On the Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics

By Michael Davidson

This new book by eminent scholar Michael Davidson gathers his essays concerning formally innovative poetry from modernists such as Mina Loy, George Oppen, and Wallace Stevens to current practitioners such as Cristina Rivera-Garza, Heriberto Yépez, Lisa Robertson, and Mark Nowak. The book considers poems that challenge traditional poetic forms and in doing so trouble normative boundaries of sexuality, subjectivity, gender, and citizenship. At the heart of each essay is a concern with the "politics of form," the ways that poetry has been enlisted in the constitution—and critique—of community. Davidson speculates on the importance of developing cultural poetics as an antidote to the personalist and expressivist treatment of postwar poetry. A comprehensive and versatile collection, On the Outskirts of Form places modern and contemporary poetics in a cultural context to reconsider the role of cultural studies and globalization in poetry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780819571373

Michael Davidson

Michael Davidson is Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century (1991) and several books of poetry.

Book preview

ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF FORM

On the Outskirts of Form

Practicing Cultural Poetics

Michael Davidson

WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS

MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT

Wesleyan University Press

Middletown CT 06459

www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

© 2011 Michael Davidson

All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America

Designed by Katherine B. Kimball

Typeset in Quadraat and Quadraat Sans by

Passumpsic Publishing

Wesleyan University Press is a member of the Green Press Initiative. The paper used in this book meets their minimum requirement for recycled paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Davidson, Michael, 1944–

On the outskirts of form: practicing cultural poetics / Michael Davidson.

     p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8195-6957-8 (cloth : alk. paper)—

ISBN 978-0-8195-6958-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)—

ISBN 978-0-8195-7137-3 (e-book)

1. Poetics.  2. Poetry—History and criticism—Theory, etc.  

3. Literature, Modern—20th century—History and criticism.  

4. Literature, Modern—21st century—History and criticism.  I. Title.

PN1055.D38   2011

808.1—dc23     2011027298

5  4  3  2  1

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I. A Public Language

1. On the Outskirts of Form: Cosmopoetics in the Shadow of NAFTA

2. The Dream of a Public Language: Modernity, Textuality, and the Citizen Subject

II. Objectivist Frames

3. Life by Water: Lorine Niedecker and Critical Regionalism

4. Closed in Glass: Oppen’s Class Spectacles

III. Approaching the New American Poetry

5. Archaeologist of Morning: Charles Olson, Edward Dorn and Historical Method

6. The Repeated Insistence: Creeley’s Rage

7. A Cold War Correspondence: Gender Trouble in the Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov

8. Looking Through Lithium: James Schuyler as Jim the Jerk

9. Ekphrasis and The New York School

10. The Pleasures of Merely Circulating: John Ashbery and the Jargon of Inauthenticity

11. Struck Against Parenthesis: Shelley and Postmodern Romanticisms

12. Skewed by Design: From Act to Speech Act in Language Writing

13. Vertigo: Thinking Toward Action in the Poetry of George Oppen

Afterword: Impossible Poetries

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not exist without the help of an extensive network of friends, colleagues, editors, and publishers—all of whom have generously supported the project of a counter/cultural poetics. Many of the essays in On the Outskirts of Form began as talks or conference papers and subsequently appeared in magazines and journals. My thanks are extended to conference organizers, gallery curators, and publishers for helping to bring these essays to light.

I am especially grateful to a number of friends and colleagues who have been faithful readers and commentators. All these chapters have been aided in one form or another by conversations with Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Marjorie Perloff, Michael Palmer, Alan Golding, Lisa Lowe, Susan Kirkpatrick, Rae Armantrout, Peter Nicholls, Peter Middleton, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, Dee Morris, Lynn Keller, Charles Bernstein, and Al Gelpi. I want to extend a special thanks to Barrett Watten, who is directly responsible for generating at least three of these chapters and whose advice has influenced many others. I also want to acknowledge the contributions of Bob Perelman and an anonymous reader who reviewed the manuscript for Wesleyan University Press. I have had excellent support from my editor, Suzanna Tamminen, and her colleagues, Parker Smathers and Leslie Starr at Wesleyan, and Lys Weiss and Peter Fong at University Press of New England. Thanks as well to Teddy Cruz for the book’s wonderful cover image and for our ongoing conversations about living in San Diego, on the outskirts of form.

Chapter 1, On the Outskirts of Form, began as a talk given at the Diasporic Avant-Gardes conference at the University of California, Irvine, in 2004. Thanks to Barrett Watten and Carrie Noland, who curated this event, and to Palgrave MacMillan Press for allowing me to reprint the essay from its volume, Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement (2009). Another early version of this chapter appeared in Textual Practice 22.4 (winter 2008). Thanks to Peter Nicholls and Routledge Publishers for granting permission to reprint. I was aided in writing this essay by conversations with Cristina Rivera-Garza, Mark Nowak, and Lisa Robertson.

Chapter 2, The Dream of a Public Language, owes its inception to the Authorship and the Turn to Language conference held at the Universität Tübingen, Germany, in 2005. Thanks to Barrett Watten for coordinating this event. A version of this essay appeared in Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics 17 (2007). Thanks to the editor, Mark Nowak, for permission to reprint. I was also aided by conversations with Heriberto Yépez and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, to whom I extend my gratitude.

Life by Water: Lorine Niedecker and Critical Regionalism was delivered as a paper at the Lorine Niedecker Centenary Celebration held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in October of 2003. Thanks are extended to Elizabeth Willis, who coordinated the conference and edited Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place (2008), in which the essay subsequently appeared. Permission to reprint is granted by the University of Iowa Press.

I am grateful to Lee Spinks and the University of Edinburgh for inviting me to deliver a lecture, ‘Closed in Glass’: Oppen’s Class Spectacles at the George Oppen: A Centenary Conference, in November 2008. The lecture was subsequently given as a keynote address at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900, at the University of Louisville. Thanks to Alan Golding for inviting me to participate.

Archaeologist of Morning: Charles Olson, Edward Dorn and Historical Method appeared in English Literary History 47 (1980) and is reprinted courtesy of the editors.

Chapter 6, ‘The Repeated Insistence’: Creeley’s Rage, was written for a Robert Creeley memorial conference held in Buffalo, New York, October 2006. Thanks to Steve McCaffery for coordinating this event. The essay appeared in Form, Power, and Person in Robert Creeley’s Life and Work, edited by Stephen Fredman and Steve McCaffery, University of Iowa Press, 2010. Permission to reprint this essay is granted by the University of Iowa Press.

A Cold War Correspondence: Gender Trouble in the Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov first appeared in Contemporary Literature 45.3 (fall 2004), copyright by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System, and is reprinted by permission of University of Wisconsin Press. Special thanks to Al Gelpi for his comments on early drafts of this essay.

Chapter 8, Looking Through Lithium: James Schuyler as Jim the Jerk, was first given as a paper at the Modern Language Association’s annual convention, December 2004. I am grateful to Henry Abelove for chairing the panel on James Schuyler and to Eileen Myles, Ron Padgett, Nathan Kernan, Bill Corbett, and Charles North, who helped expand this essay into its current form.

Ekphrasis and the New York School is an expanded version of an essay first printed in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 42.1 (fall 1983). Thanks to the editors for permission to reprint.

I am grateful to Abigail Lange, Antoine Cazé, Olivier Brossard, and Vincent Broqua, who organized John Ashbery in Paris, an international conference at the Université Paris Diderot, Institut Charles V, in March 2010, at which I presented The Pleasures of Merely Circulating: John Ashbery and the Jargon of Inauthenticity. Thanks also to John Ashbery and David Kermani, who generously provided commentary on various aspects of the essay.

A shorter version of chapter 11, Struck Against Parenthesis, was given as a paper at the Modern Language Association’s annual convention in December 1991, on a panel chaired by Stuart Curran. The essay later appeared in Keats-Shelley Journal XLII (1993), which has granted me permission to reprint. I am grateful to my co-presenter, Michael Palmer, and to Susan Howe for their conversations about this essay.

Chapter 12, Skewed by Design was delivered at the Poetic Function / Soviet Cultural Foundation conference, Language–Consciousness–Society: The Problems of Contemporary Culture, in Leningrad, August 1989. The essay subsequently appeared in Artifice and Indeterminacy: An Anthology of New Poetics, edited by Christopher Beach (University of Alabama Press, 1998) and was reprinted in Aerial 8 (1995). Thanks to the editors for granting permission to reprint, and to Joan Retallack and Barrett Watten for their helpful comments.

Vertigo: Thinking Toward Action in the Poetry of George Oppen was written during the dark days following 9/11 and was given as a talk shortly thereafter at the Modernist Studies Association annual meeting in Houston, Texas, October 2001. Thanks to Dee Morris for coordinating the panel at which this talk was presented.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following individuals and institutions for permission to reprint copyrighted or previously unavailable work, beyond the scope of fair use: Linda Oppen and the Estate of George Oppen; Lynda Claassen at the Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego; John Ashbery; Georges Borchardt, Inc.; Rich Jensen; Lloyd Center / clearcutpress.com; Keith Higgins; Lisa Robertson; Coach House Books; Chris Fishbach of Coffee House Books; Mark Nowak; Cristina Rivera-Garza and Jen Hofer; University of Pittsburgh Press; Heriberto Yépez; Art Resource; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; the estate of Larry Rivers; and The Frick Collection.

ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF FORM

Introduction

The Tension That Results

Out west, the frontier is on the edge of form. . . . Words push into the new sphere. Tribal means belonging, but not belonging to civilization. This is the tension that results. —Diane Glancy

When I began writing the essays collected in On the Outskirts of Form, the outskirts of poetry were a bit easier to see. In the early 1980s, previously unincorporated literary zones had formed into recognizable communities (Beat Generation, deep image, Black Arts, Asian American, Chicano Nationalist, Black Mountain, confessionalist, New York School, language writing) and the city of official verse culture was within commuting distance. Academic articles, conferences, and books were dividing up the terrain, and turf battles were being fought over the questions of whether—and how much—theory should be brought to poetics, whether identity politics and innovative forms were compatible, whether to build on avant-garde linguistic techniques or return to more traditional forms. And the poetic demographic had changed dramatically. Many of the new suburban denizens had found work in the very citadels of academic authority whose walls they once scaled. In the intervening years, the landscape has changed dramatically: the suburbs have given way to outlying, exurban, off-the-grid, and offshore entities that make my title seem somewhat outdated. Subsequent generations of language-writing, standup, new formalist, concretist, collaborative, flarf, intermedia, performance, transgeneric, Deaf, dub, elliptical, digital, hybrid, postliterary and, most recently, conceptual poetries have obscured the outskirts of form and made them difficult to see, if not irrelevant as a descriptor.¹ Moreover, my title is inexact since many of the movements that became canonized under the New American Poetry label were located less on the outskirts than in heterotopic sites within the metropole. Who, after all, could be more urban than Frank O’Hara or Allen Ginsberg? Thus my title represents more of a horizon than a map.

If there is a coherent narrative that links these rather disparate essays, written over a more than twenty-year period, it is the gradual shift from this spatial or geographic metaphor of poetic culture, based on schools, movements, and aesthetic positions, to a more rhizomatic and ill-defined formation being produced within globalization.² Ill defined because it is in the nature of globalized culture to hide the machinery that produces its effects. In order to see the work of culture in a transnational age, we may need to witness forms that exceed the limits of the page, the sound of the voice, the borders of the gallery space. With the exception of the first two chapters, I only skirt the outskirts of such forms, focusing largely on work produced between 1950 and 1980, from the early cold war to the beginnings of neoliberal globalization. By beginning the book at the global present and then looking backwards, I hope to complicate a certain expressive ideal that has dominated critical discussion of postwar poetry and see the trajectories it inaugurated.

One such trajectory concerns the issue of scale. Lisa Lowe cites Anish Kapoor’s vast sculpture, Marsyas, as a significant attempt to represent the historical origins of globalization in the transatlantic slave trade. It is a work that in its initial installation occupied the entire length of the gigantic turbine room on the main floor at the Tate Modern Museum in London where, as Lowe points out [viewing] the sculpture from a number of perspectives . . . it appear[s] all at once, to evoke the vast hulls and masts of the seventeenth-century ships that had brought African slaves and then Asian indentured workers to the colonized Americas (Metaphors 1). The sheer scale of Kapoor’s sculpture and the "impossibility of occupying more than a single perspective at any given time, of being both above and below the sculpture, or at both one end and the other, instantiated in a striking manner the geohistocial condition of globalization." If it is the function of globalization to efface the boundaries it secures (privatization, centralization of economies, containment of resources), then it is in the nature of art to make it visible and porous. By this formulation I do not mean to invoke the Russian formalist trope of defamiliarization to describe how art makes globalization strange, while leaving art untouched in its own sacrosanct realm, but to suggest that innovative cultural work makes the problematic of representation upon which globalization depends a factor in its creation.

Turning to poetry, we could see a shift in the meaning of scale by thinking of how the term field composition has shifted from describing psychological and expressive imperatives to a semiotic or communicational grid. Works like Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems, Frank O’Hara’s Biotherm, or Robert Duncan’s various long poems (Structure of Rime, Passages) are the models for the former tendency in which, as Duncan says, the poem is not a stream of consciousness, but an area of composition in which I work with whatever comes into it (vi). Value in such large, process-oriented works is measured not by the ratio of lived experience to textual result but by performative and affective energies generated. Among more recent poets, however, the idea of a field poetics has given way to a problematics of representability in which the sheer size and scope of the work defies decoding and for which the conveyance of an expressive subject is only one of its functions. In the last few years a number of long—very long—works have appeared that challenge the generic bounds of poetry and seem to literalize Borges’s Pierre Menard by actually writing—not imagining writing—Don Quixote. Although these works may not have globalization as their primary focus, their generative strategies, often based on procedural or conceptual formulas, offer elaborate responses to the decentralized, digitized production of information in the global mediascape. I am thinking, in this context, of a work like Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day, an 836-page retyping of the September 1, 2000, edition of The New York Times, moving from the upper left-hand corner of the paper to the lower right of each page, without stopping for columns. Goldsmith calls his work uncreative writing presumably because it is the opposite of the creative-writing workshop poem, with its expressive intent and localized speaker, but it also uncreates or deconstructs the newspaper by treating the entire page as a single measure. By making no distinctions between ad and copy, weather report and editorial page, poem and newspaper, Goldsmith recreates the news as poem while undermining the news as revealed truth. Instead of writing a new poem, Goldsmith reads through another text, and in the process creates novelty out of the most concrete example of how the present enters history.

A second example is Ron Silliman’s The Age of Huts, which is the first part of a much larger work, Ketjak, each section of which is constructed by a different procedural technique involving a regular ordering of sentences, choice of words, or repetition of syntactic forms. As an autobiographical poem, the work promises to be so long that it will become the poet’s life rather than serve as its description. On the one hand, The Age of Huts and other sections of the oeuvre are based on intimate and detailed records of the poet’s observations and obsessions, yet they are simultaneously endistanced from any possibility of totalization (via autobiography or memoir) by the formal ordering principles of composition. While these two works, from very different aesthetic fields, do not have a critique of globalization as their expressed purpose, they occupy a particularly complex response to the problem of representability by diverting agency from the one writing to the system of representation in which one is written. If composition by field depends on the localized page and voice (and typewriter), these more recent works seem unimaginable without the file and—in the case of flarf and other digitized forms—the database and search engine.

A global perspective on postwar poetics troubles the self-evident status of the Subject and the poetics of presence that it supports. As Diane Glancy indicates in the epigraph to this introduction, writing on the frontiers of form produces a kind of tension that cannot be reconciled by appealing either to the self-sufficient individual or to civilization. Recent work by the poets I discuss in my opening chapters suggest that all is not right with the liberal, individualist model that underwrites both free-trade agreements and expressivist poetics alike. How might it be possible to think outside of the Subject, capital S, and its foundational role in projects of capitalist expansion? What forms of agency exist beyond the lyric I but do not, in the process, jettison the collective? How might thinking beyond the Subject provide new understandings of residual and emergent forms of history whose horizon is not the liberation of the individual but the cohesion of the collective? My opening two essays respond to some of these questions by imagining poetics through a hemispheric frame or through new forms of citizenship, but the issue haunts even the earliest essay in this volume. In Archaeologist of Morning (1980), I address how Charles Olson built his epic work, The Maximus Poems, as a study of U.S. mercantilism from the maritime trades of the nineteenth century (which includes whaling and slavery) to the present late-capitalist versions in the cold war. His heroes, at least in the early poems of the series, are hardy New England fishing captains who own their own boats and fish the treacherous waters off Cape Ann. They are isolatos threatened by the encroachment of finance capital and corporate fisheries that destroy the local economy. What Olson sees as the destruction of the regional and particular in New England coincides with his desire to return poetry to the local body—the breath and musculature of the poet—as he develops the theme in Projective Verse and other essays. For Olson the social body and the poetic body are conjoined in a search for a polis of the immediate and particular.

When his Black Mountain student, Ed Dorn, began the long poem, Gunslinger, in 1968, he turned away from epic to satire, from oral tradition to cartoon dialogue, recognizing that Olson’s Toynbee-esque historical horizon of entrepreneurial capitalism no longer applied in a global environment. The hero of Gunslinger is not the western gunslinger who imposes rough justice on the frontier but a comic-book version, part semiotician, part jet-setting venture capitalist (his model is Howard Hughes) whose success resides in knowing how to read and manipulate the signs. Capital is no longer located in a ship or fishery but is now exchanged through fiber optics on the stock-trading floor or through intentional acts that have neither origin nor telos but the sheer frisson of exchange. The transition from Maximus to Slinger, from epic to satire, marks a recognition that the historical methodology necessary to narrate the West must include not only a study of the means of production (fishing) but of the means of representation by which that concept is disseminated (code). The West means more than the heroic fulfillment of manifest destiny; it implies the long shadow of Western imperialism as it impacts geopolitical realities globally. Dorn makes his two-dimensional characters out of the very flat surface of the screen on which the global west is being pixilated. If Olson is nostalgic for a polis of the local, Dorn cannot imagine community beyond his band of wisecracking, cynical outsiders. As a consequence Gunslinger remains more a bitter diagnosis of the problem of capital than an imagination of its cultural alternatives.

By appropriating Teresa Rivera-Garza’s phrase, outskirts of form (las afueras de la forma) as my title, I want to emphasize the implications of experimental form in addressing the geopolitical meaning of poetry. I also want to explore what Fredric Jameson, in another context, calls the ideology of the text—the social and cultural meaning of formal operations for specific communities that may exist on the outskirts of the national imaginary. Jameson is speaking of the turn toward textuality in the humanities since the 1960s in which any object of conjecture—a historical chronicle, film, the genetic code of a DNA molecule—can now be read as a system of signs (18). One could understand this textualization of history as a relativizing of truth such that any interpretation has equal value, what he elsewhere defines as the waning of affect and the flattening of agency in postmodern works. By stressing the ideology of the textual imperative, Jameson calls attention to the one creating the interpretation (his test case is Barthes’s reading of Balzac’s story, Sarrasine in S/Z) and by extension the conditions of its production. By speaking of the ideology of form I want to complicate the usual form/content binary by thinking about the ways that formal operations and strategies must be seen in relationship to constituencies for whom they are of value. This is not the same as reader-response theory, often based on an idealized reader-function, nor is it an updated version of the sociology of literature in which the form/content divide is mapped on the base/superstructure economic model. Rather, the ideology of form stresses what in an earlier book I called a work’s palimtextual character, to emphasize the multilayered quality of the material text as it annexes the history of its production, publication, and reception.³ To dig down through the layers of the palimtext is to understand its multiple inscriptions in social materiality. Form, in this sense, becomes in-formation about a work’s institutional and pedagogical functions, not a passive container of information that pre-exists the work.

As an extension of genre theory, the ideology of form addresses what Tony Bennett calls the differentiated field of social uses . . . prevailing at that time in terms of its influence on both textual strategies and contexts of reception (110).⁴ The traditional debates over poetry in binarist terms of formal/experimental, tradition/individual talent, raw/cooked seem no longer relevant if we are interested in what those dichotomies mean for individual readers. One person’s experimentalism is another’s arid aestheticism. It does no good to dismiss a given poetic practice for being retrograde or progressive without understanding the function that this operation has in a cultural setting. Emily Dickinson appropriated the hymn meters of her New England Protestant church to write incendiary poems about masculine power and antinomian presumption. The same dialect traditions that produced racist minstrelsy and white nativism in the late nineteenth century also enabled Charles Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar to signify, through dialect, on the racist assumptions of that same tradition. The collage aesthetic deployed by the royalist, Anglo-Catholic, conservative author of The Waste Land also made possible Muriel Rukeyser’s popular-front documentary poem, The Book of the Dead, Louis Zukofsky’s Mantis, and Melvin Tolson’s Harlem Gallery. The local-color regionalism that provided a nostalgic look at a lost plantation economy for post-Reconstruction America becomes, in the work of Zora Neale Hurston or Lorine Niedecker, a critical perspective on the limits of nostalgia itself. The outskirts of form have no more purchase on progressive social movements than do the Doric columns that support traditional verse.

A Public Language

[I]nstead of the poet being a beautiful machine which manufactured the current for itself, did everything for itself—almost a perpetual motion machine, of emotion. . . . Instead there was something from the outside coming in.

—Jack Spicer, Vancouver Lecture I (5)

What is the meaning / Of being numerous? George Oppen’s haunting question is left ambiguous, neither resolved in favor of the collective nor the individual (166). In the poem in which this question is asked, the shipwreck of the singular is Robinson Crusoe’s sad fate, even if his lonely sojourn on his island provides him with opportunities to test his self-reliance and Protestant economy. According to the eschatology of the Enlightenment that Robinson Crusoe narrates, his rescue from the island represents his re-investment in the social contract, but this redemption is no less problematic if, as Marx pointed out, it catapults him into social relations in which the forces of production have mastery over man. Oppen qualifies the idea that we must choose the social over the individual by stressing that when we speak in the collective pronoun "We have chosen the meaning / Of being numerous" (166; my emphasis). That is, we have chosen the story of sociality, the fall from grace and the wandering in the desert, over an Edenic solitude. Writing Of Being Numerous during the Vietnam War and ambivalently attracted by the New Left and Youth Culture, Oppen observed how the meaning of the social—the narrative of redemption—was being reified either into an ideology of political consensus, in which the outskirts of social form were collapsed into the vital center, or one of countercultural community and lifestyle revolt. The question of being numerous continues to remain open-ended for poets of Oppen’s 1930s generation who witnessed the bankruptcy of state-sponsored collectivism, both nationalist and socialist, through the Hitler-Stalin pact, but who also witnessed the human costs of individualism as the default term for unchecked market expansion. In a curious way, as Peter Nicholls observes of Oppen’s poem, the ‘shipwreck of the singular’ and the ‘meaning of being numerous’ are not antithetical options, as might first be thought, but are rather mutually implicated possibilities (98).⁵

The dream of a public language is the horizon of many poets represented in this book, but it is worth adding that their poetry has often been regarded as hermetic and densely encoded and thereby dismissive of any public whatsoever. When Frank O’Hara or Jack Spicer address individual friends in their poems, it might seem the most arrogant assertion of coterie identification—as if to say, reader, this poem is not for you. Yet the intimate reference to a specific other testifies to the poem’s existence in a social network where apostrophe interpellates not only one other reader (a lover or close friend) but potentially all others. Theodor Adorno speaks of the lyric address as a sign of the absence of a social totality, the negation of an oppressive condition: [only] he understands what the poem says who perceives in its solitude the voice of humanity (57). By stressing the lyric form in negational terms, as a reflex of social crisis, Adorno does not acknowledge how even the most hermetic poem imagines an alternative readership or participates in community formation. He can theorize a poem’s registration of what a poem cannot imagine but he cannot imagine a public poetry reading, a printing collective, a poetics blog, a prison writing workshop, a Deaf club performance—those sites and scenes where the poem circulates among its practitioners and readers. The voice of humanity, like humanism itself, is an abstraction that will not bear the weight of its multiple aspirants, all of whom speak different idiolects.

In chapter 2, I look at the relationship between poetry and public through the citizen subject as produced via the manifesto. The modern manifesto is a manifestly public document—part poetry, part pugilism—and it claims its authority not by reasoned argument but by refusing the normative functions of rational debate. It is a performative genre that must project a historical constituency that does not as yet exist—or that is being interpellated by means of the document itself. Its origins in the nascent public sphere of the eighteenth century, as Jürgen Habermas says, coincides with the emergence of a distinct political force in the coffeehouses, newspapers, and public salons of bourgeois society. We know the limits of this formulation—the non-citizens, slaves, women, disabled, and poor persons who are denied admission to the public sphere—but we may also see in Habermas’s formulation a description of how individuals form themselves into a community through talk, print, and debate. The attempt to secure and stabilize the public sphere, of course, is the province of bourgeois aesthetics, but the model remains viable, as Nancy Fraser and others have pointed out, for the subaltern, queer, and racialized subject.⁶ The intrusion of the outside in Jack Spicer’s epigraph to this section may seem a variation on surrealist automism, but it is equally a way of describing the social heteroglossia of the bar and poetry scene that Spicer inhabited and that enters the poem through debates about art in its various manifestations. Hence one of the consistent themes in these essays is the need to tease out a recalcitrant public address from work that appears more insular or private. It is easy enough to identify such address in the anti-war jeremiads of Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, or Robert Duncan; it is harder to find it in their contemporaries—Robert Creeley, the early Denise Levertov, James Schuyler, or John Ashbery—who utilize a more introspective or speculative voice. As I point out in my chapter on Creeley, however, many of his most self-conscious moments of questioning are addressed to a heteronormative masculinity against which he must endlessly measure himself. In this sense Creeley is always talking to another male, even when (especially when) he is addressing himself.

One way of thinking about a public voice in poetry is to consider how poems imagine a Subject constructed not as the caryatid supporting national identity but as a more flexible entity occupying multiple geopolitical sites. Recent debates about global citizenship under the sign of cosmopolitanism provide us with an opportunity to test the role of culture within the realities of social mobility and informational exchange. What I call cosmopoetics in chapter 1 refers to recent attempts to think of nonnarrative, experimental forms in terms of cross-cultural and cross-border realities of a new global public sphere. Emergent discourses of cosmopolitanism differ substantially from previous models based on the authority of the nation-state and its organizing dyads: local/global, metropole/province, self/other.⁷ We can see a transition from modernist master narratives of the nation-state to a new post-national formation in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, whose work offers an obvious instance of avant-garde practice in response to social formations for which there are no adequate narratives. As a Korean-born woman whose parents lived under colonial rule by Japan, China, and the United States, as an American citizen with strong ties to a colonial French Catholic educational system, as a woman under patriarchal rule, she epitomizes a diasporic cultural identity, fixed on the perpetual motion of search. Fixed in its perpetual exile (81). In one verse paragraph of her long poem/novel Dictee, Cha sorts through the various categories to which the postcolonial Subject is subject:

From A Far

What nationality

or what kindred and relation

what blood relation

what blood ties of blood

what ancestry

what race generation

what house clan tribe stock strain

what lineage extraction

what breed sect gender denomination caste

what stray ejection misplaced

Tertium Quid neither one thing nor the other

Tombe de nues de naturalized

what transplant to dispel upon

(20)

Cha’s deliberate mistranslations and grammatical errors in Dictee are a performative sign of cultural fragmentation, a marker of the non-citizen subject within a national pedagogy.⁸ The poem becomes, as Cha’s speaker says, a Tertium Quid, a non-categorizable alternative to a world of binaries that does not accommodate the diasporic subject. It is precisely this third way that permits Cha to comment incisively on the forces that have constructed an immigrant woman’s voice and enabled her to ventriloquize voices of power.

Cha’s work reinforces the need to see new cultural forms through a multileveled series of what Arjun Appadurai calls scapes—ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes—that frame economic globalization (33). In Dictee, Cha defines her cross-cultural citizenship through the colonial history of Korea that marks her mother’s nomadic youth and forms the ethnoscape through which the poet describes her entry into the United States. She is also marked by the dyadic divisions of cold-war superpower competition, a division vividly displayed by a map of Korea divided along the thirty-eighth parallel which she reproduces in a section devoted, appropriately enough, to tragedy.⁹ She uses her work as a filmmaker and performance artist to identify the experience of national citizenship as spectatorial, produced through various technological apparatuses. To assist this aspect, Cha reproduces still images drawn from film, journalism, passports, letters, and medical textbooks to show the material forms that mediate and construct her identity. Her interpellation through technoscapes and mediascapes defines a subjectivity by which foreign nationals are passed under the eyes of diplomatic authorities, immigration officials, and language instructors who control and define national citizenship.

Although Dictee was written at an early stage of our globalist endeavor that we identify with the Pacific Rim, it anticipates a world already impacted by the shift from cold-war colonialism, marshaled under the aegis of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, to corporate and ideological containment under the aegis of global media and technology.¹⁰ As a formal construct Dictee refuses linear, developmental progress, moving between prose and poetry, lyric reflection and public document, text and image, to map a new deterritorialized citizenship, a critical cosmopolitanism at the end of the cold war.

A caveat might be in order here. In defining her writing practice as deterritorialized, I risk conforming her linguistic practices to a post-colonial identity, making the two homologous—as though the function of Cha’s textual absences and dislocations is to demonstrate that she is, indeed, absent and dislocated. Writing, in such an interpretation, becomes instrumental, serving only to exemplify displacement rather than theorize an alternative to identity altogether. As a filmmaker, she might prefer to understand her work as creating a false suture between discontinuous shots, between a cold-war fantasy of geopolitical containment and a cold-war reality of territorial occupation and perpetual superpower conflict. The two are obviously components of the same film, yet they create the illusion, for any viewer, that the two can coexist, despite their differences.

Towards a Cultural Poetics

The example of Theresa Cha marks some of the difficulties of configuring U.S. poetry under generic, aesthetic, or national categories. To read her work, as I have done above, is to engage with her own pedagogical intent, one deeply implicated in the conditions of Korean identity and U.S. cold-war policy. My ability to read Cha’s work has been aided by numerous excellent readings by Lisa Lowe, Josephine Park, Shelley Sunn Wong, Elaine Kim, Juliana Spahr, and others whose work has provided a brief on reading poetry through a historical and cultural-studies frame. They remind us of the need for a cultural poetics that takes into account the various frames (in Cha’s case, visual culture, photography, film, historical chronicle, epistle, narrative,