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Contemporary Poetics

Northwestern University Press

Contents

List of Illustrations.......................................................................................................ixAcknowledgments.............................................................................................................xiEditor's Introduction: Transversions of the Contemporary....................................................................xiiiPart One. EndgameHow Empty Is My Bread Pudding Charles Bernstein............................................................................5After Language Poetry: Innovation and Its Theoretical Discontents Marjorie Perloff.........................................15Part Two. PrecursorsGetting Past Odradek Kevin Nolan...........................................................................................41The Avant-Garde and the Wake of Radical Modernism Donald F. Theall.........................................................57Doctor Williams's Position, Updated Bob Perelman...........................................................................67Wallace Stevens and the Intricate Evasions of As Simon Critchley...........................................................96Corporeal Poetics: Kathy Acker's Writing D. J. Huppatz.....................................................................111Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism Michel Delville and Andrew Norris.....................126Part Three. ConjunctionsMetaphor: The Color of Being Ricardo L. Nirenberg..........................................................................153Vagueness, Poetry Keston Sutherland........................................................................................175AND & D. J. Huppatz, Nicole Tomlinson, and Julian Savage...................................................................185Reading Notes Bruce Andrews................................................................................................197Lost and Found Bruce Andrews...............................................................................................208Part Four. CursorsConcrete Poetry: A Manifesto Augusto de Campos.............................................................................213Questionnaire of the Yale Symposium Augusto de Campos......................................................................215Epigrams, Particle Theory, and Hypertext Darren Tofts......................................................................220Image Heuretics Gregory L. Ulmer...........................................................................................233The Poetics of Cyberspace: Two Ways to Get a Life J. Hillis Miller.........................................................256From Hypertext to Codework McKenzie Wark...................................................................................279Codeworld Alan Sondheim....................................................................................................286Part Five. TranspositionsStrange Attractions: Technopoetics in the Vortext Louis Armand.............................................................293Parapoetics and the Architectural Leap Steve McCaffery.....................................................................321Traps or Tools and Damage Allen Fisher.....................................................................................348Discontinued Meditations Steve McCaffery...................................................................................372Screening the Page/Paging the Screen: Digital Poetics and the Differential Text Marjorie Perloff...........................376Notes on Contributors.......................................................................................................393

Chapter One

Charles Bernstein

for George Lakoff

The conceited poet believes the entire world to be his poem.

As if you could or could not, would or would not, were or were not; as if the day ended and a new one popped out of the imagination, free of shadows, hurtling to an end of hurt, beyond sorrow's gate; but could not nor can not, would not nor will not; as if promise were just make-believe and make-believe a veil behind a veil; as if the news were never told and ignorance took the place of this incessant, miserable rain.

All the signs say no passage; still, there must be a way.

Sometimes one has to shake off even the most sophisticated modes of self-presentation (or self-concealment) to find a sense of where you are.

Particulars and their constellation: mosaic, seriality. Imagination of the negotiation of democratic social space: the particular not consumed, not made into an abstraction nor into stone, not dominated.

The arrival of a station at the train.

Everyone is talking about memoir but I just want to forget. I want a poetry that helps me to forget what I never knew.

Show me the baloney and I will immerse myself in last season's mausoleums.

The new is never new but we make it new in order to keep it from becoming dead to us. The motto shouldn't be make it new but make it live, but necrophilia surrounds us and we take its stench as the perfume of our hip indifference to art as something that changes in time, shifts against the tides, hollers out in anguish and exasperation at the suffocating banalities that seem to call our name out loud, as if we were written by them.

Poetry is too important to be left to its own devices.

Show me a man with two feet firmly planted on the ground and I'll show you a man who can't get his pants on.

The questioning of the beautiful is always at least as important as the establishment of the beautiful.

Not the desert clarity of my lamp But the blanched consequence of my intransigence [from Mallarm]

1848-Faraday: "A slight efflorescent appearance was seen on the broken edge." Felix: "Nothing to bite but my tongue."

Free verse is not a type of poetry but an imperative to liberate verse from constraints no longer applicable for a new time and new circumstance.

The rich do live better and have the narcotic of money to help them forget how it was acquired.

Be thorough: leave no turn unstoned.

Poets can be more or less overlooked: known but not well known, like Willy Loman on a pipe fitter's holiday; known in their day but lost to us now; recovered or, if not, recovering. For every emerging poet a couple of others begin to fade; we even begin to fade to ourselves, if the truth be told. We know of the poet's poet and even hear from time to time of the poet's poet's poet, repeating, more in relief than disappointment, John Ashbery's famous quip that a famous poet is not famous. But poetry's "disappeared," as Ron Silliman once called them, haunt us, less from a fear for ourselves than a dread that the context that imparts meaning to our work is so fragile. I is not an other but many others, fellow travelers among the dead, near dead, and just about alive.

Digital poetry 2003: In 1975, everyone was worried about the idea that language is code; in 2003, everyone is worried that code is language.

To each his tone.

The truth of the poem is neither in the representation nor in the expression. Its truth dwells in what has never been and what will never be. Where possibility and impossibility collide, here the poem is forged.

Sometimes a sentence is just a sentence.

I've got difference, you've got the same....