerable influence on Mullen), that broader look at each poet’s creative sources awaits a slightly different study.

 

10.See Fifer’s “Is Flesh Advisable,” as well as Gass’s book and Stimpson’s “The Somagrams of Gertrude Stein,” among a wealth of other such criticism.

 

11.See my “Fetishism and Parody in Stein’s Tender Buttons.”

 

12.Michael Davidson, in the “Readings” section of The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (196-8), makes a similar point. For him the breakdown is between the idea that “her writing is all play” and the view that “Stein is a kind of hermetic Symbolist who encodes sexual and biographical information in complex verbal machines.” For Davidson, the commonality between these two is not that they are both fundamentally “private” but that they both “operate on either side of a referential paradigm.” What we need to do is “learn to read writing, not read meanings.” In this, he re-instates the formal, closed, nature of Tender Buttons itself.

 

13.Marianne DeKoven, in A Different Language, is particularly influenced by Kristeva, as is Ruddick. Most significant among other critics who also have explored Stein’s erotic codes are Stimpson and Gass. See my “Fetishism and Parody” for a detailed account of this approach to Tender Buttons.

 

14.In terms of moving the discourse of the “private” or erotic into the public sphere, in often dramatic ways, performance artists Karen Finley and Annie Sprinkle come to mind as offering new versions of feminist avant-gardism, ones that make the body a site of public display in overtly polemical fashion. Both merge polemical texts with enactments involving their bodies, naked or outrageously dressed up. See Re/Search: Angry Women for more examples of feminist performance art. A good deal of earlier feminist theory–and poetry followed (or perhaps preceded) this tendency–focused primarily on valuing the private sphere, including personal or “confessional” discourse. This tendency shifted value from public “event” to affect and qualities labeled “feminine,” as evident in those Anglo-American theorists who emphasize difference, among them Carol Gilligan and Nancy Chodorow. A divergence from this philosophy of difference, toward a critique of gender dualism itself, is evident in the work of several feminist conceptual artists in recent years (many influenced by French psychoanalytic theory, particularly Jacques Lacan), including, most notably, Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger. Teresa De Lauretis, Elizabeth Grosz, and Judith Butler are among those more recent theorists who call for gender ambiguity and critique feminine difference as a basis for gender theory.

 

15.In Revolution and Poetic Language, Kristeva outlines this opposition in detail. While the semiotic can, for all speaking subjects, only be experienced through language and never (after the pre-Oedipal stage) in its “pure” form, it is nonetheless at continual odds with the symbolic functioning of language, threatening to break down its rational, semantic relationships. Poetry pushes language toward the semiotic, thus proffering both pleasures and dangers readers rarely experienced–except in madness–in other types of language.

 

16.Ruddick’s most important argument along these lines is in her “A Rosy Charm.” For my argument on female fetishism, see my “Fetishism and Parody.”

 

17.See Du Bois’ now-famous passage from The Souls of Black Folk: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of looking at one’s self through the eyes of others. . . . One ever feels his two-ness–an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body” (5). Gayle’s The Black Aesthetic, among a number of anthologies from the early 1970s, provides some of the most important theoretical writings of the Black Arts Movement and the revolutionary impulse to change both the political and psychic realities of African-Americans.

 

18.The work of Barbara Smith, Gayatri Spivak, Trinh Minh-ha, bell hooks, and Gloria Anzaldúa come to mind as just a few of the theorists and critics who have reshaped the feminist thinking that first emerged in the 1970s with attention to issues of postcoloniality, racial difference, and the neglect of women of color among earlier feminist writings. Smith’s “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism” (in But Some of Us Are Brave, mentioned below) is now a classic of the many pioneering works that critiqued early feminist criticism and voiced the need for a black feminist criticism. See also Spivak’s In Other Worlds, Minh-ha’s Woman, Native, Other, and hooks’s Feminist Theory for particularly influential and important explorations of feminism and race in the U.S. and in an international frame. Anthologies that emerged in the 1980s have been crucial in collecting and disseminating revisionist feminist work by women of color. See especially This Bridge Called my Back, edited by Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga; and All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave, edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith; as well as the more recent Coming to Terms, edited by Elizabeth Weed, and In Other Words, edited by Roberta Fernández.

 

19.Saldívar-Hull argues that the racism in Melanctha has been either excused or ignored altogether by critics–even feminist critics–in their commitment to championing Stein’s radical experimental style. See Saldívar-Hull and Bernstein, “Professing Stein/Stein Professing.” See also Milton Cohen for a reassessment of Stein’s racial politics.

 

20.See Ruddick’s “A Rosy Charm” for her fine reading of this passage.

 

21.The phrase is from Loy’s mythological and autobiographical epic, “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” in The Last Lunar Baedeker 124. See my “Mina Loy’s ‘Mongrel’ Poetics” in the forthcoming book Mina Loy: Woman and Poet for a treatment of Loy’s racial and gender politics.

 

22.Teresa De Lauretis addresses this issue in her essay “The Violence of Rhetoric: Considerations on Representation and Gender,” in Technologies of Gender.

 

23.See Bernstein’s “Professing Stein” for a discussion of Tender Buttons as a radical expression of its time.

 

24.In How Phenomena Appear to Unfold, and in other uncollected articles, Scalapino has written about Ron Silliman, Charles Bernstein, Alice Notley, and Hannah Wiener, as well as about Duncan, Creeley, H.D., and Stein.

 

25.See Perloff’s “Pound/Stevens: whose era?” for one account of the divide between a Poundian object-oriented, historical poetics, and the more meditative, essentially Romantic, Stevensian mode. Taken on its own terms, the distinction holds true. The dichotomy implies, however, a false dualism. In this particular piece, Perloff seems to hold either that these two “modes” were in fact the only ones present in the early part of the century, or that writers with other concerns–Harlem Renaissance poets were at work at the same time, as were avant-gardists with preoccupations sometimes quite divergent from Pound’s–somehow fit neatly into this one central divide.

 

26.See Conte’s Unending Design for a detailed account of serial form in writers including Creeley, Duncan, Jack Spicer, and others.

 

27.See, in particular, “What Is English Literature” (LIA 11-55) for Stein’s personal version of English and American literary history.

 

28.See Robert Grenier’s identification of Stein’s “phenomenological” preoccupation in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book: “T.B., as early ‘phenomenological investigation,’ is interpretative/as it is revelatory–the whole storm of passion, discernment, definition, feeling//carried by language” (205).

 

29.For comparison, note Stein’s statements about her understanding of English literature in “What Is English Literature.” Stein invokes the same sort of dialectic between subjective and objective experience, as a dance of mysterious origins, one that itself becomes the subject of inquiry: “There are two ways of thinking about literature as the history of English literature, the literature as it is a history of it and the literature as it is a history of you” (LIA 12). And later: “And so my business is how English literature was made inside me and how English literature was made inside itself” (LIA 14).

 

30.Wendy Steiner’s fine introduction to Lectures in America likens Stein’s experiments with repetition to those of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein two generations later, in the Pop Art movement. Steiner argues convincingly that both Stein and the later visual artists revel in their own culture’s versions of mechanism and structural repetition, adapting them to new art forms in defiant, and celebratory, ways. See LIA xiii-xv.

 

31.The serial writing of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and other male writers was in fact preceded by Stein’s, and in her hands, such seriality emerged with a distinctly erotic–and feminine–perspective, especially in Tender Buttons, “Lifting Belly,” and her other erotic poetry. For historical comparison, one might note that the first three of the Cantos were published in June, 1917, in Poetry 10.

 

32.Scalapino discussed in our interview the serial forms of pop culture and mass media, including TV news and soap operas. While she acknowledged the possible appeal of the sit-com or soap opera as serial form, she herself can’t stand either one: “There is something interesting about the serial form almost as if it were soap opera. Except I hate soap operas and I never look at them, they’re terribly boring and irritating. But it’s the idea that something could go on and then start again and keep going, and it would always reproduce some of the information that’s core information so that you could come into it at any point. It implies that there’s no end to this and also that people are attending to very intricate but essentially delicate small things that they’re doing. There’s something about that that’s satisfying, but definitely not at all satisfying in soap operas.”

 

33.Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound 86.

 

34.Scalapino briefly mentioned in our interview her feelings about the possibility of writing in closed forms, one that indicates the depth of her discomfort with being boxed in: “Writing a form that implies closure in conventional works that I’ve heard or read–I find that completely stifling. You feel that you’re trapped and dead. I have a reaction of total claustrophobia.”

 

35.See Avis for a brief and general account of these symbols in Taoism.

 

36.See “Poetry and Grammar” (LIA 212-14) on the “interesting” role of articles, pronouns, and conjunctions–particularly articles, which have the power to “please as the name that follows cannot please” (212).

 

37.In particular, Scalapino seems to attribute the “bud” to both the man and the woman as the poem progresses, so that its phallic association is either “lent” to the woman or redefined as a female quality.

 

38.The last series in way, “hoofer,” works to very similar ends. That series begins with a scene on a bus and moves to a sexual motif, though in markedly non-erotic language: the first appearance of a sexual phrase is: “. . . women / in their being licked / between their legs” (139). The imagery that likens the sexual to the animal hearkens back to that they were at the beach , but the over-all form–juxtaposing the social “scene” with a sexual moment–coincides with the same structure in “The floating series.”

 

39.Scalapino may even be responding to the prevalent soft porn poses explored by Annette Kuhn. The most frequent poses avoid any disorientation of the spectator’s direct experience of the “object” photographed, most often through the use of realistic poses, as though the viewer had just happened upon a scene in which the woman is, usually, unconscious of the viewer’s gaze. Scalapino implies that, as a formal strategy that disrupts the way we would otherwise receive each image, juxtaposition of two or more images (or pieces of text) can indeed destroy the “realism” of the medium and thereby challenge us to see things differently. See Kuhn for a detailed analysis of poses and the position of the gazer in different types of pornographic representations.

 

40.I am thinking, in particular, of Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, an important precursor to Ellison’s Invisible Man, in which the narrator’s race is “invisible” insofar as he can “pass” for white–with the price of a blurring, even denial, of identity, that makes him both tortured and, ironically, unsympathetic. In other more recent treatments of the idea of invisibility, Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark raises the issue of the construction of “whiteness,” as well as blackness, in American culture, most often dependent on an unacknowledged black “other.” Wallace, in Invisibility Blues, a collection of her essays, argues that frequent visual representations of African-American women (and other women of color) in fashion photos is accompanied by the conspicuous absence of their voices in the influential spheres of public discourse, both political and academic. See her introduction for a full account of the issue of “visibility” and language for African-American women.

 

41.See Stein’s important recapitulation of her arguments in “Composition as Explanation” at the opening of “Portraits and Repetition”: “In Composition as Explanation I said nothing changes from generation to generation except the composition in which we live and the composition in which we live makes the art which we see and hear” (LIA 165). Scalapino’s insistence on the relationship between a culture and its “style” is clearly an articulation of a similar position. Yet, significantly, Scalapino takes the extra step (one typical of avant-gardist attitudes toward language) of using a disorienting or disruptive style of her own precisely to alter the entrenched traditions that artistic conventions reflect. See Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde for the most complete treatment of the issue of stylistic and cultural revolutions.

 

42.In particular, the privileging of personal experience and language in the writing of such poets as Anne Sexton and Sharon Olds comes to mind, in contrast to the more outward-looking and “historical” poetry of other feminist writers, such as Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich. Yet, despite a similar orientation toward social and political issues, Scalapino rejects the mode of this sort of politically engaged poetry because it, too, has most often been voiced in relatively traditional forms.

 

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